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The Murder Machine
An electronic edition
Pádraic H. Pearse
Electronic edition compiled by
Pádraig Bambury
University College, Cork
Second draft.
Proof corrections by
Pádraig Bambury
Dara Mac Domhnaill
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Select editions
P.H. Pearse, An sgoil: a direct method course in Irish (Dublin: Maunsel, 1913).
P.H. Pearse, How does she stand? : three addresses (The Bodenstown series no. 1) (Dublin: Irish Freedom Press, 1915).
P.H. Pearse, From a hermitage (The Bodenstown series no. 2)(Dublin: Irish Freedom Press, 1915).
P.H. Pearse, The murder machine (The Bodenstown series no. 3) (Dublin: Whelan, 1916). Repr. U.C.C.: Department of Education, 1959.
P.H. Pearse, Ghosts (Tracts for the Times) (Dublin: Whelan, 1916.
P.H. Pearse, The Spiritual Nation (Tracts for the Times) (Dublin: Whelan, 1916.
P.H. Pearse, The Sovereign People (Tracts for the Times) (Dublin: Whelan, 1916.
P.H. Pearse, The Separatist Idea (Tracts for the Times) (Dublin: Whelan, 1916.
Pádraic Colum, E.J. Harrington O'Brien (ed), Poems of the Irish revolutionary brotherhood, Thomas MacDonagh, P.H. Pearse (Pádraic MacPiarais), Joseph Mary Plunkett, Sir Roger Casement. (New and enl. ed.) (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1916). First edition, July, 1916; second edition, enlarged, September, 1916.
Michael Henry Gaffney, The stories of Pádraic Pearse (Dublin [etc.]: The Talbot Press Ltd. 1935). Contains ten plays by M.H. Gaffney based upon stories by Pádraic Pearse, and three plays by Pádraic Pearse edited by M.H. Gaffney.
Proinsias Mac Aonghusa, Liam Ó Reagain (ed), The best of Pearse (1967).
Seamus Ó Buachalla (ed), The literary writings of Patrick Pearse: writings in English (Dublin: Mercier, 1979).
Seamus Ó Buachalla, A significant Irish educationalist: the educational writings of P.H. Pearse (Dublin: Mercier, 1980).
Seamus Ó Buachalla (ed), The letters of P. H. Pearse (Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Smythe, 1980).
Pádraic Mac Piarais (ed), Bodach an chóta lachtna (Baile Átha Cliath: Chonnradh na Gaedhilge, 1906).
Pádraic Mac Piarais, Bruidhean chaorthainn: sgéal Fiannaídheachta (Baile Átha Cliath: Chonnradh na Gaedhilge, 1912).
Pádraic Pearse, Collected works of Pádraic H.
Pearse (Dublin: Phoenix Publishing Co. ? 1910 1919). 4 vols. v. 1. Political writings and speeches. - v. 2. Plays, stories, poems. - v. 3. Songs of the Irish rebels and specimens from an Irish anthology. Some aspects of Irish literature. Three lectures on Gaelic topics. - v. 4. The story of a success, edited by Desmond Ryan, and The man called Pearse, by Desmond Ryan.
Pádraic Pearse, Collected works of Pádraic H.
Pearse (Dublin; Belfast: Phoenix, ? 1916 1917). 5 vols. [v. 1] Plays, stories, poems.--[v. 2.] Political writings and speeches.--[v. 3] Story of a success. Man called Pearse.--[v. 4] Songs of the Irish rebels. Specimens from an Irish anthology. Some aspects of irish literature.--[v. 5] Scrivinni.
Pádraic Pearse, Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse … (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company 1917). 3rd ed. Translated by Joseph Campbell, introduction by Patrick Browne.
Pádraic Pearse, Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse. 6th ed. (Dublin: Phoenix, 1924 1917) v. 1. Political writings and speeches -- v. 2. Plays, stories, poems.
Pádraic Pearse, Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse (Dublin: Phoenix Pub. Co., 1924). 5 vols. [v. 1] Songs of the Irish rebels and specimens from an Irish anthology. Some aspects of Irish literature. Three lectures on Gaelic topics. -- [v. 2] Plays, stories, poems. -- [v. 3] Scríbinní. -- [v. 4] The story of a success [being a record of St. Enda's College] The man called Pearse / by Desmond Ryan. -- [v. 5] Political writings and speeches.
