Introducing Generation Asterisk – the cohort of students forever marked by Covid
It is celebrated, or feared, as a moment of truth. For whether they are received in joy or trepidation, at least exam results usually feel like that: the truth. A yardstick. An assessment whose rules, for all their knots and warps, were known at the outset, not just of the school year, but of every student’s school career from the moment they toddled into reception.
Not this year.
This year there is not one yardstick, but three – mocks, estimated grades, and resits. This year, using teachers’ predictions, almost 40pc of children were awarded the highest marks – 11pc higher than the previous record.
This year the moment of truth has been replaced by a miasma of doubt; the distilling of hopes and dreams, of university and career, has been replaced by uncertainty and the prospect of snide comments for ever more: “Ah yes, you got your results in 2020.” Not so much A star as A asterisk – marked out for eternal doubt like the performances of thickly-bearded East German female athletes in the 1980s.
It feels like a unique nightmare for all sides – both those who were heading for top marks anyway, their grades now regarded with scepticism; and those whose performance has been shattered by the pandemic.
And it is unique. “Without precedent,” according to Sir Anthony Seldon, the former headmaster and historian. “Students, sometimes classes, could fall to individual tragedy,” he says. “But to have an entire year wiped out like this? Not even in 1914-18 or 1939-45, did schools close down, were exams not sat. We’ve never been here before.”
He worries that teenagers, so often their own harshest critics, will be beset by self-doubt as results are announced. “They know they haven’t sat exams, so they will need convincing themselves. They shouldn’t feel there is a stigma about them as this generation. They shouldn’t succumb to that. In the vast majority of cases they should feel pride.”
Pride or self-doubt? On such psychological twists the fate of lifetimes can rest. Seldon himself recalls initially flunking his own A-levels – one C and two Es – but restoring self-confidence with resits – confidence that helped shape his character and career for decades to come. The biggest risk today, he says, is of a generation which – however they have performed as individuals – cannot help questioning itself in future, or is made to question itself by friends, family or employers who – consciously or not – can’t help thinking of the 2020 cohort as Generation Covid*.
Exceptionalism is not new, but that is not to diminish its effects – or at least the effects that, in retrospect, we ascribe to it. In France, where I was a correspondent at the beginning of the century, I grew used to hearing the term “soixante-huitards” to refer to a generation formed in the heat of May protests in 1968. Anti-war, anti-capitalism, anti-government, 68ers was deployed to mean someone given to, and moulded by, the very act of protest.
As such the phrase could, depending on who used it, and about whom, carry with it a smear of self-righteousness, or an enduring whiff of the troublemaker; it could describe individuals by turns charming or infuriating, to whom the rules don’t apply. Bernard Kouchner, a communist medical student at the Sorbonne who went on to found Medecins Sans Frontieres and serve in various governments, disdaining party affiliation, seemed to sum up the type.
Yet the term mattered and its significance echoed down the years. 68ers were, as President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested during his 2007 election campaign, almost half a century later, the kind of people “who had said that anything goes; that authority, good manners and respect were out of fashion; that nothing was sacred, nothing admirable; that there were no rules and no standards; and that nothing was forbidden.” Their legacy, he insisted, should be “liquidated”.
Once elected, though, he appointed Koucher, a man who once caroused with Fidel Castro, to be his Foreign Secretary. The exceptionalism of les soixante-huitards, it turned out, was just a subset of French exceptionalism itself.
Yet there are events – war, disease, disaster – which seem to turn generations against the societies that formed them, which mark a cleavage with the past, tip them over the edge and impel them to disrupt the status quo. You can often see it in the postwar sentiments of those children – quarter of a million of them – who snuck under the age limit (19) and volunteered for the trenches a little over a century ago. How soon their enthusiasm and respect for authority turned, in many cases, to disillusioned anti-authoritarianism, even pacifism.
Extreme events crystallise discontent. We remember the overwhelmingly youthful faces dancing atop the Berlin Wall in 1989, helping to haul great chunks of it down. But Mikhail Gorbachev always thought that their road to revolution was embarked upon three years earlier, the day that Chernobyl melted down.
“The Chernobyl disaster, more than anything else, opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue,” he wrote 20 years after the meltdown.
The manner in which Chernobyl exposed the powerlessness of the USSR’s huge bureaucracy was “perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union” and its communist satellites, he noted. “There was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.”
All of us can attest to the fact that, like Chernobyl, the extraordinary impact of a singular event – Covid – is making us look anew upon our social and political bonds. Exam day has focussed still further that impact on single year groups of students who feel their very futures are at stake.
It is enough to make anyone, not just a moody teenager, cry foul, throw their hands in their air, and ask “why did this have to happen to me?”
Yet, for all its pitfalls, there are twin upsides to being a member of Generation Covid*. First, they are a group given coherence by their one-off experience. What bonds, what secret handshakes, nods and winks, shall they form among themselves, what secret sympathy in future years, so that the veterans of today become tomorrow a “happy few”?
And if that is perhaps too poetic a consolation, there is meatier solace in that Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. Which is that, in the era of “the attention economy”, there is great merit merely in standing out. Just ask Donald Trump.
So to paraphrase King Henry: “And exam, examining, shall ne’er go by/From this day to the ending of the world,/ But we in it shall be remembered.”
Down the decades its very notoriety will make results day 2020 a badge of renown for those whose lives it upset, a club with few members. They may one day come to be known for their risk-aversion, mistrust, and abiding sense of injustice.
Equally, more happily, they may be famed for their resilience, independence and rule-busting entrepreneurialism. For now, though, it is certain that they will not be forgotten.
And that, on a first date, or a job interview, is not a bad start.
