I have claimed elsewhere that the native Irish education system
possessed pre-eminently two characteristics: first, freedom for the
individual, and, secondly, an adequate inspiration. Without these two
things you cannot have education, no matter how you may elaborate
educational machinery, no matter how you may multiply educational
programmes. And because those two things are pre-eminently lacking in
what passes for education in Ireland, we have in Ireland strictly no
education system at all; nothing that by any extension of the meaning of
words can be called an education system. We have an elaborate machinery
for teaching persons certain subjects, and the teaching is done more or
less efficiently; more efficiently, I imagine, than such teaching is
done in England or in America. We have three universities and four
boards of education. We have some thousands of buildings, large and
small. We have an army of inspectors, mostly overpaid. We have a host of
teachers, mostly underpaid. We have a Compulsory Education Act. We have
the grave and bulky code of the Commissioners of National Education, and
the slim impertinent pamphlet which enshrines the wisdom of the
Commissioners of Intermediate Education. We have a vast deal more in the
shape of educational machinery and stage properties. But we have, I
repeat, no education system; and only in isolated places have we any
education. The essentials are lacking.
And first of freedom. The word freedom is no longer understood in
Ireland. We have no experience of the thing, and we have almost lost our
conception of the idea. So completely is this true that the very
organisations which exist in Ireland to champion freedom show no
disposition themselves to accord freedom: they challenge a great
tyranny, but they erect their little tyrannies. “Thou shalt not” is half
the law of Ireland, and the other half is “Thou must.”
Now, nowhere has the law of “Thou shalt not” and “Thou must” been so
rigorous as in the schoolroom. Surely the first essential of healthy
life there was freedom. But there has been and there is no freedom in
Irish education; no freedom for the child, no freedom for the teacher,
no freedom for the school. Where young souls, young minds, young bodies,
demanded the largest measure of individual freedom consistent with the
common good, freedom to move and grow on their natural lines, freedom to
live their own lives--for what is natural life but natural
growth?--freedom to bring themselves, as I have put it elsewhere, to
their own perfection, there was a sheer denial of the right of the
individual to grow in his own natural way, that is, in God’s way. He had
to develop not in God’s way, but in the Board’s way. The Board, National
or Intermediate as the case might be, bound him hand and foot, chained
him mind and soul, constricted him morally, mentally, and physically
with the involuted folds of its rules and regulations, its programmes,
its minutes, its reports and special reports, its pains and penalties. I
have often thought that the type of English education in Ireland was the
Laocoon: that agonising father and his sons seem to me like the teacher
and the pupils of an Irish school, the strong limbs of the man and the
slender limbs of the boys caught together and crushed together in the
grip of an awful fate. And English education in Ireland has seemed to
some like the bed of Procustes, the bed on which all men that passed
that way must lie, be it never so big for them, be it never so small for
them: the traveller for whom it was too large had his limbs stretched
until he filled it; the traveller for whom it was too small had his
limbs chopped off until he fitted into it--comfortably. It was a grim
jest to play upon travellers. The English have done it to Irish children
not by way of jest, but with a purpose. Our English-Irish systems took,
and take, absolutely no cognisance of the differences between
individuals, of the differences between localities, of the differences
between urban and rural communities, of the differences springing from a
different ancestry, Gaelic or Anglo-Saxon. Every school must conform to
a type--and what a type! Every individual must conform to a type--and
what a type! The teacher has not been at liberty, and in practice is not
yet at liberty, to seek to discover the individual bents of his pupils,
the hidden talent that is in every normal soul, to discover which and to
cherish which, that it may in the fullness of time be put to some
precious use, is the primary duty of the teacher. I knew one boy who
passed through several schools a dunce and a laughing-stock; the
National Board and the Intermediate Board had sat in judgment upon him
and had damned him as a failure before men and angels. Yet a friend and
fellow-worker of mine discovered that he was gifted with a wondrous
sympathy for nature, that he loved and understood the ways of plants,
that he had a strange minuteness and subtlety of observation--that, in
short, he was the sort of boy likely to become an accomplished botanist.
I knew another boy of whom his father said to me: “He is no good at
books, he is no good at work; he is good at nothing but playing a tin
whistle. What am I to do with him?” I shocked the worthy man by replying
(though really it was the obvious thing to reply): “Buy a tin whistle
for him.” Once a colleague of mine summed up the whole philosophy of
education in a maxim which startled a sober group of visitors: “If a boy
shows an aptitude for doing anything better than most people, he should
be encouraged to do that, and to do it as well as possible; I don’t care
what it is--scotch-hop, if you like.”
The idea of a compulsory programme imposed by an external authority upon
every child in every school in a country is the direct contrary of the
root idea involved in education. Yet this is what we have in Ireland. In
theory the primary schools have a certain amount of freedom; in practice
they have none. Neither in theory nor in practice is such a thing as
freedom dreamt of in the gloomy limbo whose presiding demon is the Board
of Intermediate Education for Ireland. Education, indeed, reaches its
nadir in the Irish Intermediate system. At the present moment there are
15,000 boys and girls pounding at a programme drawn up for them by
certain persons sitting round a table in Hume Street. Precisely the same
text-books are being read to-night in every secondary school and college
in Ireland. Two of Hawthorne’s _Tanglewood Tales_, with a few poems in
English, will constitute the whole literary pabulum of three-quarters of
the pupils of the Irish secondary schools during this twelvemonths.[1]
The teacher who seeks to give his pupils a wider horizon in literature
does so at his peril. He will, no doubt, benefit his pupils, but he will
infallibly reduce his results fees. As an intermediate teacher said to
me, “Culture is all very well in its way, but if you don’t stick to your
programme your boys won’t pass.” “Stick to your programme” is the
strange device on the banner of the Irish Intermediate system; and the
programme bulks so large that there is no room for education.
The first thing I plead for, therefore, is freedom: freedom for each
school to shape its own programme in conformity with the circumstances
of the school as to place, size, personnel, and so on; freedom again for
the individual teacher to impart something of his own personality to his
work, to bring his own peculiar gifts to the service of his pupils, to
be, in short, a teacher, a master, one having an intimate and permanent
relationship with his pupils, and not a mere part of the educational
machine, a mere cog in the wheel; freedom finally for the individual
pupil and scope for his development within the school and within the
system. And I would promote this idea of freedom by the very
organisation of the school itself, giving a certain autonomy not only to
the school, but to the particular parts of the school: to the staff, of
course, but also to the pupils, and, in a large school, to the various
sub-divisions of the pupils. I do not plead for anarchy. I plead for
freedom within the law, for liberty, not licence, for that true freedom
which can exist only where there is discipline, which exists in fact
because each, valuing his own freedom, respects also the freedom of
others.