We are asked here to vote out of public funds £5,500,000 for education. We are asked to provide the sum of £4,500,000 for primary education. Our function here is definitely to ensure, when we vote away the people's money, that the people are getting reasonable value for it. Particularly, when we vote away enormous sums of public money for the education of the youth of the country, we should ensure that at least the parents, who are the taxpayers, are reasonably satisfied that their children are, in fact, being educated. To my mind, there is a vast difference between instruction and education. Nobody questions the fact that the children in our primary schools systematically receive so many hours instruction every day; that the syllabus is adhered to, and the face of the clock respected. But what parents are concerned about, and what Parliament should be concerned about, is the result. Is education, in the broad and general sense, advancing, or is it going back? As a result of observations, as a result of contacts, as a result of what I read, and as a result of information gleaned from those I meet, whether in professorial life, in business life, in professional life, or a fair cross section of the parents of this country, I am bound to say that there is thorough and absolute dissatisfaction with our present educational results. The Taoiseach established a commission selected by himself, a commission of experienced men, reasonably mixed with regard to their knowledge of life, their experience and their contacts. That commission, the Vocational Commission, sat throughout a very lengthy period, and carried out their work conscientiously and energetically. It was presided over by a very distinguished Irish Bishop, who himself could rightly be regarded as an authority on education. That commission felt bound to report the complete dissatisfaction of the parents with the education being given to their children. The teachers themselves inquired at great length into the same subject and the teachers, on behalf of the parents, again reported that parents are entirely dissatisfied with the results being obtained from the millions we are voting. Businessmen will tell you that in recent years the type of young recruit they are getting is best described, from their point of view, as nearly totally uneducated. Time and again I have listened to discussions and ordinary conversations between people engaged in secondary and university education and, in recent years, every time such a group get together and discuss education they will always come round to the same point where they deplore the evidence of retrogression in the type of students coming up to them from below.
I have no great confidence or no enthusiasm in raising this particular question here because for 13 years back we have been met in this House by a kind of sphinx-like immobility, the kind of force and strength that comes from weighty inertia. Having experience of that kind of very heavy indifference, it is with no enthusiasm, with no confidence, or with no hope of anything resulting that one approaches such a subject vis-a-vis the present Minister. We had here last week a discussion on a motion which suggested that some advisory council should be brought into being so as to advise on this immensely important question of education. We had the parrot-like reply that we have been hearing for years. We had this Vocational Commission brushed aside. They know nothing; the political chief and the permanent advisers know all. We had the teachers' own report treated with equally scant courtesy. Nevertheless, some of us here remember, before the customary somersault was done, the Taoiseach standing up in that bench some seven years ago and telling us he was entirely dissatisfied with or felt rather uneasy at the results being obtained and that he felt that some commission should inquire into these results. However, be that as it may. There is ample evidence up and down this country that parents are dissatisfied with the outcrop from our schools; that the children are not being fairly equipped for the life they have to face afterwards and that the educational standards of the country generally are dropping.
Under the Constitution we are bound—and the Minister is the instrument to carry it out—to ensure that the youth of the country gets proper education and proper facilities for being educated. If there is dissatisfaction on the part of the general run of parents, or if distinguished authorities on educational matters that are called on by the Government and Parliament to inquire into the matter report adversely, then there is a responsibility on the Minister and on the Government to have the whole matter exhaustively inquired into. When that particular request is made to the Government by such a body and when that is endorsed and followed up by a similar appeal on behalf of the organised teaching profession who say that things are bad, that children are not being properly educated, that the rule of the Department is interfering with the education of children, or depriving some of them of education, then we have got to lean back and consider whether we are not, in fact, violating the rights given under the Constitution and whether others of us here are entitled lightly to trip through the Lobbies and vote another £5,500,000 of public funds for a purpose that is not being achieved.
Some years ago, the teachers, 15 years or so after the policy was adopted of endeavouring to teach the young population principally through the Irish language—a policy that, at its inception, was heartily and enthusiastically endorsed and demanded by a very high percentage of teachers— being conscientious, high-minded professional people with a sense of responsibility and observing the results and feeling, perhaps, uneasy at the finished product, themselves carried out a very lengthy and detailed inquiry into whether that policy was or was not having an adverse effect on education. That particular inquiry was confined to teachers who were sufficiently competent in the Irish language to teach through that language. After years of investigation they submitted their report. I am not sufficiently intimate with the subject to say whether the findings in the report were, in fact, correct or otherwise, but I am sufficiently conversant with what the functions and even the normal courtesy of a Minister should be to know that a document of that kind deserved the very fullest and deepest consideration by any servant of Parliament who is highly paid to take charge of education in this country. There were things in that report to make anybody who is responsible for the education of the youth of Ireland lie awake at night wondering whether he was sinning against the young children of the country. There were pages in that report that would bring tears to the eyes of anybody with human feelings towards little children. You read of the little children who want to give expression to their feelings by conversation, and they find themselves surrounded and regimented and given orders through a language that is strange to them, and you observe the result of the curbing and checking of the little impulses of those children and the disastrous effect on the human make-up eventually.
