The results are in, and either those last-minute prayer candles worked or they didn’t.
All forms of social media have been flooded today with messages reassuring outgoing sixth-years that the Leaving Cert is no more than letters and numbers on a sheet of paper, and that your results are, in the grand scheme of things, unimportant.
This is true. Kind of. Sometimes.
Not everybody needs to worry about the Leaving Cert. Not even close, in fact. A lot of people will go on to achieve better things in their lives because they ended up getting ten, or fifty, or one-hundred points fewer than they needed for the course they thought would define their lives.
There will often be a way to make your life work in your favour, regardless of how you’ve fared in an education system that prizes a very limited range of skills. That’s the good news.
But the annual well-meaning, pat-on-the-back platitudes that surface on social media around the ides of every August miss one crucial point: nobody gets to decide what’s important for somebody else.
First, some people want to worry about the Leaving Cert. Some people need to worry about the Leaving Cert. There are jobs and courses and vocations and paths that you simply cannot access without a certain level of academic success – no matter how much sense it doesn’t make that you need to do well in Maths, and Irish and another language in order to get into the history course you want.
If you know somebody who wants to be a doctor, that has just today discovered that they’ll be repeating the Leaving Cert next June, you might want to follow up telling them “Ah sure, it’s only the Leaving” by ducking very quickly.
Second, no matter the course, no matter the college, if you’ve had your heart set on something for a long time it does you very little good to see somebody in their thirties who has already carved out a life for themselves to tell you that the thing you’re disappointed about doesn’t matter.
When we put the Leaving Cert behind us, we positively bathe in the contentment that we’ll never have to think about it again. We recline in the luxury of waking up from a nightmare that ends with the words “Léigh anois go curamach”. But when we put several years between us and the experience, we forget how important it feels at the time.
Compared to secondary school, the specialisation and independence that college offers are like manna from heaven.
How flippant it is to tell somebody not to worry, that the Leaving Cert is no real measure of your own personal brilliance (something which is unbelievably true) when doing well in the Leaving Cert is the most straightforward way to get to where you want to be. To get to a place where your brilliance will finally be valued.
Of course it’s not the only way, but it’s the handiest way, and it’s a head-wrecker when it doesn’t go your way – and it’s because you’ve simply assigned it too much importance. It is genuinely really annoying to have to start a course you’re not enthusiastic about, or go back for a second bite of sixth year.
Getting where you want to go almost always involves back-doors and side-gates and unexpected detours, but it’s pointless to pretend that the Irish education system isn’t set-up in such a way that failing to achieve the points you need in your Leaving Cert isn’t an incredibly frustrating roadblock.
The frustration that so many young people feel today when they open their results won’t be an youthful over-reaction to something that doesn’t matter, it’s a mature response to realising your plans have just been shifted without your approval. Re-adjusting is never easy, and it doesn’t get any easier when a clipped, cliched Facebook post from someone earning €60,000 a year telling you not to dwell on it.
The difference between seeing what you want on that cert and not, is the difference between ending up in the course of your dreams or overcoming an obstacle course. You’ll look around at your friends and you’ll tell yourself that all of their lives are going according to plan while you’ve just suffered a serious setback.
And maybe you have. Maybe it’s going to take some serious work on your part to get where you want to be, work you could have avoided if one question on one paper had been a bit sounder back in June. That’s a valid reason for upset.
Learning to set your own metrics for success is a skill more valuable than anything you’re forced to learn for your Leaving Cert. Learning to ignore people who don’t know you well enough to tell you what you shouldn’t and shouldn’t pay attention to is another.
What you want to do in your life is very important and until the Leaving Cert is overhauled, it remains too-huge a factor in that process. If you’ve gotten what you wanted, congratulations – if you haven’t, you absolutely have the potential to get there eventually. These are the two realities young people in Ireland will face today – let’s not do anyone the disservice of telling them it doesn’t matter.
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