Pádraic Pearse, Short stories of Pádraic Pearse
(Cork: Mercier Press, 1968 1976 1989). (Iosagan, Eoineen of the birds, The
roads, The black chafer, The keening woman).
Pádraic Pearse, Political writing and speeches (Irish prose writings, 20) (Tokyo: Hon-no-tomosha, 1992). Originally published: Dublin: Maunsel & Roberts, 1922.
Pádraic Pearse, Political writings and speeches (Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse) (Dublin and London: Maunsel & Roberts Ltd., 1922).
Pádraic Pearse, Political writings and Speeches (Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse) (Dublin: Phoenix 1916). 6th ed. (Dublin [etc.]: Phoenix, 1924).
Pádraic Pearse, Plays Stories Poems (Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse) (Dublin, London: Maunsel & Company Ltd., 1917). 5th ed. 1922. Also pubd. by Talbot Press, Dublin, 1917, repr. 1966. Repr. New York: AMS Press, 1978.
Pádraic Pearse, Filíocht Ghaeilge Pádraig Mhic Phiarais (Áth Cliath: Clóchomhar, 1981) Leabhair thaighde; an 35u iml.
Pádraic Pearse, Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse (New York: Stokes, 1918). Contains The Singer, The King, The Master, Íosagán.
Pádraic Pearse, Songs of the Irish rebels and specimens from an Irish anthology: some aspects of Irish literature : three lectures on Gaelic topics (Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse) (Dublin: The Phoenix Publishing Co. 1910).
Pádraic Pearse, Songs of the Irish rebels (Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse) (Dublin: Phoenix Pub. Co., 1917).
Pádraic Pearse, Songs of the Irish rebels, and Specimens from an Irish anthology (Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse) (Dublin: Maunsel, 1918).
Pádraic Pearse, The story of a success (The complete works of P. H. Pearse) (Dublin: Phoenix Pub. Co., 1917) .
Pádraic Pearse, Scríbinní (The complete works of P. H. Pearse) (Dublin: Phoenix Pub. Co., 1917).
Julius Pokorny, Die Seele Irlands: Novellen und Gedichte aus dem Irisch-Galischen des Patrick Henry Pearse und Anderer zum ersten Male ins Deutsche übertragen (Halle a.S.: Max Niemeyer 1922)
James Simmons, Ten Irish poets: an anthology of poems by George Buchanan, John Hewitt, Pádraic Fiacc, Pearse Hutchinson, James Simmons, Michael Hartnett, Eilean Ní Chuilleanáin, Michael Foley, Frank Ormsby & Tom Mathews (Cheadle: Carcanet Press, 1974).
Cathal Ó hAinle (ed), Gearrscéalta an Phiarsaigh (Dublin: Helicon, 1979).
Ciarán Ó Coigligh (ed), Filíocht Ghaeilge: Phádraig Mhic Phiarais (Baile Átha Cliath: Clóchomhar, 1981).
Pádraig Mac Piarais, et al., Une île et d'autres îles: poèmes gaeliques XXeme siècle (Quimper: Calligrammes, 1984).
Select bibliography
Pádraic Mac Piarais Pearse from documents (Dublin : Co-ordinating committee for Educational Services, 1979). Facsimile documents. National Library of Ireland. facsimile documents.
Xavier Carty, In bloody protest—the tragedy of Patrick Pearse (Dublin: Able 1978).
Helen Louise Clark, Pádraic Pearse: a Gaelic idealist (1933). (Thesis (M.A.)--Boston College, 1933).
Mary Maguire Colum, St. Enda's School, Rathfarnham, Dublin. Founded by Pádraic H. Pearse. (New York: Save St. Enda's Committee 1917).
Pádraic H. Pearse ([s.l. : s.n., C. F. Connolly) 1920).
Elizabeth Katherine Cussen, Irish motherhood in the drama of William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, and Pádraic Pearse: a comparative study. (1934) Thesis (M.A.)--Boston College, 1934.
Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: the triumph of failure (London: Gollancz, 1977).
Stefan Fodor, Douglas Hyde, Eoin MacNeill, and Pádraic Pearse of the Gaelic League: a study in Irish cultural nationalism and separatism, 1893-1916 (1986). Thesis (M.A.)--Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 1986.
