Arts: Bent old men in Connemara pubs will chill the blood with tales of the Junior Cert Maths paper

"Education is an admirable thing," Oscar Wilde once wrote. "But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." I was reminded of the line by a week spent in Ireland, where it is currently the exam season, an agonythat is rather less domestic or ignorable in that country than in this one. Here only participants, their immediate relatives and disc jockeys anxious to cosy up to their audiences could be expected to share the sense of imminent ordeal. In any case, the sense of communal suffering is dissipated by the existence of so many different examination boards. As a result, it's quite easy to spend the summer completely oblivious to the huddled masses waiting to be processed for emigration from childhood, hoping that their visas will pass scrutiny.

In Ireland, on the other hand, every eligible pupil from Malin Head to Skibbereen sits the same papers at precisely the same time and no sane citizen could possibly remain in ignorance of what is taking place. It's as if the whole country has got butterflies in its stomach. The evening news bulletins carry reports on the state of Irish youth's nerves and broadsheet papers include a daily page of analysis and comment on the Junior and Leaving Cert papers. You get the feeling that a really tough maths paper might easily plunge the country into a foreign exchange crisis.

At first glimpse, this has a certain sweetly comic edge to it, particularly if you are used to a more phlegmatic (or indifferent) tradition. "No doubt tornadoes of relief swept the country as the magic letters `Kinsella' featured," says Mr Pat Hunt, a teacher from County Wicklow, welcoming the appearance of a heavily backed poet in Paper 2 of the English exam. "The dogs in the street have been barking for Kinsella for months," he continues in a practical demonstration of hyperbole, "and had he not featured, coronary-care units would have been working overtime."

It's understandable, perhaps, that teachers should get a bit wound-up - this is an audit on their own expertise, too - but the febrile mood transmits itself to journalists as well. "Yesterday's Junior Cert higher- level maths paper was the stuff of which legends are made," writes Anne Byrne in the Irish Times's special section. "The second paper is traditionally regarded as the more difficult and this year the prophets of doom appeared to have been fully justified in their foreboding." Legends indeed. In 60 years' time, bent old men in Connemara pubs will tug on their stout and chill the blood with tales of the Junior Cert Maths paper of '96; pass by a deserted school at the wrong time of night and they say you can still hear the eerie howls of anguished children.

At second glimpse, this all begins to look distinctly enviable - the luxury of living in a small country, where common experience might actually count for something. What can the English share now, but the stinging pleasure of being humiliated by the Swiss at football? And that education should be the object of a gossipy national obsession only increases the sense of wistful admiration. In Taiwan and Japan, there are similar media exercises in examination post-mortems, journalists in the latter country going so far as to analyse what the correct answer to every question should have been (an enterprise that seems likely only to lead to an increase in teenage suicides). Ireland's exam fever appears to place it in a club we might like to join.

But, while a third glimpse doesn't entirely undermine the sense of envy, it does raise some questions about what exactly an education is for. One headline after the opening day of exams read approvingly "First papers have a comforting air of familiarity". This was a relief to students and teachers alike, it seemed, but the mood of contentment didn't last. Along came the legendary Junior Certs Maths. Sister Marie McNamara from County Tipperary was unequivocal: "It was a test of how to face a very difficult challenge, and I don't think that is fair." The day before, the same teacher had praised an exam by saying that it "contained no surprises". This wasn't an unusual sentiment incidentally - to put it crudely, much of the analysis seemed concerned less with the ingenuity or interest of the papers than with the degree to which they permitted, even coaxed, students to regurgitate the knowledge with which they had been fed. The effect was of a benign Gradgrindery - education reduced to the possession and ready production of curricular information, rather then the creation of a habit of mind.

Life, of course, is rarely so biddable as to exclude surprises or difficult challenges. Life's vocabulary includes no word for "fair". I doubt if there's much wrong with Ireland's exam system (it's educational record is, after all, rather better than ours), but you do wonder what lessons children might be learning from the indignation and relief with which their elders dissect its workings.