From Leaving CertiFiCate to Leaving SChooL a Longitudinal Study ...

Curriculum, Teaching and Learning 67
The second-level education system in Ireland has been described as hierarchical,
with an inequality in power and control between teachers and
students (see Lynch and Lodge, 2002). During the junior cycle, students
in the Post-Primary Longitudinal Study cohort were particularly negative
about the exercise of what they deemed to be arbitrary rules and unfair
treatment (see, for example, Smyth et al., 2007). By senior cycle, some
students felt that this hierarchical approach was even more inappropriate,
given their maturity and status as (almost) adults:
In some ways I think they should respect you more, even though,
yeah, they are your elders, they’re older than you like.
They have to show us respect too if they want respect.
Like you go into fifth year and a teacher turns around to you and tells
you to shut up. By the time you’re in fifth year you’re 16, you’re not
too far from being an adult. You’re not going to turn around and go
take it. You’re just going to go what are you saying to me like.
…They want to be spoken to with respect, so do we …
We’re not animals or anything like that.
Yeah, they treat you like animals after that.
Yeah.
Shut up and sit down, don’t open your mouth like you know. (Dawes
Point, boys’ school, working-class intake)
Although this pattern was more evident in working-class schools, a
number of students across many of the schools pointed to instances of
unfair treatment. Firstly, some students felt that teachers did not provide
sufficient encouragement to academically weaker students and tended to
‘look down’ on or ignore them (an issue also highlighted in the retrospective
accounts of young people who did not go on to higher education,
see McCoy et al., 2010):
Because they’re just like, you could ask for help and they’d be just
like, they ignore you, if you’re not brilliant they don’t help you. I’m
telling you, that’s the truth.