James Hayes, Patrick H. Pearse, storyteller (Dublin: Talbot, 1920).
John J. Horgan, Parnell to Pearse: some recollections and reflections (Dublin: Browne & Nolan, 1948).
Louis N. Le Roux, La vie de Patrice Pearse (Rennes: Imprimerie Commerciale de Bretagne, 1932). Translated into English by Desmond Ryan (Dublin: Talbot, 1932).
Proinsias Mac Aonghusa, Quotations from P.H. Pearse, (Dublin: Mercier, 1979).
Mary Benecio McCarty (Sister), Pádraic Henry Pearse: an
educator in the Gaelic tradition (1939) (Thesis (M.A.)--Marquette
University, 1939).
Hedley McCay, Pádraic Pearse; a new biography (Cork: Mercier Press, 1966).
John Bernard Moran, Sacrifice as exemplified by the life and writings of Pádraic Pearse is true to the Christian and Irish ideals; that portrayed in the Irish plays of Sean O'Casey is futile (1939). Submitted to Dept. of English. Thesis (M.A.)--Boston College, 1939.
Sean Farrell Moran, Patrick Pearse and the politics of redemption: the mind of the Easter rising, 1916 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1994).
P.S. O'Hegarty, A bibliography of books written by P. H. Pearse (s.l.: 1931).
Máiread O'Mahony, The political thought of Padraig H. Pearse: pragmatist or idealist (1994). Theses--M.A. (NUI, University College Cork).
Daniel J. O'Neill, The Irish revolution and the cult of the leader: observations on Griffith, Moran, Pearse and Connolly (Boston: Northeastern U.P., 1988).
Mary Brigid Pearse (ed), The home-life of Padraig Pearse as told by himself, his family and friends (Dublin: Browne & Nolan 1934). Repr. Cork, Mercier 1979.
Maureen Quill, Pádraic H. Pearse—his philosophy of Irish education (1996). Theses--M.A. (NUI, University College Cork).
Desmond Ryan, The man called Pearse (Dublin: Maunsel, 1919).
Nicholas Joseph Wells, The meaning of love and patriotism as seen in the plays, poems, and stories of Pádraic Pearse (1931). (Thesis (M.A.)--Boston College, 1931).
The edition used in the digital edition
Pádraic Pearse
The Murder Machine
Political Writings and Speeches
Dublin
Phoenix Publishing Co. Ltd.
1924
5–50
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By Pádraic Henry Pearse (1879-1916).
1912
The text is in English.
Words and phrases are in Irish.
Words and phrases are in Latin.
political
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19/20c
pamphlet
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Preface
This pamphlet is not, as its name might seem to import, a penny dreadful, at least in the ordinary sense. It consists of a series of studies of the English education system in Ireland. The article entitled "The Murder Machine" embodies an article which appeared in the
Irish Review for February 1913. The article called
An Ideal in Education was printed in the
Irish Review for June 1914. The rest of the pamphlet is a collation ofnotes made for a lecture which I delivered in the Dublin Mansion House in December 1912.
P. H. PEARSE
St. Edna's College, Rathfarnam, 1st January 1916
The Broad-Arrow
A French writer has paid the English a very well-deserved compliment.
He says that they never commit a useless crime. When they hire a man to
assassinate an Irish patriot, when they blow a Sepoy from the mouth of a
cannon, when they produce a famine in one of their dependencies, they
have always an ulterior motive. They do not do it for fun. Humorous as
these crimes are, it is not the humour of them, but their utility, that
appeals to the English. Unlike Gilbert's Mikado, they would see nothing
humorous in boiling oil. If they retained boiling oil in their penal
code, they would retain it, as they retain flogging before execution in
Egypt, strictly because it has been found useful.
This
observation will help one to an understanding of some portions of the
English administration of Ireland. The English administration of Ireland
has not been marked by any unnecessary cruelty. Every crime that the
English have planned and carried out in Ireland has had a definite end.
Every absurdity that they have set up has had a grave purpose. The
Famine was not enacted merely from a love of horror. The Boards that
rule Ireland were not contrived in order to add to the gaiety of
nations. The Famine and the Boards are alike parts of a profound
polity.
I have spent the greater part of my life in immediate
contemplation of the most grotesque and horrible of the English
inventions for the debasement of Ireland. I mean their education system.
