'Dear Chinua Achebe," wrote a Nigerian student to the famous author. "Your novel Things Fall Apart is the greatest African book I have read. There is only one thing wrong with it. You did not supply any model questions and answers at the end," writes Declan Kiberd.
Last Wednesday, watching delighted schoolchildren queue for writers' autographs at the Bisto Children's Books Ireland awards, I wondered how many of them would still be able to read for pleasure in their Leaving Certificate years. In societies where exams count for so much, literature can sometimes be reduced to a hunt for "the rights answers" rather than forming an element of our daily vision.
Research over the past decade has suggested that quite a number of senior schoolchildren lose the habit of reading for fun at the age of 15 or 16; and that many of these may not return to it for a decade or more afterwards.
Tomorrow another class of school-leavers faces the English paper. There is luck as well as skill involved in getting the desired result. If the prepared topics don't come up, you can feel pretty vulnerable. The points system may be fair, but there is an element of rough justice about it too.
"In exams," lamented Oscar Wilde, "the foolish ask questions which the wise cannot answer." He said this in the knowledge that there are no real answers to any questions worth asking. Those who find the going tough tomorrow might take some comfort in the fact that many who have scored only a C in the Leaving Cert have gone on to take first-class honours in the subject at university. The converse is also true - not all who get Leaving Cert As excel in the subject in college, where markers are less interested in what you know than in how you use the knowledge you have.
Some of the greatest literary geniuses of all never made it to university. Michael Holroyd, author of a multi-volume biography of Bernard Shaw, says that he acquired all his literary education in the Birkenhead Public Library. Shaw himself did most of his early reading in the British Museum.
"Men have set up a great mill called examinations to destroy the imagination," said WB Yeats. His brother, the future painter Jack, had no relish for the mills either, once confessing to his startled grandmother that he had deliberately come last in a school test, because he could "never bear to look into the faces of the boys whom he had beaten".
Quite a few of those geniuses who made it to college couldn't settle and left after just a few months, the major contemporary example being Bob Dylan. "The University of Minnesota was like an old people's home," he jibed.
Most of those who sit the exam tomorrow will get some sort of offer in August and go happily forward on that basis. Despite the manifest flaws of the points system, nobody has yet come up with a better one. Perhaps its most negative aspect is the pressure which it puts on students who score high points to pursue "prestigious" professional subjects, which may not truly reflect their deepest inclinations or real interests.
Every year in our universities, a number of students in the professional faculties beat a path to the door of a humanities lecturer. They seek advice as to whether it might not be too late to re-register for an arts degree and also ask for guidance on how best to break this terrible news to their parents.
They sometimes face the same sort of embarrassment which young men felt, a couple of generations ago, when they left the religious seminary after years of study for the priesthood. In those days, some "spoilt priests" preferred to emigrate rather than return to their communities. Nowadays, an option for the secular priesthood of the arts isn't quite so traumatic, but it can pose problems in families with strong legal or medical traditions.
Which isn't to say that most of our doctors and lawyers aren't secure in their vocations - interestingly, there are at present, probably for the first time in history, more lawyers than priests in Ireland. Many doctors and lawyers, now in their fifties and at the very zenith of their professions, would have secured the equivalent of just two or three Cs in the older, relaxed Leaving Cert of the 1960s - yet this has not prevented them from doing brilliant work.
With the grade inflation and points pressure of the past two decades, the situation has been reached in some universities rather like that mocked by the late John McGahern in the old teacher-training colleges: "You needed 85 per cent to get in, but only 40 per cent to get out."
A utilitarian model has come to dominate education. The subjective element is now removed, as far as possible, from the assessment of examinations in arts disciplines.
We shall never see a return to the days when Oscar Wilde took a Greek test in Oxford and translated not just the 12 lines set by his examiner in the viva but also the next 20.
The examiner eventually lost patience, thinking the candidate was simply showing off that he had memorised the entire English translation of the work. "Why did you persist after the 12 lines, Mr Wilde?" he asked. "I wanted," said Oscar, "to find out what happened next."