No Irish Catholic can examine the system of National Education without
being filled with alarm for the safety of our faith in Ireland.
The tendency of the national system is to give a full control over the
education of the rising generations in Ireland to the English
Government, thus affording them an opportunity of undermining true
faith, and of effecting by favours, promises, gifts, and influence, what
they sought in vain to obtain by penal laws, by confiscation of
property, and by fire and sword. The system also tends to weaken
pastoral authority, to deprive the successors of the apostles, who were
sent by Christ to teach all nations, of their lawful influence, and to
separate priest and people. Such consequences necessarily follow from
the operation of model and training schools, and from the vast powers
given in all educational matters to a body of commissioners appointed by
the government, and dependent on it--commissioners, many of whom are
openly hostile to the religion of the people of Ireland, whilst others
have given proof that they are either unable or unwilling to defend it
or support its rights and interests. But even if the commissioners were
most anxious to do justice to Catholics, the nature of the system which
they have bound themselves to carry out would frustrate their good
intentions. The mixed system proposes to collect into the same school
teachers and pupils of every religious denomination, Catholics,
Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Jews, and to do nothing and to
teach nothing in the school, and to publish nothing in the schoolbooks,
offensive to any of them. Hence all prayers, the catechism, all teaching
of the special doctrines and practices of the Catholic Church, must be
banished from the school during the hours of teaching, and the books
placed in the hands of children which are calculated to exercise great
influence on their after life, must be compiled in a style of
indifference to every religion. Indeed we could not expect to find
anything good or religious in books composed by a Protestant archbishop
of rationalistic and latitudinarian views, who does not appear to have
believed in the Trinity or the Divinity of Christ, who raised himself to
the episcopal dignity by publishing the _Errors of Romanism_, and who
terminated his career by admitting that his object in compiling some of
the books introduced into the national schools was to dissipate the
darkness in which the Irish people are sitting, or, in other words, to
spread among them his own dangerous principles, and to undermine their
faith.
Whilst the national system is beset by so many dangers, we cannot but be
anxious that its character and tendencies should be accurately examined,
and the objections to which it is liable fairly stated to the public. We
are now happy to be able to say that all this has been done by a
Protestant barrister, Mr. Isaac Butt, late M.P. for Youghal. This
learned and eloquent gentleman has just published a treatise entitled
_The Liberty of Teaching Vindicated_, in which he gives the history of
the system of National Education, and discusses its merit. The writer
appears to have studied the subject with the greatest care, and to have
made himself acquainted with all its bearings. His treatise is written
with great clearness and moderation; his views upon education are
liberal and accurate; and his arguments against allowing the education
of Ireland to pass into the hands of a hostile government, are most
powerful and unanswerable. Mr. Butt has rendered us an immense service
by publishing so valuable a treatise. We recommend all our friends to
provide themselves with it, and to peruse it most carefully.
We shall now give some few extracts from it to show the spirit in which
it is written. The treatise is dedicated to Mr. Gladstone, and in the
dedication Mr. Butt calls on that great statesman to apply to Ireland
the principles of justice and liberality, which he had so often
advocated in the case of other nations, principles unhappily ignored in
the management of Irish affairs by those who have the reins of power in
their hands.
"Most of our departments are managed as if the chief art of
Irish government consisted in a dexterous thwarting, or, at
least, ignoring of all local and national wishes, as they
are represented by the class with whom the department has to
deal. In no country in the world, not even in the Austrian
provinces of Venetia, are national feeling and sentiment so
completely excluded from any control over the management of
national affairs"--(p. viii.)
Applying what he had stated to the question of national education, he
adds:--
"The House of Commons, with an almost prodigal, but a wise
liberality, has placed at the disposal of the Irish
Government large and ample funds for the purposes of
national education. These funds are administered on a plan
opposed to the feelings of all creeds and all classes of the
Irish nation. Ninety-nine out of every hundred Irishmen
condemn it. There is not an Irish constituency from Bandon
to Derry in which any man could be returned as an advocate
of the national system, if the question were purely one of
its approval or disapproval. There is not a parish in
Ireland in which the inhabitants, if they had their choice,
would adopt it as the system of their parish school. Right
or wrong, the present system is one forced, by official
coercion, on the Irish people. It is a national system,
maintained and supported in defiance of the sentiment of the
nation"--(p. viii.)
Looking at the national system in a religious point of view, Mr. Butt
adds, that it is in antagonism with the wishes and feelings of all
classes of the Irish people.
