It's A Dead Cert
(I wrote this as an opinion piece for the Sunday Business Post in June 2013. Fresh out of Irish secondary education, I outline about the system's failings, and what could be done to improve the situation.)
Today, our ability to use computers is like a lingua franca in the business and social worlds. The rise of e-mail, social networking, and online publishing all tell us this.
Politicians use phrases like ‘the knowledge economy’ to convince us that they recognize the need to develop a tech-savvy workforce, so why don’t they ensure our secondary education reflects this need? The structure of the Leaving Cert. exam doesn’t reflect how we now use information. With the advent of search engines, simply memorizing facts is of negligible importance compared to the ability to critically analyze information.
Welcome to the 21st century, where having skills is more important than having a specified vocation. With technology improving so rapidly, we should be wary about pigeon-holing students into one specific career, rather than teaching them widely-applicable skills. So many of today’s in-demand jobs didn’t exist fifteen years ago, and we don’t know what some of 2025’s jobs will be. John Green, a New York Times bestselling author who is perhaps best known as a professional videographer on YouTube, once remarked: "If you had told College Me that I would become a professional YouTuber, I would’ve been like, 'That’s not a word.'" Today, it is possible to make a living on YouTube alone. Nine years ago, the site didn’t exist.
I come from a family of people who tinker with things. My older brothers, John and Patrick, are currently working on their second technology startup, called Stripe, in San Francisco. They started their love affair with computers by first taking them apart to “improve them”, and later learning how to program. Patrick reminisced how, when we first got an internet connection, it was so slow that he would read books while waiting for webpages to load. But Patrick and John didn't build computers from spare parts or learn SSH because they thought that those would be useful skills when they founded Stripe. That's not how the brain of a seven- or nine-year-old works: it’s usually more concerned with what's interesting and fun.
In the same vein, the Coder Dojo movement, which teaches programming to children and teenagers worldwide, doesn't teach with the aim of producing employable computer scientists; the classes started because someone (James Whelton) loved programming and wanted to share his enthusiasm. It's almost as if those students now having the skills to be in-demand computer programmers is an unintended side-effect.
Having graduated secondary school last week, many people are asking me if I’ll miss it, or whether I’m looking forward to the ‘real world’. This always strikes me as an odd phrase, as if the world I've just spent 19 years is somehow less real than the one I'm about to enter. What they mean, of course, is that I'll enjoy more freedom as an adult, away from the strict routines and inevitable lack of independence that comes with being in secondary school and living at home. They mean that my interests can now take center-stage, since I don’t have bells, timetables, and homework assignments to distract me. Why should I have to wait until I graduate to focus on my interests? There isn't a switch that flips when you graduate or reach the age of 18; you become an adult when you take responsibility for your life. You do that at any stage by taking on projects: doing something specifically because you enjoy it, rather than it being prescribed by the curriculum. I think all students should have projects while they’re in secondary school. They should be practising in their chosen creative outlet, learning a language (computer or human), or playing a sport. If they don’t know what sort of projects excite them, they should try new things. Even though in secondary school, teens are growing tired of childhood, they still possess that childlike sense of enthusiasm. I don’t think it’s an outlandish claim to say that all teens are passionate about something: they just need to find out what it is.
When I started studying for my Leaving Cert., I soon realized that the Venn diagram of what I was learning and what I was truly enthusiastic about didn’t have a lot of overlap. Armed with my projects (I loved writing fiction), I set about taking Paul Graham’s advice and began treating school like a day job. In his own essay on secondary school, entitled “What You’ll Wish You’d Known”, Graham points out that a musician who works in a café by day to pay her bills doesn’t think of herself as a waitress. She’s still a musician at heart. Similarly, I thought of myself as an aspiring writer who just happened to spend most of his time studying for the Leaving Cert. I studied during term-time and, in June, published some short pieces of fiction for the Amazon Kindle, entitled ‘A Certain Freedom’. In August, I wrote a series of essays on my experiences growing up with a physical disability. According to an e-mail from a reader, those essays are now being distributed to parents who attend a center for cerebral palsy in Perth, Australia.
The quote "I never let my schooling interfere with my education" is attributed to Mark Twain. More than ever before in history, more and more of students' schooling and preparation for the real world is happening outside their classrooms. In economics, we learn of a concept called 'occupational mobility', the ease with which workers can move between one vocation and another. Today's Leaving Cert. curriculum should teach skills that enhance our mobility. It should facilitate students discovering what they're truly enthusiastic about. It should serve students better.
Tommy Collison is a Leaving Cert. student who will begin studying journalism at New York University next September. He writes on 42409.org.
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