A band-aid or a sustainable shift in focus?

Delighted with the news that the leaving certificate is being reviewed, as you can imagine.   I muse at what might be the result – A band aid or a sustainable shift in focus!

What would I do?  What would you do?   Would you move from the individualistic nature of school as we know it – we learn, we study and we work as individual units in the current Irish education system – to a more team based approach that would be more representative of the real world, perhaps even the actual workplace?  Would you move from ‘going alone’ to building, utilising and benefiting from a broad network of allies.  Would you move from the current promise of a pupil/teacher 25:1 ratio to a facilitative approach of teams who learn, study and work for the benefit of each other?  Would you move from subjects now being formally taught to students for over 300 years to a knowledge-based society of skills and attitudes?  Would you replace English with Communication Skills involving presentation and facilitation skills?  Would you replace the accounting syllabus with SAGE Line 50 accounts packages (or equivalent)?

It is high time we play to students’ natural strengths and stop forcing those with limited linguistic intelligence to do languages, stop forcing those with limited mathematical intelligence to do maths.

Would we boldly move from IQ to EQ?  Maybe, just maybe, the NCCA and those that govern, will be brave and recreate a leaving certificate that sets people up for success, not failure, by building on students’ interests and abilities, playing to actual intelligences rather than merely limiting to IQ, and IQ alone.