I move Amendment 2:—
To delete the section and substitute a new section as follows:—
(1) In this Act, save as hereinafter provided, the expression "child to whom this Act applies." means a person who has attained the age of six years and has not attained the age of sixteen years.
(2) A person who has not attained the age of sixteen years but has attained the age of fourteen years and has been granted, in accordance with regulations made by the Minister, a certificate that he has attained a prescribed standard of education shall not be deemed to be a person to whom this Act applies for the purpose of the provisions of this Act relating to attendance at a national or other suitable school if and so long as he is under apprenticeship in accordance with a scheme approved by the Minister, or is receiving technical or post-elementary education, or, being in employment, is in attendance at a specified course or courses of instruction approved by the Minister, during a specified number of hours per year.
I think it will be admitted that this amendment is the most important one that is to be proposed in connection with the whole Bill. I propose it because I felt that on the occasion of the Second Reading, and on several other occasions on which the matter of education was before the Dáil, that there was a general feeling and a general expression of opinion that the age at which children leave school—the age up to which they are compelled to attend school—was too low. I believe that in proposing the amendment I am giving expression to that general feeling of members in all parts of the House. At this early stage of these discussions I want to re-echo what Deputy Gorey said: that none of these amendments are put in a party spirit or will be discussed in a party spirit as far as I am concerned in any case. I feel that fourteen is too early an age to cast a child aside without any care as to its future welfare. That, in effect, is what the position has been up to this. The two years from fourteen to sixteen are, by the experience of a great many who have made a deep study of educational matters in this and other countries, taken to be almost the two most important years in the child's life. It is from that period that most can be done towards shaping the child's character and its inclinations especially in the direction of a vocational career. Up to the age of fourteen the child gets an education of a more or less elementary type without any attempt at specialisation or giving it in any way a vocational character, and it is absolutely necessary, of course, that that should be so. It is at this age that an attempt can be made successfully to direct the mind of the child towards the occupation which he or she is to follow as a future citizen.
As regards this amendment, I hope I shall have the solid support of those who represent the principal industry in this country, because it is the future agriculturists of the country who will be mainly affected by it. Many representatives of the Farmers' Party, Deputy Baxter especially, have from time to time pointed out that the education given or attempted to be given by our agricultural instructors throughout the country is lost to a great extent—that it is wasted because the child has not reached the stage of education at which he can benefit by that instruction. It is during these two years that the child's mind, in the rural areas especially, can be most successfully directed towards agricultural education, and towards getting the necessary foundation and the necessary knowledge of the processes of agriculture and of the science underlying it. This amendment had to be framed in a particular way in order to bring it within the scope of the Bill, but it is not my intention that children between the ages of fourteen and sixteen should be compelled to undergo what is sometimes called primary education. That is not the intention of the amendment. It will be necessary, to some extent in any case, to reorganise our educational institutions and our teaching power in order to deal specially with those children if we are to get them into the schools. But that can be done and it does not present any great difficulty.
If we seek to discover what is done in other countries we will find that the tendency in all modern progressive countries is to take special care of the child between the age of fourteen and sixteen. In proposing this increase in the school age we are not travelling on unexplored ground. We have experience on which we can fall back. A very interesting expriment was made in one of the Canadian States in the year 1919. There was contained in their Compulsory School Attendance Bill a special provision with regard to adolescent children under which children from the age of fourteen to sixteen were specially compelled to attend school. Certain exemptions were made. In the case of a child employed in or about the home of its parents or guardian he got what is called a home certificate, and in certain circumstances where a child was in a particular type of employment he got an exemption also, but for these children special part-time courses were instituted at which they had to attend for not less than four hundred hours per year. While that was made compulsory, there was also taken in the same Bill, powers to compel children up to the age of eighteen to attend part-time or special courses for special purposes.
That was in 1919, and the report of the Minister for Education for that province of Ontario for 1923 tells us how the Act has worked out. It will be interesting to have that experience before us in coming to a decision on this particular question here. This is an extract from the report:—
"The friends of education throughout the province have been watching with great interest the operation of the legislation introduced by the Hon. Dr. Cody in 1919, with a view to securing greater regularity of attendance, and to extend the period of instruction. As he pointed out in introducing his Bill, the efficiency of a school depends very largely upon the extent to which children avail themselves of the instruction offered. It is manifest that, however good the schools, they have no direct influence on children who are outside their doors. Sufficient time has now elapsed to show results from this legislation. The enrolment in the elementary schools has now risen to 601,485, which is twenty-one per cent. of the entire population of the province."