The English once proposed in their Dublin Parliament a measure for the
castration of all Irish priests who refused to quit Ireland. The
proposal was so filthy that, although it duly passed the House and was
transmitted to England with the warm recommendation of the Viceroy, it
was not eventually adopted. But the English have actually carried out an
even filthier thing. They have planned and established an education
system which more wickedly does violence to the elementary human rights
of Irish children than would an edict for the general castration of
Irish males. The system has aimed at the substitution for men and women
of mere Things. It has not been an entire success. There are still a
great many thousand men and women in Ireland. But a great many thousand
of what, by way, of courtesy, we call men and women, are simply Things.
Men and women, however depraved, have kindly human allegiances. But
these Things have no allegiance. Like other Things, they are for sale.
When one uses the term education system as the name of the system of
schools, colleges, universities, and what not which the English have
established in Ireland, one uses it as a convenient label, just as one
uses the term government as a convenient label for the system of
administration by police which obtains in Ireland instead of a
government. There is no education system in Ireland. The English have
established the simulacrum of an education system. but its object is the
precise contrary of the object of an education system. Education should
foster; this education is meant to repress. Education should inspire;
this education is meant to tame. Education should harden; this education
is meant to enervate. The English are too wise a people to attempt to
educate the Irish, in any worthy sense. As well expect them to arm
us.
Professor Eoin MacNeill has compared the English education
system in Ireland to the system of slave education which existed in the
ancient pagan republics side by side with the systems intended for the
education of freemen. To the children of the free were taught all noble
and goodly things which would tend to make them strong and proud and
valiant; from the children of the slaves all such dangerous knowledge
was hidden. They were taught not to be strong and proud and valiant, but
to be sleek, to be obsequious, to be dexterous: the object was not to
make them good men, but to make them good slaves. And so in Ireland. The
education system here was designed by our masters in order to make us
willing or at least manageable slaves. It has made of some Irishmen not
slaves merely, but very eunuchs, with the indifference and cruelty of
eunuchs; kinless beings, who serve for pay a master that they neither
love nor hate.
Ireland is not merely in servitude, but in a kind of
penal servitude. Certain of the slaves among us are appointed jailors
over the common herd of slaves. And they are trained from their youth
for this degrading office. The ordinary slaves are trained for their
lowly tasks in dingy places called schools; the buildings in which the
higher slaves are trained are called colleges and universities. If one
may regard Ireland as a nation in penal servitude, the schools and
colleges and universities may be looked upon as the symbol of her penal
servitude. They are, so to speak, the broad-arrow upon the back of
Ireland.
The Murder Machine
A few years ago, when people still believed the imminence of Home
Rule, there were numerous discussions as to the tasks awaiting a
Home Rule Parliament and the order in which they should be taken up. Mr.
John Dillon declared that one of the first of those tasks was the
recasting of the Irish education system, by which he meant the English
education system in Ireland. The declaration alarmed the Bishop of
Limerick, always suspicious of Mr. Dillon, and he told that statesman in
effect that the Irish education system did not need recasting—that all
was well there.
The positions seemed irreconcilable. Yet in the
Irish
Review I quixotically attempted to find common ground between the
disputants, and to state in such a way as to command the assent of both
the duty of a hypothetical Irish Parliament with regard to education. I
put it that what education in Ireland needed was less a reconstruction
of its machinery than a regeneration in spirit. The machinery, I said,
has doubtless its defects, but what is chiefly wrong with it is that it
is mere machinery, a lifeless thing without a soul. Dr. O'Dwyer was
probably concerned for the maintenance of a portion of the machinery,
valued by him as a Catholic Bishop, and not without reason; and I
for one was (and am) willing to leave that particular portion untouched,
or practically so. But the machine as a whole is no more capable of
fulfilling the function for which it is needed than would an automaton
be capable of fulfilling the function of a living teacher in a school. A
soulless thing cannot teach; but it can destroy. A machine cannot make
men; but it can break men.
