A few years ago, when people still believed in the imminence of Home
Rule, there were numerous discussions as to the tasks awaiting a Home
Rule Parliament and the order in which they should be taken up. Mr. John
Dillon declared that one of the first of those tasks was the recasting
of the Irish education system, by which he meant the English education
system in Ireland. The declaration alarmed the Bishop of Limerick,
always suspicious of Mr. Dillon, and he told that statesman in effect
that the Irish education system did not need recasting--that all was
well there.
The positions seemed irreconcilable. Yet in the _Irish Review_ I
quixotically attempted to find common ground between the disputants, and
to state in such a way as to command the assent of both the duty of a
hypothetical Irish Parliament with regard to education. I put it that
what education in Ireland needed was less a reconstruction of its
machinery than a regeneration in spirit. The machinery, I said, has
doubtless its defects, but what is chiefly wrong with it is that it is
mere machinery, a lifeless thing without a soul. Dr. O’Dwyer was
probably concerned for the maintenance of a portion of the machinery,
valued by him as a Catholic Bishop, and not without reason; and I for
one was (and am) willing to leave that particular portion untouched, or
practically so. But the machine as a whole is no more capable of
fulfilling the function for which it is needed than would an automaton
be capable of fulfilling the function of a living teacher in a school. A
soulless thing cannot teach; but it can destroy. A machine cannot make
men; but it can break men.
One of the most terrible things about the English education system in
Ireland is its ruthlessness. I know no image for that ruthlessness in
the natural order. The ruthlessness of a wild beast has in it a certain
mercy--it slays. It has in it a certain grandeur of animal force. But
this ruthlessness is literally without pity and without passion. It is
cold and mechanical, like the ruthlessness of an immensely powerful
engine. A machine vast, complicated, with a multitude of far-reaching
arms, with many ponderous presses, carrying out mysterious and
long-drawn processes of shaping and moulding, is the true image of the
Irish education system. It grinds night and day; it obeys immutable and
predetermined laws; it is as devoid of understanding, of sympathy, of
imagination, as is any other piece of machinery that performs an
appointed task. Into it is fed all the raw human material in Ireland; it
seizes upon it inexorably and rends and compresses and re-moulds; and
what it cannot refashion after the regulation pattern it ejects with all
likeness of its former self crushed from it, a bruised and shapeless
thing, thereafter accounted waste.
Our common parlance has become impressed with the conception of
education as some sort of manufacturing process. Our children are the
“raw material”; we desiderate for their education “modern methods” which
must be “efficient” but “cheap”; we send them to Clongowes to be
“finished”; when “finished” they are “turned out”; specialists “grind”
them for the English Civil Service and the so-called liberal
professions; in each of our great colleges there is a department known
as the “scrap-heap,” though officially called the Fourth
Preparatory--the limbo to which the _débris_ ejected by the machine is
relegated. The stuff there is either too hard or too soft to be moulded
to the pattern required by the Civil Service Commissioners or the
Incorporated Law Society.
In our adoption of the standpoint here indicated there is involved a
primary blunder as to the nature and functions of education. For
education has not to do with the manufacture of things, but with
fostering the growth of things. And the conditions we should strive to
bring about in our education system are not the conditions favourable to
the rapid and cheap manufacture of readymades, but the conditions
favourable to the growth of living organisms--the liberty and the light
and the gladness of a ploughed field under the spring sunshine.
In particular I would urge that the Irish school system of the future
should give freedom--freedom to the individual school, freedom to the
individual teacher, freedom as far as may be to the individual pupil.
Without freedom there can be no right growth; and education is properly
the fostering of the right growth of a personality. Our school system
must bring, too, some gallant inspiration. And with the inspiration it
must bring a certain hardening. One scarcely knows whether modern
sentimentalism or modern utilitarianism is the more sure sign of modern
decadence. I would boldly preach the antique faith that fighting is the
only noble thing, and that he only is at peace with God who is at war
with the powers of evil.
In a true education system, religion, patriotism, literature, art and
science would be brought in such a way into the daily lives of boys and
girls as to affect their character and conduct. We may assume that
religion is a vital thing in Irish schools, but I know that the other
things, speaking broadly, do not exist. There are no ideas there, no
love of beauty, no love of books, no love of knowledge, no heroic
inspiration. And there is no room for such things either on the earth or
in the heavens, for the earth is cumbered and the heavens are darkened
by the monstrous bulk of the programme. Most of the educators detest the
programme. They are like the adherents of a dead creed who continue to
mumble formulas and to make obeisance before an idol which they have
found out to be a spurious divinity.
Mr. Dillon was to be sympathised with, even though pathetically
premature, in looking to the then anticipated advent of Home Rule for a
chance to make education what it should be. But I doubt if he and the
others who would have had power in a Home Rule Parliament realised that
what is needed here is not reform, not even a revolution, but a vastly
bigger thing--a creation. It is not a question of pulling machinery
asunder and piecing it together again; it is a question of breathing
into a dead thing a living soul.