Ballymun in Dublin is being redeveloped but it is still one of the State's poorest areas. This morning, as usual, the buses travelling up and down the Ballymun Road carry bold advertisements across the back. What is unusual, though, is that the ads are not for mobile phones, or car exhausts or chocolate bars.
They are for something supposed to be outside the marketplace, beyond the reach of consumerism: the Leaving Certificate examinations. The Ballinteer Institute is selling grinds for the upcoming Easter holidays: Special offer! Three subjects only £150 (fourth subject free if booked and paid for before April 1st 2001!). Places such as the Ballinteer Institute have been around for a while. The most prominent of the exam factories, Bruce College in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Belfast, has 1,200 full-time students and thousands of customers for its cramming sessions at weekends and over school holidays. The Institute of Education in Dublin has almost 700 pupils on its day Leaving Certificate course. Typically, these places charge about £115 a subject a term, with reduced rates if you take a lot of courses. Typically, too, their customers are middle-class pupils repeating the Leaving Cert in search of extra points. It is just one of the umpteen ways our compassionate society lends a helping hand to the deserving rich.
The appeal is obvious: no messing about, top-class teachers and the inside dope on how to squeeze extra marks out of whatever your level of knowledge. All pretence at a rounded education is dropped in favour of a ruthless matching of means to ends. The teachers who cut the mustard are paid over the odds. Bruce College is advertising aggressively for experienced teachers with high standards, career goals, and excellent presentation, offering in return a highly competitive pay package.
AND these teachers know the tricks of the trade. If you're studying pass maths, for example, the Ballinteer Institute will show you some easy ways to see off competition from the unenlightened. You may not know this but it is possible to find the mean and the standard deviation directly from your calculator. This procedure takes about one minute and it has been worth 20 marks each year for the last four years. Twenty marks in one minute - not bad value. They also reckon that out there in the regular schools there are still teachers guilty of the most egregious error imaginable: teaching things that don't feature in the exams. The new Leaving Cert higher maths syllabus has been on the go since 1994 but some teachers and their students are still unaware that certain topics are not on the course. In co-ordinate geometry the following are not on the course: (a) bisectors of angles, and by implication the in-centre of a triangle, (b) orthogonal circles, (c) systems of circles.
The unashamed pragmatism of the grind schools, their naked appeal to the notion that money can boost your chances in what is supposed to be a free competition, blows an obvious hole in the facade of meritocracy. But, at one level, their presence has been comforting. The fact that relatively privileged parents feel the need to buy extra help for their children before the exams suggests they couldn't buy that help afterwards. It has been a backhanded compliment to the integrity of the exams. You feel the need for extra armour only if you know the battle itself is going to be evenly fought.
Now, though, that comfort has gone. This year, the grind schools have ceased to be a relatively marginal interference and become a decisive influence. While ordinary secondary schools are closed by the ASTI action (two days this week, three next week), the commercial results factories are grinding away. The little perks they can offer have been magnified into huge advantages. To their standard product of streamlined, stripped-down exam technique has been added the huge bonus of much more time at school and more continuity in the teaching.
THE ads on the Ballymun bus (Buy Now! Special Offer!) don't just mark a grotesque new stage in the marketing of a basic education as a commercial product. They also dramatise the inequalities heightened by the ASTI's campaign. That bus, as it happens, is a cross-city route, serving both the leafy suburbs on the south side and the wind-swept tower blocks on the north. On one side £150 for a few top-up classes over the Easter break might well seem a special offer. On the other, £150 is, for many, a week's family income. One family's fantastic bargain is another's impossible dream. That's why the transformation of the exams into a commercial marketplace is so grotesque. The ASTI intensely dislikes the grind schools and regards them as exploitative. But it is, at the moment, their great benefactor, propelling them into a position where they must be finding it hard to keep up with demand for their services. Though the union has issued dark warnings that parents supervising classes or exams would be regarded as strike-breakers, it has been strangely silent about the grind schools. It does not seem concerned that some people can buy their way out of the dispute. If we end up with a system in which education is a commodity and teachers are mere sales representatives, the teachers who least want to see this outcome will have done most to bring it about.