The Real Purpose of Education

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The trips to the teacher conferences in Easter can be a trial for a Minister for Education during hard times. The teacher conferences allow gamekeepers to play poacher, and a Minister takes his dignity in his hands before them.

Last week, Minister Quinn was like nothing so much as a B-29 bomber flying over Germany during the Second World War, dropping tin foil in the hopes that the radar doesn’t pick him up and stick a few Messerschmitts on his tail. And with the way history is currently being treated by the Department, it might have occurred to some history teachers to stockpile a few those Messerschmitts in a hanger somewhere, just in case.

The Minister’s tin foil came in three species – the ongoing debate about school ownership, reform of the Leaving Cert marking system, and an extraordinary suggestion that all National School teachers should have passed Honours Maths during the Leaving Cert before being handed their box of chalk and a few tidy cuts of marla.

Of the three suggestions, the change to the Leaving Cert grading is most likely to happen. The school ownership debate will drag on for decades, while the Honours Maths requirement is utter nonsense. But while the grading change may happen, that does not necessarily mean it is worthwhile.

The reason behind the proposed changes to the Leaving Cert grades – changing them back to ten per cent bands, rather than the current five – is that the Department feels the current system leads to too much targetting of exams, and exams aren’t what education is about at all.

Education, according to the Department, is not about cramming or learning by rote. Education is about giving students the ability to think for themselves, and not some outdated legacy-of-the-slave-trade theory about teaching students stuff that they didn’t previously know.

There are two points to note about the theory of education. Firstly, the idea that students are inhibited from thinking for themselves by the current system is usually put forward by the third level sector, who report that students are getting thicker every year, damn them.

The universities are inclined to be a little more diplomatic in delivering this bad news, but wall-to-wall thickos in the lecture halls is what it boils down to. Students, they say, are spoon-fed in secondary school, and are therefore incapable of working on their own at third level.

The evidence of this is purely anecdotal – the universities do not stoop so low as to back this argument up with figures. Nor indeed does anybody ask just how much regular feeding, as opposed to spoon-feeding, goes on in the lectures hall of Erin.

Not only are the third-level sector’s complaints about students needing spoon-feeding not backed up by evidence, there is evidence to the contrary. The fact that students target their exams so precisely is clear evidence of strategic thinking, such target-setting being an clear instance of short term operations aimed at a long term goal.

You say the students did not figure this out this targetting themselves, but are taught it in school. Very well, but what they are surely not taught how to do in school is how to get into nightclubs when they should be at home either studying or working on the land. It is in this difficult art that you find young people’s analytic thinking at its finest.

Consider two friends who regularly swapped glasses and donkey jackets before attempting to get into nightclubs in Ballyhaunis during the the Saturday nights of their youth, in the 16th or 17th Century, I believe. The baby-faced one didn’t look so cherubic without his glasses, while the donkey jacket added that certain air of maturity – he could have been just home from the buildings in London.

As for the donkey jacket’s original owner, he was sufficiently alpha in those days to wear two pair of glasses and still carry himself like Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart. No lack of analytical thinking in those excellent products of the Irish educational system.

Besides. The second point is that teaching students to think isn’t, in fact, the sole purpose of education. Thinking is something that human beings are programmed to do. Education can polish it a little, but the best practical thinking is done on the feet, in the real world, when the pressure is on.

The true purpose of education is to take a body of knowledge and hand it on to the next generation. Thinking is like breathing. It’s not so much an achievement as a base requirement.

When students go out into the great world they invariably find out to their horror that employers don’t employ people to think. Employers employ people to do, which is a completely different thing.

If you are employed by the ESB, they will appreciate it if you have some little understanding of electro-physics. Accountants are often praised for their ability to do sums. And flawed though the HSE may be, they still prefer doctors who can identify elbows from other items of anatomy.

There is no way to analyse these facts, nor is there any purpose served in thinking about them. You just sit down and learn them off, just like others have done before you for hundreds of years.

As for your richer life, outside of the office, the case for the Old School was best put by Professor Harold Bloom of Yale University in his book How to Read, and Why. When it comes to poetry, Bloom makes the point that not only should you read poems but, where-ever possible, you should memorise them as well.

How did Nelson Mandela survive twenty-seven cruel years on Robben Island? Tremendous character and fortitude of course, but also by little things, like reciting William Earnest Henley’s Invictus, night after night. There was a man who was armed for the world.

Good poetry learned by heart is a gift to treasure forever. Would that the Department of Education were interested in ensuring our current schoolchildren were armed so well.

Religion in Schools

First published in the Western People on Monday.

