Stop me if you've heard me say this before. I honestly can't remember because I know I've meant to say it many times, but I think I've only written the essence of this post in my head.
The more I learn about Ireland's education system the less I like it. There are a lot of little things that annoy me, but one of the biggest is the way the subjective is often passed off as fact.
Today my daughter brought home an exam she took a couple of weeks ago. She tells me that every question was drawn from state-administered junior cert exams in geography.
One question shows a chart of "earnings of factory workers 1997-2002". The chart shows wages per hour for males and females for each year represented in a bar chart format. The students are then asked, "Which sentence best describes the information in the bar chart above"?
There are four sentences and three are quite clearly wrong. That leaves only one possible answer, which reads {ignore the grammar here, which I'm sure is a mess, but I'm never 100% certain as the rules of grammar in Ireland are different from those that apply in the US}: The hourly wage for women in Irish factories has increased slightly between 1997 & 2002, but is still not level with the hourly wages of men.
Well, maybe that's true and maybe it's not. How does one define "slightly"? I looked at the chart and it seems that the average woman's wage was approximately €6.60 in 1997 and had risen to approximately €8.20 by 2002. A rise of €1.60 or 24%. Is that a "slight" rise over a five year period? I think a case could be made that this represents a substantial rise, which would mean that there is no right answer to this question.
There is no need for the word "slightly" in this question. All it does is make the answer subjective and imprecise. Now, if this is just a question set by a teacher in the school, then it's a small concern, but if this is representative of the state's formal examinations it's a much bigger problem. How are Irish children supposed to learn to sift facts from opinions if the state's own examiners don't know the difference?
This is not a once off. I have seen a lot of this stuff in many text books and on exams. And, don't get me started on the anti-Americanism that's prevalent in the history books (I'm sure I've mentioned this before, right?).
