The general framework of it, certainly, and I have, in my statement, given a brief description of that general framework. Deputy O'Connell led off by an interesting account of my own personality. He described me as a philosopher living somewhere away in the clouds, and detached from the realities of education and the realities of life. I wish I could live up to that beautiful legend. There are occasions, and there have been recent occasions, when I could heartily wish that it was my lot to be detached from realities and actualities. But the Deputy knows how far that description accords with my share of the realities, and how far it has been my lot to live in detachment and to philosophise in the clouds. The Deputy did me the honour to say that he had read some articles I had written recently on the question of Irish educational policy, but he rather suggested that these were of such a high-flying description that their content and the inferences to be drawn from them were not within the reach of the ordinary man. I venture to say again that that is very far from the actuality, and that the ordinary man who read these articles understood perfectly well what they meant and the kind of Irish educational aim which they described, understood it not only in general but to a very large extent in detail.
I have been twitted with vagueness, and among the criticisms which I have had the benefit of listening to I have come across two definitions of education. One of them was Deputy Good's, that the function of education was to prepare people for the battle of life. If I had said anything as vague as that I should certainly have deserved a good deal of the criticism that has been levelled against me. I am quite sure that when that definition was forthcoming the question was arising in the minds of other Deputies whether the object of education was to prepare the young person for his own battle of life or for somebody else's battle of life.
Another definition with which we were provided was that the business of education was to enable young people to form a right judgment about everything. Now, if I had said anything nearly so vague as that, or so highly philosophical, I would deserve to be placed on that high philosophical pedestal that has been provided for me so kindly by Deputy O'Connell. But I said something very different, and what I said I am prepared to say at any public meeting in the country, and when I have said it I know that those who listen to me will not say that it is either vague or unintelligible. I have declared my policy of education to be the conservation and development of Irish nationality. It is not the aim of education generally that I am here to describe, but the policy of education adopted by an Irish Minister and an Irish Department for this country. I have declared my policy of education to be the conservation and development of Irish nationality.
Deputy Good asked what I meant by nationality. I thought I had explained that briefly. I will explain it now. By Irish nationality I mean Irish civilisation, the form and type of civilisation which is accordant to the genius of this people, to their traditions and to their outlook on the future. And lest there should be any accusation of vagueness arising upon that, I should say, further, that their civilisation comprises in one all the human aspects of their common life, its economic aspect, its cultural aspect, its political aspect, its spiritual aspect, not excluding even its recreations and its amusements. I am told that that aim is not a policy and is not intelligent. I say that I am prepared to go before any crowd of Irishmen anywhere and to appeal to them as to whether that is or is not an intelligible policy.
The main fact that I have had to face is this, that my Department, when it came into existence, found itself in charge of a State system of education, found itself the interior of a State plan of education which had no such general aim or policy, which sought, and in its inception, deliberately sought, to educate the youth of Ireland as if Ireland was nothing to them, nothing to them but their breeding ground, which did not endeavour to interest them in the life and progress of the nation to which they belonged, which cared nothing— and I say that emphatically—for their economic welfare as a community, which aimed directly at cutting them off from the cultural traditions of their own past, and at depriving them of any inspirations that they could derive from that source. My policy has been, is, and will be, while I have that responsibility, to reverse all that and to put the very contrary in its place. I have said that on the economic side that policy will have special regard to the economic policy instituted and carried on by the Departments of my colleagues, the Minister for Lands and Agriculture, and the Minister for Industry and Commerce, and I trust that that accord between education and economic development will be of a very intensive kind.
Let us take, for example, the rural district. As we have been frequently reminded, the greater part of the economic life of this country is in the rural districts, and is connected with rural industry. I propose that in a rural district the school, the teacher and the work of the pupils shall be characterised by an intense interest in the conditions and development of the district in which they live and of the community for which that school has been established, and that they shall not have their eyes on the ends of the earth. As I have said in another place, the test of success for such a school, or for any school in Ireland, will not be for me, as it has been for many in the past, the successes of individual pupils who have gone away from that community and attached themselves elsewhere. It would not be for me a success for a rural school in Ireland if it was to provide Prime Ministers for every country in the world and if at the same time it was not associated with the development and advancement—the improvement culturally, economically, spiritually and in every way that you can regard it— of the community of the district in which the school is situate. The same applies, in its measure, to the secondary schools which draw from wider areas, and the same applies in my mind to the universities which work for the whole country.