"There is no nation on earth who cherish religious feelings
with a more deep and enthusiastic devotion than do the
Irish. They are the very last people among whom the
experiment of an education, which excludes the fulness of
religious teaching, should be tried. The result of the
experiment has been, that by all creeds and classes of
Irishmen, the 'national' system is condemned. All who avail
themselves of it do so grudgingly and of necessity. It is a
system forced upon the people by their rulers.... It is for
the Irish nation themselves to judge of the education which
is suited to the wants of the Irish poor. The system which
is condemned by the universal suffrage of the Irish nation,
is unfit for Ireland, because it is so condemned--(p. ix.)
"If we are driven to justify our opinions, we have only to
refer to the example of England. In England, every school
that receives aid from the funds of the State, is a school
avowedly teaching the doctrines of some religious body. Full
and unrestricted religious instruction is made an essential
part of national education in England. In Ireland, a school
which adopts that instruction as its rule, is consequently
placed under a ban, and denied all assistance from the
national funds. It matters not whether the instruction be
Protestant or Catholic, it equally condemns the school in
the eyes of our rulers"--p. x.
Treating of the difference between the systems prevailing in England and
Ireland, Mr. Butt adds:--
"In point of principle, no reason can be assigned for the
difference between England and Ireland. If it be wrong in
Ireland to endow and aid a purely Roman Catholic school, it
is equally so in England. The difference established between
the two countries can neither be justified nor accounted for
upon any rational principle. It fosters the belief in the
mind of every Irishman that his country is treated as an
inferior. In many Irishmen it promotes the belief that
religious instruction, which is free in English schools, is
placed under restriction in Ireland, because the faith of
the majority of the Irish people is proscribed"--(p. xi.)
And may we not ask has not the Irish Catholic sufficient grounds for
adopting this opinion? Has not all the legislation of the country for
centuries been directed to the destruction of Catholicity?
The question is next referred to of the tendency of the national system
to throw the whole education of the country into the hands of the
government.
"I do not shrink from inviting your consideration to the
complaint--that the Irish national system, as now
constituted, is one gigantic contrivance for bringing the
whole education of Ireland under government control. I
appeal with confidence to you, as an English statesman,
against the attempt to 'Anglicise' the education of the
Irish people--against the project of bringing up, in
government academies, an army of schoolmasters, who, in
school, and still more out of school, are to form for
government a moral and intellectual police--against the
system of lavish bribery by which it is plainly proposed to
attract all talent in the humbler classes of Irishmen into
the service of an anti-Irish Board--against the institution
in our country of a great system of universal education,
subject to influences that are not Irish, and administered
in a spirit of distrust of the whole Irish people, their
national prejudices, and their religion"--(p. xii.)
In the course of the work, proofs are given of the way in which it was
sought to establish government influence. In the beginning, according to
the letter of Lord Stanley, only one model school was to be erected in
Ireland, and the minor schools through the country were to remain quite
independent. In 1835, the commissioners began to manifest more extensive
designs, and in a report to Lord Mulgrave, it was proposed to establish
a model school in each county, to take the training of all the teachers
of the kingdom into the hands of the Board, and, at the same time, the
plan was adopted to introduce books treating of common Christianity, and
compiled by Dr. Whateley, and, in fact, to make the authority of the
commissioners paramount in everything connected with the education of
the future generations in Ireland. On this Mr. Butt observes:--
"In no country ought such a system to be tolerated--least of
all in Ireland, where--it ought not, it cannot be
disguised--there still exists the antagonism between the
English government and the thoughts and feelings and
sentiments of the nation. I would not write the truth if I
did not say, that any one who knows Irish affairs must
expect the administration of such a system to be
anti-national. He would be informed, without surprise, that
from the lessons of history there was carefully excluded all
that would remind Irishmen of their distinctive
nationality--that the whole tone and tendency of the
literature were English--and that, in drawing up the
lesson-books in which Irish children are to be taught,
Englishmen and Scotchmen were the only persons worthy of the
confidence of the Irish National Board.
"I am content to be accounted of narrow and provincial
feelings when I thus point to the anti-national character of
the system. From the invasion of Henry II. to the present
time, English rulers have been engaged in one device or
another to destroy the distinctive nationality of Irishmen.
