Ireland's big school secret: how a year off-curriculum changes teenage lives

In TY in 1998 I:<p>worked at an architect&#x27;s, an archeologist&#x27;s, a hospital, an epidemiological research institute where I got to use _my own computer_ all day - decided I needed to work with computers, got a summer job there.<p>earned the President&#x27;s Award medal<p>had one class where we stripped an engine over the term<p>got my first aid certificate<p>learned how to develop film<p>took night classes touch typing (on an electric typewriter)<p>took part in the Irish language school music competition<p>took German<p>was in a play<p>got an award at the Young Scientist<p>I really developed as a person. I hadn&#x27;t ever really stopped to think what my life would be like without that development but I suspect it was very beneficial. It certainly wasn&#x27;t a &quot;doss&quot; - and it started to grow a self determination muscle - find your own work experience, find projects you want to try etc.

In Quebec you find a similar program; elementary school is K-6, and high school is 7-11. Following this you can optionally attend an interstitial educational system called &quot;CEGEP&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s government funded and costs next to nothing.<p>CEGEP has two streams, pre-university or professional. For the latter, you learn skills like aircraft mechanics. For the former, you pick a stream that bulks up what would normally be first-year university courses like calculus, biology etc for a science stream.<p>However, you are required to take approx 15-20% of your courses in an &quot;opposite&quot; stream to force you to get acquainted with other alternatives before you commit to university. In addition, the structure is much like university (you pick your classes &amp; schedule, class sizes are increased compared to HS, your responsibility is increased) which is a good transition for university if that&#x27;s where you&#x27;re headed.<p>I think it&#x27;s a wonderful system and I wish it was more widespread.

Patrick Collison (Stripe) credits the Transition Year in Ireland for his computer interest<p>&quot; Ireland actually has this interesting thing called “transition year,” this year between two major exams of high school or at least Ireland’s high school equivalent.Transition year is a formally designated year that’s optional, where you can go and pursue things that you might not otherwise naturally tend to pursue, and the school tends to be much more permissive of going and spending three months abroad or going and doing some work experience in this area or whatever the case may be. And so, in that year, I basically decided to spend as much of it as possible programming, and so I did that.”&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;networkcapital.beehiiv.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;stripe-ceo-patrick-collisons-parents-subtle-art-not-helicopter-parent" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;networkcapital.beehiiv.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;stripe-ceo-patrick-coll...</a>

Everybody mocks me when I say this. But the most productive people in the world spent their time doing what they thought was fun.<p>It’s like our biology is smarter than us. If it’s fun our brains are telling us there’s something about it we need. It’s like when you think a girl is cute for the first time. There’s no logic in it to you, but it’s the most logical thing in the world, that’s why it’s fun.<p>Hans Zimmer used to just like play with all kinds of stuff when he was young just to see what it would sound like.<p>I listened to an intel exec (after pat came back) and he talked about how he was disassembling and reassembling the house electronics as a kid.<p>Or me - I would just code for fun and my dad got me some books on it. I hardly ever did any school on it.<p>If we let kids just do what they want and have fun, I think they would get good at what they love and have fulfilling careers.<p>If you have to do what your told your whole life - who even wants to live it?<p>So maybe we just let kids have their freedom. I know it sounds crazy but what if we applied the rights to life liberty and pursuit of happiness to them? I think they would amaze us. Kids are so clever, I think we would have so much creativity our minds would be blown!<p>To conclude I think that we have a dearth of people who know what to do. So many employees and fewer small businesses. I think if we give kids freedom, the chance to figure out what they like doing, and how to do it, as adults they will be able to start businesses better and manage them.<p>Just my thoughts!

In Ireland -- with one kid in Junior Cert and one who did Junior Cert, then had an external Transition Year, then self studied for A levels, and one who&#x27;s done home school&#x2F;self study through GCSE and now doing A levels.<p>It&#x27;s an optional, definitely not universal thing. Not all schools offer it, and even then I get the impression that it&#x27;s well less than half the students take the opportunity. The implementation is also highly school dependent, which is either totally expected or a complete surprise, given that the rest of the curriculum and tests are all national level standards.<p>This article paints a far rosier picture than I&#x27;ve really seen from the local experiences, but that&#x27;s probably as much the lack of drive at the school than anything else.<p>My eldest&#x27;s TY experience with us was great -- we took the opportunity to AirB&amp;B around Europe, at least till Covid hit. But we were totally comfortable with dealing with the home schooling part of that for the three of them.

Sounds like a great idea.<p>In England, I&#x27;ve seen education get consistently more rigid and inflexible over the years. All about tests, tests and more tests. Teachers leave the profession, children turn off. And as it consistently fails to produce better results, the answer is always to do more of what has failed.<p>Bring something like this to England, please!

20 years ago it was considered a &#x27;doss year&#x27; (waste&#x2F;screw-around etc.), and the general perception was that it was for those that require a little more time in the oven developmentally before proceeding to the next stage. I was a child then so I don&#x27;t know if that was true, but certainly the majority of people who took it were not academically inclined.