One of the most terrible things about the
English education system in Ireland is its ruthlessness. I know no image
for that ruthlessness in the natural order. The ruthlessness of a wild
beast has in it a certain mercy—it slays. It has in it a certain
grandeur of animal force. But this ruthlessness is literally without
pity and without passion. It is cold and mechanical, like the
ruthlessness of an immensely powerful engine. A machine vast,
complicated, with a multitude of far-reaching arms, with many ponderous
presses, carrying out mysterious and long-drawn processes of shaping and
moulding, is the true image of the Irish education system. It grinds
night and day; it obeys immutable and predetermined laws; it is as
devoid of understanding, of sympathy, of imagination, as is any
other piece of machinery that performs an appointed task. Into it is fed
all the raw human material in Ireland; it seizes upon it inexorably and
rends and compresses and re-moulds; and what it cannot refashion after
the regulation pattern it ejects with all likeness of its former self
crushed from it, a bruised and shapeless thing, thereafter accounted
waste.
Our common parlance has become impressed with the conception
of education as some sort of manufacturing process. Our children are the
raw material
; we desiderate for their education modern methods
which
must be efficient but cheap; we send them to Clongowes to be finished
;
when finished they are turned out
; specialists grind
them for the
English Civil Service and the so-called liberal professions; in each of
our great colleges there is a department known as the scrap-heap
, though
officially called the Fourth Preparatory—the limbo to which the debris
ejected by the machine is relegated. The stuff there is either
too hard or too soft to be moulded to the pattern required by the Civil
Service Commissioners or the Incorporated Law Society.
In our
adoption of the standpoint here indicated there is involved a primary
blunder as to the nature and functions of education. For education has not
to do with the manufacture of things, but with fostering the growth of
things. And the conditions we should strive to bring about in our
education system are not the conditions favourable to the rapid and
cheap manufacture of ready-mades, but the conditions favourable to the
growth of living organisms—the liberty and the light and the gladness of
a ploughed field under the spring sunshine.
In particular I would urge
that the Irish school system of the future should give freedom—freedom
to the individual school, freedom to the individual teacher, freedom as
far as may be to the individual pupil. Without freedom there can be no
right growth; and education is properly the fostering of the right
growth of a personality. Our school system must bring, too, some gallant
inspiration. And with the inspiration it must bring a certain hardening.
One scarcely knows whether modern sentimentalism or modern
utilitarianism is the more sure sign of modern decadence. I would boldly
preach the antique faith that fighting is the only noble thing, and that
he only is at peace with God who is at war with the powers of evil.
In a true education system, religion, patriotism, literature, art and
science would be brought in such a way into the daily lives of boys and
girls as to affect their character and conduct. We may assume that
religion is a vital thing in Irish schools, but I know that the other
things, speaking broadly, do not exist. There are no ideas there, no
love of beauty, no love of books, no love of knowledge, no heroic
inspiration. And there is no room for such things either on the earth or
in the heavens, for the earth is cumbered and the heavens are darkened
by the monstrous bulk of the programme. Most of the educators detest the
programme. They are like the adherents of a dead creed who continue to
mumble formulas and to make obeisance before an idol which they have
found out to be a spurious divinity.
Mr. Dillon was to be
sympathised with, even though pathetically premature, in looking to
the then anticipated advent of Home Rule for a chance to make education
what it should be. But I doubt if he and the others who would have had
power in a Home Rule Parliament realised that what is needed here is not
reform, not even a revolution, but a vastly bigger thing—a creation.
It is not a question of pulling machinery asunder and piecing it
together again; it is a question of breathing into a dead thing a living
soul.
" I Deny "
I postulate that there is no education in Ireland apart from the
voluntary efforts of a few people, mostly mad. Let us therefore not talk
of reform, or of reconstruction. You cannot reform that which is not;
you cannot by any process of reconstruction give organic life to a
negation. In a literal sense the work of the first Minister of Education
in a free Ireland will be a work of creation; for out of chaos he will
have to evolve order and into a dead mass he will have to breathe
the breath of life.
The English thing that is called education in
Ireland is founded on a denial of the Irish nation. No education can
start with a Nego, any more than a religion can. Everything that even
pretends to be true begins with its Credo. It is obvious that the savage
who says I believe in Mumbo Jumbo
is nearer to true religion than the
philosopher who says I deny God and the spiritual in man.
Now, to teach
a child to deny is the greatest crime a man or a State can commit.
Certain schools in Ireland teach children to deny their religion; nearly
all the schools in Ireland teach children to deny their nation. I deny
the spirituality of my nation; I deny the lineage of my blood; I deny my
rights and responsibilities.
