Victoria White: It's time to end this charade we call the Junior Cert

The Junior Certificate needs to be bombed. As I head towards putting my first sacrifice on the altar of state exams in June, I'm appalled by what it's teaching him.

He's learning to consult past papers and engage in risk analysis worthy of Ladbrokes to work out what will appear on the day. He's learning to study just what he thinks he needs to know.

Worst of all, he seems to think that's all he needs to know in life.

The most important thing he should be learning now is how little he knows. That the world is a big, bright, open place full of questions which we oldies are finding harder to answer.

Small questions like: What is the meaning of life? If there is a God, why do good people suffer?

My son has that sewn up too. He got 94pc in his Christmas religion test, so he's confident he has heaven on his side.

I pity him when he storms heaven for a girl's love and hears nothing back. Or faces a work situation in which there are no obvious answers. The Junior Cert hasn't prepared him for life. It is insulting to him as a human being.

But this year, hopefully, will mark the start of major changes in the Junior Cycle. My next son brought a note home from school saying he will be in the first year that completes the new Junior Cycle, starting with changes to English from September.

He's disgusted. He likes the idea of playing to win in a game calculated to make middle-class boys winners.

I'm thrilled. The new Junior Cycle will try to teach "key skills" they need for life including "managing information", "staying well", "managing myself" and "working with others".

WINNERS

This is the first real acknow-ledgement in our education system that you can't learn life from a book.

The Junior Cycle exam will be less important, because 40pc of a student's grade will be from continuous assessment within their subjects. There will also be short courses in new subjects like artistic performance, Chinese, programming and coding, caring for animals and PE.

Schools can think up their own short courses based on who they are and where they are. You can imagine a school on a river doing canoeing or a school on a beach doing surfing.

The teachers' unions are concerned that assessments may not be standard from school to school because they will be done by the teachers. But that's up to teachers to sort, right?

They're upset because teachers are only getting one day's in-service training to implement the changes to English this year. But they're professionals, and if they have the will they can make this work. It must. The charade that is the Junior Cert has to stop.

Art teachers are already managing continuous assessment for the Junior Cert because no one pretends you can do an art project on a desk in three hours.

Art is the Junior Cert subject from which my eldest son is learning most. He's spent weeks making a bird's nest in the garage. We've been asking some amazing questions, like: How the hell did birds learn to make these things?

Still, he says he might give up art for the Leaving. Everyone's telling him you can't get high grades in it. So that's that, isn't it?

Or what about exploding a second bomb, this time under the Leaving itself?