All the speculations one saw a few years ago as to the probable effect
of Home Rule on education in Ireland showed one how inadequately the
problem was grasped. To some the expected advent of Home Rule seemed to
promise as its main fruition in the field of education the raising of
their salaries; to others the supreme thing it was to bring in its train
was the abolition of Dr. Starkie; to some again it held out the
delightful prospect of Orange boys and Orange girls being forced to
learn Irish; to others it meant the dawn of an era of commonsense, the
ushering in of the reign of “a sound modern education,” suitable to the
needs of a progressive modern people.
I scandalised many people at the time by saying that the last was the
view that irritated me most. The first view was not so selfish as it
might appear, for between the salary offered to teachers and the
excellence of a country’s education system there is a vital connection.
And the second and third forecasts at any rate opened up picturesque
vistas. The passing of Dr. Starkie would have had something of the
pageantry of the banishment of Napoleon to St. Helena (an effect which
would have been heightened had he been accompanied into exile by Mr.
Bonaparte Wyse), and the prospect of the children of Sandy Row being
taught to curse the Pope in Irish was rich and soul-satisfying. These
things we might or might not have seen had Home Rule come. But I
expressed the hope that even Home Rule would not commit Ireland to an
ideal so low as the ideal underlying the phrase “a sound modern
education.”
It is a vile phrase, one of the vilest I know. Yet we find it in nearly
every school prospectus, and it comes pat to the lips of nearly everyone
that writes or talks about schools.
Now, there can be no such thing as “a sound modern education”--as well
talk about a “lively modern faith” or a “serviceable modern religion.”
It should be obvious that the more “modern” an education is the less
“sound,” for in education “modernism” is as much a heresy as in
religion. In both mediaevalism were a truer standard. We are too fond of
clapping ourselves upon the back because we live in modern times, and we
preen ourselves quite ridiculously (and unnecessarily) on our modern
progress. There is, of course, such a thing as modern progress, but it
has been won at how great a cost! How many precious things have we flung
from us to lighten ourselves for that race!
And in some directions we have progressed not at all, or we have
progressed in a circle; perhaps, indeed, all progress on this planet,
and on every planet, is in a circle, just as every line you draw on a
globe is a circle or part of one. Modern speculation is often a mere
groping where ancient men saw clearly. All the problems with which we
strive (I mean all the really important problems) were long ago solved
by our ancestors, only their solutions have been forgotten. There have
been States in which the rich did not grind the poor, although there are
no such States now; there have been free self-governing democracies,
although there are few such democracies now; there have been rich and
beautiful social organisations, with an art and a culture and a religion
in every man’s house, though for such a thing to-day we have to search
out some sequestered people living by a desolate sea-shore or in a high
forgotten valley among lonely hills--a hamlet of Iar-Connacht or a
village in the Austrian Alps. Mankind, I repeat, or some section of
mankind, has solved all its main problems somewhere and at some time. I
suppose no universal and permanent solution is possible as long as the
old Adam remains in us, the Adam that makes each one of us, and each
tribe of us, something of the rebel, of the freethinker, of the
adventurer, of the egoist. But the solutions are there, and it is
because we fail in clearness of vision or in boldness of heart or in
singleness of purpose that we cannot find them.
V