100 years of Junior Cycle curriculum – 1914 to 2014

One hundred years ago, Pádraig Pearse wrote scathingly about the stranglehold of the examination system on the secondary school curriculum in an Ireland still under British rule. In 1914 he wrote a critical article in The Irish Review which he subsequently published in 1916 as his well-known pamphlet - The Murder Machine. In this pamphlet he stated:
'The idea of a compulsory programme imposed by an external authority upon every child in every school in a country is the direct contrary of the root idea involved in education ….. The first thing I plead for is freedom; freedom for each school to shape its own programme in conformity with the circumstances of the school…. Freedom for the individual teacher to impart something of his own personality to his work ….' To-day, one hundred years later, in an independent Ireland, an examination-dominated curriculum persists in our second level school system. Since 1922, there have been various attempts to loosen or remove the chains of centralised examinations from our second level curriculum, especially at junior cycle, but all such attempts have failed to date.