This Nego is their Credo, this evil their
good.
To invent such a system of teaching and to persuade us that
it is an education system, an Irish education system to be defended by
Irishmen against attack, is the most wonderful thing the English have
accomplished in Ireland; and the most wicked.
Against Modernism
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 common sense, 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 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.
An Ideal in Education
The words and phrases of a language are always to some extent
revelations of the mind of the race that has moulded the language. How
often does an Irish vocable light up as with a lantern some immemorial
Irish attitude, some whole phase of Irish thought! Thus the words which
the old Irish employed when they spoke of education show that they had
gripped the very heart of that problem. To the old Irish the teacher was
aite, fosterer
, the pupil was dalta, foster-child
, the system was
aiteachas, fosterage
; words which we still retain as oide, dalta,
oideachas.
And is it not the precise aim of education to foster
? Not
to inform, to indoctrinate, to conduct through a course of studies
(though these be the dictionary meanings of the word), but first and
last to foster
the elements of character native to a soul, to help to
bring these to their full perfection rather than to implant exotic
excellences.
Fosterage implies a foster-father or foster-mother—a
person— as its centre and inspiration rather than a code of rules. Modern
education systems are elaborate pieces of machinery devised by
highly-salaried officials for the purpose of turning out citizens according
to certain approved patterns. The modern school is a State-controlled
institution designed to produce workers for the State, and is in the
same category with a dockyard or any other State-controlled institution
which produces articles necessary to the progress, well-being, and
defence of the State. We speak of the efficiency
, the cheapness
, and the
up-to-dateness
of an education system just as we speak of the efficiency
, the cheapness
, and the up-to-dateness
of a system of
manufacturing coal-gas. We shall soon reach a stage when we shall speak
of the efficiency
, the cheapness
, and the up-to-dateness
of our systems
of soul-saving. We shall hear it said Salvation is very cheap in
England
, or The Germans are wonderfully efficient in prayer
, or Gee, it
takes a New York parson to hustle ginks into heaven.
Now, education is
as much concerned with souls as religion is. Religion is a Way of Life,
and education is a preparation of the soul to live its life here and
hereafter; to live it nobly and fully. And as we cannot think of
religion without a Person as its centre, as we cannot think of a church
without its Teacher, so we cannot think of a school without its Master.
A school in fact, according to the conception of our wise ancestors,
was less a place than a little group of persons, a teacher and his
pupils. Its place might be poor, nay, it might have no local habitation
at all, it might be peripatetic: where the master went the disciples
followed. One may think of Our Lord and His friends as a sort of school:
was He not the Master, and were not they His disciples? That gracious
conception was not only the conception of the old Gael, pagan and
Christian, but it was the conception of Europe all through the Middle
Ages. Philosophy was not crammed out of text-books, but was learned at
the knee of some great philosopher: art was learned in the studio of
some master- artist, a craft in the workshop of some master-craftsman.
Always it was the personality of the master that made the school, never
the State that built it of brick and mortar, drew up a code of rules to
govern it, and sent hirelings into it to carry out its decrees.
I do
not know how far it is possible to revive the old ideal of fosterer and
foster-child. I know it were very desirable. One sees too clearly that
the modern system, under which the teacher tends more and more to
become a mere civil servant, is making for the degradation of education,
and will end in irreligion and anarchy. The modern child is coming to
regard his teacher as an official paid by the State to render him
certain services; services which it is in his interest to avail of,
since by doing so he will increase his earning capacity later on; but
services the rendering and acceptance of which no more imply a sacred
relationship than do the rendering and acceptance of the services of a
dentist or a chiropodist. There is thus coming about a complete reversal
of the relative positions of master and disciple, a tendency which is
increased by every statute that is placed on the statute book, by every
rule that is added to the education code of modern countries.
Against
this trend I would oppose the ideal of those who shaped the Gaelic
polity nearly two thousand years ago. It is not merely that the old
Irish had a good education system; they had the best and noblest that
has ever been known among men. There has never been any human
institution more adequate to its purpose than that which, in pagan
times, produced Cuchulainn and the Boy-Corps of Eamhain Macha and, in
Christian times, produced Enda and the companions of his solitude in
Aran. The old Irish system, pagan and Christian, possessed in
pre-eminent degree the thing most needful in education: an adequate
inspiration. Colmcille suggested what that inspiration was when he said,
If I die it shall be from the excess of the love that I bear the
Gael
. A love and a service so excessive as to annihilate all thought
of self, a recognition that one must give all, must be willing always to
make the ultimate sacrifice; this is the inspiration alike of the story
of Cuchulainn and of the story of Colmcille, the inspiration that made
the one a hero and the other a saint.