The daily newspapers have sought, within the past few weeks, to focus our attention on Denmark and they have held up Denmark to us as an example. I am prepared to take Denmark as an example. Mutatis mutandis. I do not say that everything that is done in Denmark should be copied in Ireland. I should rather say that I am prepared to take Denmark as an inspiration, and the general characteristic that I find applied to the education which has built up the economic success of Denmark—the general characteristic which I find applied to it by an Irish observer is, that it is intensely national. Well, if I had never read that about Denmark my own instincts and my own experience as an Irishman would have told me that, apart altogether from cultural and spiritual aims, the right line for any person responsible for education in Ireland to take with regard to Irish education—the right line with the economic future of the country and its economic development in view—is to make Irish education intensely national. I stand by that. That is the key-note of my educational policy. I could not be associated with any policy which was not dominated and vivified by that principle, and I should very much prefer, if any other policy were instituted in this country, not to be associated with it at all.
Now, I have said that the State plan of education and the State system of education to which this Department succeeded had no such aim, no such policy and no such spirit, but an aim, policy and spirit which were exactly contrary to that which I have advocated. I could perhaps illustrate that best by one or two concrete examples. I have here a semi-official statistical description, in a publication known as the Irish Parliamentary Gazetteer, of the state of the various parts of Ireland just at the time when what is known as the system of national education, that is to say, State-aided primary education, was established in Ireland nearly a century ago. There are some surprising economic facts to be found in that semi-official description. I will give one or two instances. It states that at that time when the bulk of the people of Ireland were what is described as illiterate, and the benefits of this new plan of education were about to be conferred upon them, in the districts of Westport, Newport and Ballinrobe, in the County of Mayo, there were 35,000 linen workers engaged in the linen industry in that small district. What did the national system of education do for the linen industry? You have only got to go there now to see. The remains are to be found in the ruins of the vacant warehouses on the quays at Westport.
I will give another example. I happen to have been born and reared within a few miles of a school that appears as No. 1 on the historic roll of the Commissioners of National Education. School No. 1 was situated in the upper part of Glenariff, in the County of Antrim, and that School No. 1 was, I think, actually set up under the patronage of one of the Commissioners of Education who himself was a native of the locality. When that School No. 1 was established the Irish language was universally spoken by the people of that district. I should not be surprised if it was spoken by the Commissioner himself. It certainly was by his father, who was a man of considerable celebrity in that part of the country, and, as a matter of fact, of considerable celebrity throughout Ireland, and who played a large part in the movement for the revival of Irish national culture. It was a purely Irish-speaking district; it has ceased to be that completely; there may be a few old people alone there now who have a knowledge of Irish, but the benefits of the English language came in, and Glenariff has the same story to tell as the districts of Westport and Ballinrobe. It has not developed one iota economically since National School No. 1 was established.
National School No. 1 did not do one thing for the benefit of the people and community of that district, except this: it provided some of those who resided in it with an easier means of escape from the life of that community and to establish themselves elsewhere.
My policy is to reverse all that. I want to interest the teachers of Ireland, and the youth of Ireland, in all that belongs to the life of the community among whom they live and to whom they belong. I want to interest them in their economic life and in their civic life and to do it in a more thorough, and in a more penetrating way than by sticking either rural science or civics into the programme as what is called a subject. My policy is founded upon faith and confidence in the future of this country and this nation, in its capacity for development, in its capacity for repairing the injuries of every kind—cultural, economic, civil or political—that it has suffered in the past century, since this system of so-called national education was established; and it is upon that policy that I invite your verdict and your judgment. It is for that policy, stated in these terms, and not upon administrative details, that I ask Deputies to pass judgment. I do not want to evade any issue. Neither do I wish to allow the real issue to be clouded.
If Deputies desire to have an adverse pronouncement upon any portion of the administrative work of my Department, the course of our procedure will give them an opportunity of doing so.
