The current system should carry a health warning
LATIN ISN’T too fashionable these days but, back when I was a lad, teachers were fond of bellowing “Mens sana in corpore sano” at us as we wheezily ran around the perimeter of the football pitch.
“A sound mind in a healthy body”, as the phrase from Juvenal translates, certainly seemed like a fine ambition and a good desired outcome when educating youngsters back in the 1970s. It might even be a phrase we should try injecting back into our own education system today, especially at a time when schoolchildren find themselves locked into a merciless points race for college places.
Having experienced the pressures of the Leaving Cert as a parent for the first time, it seems to me that the system has left “mens sana in corpore sano” far, far behind.
Instead, the system should carry a health warning: doing exams can ruin your health.
Aside from my own experience, it was a long chat with my friend Eamon which crystallised what is wrong with our education outcomes. Eamon runs a super-groovy sports shop, the type which attracts sporty, dynamic young blokes who want to earn some money as they get through school.
Over the past year, Eamon has employed two young guys “who have the ability to do whatever they want,
to achieve anything they want”. But during 2012 he noticed a change in both of their personalities, first as the pre-exams loomed, then as the exams themselves hoved into view, and then as the waiting for the results set in.
With one of them, the change was so marked that Eamon had to tell him “that he was no longer a good guy to be working alongside”.
And I’m sure you know the story’s end: both guys had their sights set on particular college courses. Neither achieved the necessary points for entry.
No doubt they still have their healthy bodies. But what about their sound minds? What about their mental health?
There are a million such stories in Irish education, and in education globally. Recently, the New York Times ran a story about how the children of wealthy New Yorkers, on holiday up in the Hamptons, were having SAT grinds throughout their holidays as they struggled to get the scores necessary to get into elite colleges.
The evidence that exerting undue pressure on kids to do well in exams causes enormous mental harm is overwhelming. But it doesn’t seem to stop the parents: in one Washington State school, when a child got a failing grade on a project that demanded the kids file an eight-page paper and present a 10-minute oral report before they graduated, the child’s parents promptly hired a lawyer.
There is an irony in this focus on success-through-exams. I have just finished writing a new, 700-page Irish Food Guide.
Many of the producers and cooks who feature in the new book – and who have helped it grow to such a considerable size – are people who worked through the Celtic Tiger, bought into the Tiger dreams, and then lost their jobs.
A catastrophe, you might think. Well, no actually. These smart, resourceful folk have seen their problem as an opportunity, and switched to doing
the thing they had actually always wanted to do: making food, being creative, using their real talents, not just their Leaving Cert points.
They feel liberated, not let down.
We need our healthy bodies to live well but, without sound minds, without the “mens sana”, the body is disembodied.
John and Sally McKenna’s Irish Food Guide will be published later this month.