Master and Disciples
In the Middle Ages there were everywhere little groups of persons
clustering round some beloved teacher, and thus it was that men
learned not only the humanities but all gracious and useful crafts.
There were no State art schools, no State technical schools: as I have
said, men became artists in the studio of some master-artist, men
learned crafts in the workshop of some master craftsman. It was always
the individual inspiring, guiding, fostering other individuals; never
the State usurping the place of father or fosterer, dispensing education
like a universal provider of readymades, aiming at turning out all men
and women according to regulation patterns.
In Ireland the older and
truer conception was never lost sight of. It persisted into Christian
times when a Kieran or an Enda or a Colmcille gathered his little group
of foster-children (the old word was still used) around him; they were
collectively his family, his household, his clann; many sweet and
endearing words were used to mark the intimacy of that relationship. It
seems to me that there has been nothing nobler in the history of
education than this development of the old Irish plan of fosterage under
a Christian rule, when to the pagan ideals of strength and truth there
were added the Christian ideals of love and humility. And this,
remember, was not the education system of an aristocracy, but the
education system of a people. It was more democratic than any education
system in the world to-day. Our very divisions into primary, secondary,
and university crystallise a snobbishness partly intellectual and partly
social. At Clonard Kieran, the son of a carpenter, sat in the same class
as Colmcille, the son of a king. To Clonard or to Aran or to Clonmacnois
went every man, rich or poor, prince or peasant, who wanted to sit at
Finnian's or at Enda's or at Kieran's feet and to learn of his wisdom.
Always it was the personality of the teacher that drew them there.
And so it was all through Irish history. A great poet or a great scholar
had his foster-children who lived at his house or fared with him through
the country. Even long after Kinsale the Munster poets had their little
groups of pupils; and the hedge schoolmasters of the nineteenth century
were the last repositories of a high tradition.
I dwell on the
importance of the personal element in education. I would have every
child not merely a unit in a school attendance, but in some intimate
personal way the pupil of a teacher, or, to use more expressive words,
the disciple of a master. And here I nowise contradict another
position of mine, that the main object in education is to help the child
to be his own true and best self. What the teacher should bring to his
pupil is not a set of ready made opinions, or a stock of cut-and-dry
information, but an inspiration and an example; and his main
qualification should be, not such an overmastering will as shall impose
itself at all hazards upon all weaker wills that come under its
influence, but rather so infectious an enthusiasm as shall kindle new
enthusiasm. The Montessori system, so admirable in many ways, would seem
at first sight to attach insufficient importance to the function of the
teacher in the schoolroom. But this is not really so. True, it would
make the spontaneous efforts of the children the main motive power, as
against the dominating will of the teacher which is the main motive
power in the ordinary schoolroom. But the teacher must be there always
to inspire, to foster. If you would realise how true this is, how
important the personality of the teacher, even in a Montessori
school, try to imagine a Montessori school conducted by the average
teacher of your acquaintance, or try to imagine a Montessori school
conducted by yourself!
Of Freedom in Education
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 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 or
practice is such a 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 around a table in Hume street.
Precisely the same textbooks 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 Irish secondary schools during this
twelve months 1912-13.. 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 services
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.
Back to the Sagas
That freedom may be availed of to the noble ends of education there
must be, within the school system and within the school, an adequate
inspiration. The school must make such an appeal to the pupil as shall
resound throughout his after life, urging him always to be his best
self, never his second-best self. Such an inspiration will come most
adequately of all from religion. I do not think that there can be any
education of which spiritual religion does not form an integral part; as
it is the most important part of life, so it should be the most
important part of education, which some have defined as a preparation
for complete life. And inspiration will come also from the hero-stories
of the world, and especially of our own people; from science and art if
taught by people who are really scientists and artists, and not merely
persons with certificates from Mr. T. W. Russell; from literature
enjoyed as literature and not studied as texts
; from the associations of
the school place; finally and chiefly from the humanity and
great-heartedness of the teacher.
