The Unmentionable

Examinations do not simply assess knowledge; they organise it.


The room is spare. A table. Three chairs. No syllabus. No marking scheme. Only a question that has been quietly accompanying me since I returned to teaching Higher Level Leaving Certificate English, after many years working within the IB Literature framework.
Two figures arrive first.
One attends closely to systems — to procedures, classifications, and the quiet authority exercised by practices that present themselves as neutral.
The other watches more obliquely, attentive to posture, ease, vocabulary — to what people take for granted when they feel they belong.
They invite me to speak.


Foucault
You have described a sense of dissonance since returning to this system. What do you take that dissonance to be?
Me
At first, I assumed it was a question of difficulty — that one curriculum demanded more than the other. That explanation no longer holds. What I am encountering is not a difference in standards but a difference in orientation.
In the Leaving Certificate, literary knowledge appears as something to be demonstrated: clearly, coherently, under carefully standardised conditions. In the IB, it appeared more often as something to be constructed: provisionally, dialogically, across time and modes.


Foucault
So you are not describing two examinations, but two ways in which knowledge is rendered intelligible.
Me
Yes. Assessment does not merely register learning; it shapes the conditions under which particular forms of understanding become visible, credible, and worth performing.
This becomes especially apparent under examination conditions, where patterns of choice tend to align with familiarity and recognisability — not as a failure of ambition, but as a rational response to the epistemic logic of the system itself.


Bourdieu(interrupting)
You are describing competence within a field.
Me
Exactly. Within a highly standardised, terminal assessment structure, caution functions as a form of intelligence. Choosing what is familiar is not an abdication of thought; it is an alignment with what is most likely to be recognised as legitimate.
Seen in this way, student behaviour reads less as resistance to challenge and more as fluency in the rules of the game.


Bourdieu
And your own response?
Me
I have come to see it as the product of a different professional formation. My pedagogical instincts were shaped in a field where interpretive risk is normalised, where uncertainty is not penalised but worked through, and where authority accrues through sustained engagement rather than singular performance.
What initially registered as hesitation now reads as precision — calibrated to a different set of expectations.



Foucault
You have mentioned the structure of the Leaving Certificate papers. Why does that matter?
Me
Because structure teaches quietly. Paper 1 privileges language — rhetoric, creativity, the critical reading of unseen texts. Paper 2 consolidates literature into a single, summative space.
That division does not diminish literary study, but it does delimit it. It suggests where interpretation properly belongs, and under what conditions it should appear. Such design choices are never neutral; they shape how a subject is understood and inhabited.


Foucault
And yet, you resist critique.
Me
Because critique presumes a hierarchy I no longer find helpful, a national system assessing tens of thousands of candidates must prioritise equity, reliability, and standardisation. Those priorities inevitably carry epistemological consequences.
What unsettled me was not deficiency, but difference — and the way that difference rendered my own assumptions newly visible.


Bourdieu
So what, then, are you learning?
Me
Translation. How to articulate deep literary engagement within an assessment culture that values clarity, containment, and demonstrability — without abandoning intellectual seriousness.
It has sharpened my attention to how confidence is produced, how risk is rationed, and how students, often tacitly, learn what kinds of thinking are worth performing.


They leave.
​
The question remains.

At what point does an assessment stop measuring knowledge and begin producing it?

After six months teaching Leaving Certificate English, I find myself less interested in comparisons of rigour and more attentive to the kinds of knowers different systems invite students to become. English, in this sense, is never simply about texts.

It is about the conditions under which interpretation is allowed to appear — and to count.
本稿は、アイルランドのリービング・サーティフィケート英語（上級）を6か月間教えた経験を、IB文学教育の背景から省察的に捉えた思考実験である。フーコーとブルデューとの架空の対話という形式を用い、試験が単に学習を測定する装置ではなく、「何が知識として可視化され、正当と認められるか」を構成する制度であることを示す。リービング・サーティフィケートでは、文学的知識は標準化された条件下で「示される」ものとして位置づけられ、IBでは対話的・暫定的に「構築される」傾向が強い。この違いは難易度ではなく認識論的方向性の差である。試験下で学生が慣れ親しんだ素材を選ぶ行為は、挑戦回避ではなく、その制度における合理的な熟達として理解されるべきだと論じる。最終的に、本稿は英語教育を「テクスト」ではなく、「解釈が現れ、価値を持つ条件」をめぐる営みとして捉え直す。

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