It’s years away, but Daughter Number Four has already raised the subject of what secondary school she’s going to. Understandably, she wants to end up with some of her friends.
We want that, too, though at the moment we’re adhering to a policy of being as vague as possible. Because we don’t know. We don’t know if her friend group might change over the next three years. We don’t know if she’ll suddenly display a previously-unspotted aptitude that might influence the decision. We do have preferences, mostly for unacademic reasons, but beneath our thinking is a sense that the various schools aren’t that different from each other.
From the first day, Daughter Number Four will be funnelled into a system based on a set of (middle-class) beliefs that have not changed much in decades: as she moves towards the Leaving Certificate, the academic pressure will be ratcheted up and with it, the implicit message that this exam is crucial in determining the future shape of her life. Not just the exam, but also the complicated and often opaque system that determines what college place she might get.
Yet on the day she receives her results, she’ll be surrounded by people – her parents, her teachers, experts on the radio – telling her that, actually, the results aren’t that important. There are many ways to get to where you want to be. To which she may well reply: then what were the last six years about?
Why do parents still view a trade as a consolation career prize for their kids?
Labubu dolls will be piling up in landfill in six months’ time
My wife speaks to me from other parts of the house, for reasons that puzzle me
My granddaughter’s birthday party was partially a celebration, but also to mark a departure
Increasingly, our education system seems to be an example of doing the same thing over and over and hoping for – pardon the pun – a different result. Because it is the product of, and preparation for, a world that is fast disappearing.
It’s by no means a representative sample, but out of Daughter Number Four’s older siblings only one works in an area connected to what she studied in college. The other three either completed college and then did something completely different, or didn’t finish college at all.
When that happened, I couldn’t help but worry: because like most parents, I’m a product of the school-college-job template. My parents were fervent believers in this system. I believed the same. Because I hadn’t given it too much thought, but also because it was a comfort. School-college-career-house-marriage-kids. Get them settled.
What my children demonstrated to me is the increasing dissonance between our educational system and the world it is preparing students for. The rate of change in the real world is so rapid, it’s almost impossible for educators to keep up. They worry, rightfully, about students using artificial intelligence (AI) rather than actually learning. But another worry is that, because of AI, many of the careers we are preparing young people for may not exist in the future, or may have morphed into something else. No one knows. When Daughter Number Four does her Leaving Cert – if that exam still exists – it’s close to impossible to tell what her options may be.
I’d love to come up with some slick solution to this, but as the man said, prediction is difficult, especially about the future. Certainly, it will require a reimagining of what a “career” is: young people today may go through multiple iterations of that in the course of the working life. We also need to root out some the classist assumptions about what constitutes a “good” job.
When I was in school, if I had announced I wanted to be a plumber, my parents would have viewed this as a failure; an inability to cope with an education system entirely predicated on academic achievement. Perhaps it’s not said out loud nowadays, but the system is still set up in the same way. A trade is a consolation prize – yet trades are more likely to exist and still be in huge demand.
Yes, encourage your children to read. But teaching them to rewire a plug would be no harm either.