A heroic tale is more essentially a
factor in education than a proposition in Euclid. The story of Joan of
Arc or the story of the young Napoleon means more for boys and girls
than all the algebra in all the books. What the modern world wants more
than anything else, what Ireland wants beyond all other modern
countries, is a new birth of the heroic spirit. If our schools would set
themselves that task, the task of fostering once again knightly courage
and strength and truth— that type of efficiency rather than the peculiar
type of efficiency demanded by the English Civil Service— we should have
at least the beginning of an educational system. And what an appeal an
Irish school system might have! What a rallying cry an Irish Minister
of Education might give to young Ireland! When we were starting St.
Enda's I said to my boys: We must re-create and perpetuate in Ireland
the knightly tradition of Cuchulainn, better is short life with honour
than long life with dishonour
; I care not though I were to live
but one day and one night, if only my fame and my deeds live after me
;
the noble tradition of the Fianna, we, the Fianna, never told a lie,
falsehood was never imputed to us
; strength in our hands, truth on our
lips, and cleanness in our hearts
; the Christ-like tradition of
Colmcille, if I die it shall be from the excess of the love I bear the
Gael
.
And to that antique evangel should be added the evangels of later
days: the stories of Red Hugh and Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet and John
Mitchel and O'Donovan Rossa and Eoghan O'Growney. I have seen Irish boys
and girls moved inexpressibly by the story of Emmet or the story of Anne
Devlin, and I have always felt it to be legitimate to make use for
educational purposes of an exaltation so produced.
The value of the
national factor in education would appear to rest chiefly in this, that
it addresses itself to the most generous side of the child's nature,
urging him to live up to his finest self. If the true work of the
teacher be, as I have said, to help the child to realise himself at his
best and worthiest, the factor of nationality is of prime
importance, apart from any ulterior propagandist views the teacher may
cherish. The school system which neglects it commits, even from the
purely pedagogic point of view, a primary blunder. It neglects one of
the most powerful of educational resources.
It is because the English
education system in Ireland has deliberately eliminated the national
factor that it has so terrifically succeeded. For it has—succeeded in
making slaves of us. And it has succeeded so well that we no longer
realise that we are slaves. Some of us even think our chains ornamental,
and are a little doubtful as to whether we shall be quite as comfortable
and quite as respectable when they are hacked off.
It remains the
crowning achievement of the National
and Intermediate systems that they
have wrought such a change in this people that once loved freedom so
passionately. Three-quarters of a century ago there still remained in
Ireland a stubborn Irish thing which Cromwell had not trampled out,
which the Penal Laws had not crushed, which the horrors of '98 had not
daunted, which Pitt had not purchased: a national consciousness
enshrined mainly in a national language. After three-quarters of a
century's education that thing is nearly lost.
A new education system
in Ireland has to do more than restore a national culture. It has to
restore manhood to a race that has been deprived of it. Along with its
inspiration it must, therefore, bring a certain hardening. It must lead
Ireland back to her sagas.
Finally, I say inspiration must come
from the teacher. If we can no longer send the children to the heroes and
seers and scholars to be fostered, we can at least bring some of the
heroes and seers and scholars to the schools. We can rise up against the
system which tolerates as teachers the rejected of all other professions
rather than demanding for so priest-like an office the highest souls and
noblest intellects of the race. I remember once going into a schoolroom
in Belgium and finding an old man talking quietly and beautifully about
literature to a silent class of boys; I was told that he was one of the
most distinguished of contemporary Flemish poets. Here was the sort of
personality, the sort of influence, one ought to see in a
schoolroom. Not, indeed, that every poet would make a good
schoolmaster, or every schoolmaster a good poet. But how seldom here has
the teacher any interest in literature at all; how seldom has he any
horizon above his time-table, any soul larger than his results fees!
The fact is that, with rare exceptions, the men and women who are
willing to work under the conditions as to personal dignity, freedom,
tenure, and emolument which obtain in Irish schools are not the sort of
men and women likely to make good educators. This part of the subject
has been so much discussed in public that one need not dwell upon it. We
are all alive to the truth that a teacher ought to be paid better than a
policeman, and to the scandal of the fact that many an able and cultured
man is working in Irish secondary schools at a salary less than that of
the Viceroy's chauffeur.
When We are Free
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 archaeology 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.