'In the Real World'

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Education seems particularly susceptible to clichés.

‘In the real world’: is there any more triggering phrase to someone who actually works in a school? We’re hearing it a lot these days in relation to any objection to children using AI in their schoolwork, or in official terminal assessments, like the forthcoming Additional Assessment Components in the Leaving Certificate (hilariously, AI is cited as a ‘real world’ phenomenon):

‘But in the real world they’ll be using it.’

Here are the tedious and condescending assumptions behind this apparently bland phrase:

  • School isn’t part of the ‘real world’.

  • That is because only adulthood is ‘real’. 

  • Childhood is mere preparation for adulthood (associated assumptions: primary school is preparation for secondary, secondary for third-level, third-level for work: none has purpose in and of itself unconnected with what is to come).

  • In fact, preparation for only one part of the adult world: the world of work. Specifically, the business-world.

  • Teachers (like nurses, police, retail workers) do not live in the ‘real’ world, despite paying taxes, coping with mortgages and bringing up children.

  • I, the person who uses that phrase, know better than you, the mere teacher who does not understand the more important demands of the world of business.

  • The purpose of education is transactional. What matters is the output, the end result, rather than the process itself.


Mind you, there is a core of truth here: school is not and should not be part of the ‘real world’ of business and work. Children are not mini-adults. Schools are not businesses, nor factories, as Charles Dickens pointed out in Hard Times.

Other educational clichés which are regularly foisted on us:

  • You can just Google it / look it up. Frequently and regularly debunked (we’ll start with Daisy Christodoulou’s The Seven Myths of Education), but irrepressible, still often rearing its head like a supposedly-dead zombie in a slasher movie. Some people really do think information is the same thing as knowledge. The arrival of AI has dismayingly supercharged this cliché.

  • 21st century skills: we’re a quarter of the way through the century now, and some people still think there is something unique in this randomly chosen chunk of time. I think of this as the arrogance of the present. The skills are usually handily alliterative - collaboration, creativity, critical thinking! [These are of course fundamental and (ha!) critical human attributes, but they are permanent parts of humanity, and no more important in 2024 than they were when Shakespeare was collaboratively creating and producing King Lear with his company of actors in 1606. I’m looking forward to seeing what 22nd century skills are].

  • Rote learning: I wrote about this in terms of the Leaving Certificate in English. This one may be the most common zombie in Irish educational discourse.

  • Revolutionise: education always needs to be revolutionised, because past generations got it all wrong. Stating this makes you think you sound with-it and go-ahead.

Back I go now to the real world of the classroom.