Uprooted: Education In A Post-Covid World
Article originally published in Issue 4 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
By Seamus Lalor
As this issue goes to print I’ll be going through the process of cramming for the Leaving Certificate, a set of exams you’ve probably not sat in ages but have had appear in anxiety-ridden nightmares. These exams serve as a glorified sieve for third level - supposedly filtering students into limited college courses on the basis of merit. This merit is backed by supposed anonymity - we all fill out the same papers, somehow making the whole process meritocratic. Nobody particularly likes the Leaving Cert but it somehow lingers on - if anything just because people are deathly scared of altering it.
However, the COVID pandemic has laid this attitude of “business as usual” to rest - intermittent school closures have thrown a spanner in the examination process, disrupting the education system fundamentally. The Department of Education has had to admit this on some level, announcing amendments to the exams that imply a return to normality isn’t on the cards in the immediate term. However, what does a fairer alternative to our education system look like? Why is there such a need for an alternative system? How should we as socialists respond to these recent developments?
The world in which we live
At the most basic level, our education system exists to reproduce the world in which we live. Capitalism views schooling as a way to reproduce and legitimise the divides necessary for its operation - be they along class lines or between so-called “high” and “low” skilled workers. In practical terms this means that the education system locks working-class people into exploitation, providing those in power with convenient excuses to explain away inequalities within our lives.
This reproduction is seen most blatantly in our CAO (Central Applications Office) system - college spaces are arbitrarily limited, being doled out to those who earn the most points in their Leaving Certificate exams. This system is presented as a meritocratic race, with all students being anonymised, sitting the same exams, and earning points based on ability. However, it ignores and exacerbates the existing divides at play in this country - with working-class students not gaining access to the same private schools, grinds, and questionably sourced Beacon vaccines provided to the children of property. This supposed meritocracy is laid bare each year with the infamous publication of the feeder schools list by the Irish Times - if it really is a fair race, how come the same few private schools get to win so often?
Fundamental issues within the Irish education system have been evident for years, almost to the point where listing them feels cliché. Because of the pressure generated by the exam system, teachers are forced to focus on the appearance of knowledge as opposed to its actual acquisition - creating a system where rote learning is incentivised and the bare minimum to pass exams gets covered. These issues are seen most acutely when it comes to the Irish language - a major bone of contention and source of embarrassment. Our obsession with the appearance of knowledge strips away any vitality from the language, with its existence being condensed down into a series of essays without any real context or cohesion. This lack of vitality creates a certain alienation within students as they half-learn endless Sraith Pictiúr, leading to the infamous false narratives of our language being “outdated” or “dead”. In the simplest of terms, our current system turns students away from their subjects - getting them to regurgitate the bare minimum without enthusiasm and never engage again.
Zoomed out
In the early 2000s, writer Mark Fisher complained about the utter lack of motivation his students seemed to show towards life. According to Fisher, "students are aware that if they don't show up for weeks on end [...] or if they don't produce any work they will not face any meaningful sanction" but that "they typically respond to this freedom not by pursuing projects but by falling into hedonic (or anhedonic) lassitude: the soft narcosis [...] the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana." [1] I can’t help but feel that these complaints from over a decade ago perfectly capture the universal experience of online learning.
In the same way that our exams are based around the appearance of knowledge, online classes felt like the appearance of education - with a lot of my friends struggling to retain any material covered or even to get out of bed a lot of the time. Lockdown led to the existing failings and inequalities within our school system being exposed even further. According to a recent study from the Netherlands, primary school students made ‘little or no progress whilst learning from home’, with children from disadvantaged backgrounds being hit the hardest [2]. At times it felt as if my classmates knew that something was fundamentally broken as we sat through endless Google Meet classes, even if none of us wanted to admit as such.
This utter lack of motivation wasn’t the result of lockdown, laziness, or the closure of gyms somehow unleashing a wave of depression. It was instead the result of a system that wanted to drone on about “business as usual”, even when that bordered on being farcical. The Department of Education played fast and loose with public health guidelines, ignoring evidence that the virus was airborne and convincing nobody of their mantra that ‘schools are safe’. Our year was shrouded with uncertainty - with us not knowing whether we’d sit an exam, complete projects, or count as close contacts.
This lack of guidance provided by the government helped create conditions tailor-made to drive people insane, with the state ignoring problems until they reached the point of no return. This attitude was mirrored most blatantly during the failed attempt to reopen schools this January - we were sat at thousands of cases a day as a new variant became dominant, yet we had to act as if nothing had changed. Students were essentially told that they’d have to put vulnerable family at risk so they could prepare for a set of exams that weren’t even ensured to go ahead, something that naturally drove people mental. Online learning wasn’t a challenge solely on account of what was new, but instead due to the unspoken contradictions and inequalities that arrived before it - with an unequal system somehow becoming even more blatant.
Cad anois?
Something Mark Fisher aptly diagnosed was a push by the ruling-class to depoliticise students, a trend arguably exemplified by the fact it was easier for the government to imagine the world ending than to legislate for and invest in the provision of open access. Problems faced by young people are solely presented on an individual level and any notion of change is generally laughed at by those in power - with the state trying to convince us that endemic rates of anxiety and depression are completely unrelated to material conditions and that our collective interests are best served by individuals bettering themselves. This push towards atomisation is mirrored both through our exam systems and the sterile, corporate language used by Norma Foley when she talks about us. Students are a ‘stakeholder’ in education, competing in the “traditional Leaving Cert experience” between bouts of mandatory “wellbeing” sessions. We’re tricked into believing that there is no alternative, helping create a self-fulfilling prophecy on account of our inability to imagine something new.
One of the most exciting developments of the past few years has been a push away from this cycle of impotence - with students across the country reasserting their ability to organise and demand a fairer alternative to our current system. This ability was shown in an embryonic form with the Fridays for Future movement and the Cancel the Leaving Cert campaign, with young people across the country coming together and actively challenging the narratives of those in power.
As we edge ever closer to emerging from lockdown we need to channel this energy, assisting these movements to ensure that a return to “business as usual” doesn’t occur. As socialists we need to agitate for an end to this system of artificial scarcity, a system where 73% of LGBT youth feel unsafe at school [3], and a system where we’re made to pay the second highest rate of student fees in Europe [4]. Young people from working-class backgrounds have been ignored for far too long in this country, solely being viewed as a convenient scapegoat by our capitalist class. On account of this we must support and actively engage with struggles against student fees, discrimination within schools, and unequal access to third level. To badly paraphrase the words of the late poet Paul Curran, we must ‘part [in] the system's indifference’, helping present and push towards an equitable and accessible alternative.
1. http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007656.html
2. https://www.demographicscience.ox.ac.uk/post/children-learned-little-or-nothing-during-school-closures-despite-online-learning
3. https://www.thejournal.ie/lgbt-students-at-school-survey-4887291-Nov2019/?utm_source=shortlink 4. https://www.thejournal.ie/student-contribution-university-fees-ireland-one-of-highest-in-the-world-facts-2936999-Aug2016/