The attempt is as unwise as it is unjust. It can only be
effected by the destruction of public spirit and the
demoralization of the country. The empire in which we are
associated gains no more by the destruction of the
individual nationality of its component parts, than society
would gain by the destruction of all distinctive character
in those who compose it. If even the Irish people are to be
taught to love England, they must be taught to love Ireland
first, and to feel that there is no inconsistency between
the most intense Irish feeling and attachment to the empire
of which Ireland forms a part. There is a waste of energy in
every attempt to extirpate national prejudices and feelings,
which makes the attempt a blunder as well as a crime. Russia
has not yet Russianized Poland, and the Irish are as far
from being West Britons as they were in the days of James I.
"It must be remembered that the effect of such a proposal
was to substitute for the varying forms of individual energy
and local exertion one great uniform system. While the
education of the people was eked out by the sacrifices of
the people themselves, or supplied by the desultory efforts
of individuals, there was always room for the play of
national and local feelings. So far as a plan like that
propounded in this report was successful, it destroyed all
other industrial energies among the lower orders. The old
hedge schoolmaster could no longer make out his bread. The
poor scholar could no longer wander from house to house,
teaching the old history of Ireland in return for the food
and lodging he received. All the lower orders of the people
were to be taught by masters trained in a government
college, and drilled in a system from which all national
feeling was excluded--masters, of whom it was put forward as
their chief merit that they would be political and moral
agents of the government, inculcating order on a lawless,
and teaching civilization to a barbarous, people.
"The report of 1835 suggested, of necessity, the question of
religion. The masters, according to its proposal, were
plainly to be indoctrinated in matters from which religion
could not be separated. They were to be instructed in mental
philosophy by a professor, specially appointed for that
purpose. This training must be given them that they may be
qualified to direct 'the thoughts and inclinations of Irish
children in a right direction'. Would it have been
unreasonable, is it unreasonable now, that the guardians of
the faith of any portion of the Irish people should feel
anxious to have some security for the character of the
'mental philosophy' in which the teachers of the people were
trained?
"Comparing the plan announced in Lord Stanley's published
letter with that which was carried into effect, under the
joint operation of the interpolated passage and the report
of 1835, it is obvious that those who might be perfectly
satisfied with the arrangements of the first, either as to
religious or national feeling, might yet be wholly
dissatisfied upon the very same points with the second.
"Under the covert and guarded language of the report of
1835, we can clearly trace the inauguration of a new
system--a system wholly unlike anything that had preceded it
or had ever been recommended--a system which was to
establish in every parish a government agent, under the name
of a national schoolmaster, and which was also to become a
great government university for the teaching of the middle
classes.
"This last was to be accomplished by the medium of the model
schools. One of these was to be established in each county.
The master was to be a person of superior attainments, with
a salary very far above that of any curate of the
Established Church, and in these schools a superior
education was to be conveyed. We shall see how steadily the
plan, first broached in the annual report of 1835, has been
carried out.
"In 1837, the report tells us that 'they had added to their
normal establishment in Dublin a scientific department and a
school of industry, in the immediate neighbourhood of
Dublin, with work-rooms and a farm of from forty to fifty
acres attached to it'. In the same report they propose to
appoint a superintendent for each of twenty-five
districts--residing at the model school, and having L125
a-year, with apartments and allowances. The head master of
each model school was '_to be authorised to receive a
limited number of boarders at such charge to their parents
and friends as the commissioners might think proper, having
regard to local circumstances'_.
"At the same time, they stated their intention to establish,
generally, schools termed secondary, in which 'scientific
instruction' and 'instruction in manual occupation' should
be given;--a portion of land for garden husbandry to be an
indispensable adjunct to each secondary school.
"In 1839 they modestly announce a model farm, near Dublin,
as only in its infancy, with twelve agricultural pupils,
'deriving much benefit from the judicious system of farming
which they see practised there'.
"In 1840 they determine to establish twenty-five
agricultural model schools--each of them in connection with
an elementary national school. They subsequently establish
twelve pupil-teacherships in their central agricultural
institution--scholarships, in fact, which are competed for
by the most promising students in their rural agricultural
schools.
"I have referred to these establishments in proof of the
assertion that the national system has been gradually
expanded into a vast educational institution, absorbing and
controlling the education of the poorer classes, and, to a
great extent, that of the middle classes of the country.
"The extent to which this has proceeded will be understood
by a reference to the last report of the Commissioners, that
for the year 1864.
"It appears by this report that there are at present in
operation twenty-six model schools (classing the three
metropolitan schools as one establishment). The expenditure
within the year upon these model schools amounts to nearly
L25,000.
"In addition to the Albert Model Farm at Glasnevin, near
Dublin, there are in connection with the Board thirty-six
agricultural schools; nineteen of these are under the
exclusive management of the Board--seventeen partly under
local control.