A cold and deathly chill must have run down Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn’s spine when he heard that even the Association of Catholic Priests reached for the trusty crozier and came out swinging.

There is a thing in politics called playing to the constituency and, difficult though it is to look into the heart of another, this is almost certainly what the Minister was up to when he suggested last week that teachers should spend less time teaching religion in national schools and more time teaching English and Maths.

The Minister was responding to complaints at the Irish Primary Principals Network annual conference that the curriculum was overloaded, and shot for what he must have thought an open goal at the time.

Now, when the most liberal wing of the Irish Church is giving him the business, the unfortunate Minister must surely feel more like Paddy Cullen in that infamous moment of the All-Ireland Final of 1978. If the Minister knows who Paddy Cullen is in the first place, of course.

This is a minor skirmish in the larger national battle, as the country re-organises itself for the post-Catholic reality. One of Ruairí Quinn’s stated aims as Minister for Education is to give parents more choice in their children’s education by having the Catholic Church hand over schools to non-Catholic patrons, but he’s meeting no small amount of resistance in this regard.

Why this is so is harder to understand. It may be residual loyalty to the fallen Faith, or it may be general terror of another quango terrorizing the land, or it may be some other thing. But it is an interesting moment in the country’s history, as a page slowly turns.

The Irish Education System began in 1831 when Lord Stanley, who would later become Prime Minister of Great Britain as the Earl of Derby, wrote a letter to Augustus FitzGerald, Duke of Leinster, proposing that His Majesty’s Government establish an Irish Schools Board. Stanley was Chief Secretary for Ireland at the time, and his idea was that children of all denominations should be educated together with no regard paid to religion.

Or at least, only a biteen of regard. Just a hint, like. In the early years of the scheme, the schools taught “common Christianity,” which was based on either a piece of Scripture or a lesson on Bible history, from texts chosen by the Commissioners of the Irish Schools Board.

The Catholic hierarchy split on the Schools issue, with both sides of the divide represented by two of the major figures of the time – Daniel Murray, Archbishop of Dublin, and John McHale, Archbishop of Tuam, and after whom McHale Park is named.

Archbishop Murray was twenty years older than Archbishop McHale. Having lived through the penal laws and Catholic Emancipation having only recently been passed, Murray was an advocate of softly, softly diplomacy. He didn’t much care for Stanley’s idea, but he thought it better than the hedge school and therefore viewed it as progress.

Archbishop McHale, by contrast, loathed Lord Stanley’s idea and made no secret of that loathing. McHale’s issue was that the schools were an insidious effort to convert the Irish to Protestantism, and that was not going to happen on McHale’s watch.

One hundred and eighty years on, this seems a strange stand-off. But the entire history of Ireland, the nature of the state and our long and difficult history with our nearest neighbour, at once our best friend and worst enemy, all centers on differences of religion.

Why has there been so much strife between countries as similar as Ireland and Britain? Why couldn’t the Irish get with the program, just as the Welsh and the Scots had? The Normans invaded Ireland, but they invaded England first! That’s how it works! Why couldn’t the Irish get that?

The answer is religion. The Scots and Welsh embraced the Reformation. The Irish clung to the Faith, through the Elizabethan Plantation, Cromwell, the Flight of Earls and the Penal Laws. And now in the 1830s, having stuck it out this long, they were going to lose the Faith by stealth through a schools system where texts were chosen by someone other than the Church itself? Not on your Nelly.

It was a long struggle for McHale, but he won in the end. The Catholic Church held its first Synod in Ireland in two hundred years in Thurles in 1850 where it said it wasn’t one bit happy with the Schools Board, and by 1869 McHale’s victory was complete. The Irish Church condemned mixed education and their condemnation was ratified from Rome by Pope Pius IX.

McHale had already banned the English schools in his own diocese as soon as he could, and brought in religious orders to found Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Tuam instead. After 1869, this was the case all over Ireland. The Church of Ireland saw which way the wind was blowing, and set up their own schools with just as much fervor.

Fifty years later, when Ireland had rejoined the nations of the world, the new governments knew that the sectarian divide was a time bomb, not least if the sectarian seed were planted so early as at primary school age. They made it a priority to reclaim education as the preserve of the people, rather than the church.

Ah no. They didn’t do any such thing. It could be because Irish governments soon realised the country was broke and were grateful that someone, at least, was educating the children. Or it could be that there was an ugly and disgraceful Catholic triumphalism about the early years of the state, and successive government of the Free State and the Republic thought Church-controlled schools the natural order of things.

Who knows? All we can be sure of now is that we have an educational system at primary level based on historic distrust between two religions that no longer have much, if any, influence on the people. And that’s without even mentioning the Tuiseal Ginideach…