The population of Ontario is not quite 3,000,000—it is 2,933,000—and they have enrolled in their elementary schools over 601,000. Our population is something like 3,200,000 and yet we have enrolled something less than 500,000 in our primary schools. Twenty-two per cent. of the population are enrolled in the primary schools. The percentage here would be about 16. The report goes on to say that the attendance is at a very high figure. It says:
"The enrolment in the secondary schools has risen to 60,395, and shows an increase of 41 per cent. during the two years of the operation of the Adolescent School Attendance Act. The increased attendance since the Adolescent School Attendance Act became operative, particularly noticeable in the upper forms of the elementary schools, and in the lower forms of the secondary schools, would indicate that many juveniles who formerly spent the years of their early adolescence in unnecessary employments, often intermittent and unprofitable, or in actual idleness, are now under systematic training and discipline. The number of young people between 14 and 16 years of age who have applied for home permits"—That is the special exemption allowed under the Act—"or for work certificates has been relatively small, so small in fact that it has been found unnecessary to establish the part-time classes required under the terms of the Act in all but the largest of the urban centres. Progress has been made during the year in organising such classes."
And he says:
"The classes have been established and conducted with little or no disturbance of employment relations and with a minimum of friction. Employers co-operated freely and willingly with the school authorities in making adjustments for the time required for school attendance. The pupils themselves have been quick to realise the benefits which they are receiving from the instruction in these classes. As evidence of this it is pointed out that many of those who are freed from the necessity of attending as they reach the age of 16 ask to be allowed to remain in the classes."
That is the experience of putting into operation legislation such as would be the case if this amendment were accepted, in a country which has a smaller population than ours, with a larger area. The area of the province is something like three times the size of ours, and the population much more scattered than ours. The total expenditure on primary education in that province is £8,000,000—double what ours is. Now these are the people with whom our agriculturists have to compete in the British market, and they have thought and found that it pays them to educate their young people up to the age of 16 years. The plea has been made more than once that the children of the rural areas should be taught rural science and the elements underlying agriculture, and I hold that this is specially and eminently the time and the age when that education can be more successfully imparted, and for that reason I expect and hope that the Farmers' Party will be the strongest supporters of this amendment.
In urban areas there is as great a need for technical education fitting young boys and young girls for industrial occupations. Now there is the question of cost that was mentioned on the occasion of the Second Reading. That is the only possible objection that I can imagine that can be raised to this amendment. The Minister for Finance mentioned certain figures. I do not agree that that amount will at all be necessary, if the reorganisation which is possible in education is carried out. We have in this country, despite what Deputy McGoldrick and Deputy Heffernan said. far too many separate schools, and in consequence of that much of the efforts and much of the time of the available teaching staff is wasted. We hear of large classes and of the difficulty of dealing with large classes. The difficulty is not so much dealing with large classes as dealing with a large number of different classes. That is the real problem we have to meet, and there is room for very great economy in the teaching power in the country. If there is a suitable reorganisation of our present resources made, I do not believe that there will be that big expenditure foreshadowed by the Minister for Finance in putting this into operation. Let us take the facts.
I wonder how many Deputies realise what are the facts with regard to our school buildings and separate schools. There are eighty-three per cent. of the schools in this country taught either by one teacher or two teachers. They are what is called one-teacher schools or two-teacher schools. The figures are 4,680 out of a total of 5,636, and there is no doubt, at least in my mind, that one thousand of these schools are superfluous as separate schools. In many of these schools the teachers are employed dealing with five or six different standards in which the total number of children does not reach 30. As I say, there is room there for very great economy of teaching power. Take two adjoining schools where you have 45 children in each school—boys and girls' schools—amalgamate them and you have a school of 90. There are two teachers in each of these schools at the present time, which gives four teachers in all. The work of the amalgamated school could be more effectively done by three teachers than the teaching is now done in the separate schools by four. One teacher could be set free to do a particular type of work.
We have, fortunately, a great many of our teachers specially trained to deal with rural science teaching. There has been a special effort in that direction for eight or nine years, and teaching staff and power are available with a certain amount of organisation which is necessary. But I do not think we should allow ourselves to be frightened by any idea that there is a big abnormal expenditure involved in putting this amendment into operation. If there was, there is no shadow of doubt in my mind—and I am sure this opinion is held by many people here, and in the country—that there is nothing in which money could be better spent, or that would bring a better return than money spent on education, and especially in educating children of this age, when it can be shown that they are more or less at a loose end. That is the time that children released from school with no employment to go to very often get into mischief, and it is a time that we should be specially careful to keep a watchful eye over them and to guide them in the proper direction with regard to their future welfare as citizens. I do hope that there will be general expression of opinion and that it will be proved by members of the Dáil that their speeches, which we have often listened to in favour of the betterment of education in the country, will not prove to be merely lip-service to education, but that now that the opportunity is given to them they will avail of that opportunity and support this amendment.