I had this in the U.S. and it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. My parents signed me up for homeschool every year, but I still did public school. As a result, I just did whatever classes I wanted. Junior year, I realized that I&#x27;d have to drop all my fun classes and just do core for the last year and a half to graduate. Decided instead to not graduate and just find books on different topics from the library. Ended up with: - Huckleberry Finn - a deep History book on Roman Britain - a nonfiction coffee table book on space - an intro to physics workbook - a Spanish book - a book on governments around the world<p>As it happened, I worked through 4 big space books and realized that I was really passionate about space. When I started college it was easy to plan my direction and be motivated because I knew the area I wanted to work in.

I was in one of the first years that did transition year, and it was almost nothing but good for me. It got me much more out of my shell and I was able to do subjects I wouldn&#x27;t have been able to do otherwise. Art, in particular, thought there weren&#x27;t enough subsequently in the senior cycle for me to continue with it, sadly. My work placements were fun in different ways: I worked in a electronics repair shop and learned to solder and basic electronics (I already had a healthy respect for high voltage), worked with some architects, and also in a music studio and got an understanding of music production.<p>I&#x27;ve heard reasons for not doing it, but it&#x27;s so good for broadening the horizons of who you think you are that almost all of those reasons are almost moot.

I took a year off after high school in the US to work part time and take welding and accounting courses at the local community college. Great experience that convinced me that I did actually want to go to university.

It seems like such a year could be either revelatory or totally miserable, depending what you got and what type of person you are. Just the thought of many of those activities brings me back to all my school year anxieties.

This seems to disprove the idea that a year off from school will necessarily be a serious setback.<p>Closing schools during covid might seem to support it, but there was also a global pandemic going on at the time.<p>It would be interesting to compare TY during the pandemic vs. non-pandemic years.

I think a lot of the mental illness for young boys is that the education ladder deprives them of responsibility until way past maturity.

TY was good to me, but I think it could have been better. As the article says, each school does it differently. We did a mini company, where we created knick knacks and tried to sell them. But the entire class of 30 students was one company, which was therefore quite badly organised. I remember the teachers saying that they wouldn&#x27;t do it that way in future years. There was also orienteering.<p>And we still did some academic classes. Maths, anyway. And I think some others.<p>In my school, most of the kids didn&#x27;t do TY, so there was just one class in TY, which meant that the maths, in particular, was fairly basic: there weren&#x27;t enough of us for streaming. And jumping back into higher level maths in Fifth Year was, frankly, a bit of a shock to the system.

It works on the other end of the spectrum too. Much of my class just wanted to leave school at 16 to work on the family farm. TY gave them practical experience of running a business, stripping an engine, how to use an manage credit etc. before they went out in the world.

A few things make this effective: freedom to follow one&#x27;s curiosity, personal responsibility, and intrinsic motivation over extrinsic.<p>I used to teach public middle school, and I developed a profound belief that how we educate students is entirely backwards.<p>The things that make an off year effective scales to an entire K-12 program! See the free democratic schools like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sudbury_school" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sudbury_school</a> I believe the majority of students would thrive in such a school, if they had the chance.<p>They have no formal classes, no teachers, no tests. Yet students still learn to read earlier, they read more and at a higher level. They graduate from college at higher rates, and have higher rates of entrepreneurship. I believe this model is a superior pedagogical model for the majority of the population.<p>&quot;The Sudbury pedagogical philosophy may be summarized as the following: Learning is a natural by-product of all human activity. Learning is self-initiated and self-motivated.<p>The educational model states that there are many ways to learn and that learning is a process someone does, not a process that is done to him or her; According to the model the presence and guidance of a teacher is not necessary. &quot;<p>Check out:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Sudbury_schools" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Sudbury_schools</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phillyfreeschool.org&#x2F;why-it-works" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phillyfreeschool.org&#x2F;why-it-works</a><p>The problem is we are stuck with our current model - even when alternatives have better outcomes, parents just say &quot;well my kid would not do well with that, they are too lazy to even do what we ask.&quot; They do not realize that our current model is so broken that disinterest in a student is a perfectly rational response.<p>For example, I think video game addiction is a natural response to being forced to do something you hate 8-12 hours a day. The fact that the Philly Free School has very few students ever even playing video games at all (but they are allowed to all day if they want) paints a very clear picture that video games are a symptom not a cause.<p>And finally, a damning indictment of our current model; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cantrip.org&#x2F;gatto.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cantrip.org&#x2F;gatto.html</a>

The Cillian Murphy reference seems off. He might have been too old when it was mandated in 1994, even though it was available earlier. Anyone know for sure?

&gt; What he really wanted to close was the cultural gap between rich and poor<p>This sounds great!<p>&gt; Then there is the financial aspect of TY: some parents just can’t afford it.<p>oh for fuck&#x27;s sake

My child is too young for school but my partner and I expect to homeschool. We&#x27;ve talked about gap years in the childs early&#x2F;mid teens for travel&#x2F;backpacking&#x2F;nature excursions. I wish fellowship and apprentice work was more commonplace in the younger years too. Get out of the classroom and experience the real world.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;duzFR" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;duzFR</a>

Are there any US parents here who strongly nudged their children to take a transition year? When my girl grows up I&#x27;m leaning towards that direction because I really wish someone would have suggested it for me when I was that age.

I worked at the MIT Media Lab Europe and in the army for my transition yeah.<p>Oh and drank a lot of beer. Great times!

Folklore?

Great. Let&#x27;s model a failed country.<p>If they were smart they would start with adding more and reducing it.