"The sums expended on this agricultural department amount in
the year to more than L10,000. It will complete this
statement to add that in the same year, 1864, the training
institution of Dublin was maintained at a cost, in its
several branches, of L4,500.
"The cost of the inspection department of the institution
amounts to no less a sum than L23,000.
"The cost of the official establishment in Marlborough
Street is L15,457.
"In addition to this, a very considerable sum, amounting,
probably, to nearly L10,000, appears to be annually
distributed, at the discretion of the Board and its
inspectors, in the shape of gratuities of one kind or other
to the persons engaged in the teaching of the national
schools.
"It appears from this report (excluding the item last
mentioned), that upon the official staff of this great
educational institute there is annually expended a sum of
L49,000; and upon model and agricultural schools, wholly
foreign from the original objects, a further sum of L33,000,
making an expenditure of L82,000, one shilling of which does
not reach one of the schools, to support which the grant for
Irish education was originally made.
"The whole of this immense sum, amounting to nearly
one-third of the grant, is really spent upon a machinery
for bringing the education of the people under the entire
and absolute control of the Board.
"I do not stop to argue whether L15,000 be not an
extravagant expenditure for official expenses. That which is
of importance to observe is, that the tendency and effect of
the costly, but most effective, system of inspection is, in
reality, to convert inspection into superintendence, and to
extend the direct influence of the Board over all the
schools in connection with them. The training or normal
establishment is instituted for the express purpose of
indoctrinating the masters in the views prescribed by the
Board. But the influence does not end here. By a system of
examinations, conducted in connection with the inspection,
the Board contrives to direct the studies and mould the
train of thought of the masters. Their salaries are
increased at the pleasure of the Board. A graduated system
of promotion and a scale of rewards are established,
dependent entirely on their recommending themselves to the
inspectors. Under such a system the power nominally left to
the local patrons of selecting the schoolmaster, in reality
does not give to these patrons any substantial control.
Every national schoolmaster adopts, or professes to adopt,
the opinions of his real masters, and learns to reflect the
opinions which he knows to be in favour with the Board.
"The model schools are established partly to complete the
training of the masters, and partly to force upon the
country the entire system of the Board. Of these schools the
commissioners themselves are the patrons, and in these they
have full power of enforcing their own views. What they
'earnestly recommend' to others, they are able to adopt in
their own schools. Money is lavished upon these model
schools, so as to make them establishments of a superior
order. The model school in Marlborough Street is maintained
at an expense of L3,500. One in Belfast costs very nearly
the same sum. Most of this money is expended in the salaries
and maintenance of pupil teachers, so that these model
schools are, in effect, colleges, with their exhibitions to
attract students. Over these model schools the commissioners
have absolute control, and through them, and by means of
them, they exercise an almost absolute influence over the
whole system of education in connection with the Board. This
is, in effect, the carrying out of the plan indicated in the
report of 1835. Centralization is secured by an array of
schoolmasters, trained under the Commissioners. No man can
attain the rank of a first-class national schoolmaster who
has not gone through a training in an establishment
conducted after the most approved fashion of the Board--a
training by which he becomes thoroughly indoctrinated in all
the maxims of that fashion. He is not sent to a model school
merely to see the best mode of arranging classes or
maintaining the discipline of the school. He is sent there
to reside as the student of a college, to learn various
departments of knowledge. He is taught, in his training,
history, political economy, mental philosophy, and
scriptural history--and he learns them all in lesson books
prepared to order for the Commissioners, and by catechetical
instruction, in which he is drilled by professors and
inspectors appointed at their sole nomination.
"I pass, for the present, from this part of the subject,
with this one observation--that this sum of L80,000 is
annually expended upon a portion of the system with which
local exertion or local influence has nothing whatever to
do. It is wholly, absolutely, and unreservedly under the
direction and control of the central authority.
"In England, I may observe, the state assumes no such power.
The training institutions for schoolmasters are left
entirely under the control of the authorities of the
respective denominations. In Ireland, the rule is that the
masters should be trained by government, and accept at once
their theology, their morals, and their science of teaching
at the hands of the officials of the state. It is only the
resolute opposition of the Catholic prelates that has
prevented this project from being completely carried into
effect"--(p. 87-96.)
We regret that our space will not allow us to give more copious extracts
from the book now before us. But again we recommend our readers to read
and study the whole treatise. It will open their eyes to the dangers
with which mixed education, falsely called _national_, menaces our
Church and our country.