In these chapters I have sufficiently indicated the general spirit in
which I would have Irish education re-created. I say little of
organisation, of mere machinery. That is the least important part of the
subject. We can all foresee that the first task of a free Ireland must
be destructive: that the lusty strokes of Gael and Gall, Ulster taking
its manful part, will hew away and cast adrift the rotten and worm-eaten
boards which support the grotesque fabric of the English education
system. We can all see that, when an Irish Government is constituted,
there will be an Irish Minister of Education responsible to the Irish
Parliament; that under him Irish education will be drawn into a
homogeneous whole--an organic unity will replace a composite freak in
which the various members are not only not directed by a single
intelligence but are often mutually antagonistic, and sometimes engaged
in open warfare one with the other, like the preposterous donkey in the
pantomime whose head is in perpetual strife with his heels because they
belong to different individuals. The individual entities that compose
the English-Irish educational donkey are four: the Commissioners of
National Education, the Commissioners of Intermediate Education, the
Commissioners of Education for certain Endowed Schools, and last, but
not least, the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction--the
modern Ioldanach which in this realm protects science, art, fishery,
needlework, poultry, foods and drugs, horse-breeding, etc., etc., etc.,
etc., and whose versatile chiefs can at a moment’s notice switch off
their attention from archæology in the Nile Valley to the Foot and Mouth
Disease in Mullingar. I must admit that the educational work of the
Department as far as it affects secondary schools is done efficiently;
but one will naturally expect this branch of its activity to be brought
into the general education scheme under the Minister of Education. In
addition to the four Boards I have enumerated I need hardly say that
Dublin Castle has its finger in the pie, as it has in every unsavoury
pie in Ireland. And behind Dublin Castle looms the master of Dublin
Castle, and the master of all the Boards, and the master of everything
in Ireland--the British Treasury--arrogating claims over the veriest
details of education in Ireland for which there is no parallel in any
other administration in the world and no sanction even in the British
Constitution. My scheme, of course, presupposes the getting rid not only
of the British Treasury, but of the British connection.
One perceives the need, too, of linking up the whole system and giving
it a common impulse. Under the Minister there might well be chiefs of
the various sub-divisions, elementary, secondary, higher, and technical;
but these should not be independent potentates, each entrenched in a
different stronghold in a different part of the city. I do not see why
they could not all occupy offices in the same corridor of the same
building. The whole government of the free kingdom of Belgium was
carried on in one small building. A Council of some sort, with
sub-committees, would doubtless be associated with the Minister, but I
think its function should be advisory rather than executive: that all
acts should be the acts of the Minister. As to the local organisation of
elementary schools, there will always be need of a local manager, and
personally I see no reason why the local management should be given to a
district council rather than left as it is at present to some individual
in the locality interested in education, but a thousand reasons why it
should not. I would, however, make the teachers, both primary and
secondary, a national service, guaranteeing an adequate salary, adequate
security of tenure, adequate promotion, and adequate pension: and all
this means adequate endowment, and freedom from the control of
parsimonious officials.
In the matter of language I would order things bilingually. But I would
not apply the Belgian system exactly as I have described it in _An
Claidheamh Soluis_. The _status quo_ in Ireland is different from that
in Belgium; the ideal to be aimed at in Ireland is different from that
in Belgium. Ireland is six-sevenths English-speaking with an
Irish-speaking seventh. Belgium is divided into two nearly equal halves,
one Flemish, the other French. Irish Nationalists would restore Irish as
a vernacular to the English-speaking six-sevenths, and would establish
Irish as the national language of a free Ireland: Belgian Nationalists
would simply preserve their “two national languages,” according them
equal rights and privileges. What then? Irish should be made the
language of instruction in districts where it is the home language, and
English the “second language,” taught as a school subject: I would not
at any stage use English as a medium of instruction in such districts,
anything that I have elsewhere said as to Belgian practice
notwithstanding. Where English is the home language it must of necessity
be the “first language” in the schools, but I would have a compulsory
“second language,” satisfied that this “second language” in five-sixths
of the schools would be Irish. And I would see that the “second
language” be utilised as a medium of instruction from the earliest
stages. In this way, and in no other way that I can imagine, can Irish
be restored as a vernacular to English-speaking Ireland.
But in all the details of their programmes the schools should have
autonomy. The function of the central authority should be to
co-ordinate, to maintain a standard, to advise, to inspire, to keep the
teachers in touch with educational thought in other lands. I would
transfer the centre of gravity of the system from the education office
to the teachers; the teachers in fact would be the system. Teachers, and
not clerks, would henceforth conduct the education of the country.
The inspectors, again, would be selected from the teachers, and the
chiefs of departments from the inspectors. And promoted teachers would
man the staffs of the training colleges, which, for the rest, would work
in close touch with the universities.
I need hardly say that the present Intermediate system must be
abolished. Good men will curse it in its passing. It is the most evil
thing that Ireland has ever known. Dr. Hyde once finely described the
National and Intermediate Boards as
“Death and the nightmare Death-in-Life
That thicks men’s blood with cold.”
Of the two Death-in-Life is the more hideous. It is sleeker than, but
equally as obscene as, its fellow-fiend. The thing has damned more souls
than the Drink Traffic or the White Slave Traffic. Down with it--down
among the dead men! Let it promote competitive examinations in the
under-world, if it will.
Well-trained and well-paid teachers, well-equipped and beautiful
schools, and a fund at the disposal of each school to enable it to award
prizes on its own tests based on its own programme--these would be among
the characteristics of a new secondary system. Manual work, both indoor
and outdoor, would, I hope, be part of the programme of every school.
And the internal organisation might well follow the models of the little
child-republics I have elsewhere described, with their own laws and
leaders, their fostering of individualities yet never at the expense of
the common wealth, their care for the body as well as for the mind,
their nobly-ordered games, their spacious outdoor life, their
intercourse with the wild things of the woods and wastes, their daily
adventure face to face with elemental Life and Force, with its moral
discipline, with its physical hardening.
And then, vivifying the whole, we need the divine breath that moves
through free peoples, the breath that no man of Ireland has felt in his
nostrils for so many centuries, the breath that once blew through the
streets of Athens and that kindled, as wine kindles, the hearts of those
who taught and learned in Clonmacnois.
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Footnote 1:
1912-13.
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