When you have a report calling attention to that kind of thing, expressing the dissatisfaction of parents with the teaching, and directing attention to the feeble efforts of not well educated parents to teach their children at home, then I submit that there is something to be inquired into. Let those who are competent to carry out such an inquiry and pursue such investigations look into the matter thoroughly and then come back to Parliament and tell us "We have established a commission in which all Parliament can have confidence; the members of that commission have investigated the whole matter; here is their report and this is what influences the Department of Education." If the Minister feels comfortable and feels convinced that the policy he is pursuing, and which he has intensified, is getting suitable results and that the children are being adequately educated, then he should welcome such an inquiry; but as long as there is any doubt on that particular point, in the interest not only of the taxpayers but of parents and, above all, in the interests of the little children who will have to face the world inside or outside this country in a few years and should be adequately equipped for that hard struggle for existence, we should feel bound to hold up such an Estimate as this.
We have that hidebound, callous disregard for the opinions of the teachers; we have the same callous disregard for the views of the parents; we have the same contemptuous disregard for the results and the published views of the great commission that inquired into the vocational system in this country. Are we to take it that teachers are wrong, that parents are wrong, that the Vocational Commission is wrong and that the only one who is right is the Minister? Are we to take it that the people who move here and there getting the views of professors in universities, of businessmen, of those who are looking for clerks and taking them from among those who have recently left school are wrong?
I had an experience in a hospital recently where there were applicants for a certain very junior post. They applied verbally and were taken into a room, 11 of them. They were told to whom a letter should be addressed and each one of the 11 was told to write a very short application for the position. I happened to see those 11 applications and no person outside an inmate of Grangegorman would give the lowliest post to any one of them on the written applications. The grammar was appalling, the spelling was atrocious and there was no such thing as punctuation. The person to whom the application was made was addressed in varying terms—"honourable gentleman,""honourable sir." These applicants were turned out as educated for the ordinary battle of life. One-syllable words were spelled incorrectly and there was no punctuation from the beginning to the end of the letter of application. I would say these 11 people were a fair cross-section.
On education we spend £5,500,000 a year. That is the amount spent for the education of the generation that is growing up. That generation will be the future Irish nation, the fathers and the mothers of future Irish men and women. That is the standard that will be passed down to the following generation. We have every authoritative body that has spoken, with the exception of the Minister, either condemning the system in toto or demanding or appealing that there should be some inquiry held. This year, the same as every other year, the bell will ring, the troops will move, the money will be voted, and they will pick the pockets of the people for this. Year after year we have to stand for it.
Leaving that question on one side, just leaving it at the point that there is at least something to be inquired into, there is something else to disturb the public mind and there has to be some system of checking-up other than the examination system. I will remind the Minister that the Taoiseach felt there was a matter to be inquired into. Is everything, other than what the children are learning inside our schools, as it should be? Do we think we will breed confidence in our educational system when we have school teachers, the people who have to set an example in citizenship and good conduct to the children, behaving in the manner we witnessed here within the past two weeks; when you have those charged with the responsibility of teaching the youths who are growing up driven to such a frenzied pitch of distraction that all restraint and discipline and all respect for State institutions are completely forgotten? We have in mind the antics that took place in this particular House. Is there not something to be inquired into on that particular front? If a person charged day after day with responsibility for transmitting knowledge to hundreds of little children is demented and distracted with financial worries at home, do you think that his instruction will ever adequately be transmitted?
I can speak with a certain amount of ease on this particular question. I was one of a commission of this House that dealt with Ministers' salaries a few years ago. The case made and conceded, and the case I supported and advocated, was that Ministers could not adequately carry out their functions if their minds were to be distracted by financial worries, that they could not live reasonably, according to the standard of life they should occupy, if the salary was merely £1,000 a year. I advocated as strongly as I could that, if their functions were to be properly carried out, they should be relieved of anxiety, distress and worry, not only with regard to the present but with regard to the future. The salaries were increased by 50 per cent. and very generous pensions were provided after five or seven years' service. I believe that that action was taken in the public interest; that, if they were to be haunted by the terror of the bailiff or the bum, demanding payment for bills they could not meet, their functions could not be carried out adequately.
Yet we view with lofty, callous disdain the distractions, the worries and the appeals of family men with incomes of from £3 to £5 a week. They have no right to be worried, they have no right to look for more; the Minister's door is slammed in their faces, the Taoiseach's door is slammed in their faces, and all avenues of appeal are closed to them. That is what we are asked to subscribe to here. The £1,000 a year people must get an increase to relieve them of financial worry, so that, with a brain free from distraction, they may bludgeon others whose income is £150 or £250 a year. Is there not a case to be met and answered; is there not at least something to be inquired into, when teachers are driven to that mutinous stage where they are driven to forget even respect for the very high function they are called on to fulfil in human life, in setting an example to the next generation? Is the Minister still going to hold that there is nothing to inquire into, and that parents have no right to be dissatisfied?
It may be that the teachers, in their report, attributed the lack of education to the wrong cause—attempting to teach through a language that most of the children never hear outside school; or it may have been the mental worry of the person teaching; but there is definitely something to be inquired into. There is an obligation on the Minister to have a full inquiry made, to allow in the bright light of day, to come back here and tell Parliament the result of that inquiry, and then to ask for his £5,000,000, either to keep going a scheme which has been stamped and branded as unsatisfactory, or to put in its place a scheme which we can confidently expect to give satisfaction. However, to come year after year asking for an increasing amount to bolster up a system about which, to say the least, people are doubtful, and to have that education given by agents who are driven demented by the rising, galloping, bounding cost of living, and the impossibility of keeping a home going, is something into which an inquiry must be made.
There is another point. Nobody can go in or out of any school without noticing the size of the classes which our teachers are called on to instruct or educate. You would not have to be a teacher or need any experience in educational matters to know that it is absolutely absurd to have one teacher charged with the responsibility of teaching classes of 60, 70 or 80 pupils. It is expecting the impossible from the teacher; it is grossly unjust to the children, and it is not fulfilling our obligations to the parents. We know that the strength of a chain is the strength of the weakest link, and that the rate of progress of a class is, in the main, the speed at which the dullest child can progress. We know there is somewhere a limit in numbers beyond which the teacher is incapable of instructing properly and adequately.
Then we have the condition of the schools themselves; we have what Deputy Martin O'Sullivan referred to, the school in the area where there is so much poverty, and which in the cold winter months is inadequately heated. There are very many schools inadequately lighted. There is the delay, some of it unavoidable, in replacing schools that should not be inhabited even temporarily by goats, but where classess are assembled every day. Little tots who have come miles through all kinds of weather assemble there. Above all, a school should be a place where children learn more than mere instruction in so many subjects. The school, merely by the school routine, should instil a knowledge of cleanliness and hygiene into the children, so that later on they will carry with them through life a knowledge of decent standards of cleanliness and hygiene. When our children are packed by the hundred into hovels where coats and caps are heaped on top of other coats and caps, where there is no facility for washing filthy hands, where there is no use in the teacher calling attention to filthy faces or filthy hands, as there is no facility for cleaning them, what can anyone expect as a result in the end?
Even when we have new schools going up at great expense, but with no running water in very many of them, and no flush water in most of them, what kind of standard of hygiene or cleanliness are we aiming at? The Department of Education and the other Departments of this State will have either to knock down or bore through the walls—the high walls—that separate one Department from another in this State. I find that it is easier for the Department of Local Government and Public Health in this country to get in touch with the corresponding department in America than to get in touch with the Department of Agriculture in this country. Seemingly there is a wall between the different Departments in this country that cannot be climbed over or got through. Everybody knows that we have all kinds of commissions or conferences of one kind or another inquiring into the spread of infectious on contagious diseases, but yet in our schools we have the caps of children suffering from ringworm planked down on top of the caps of other children not suffering from that disease. We have the caps of children who are lousy being put alongside the caps of other children. Everybody knows the reason for that, but there should not be anything of that kind in any country in the world in this twentieth century. The whole lay-out of our schools should aim at a standard of cleanliness, and every facility for cleanliness and proper hygienic conditions should be provided in our schools.
Take the case of even the new schools that have been provided here. It seems to me that we have started without the slightest conception of what real education is and what should be the functions of any educational establishment. We have all kinds of bogeys, such as financial worry and debt, dogging the steps of the unfortunate teacher. Then there are a lot of hoary, antiquated bogeys crossing the practice, policy and aspirations of other Government Departments; and, of course, you have the old bogey of "averages"—the terror of every teacher—the terror that if the average, for any particular reason, falls, some assistant will walk the road, some assistant will be out of work. You have all kinds of a wrong outlook and limitations on the particular circumstances involving absence from school. Naturally, the teacher wants to protect his average, but these restrictions are such that there is no protection for the teacher. That, in itself, is a matter that should be inquired into. That, in itself, is a matter that should be inquired into by the advisory council.
