I do not want to pursue it beyond where it applies. On the question of teachers' salaries it is easy to be irresponsible and ask for higher salaries all round, particularly when one has no responsibility to provide these salaries and I do not want it to be suggested that I am doing that. I do not know whether the teachers' salaries are comparable with those paid in similar professions. The case on one side is that the teacher has to work a much shorter time in a year than those in comparable professions. That, of course, is no fault of the teacher and not a justification for a lesser salary than the competent man should be given. I understand that, judged by salaries payable in comparable work, the teachers' salary scales are rather low.
I am afraid I am not in a position to judge whether the salaries are equitable or not, but I suspect if one wants to get the best type of person into the teaching profession, one has to make the salary and emoluments as attractive as possible, so as to ensure that the intelligent, talented and educated individual whom one would like to attract into the teaching profession is not distracted into other openings available in science, engineering and other professions. We must avoid the position in which those best qualified to be teachers take up other callings and the teaching profession is denied to them.
I think we must agree that many teachers are people who, like nurses or religious, have a vocation. Personally, I believe one could not teach, unless one had a vocation for it, and I think at least a small percentage must have this vocation for teaching and they constitute the most desirable people for the profession. At the same time, there must be a number who go into teaching because it offers a reasonable standard of living, reasonable conditions of work and surroundings, and that must also be borne in mind. If a person goes into a profession because of a vocation, it is very unjust to exploit that as is done in the case of the nursing profession. The idea is there that these people will do this work because they feel it is creative and answers some need that is in them, and then we pay them less.
I have a relatively open mind on this, but there seems to be a current of feeling within the teaching profession that they could be better paid and that teachers can make invidious comparisons with other professions. The Minister's experts are probably the best people to judge the merits of the case, but there seems to me to be a palpable injustice in the situation where we have primary and secondary teachers who have comparable qualifications paid at different rates of salary. It should be decided that where the qualifications of individual teachers are the same or comparable, there is an unanswerable case for paying the same rate of salary. The differential between the different groups should be reduced and I think that would lead to a diminution of the feeling among members of the teaching profession that the primary schools are the poor relation of the whole educational system.
I do not see that you can divide the educational system into four categories: primary, secondary, vocational and university. I do not think we can divide them on a classification of degrees of importance because each in its own particular reach is a facet of the composite picture of the totally educated individual. Each part of the system that turns out the complete man has an equal importance. Consequently, our attitude should be that in each aspect of education the contribution of the teachers, whether primary, secondary, vocational or university, is equal and they should be paid at relatively equal salary rates and certainly not within the very wide disparity of salary rates paid to them at the moment. I believe that the greater injustice lies in the disparity between the pay rates of two people equally well qualified than in the disparity between the different types of teachers, primary, secondary, vocational and university.
I think the question of the school leaving age is the greatest defect of all in the Department of Education. I might be considered to be a prejudiced person on this. I am prejudiced in so far as I have very strong views on the ideal of education in any society. I think the ideal of an educational system in any society is that that educational system should be designed to develop to the fullest the latent talent of every individual in that society and that that responsibility should be the responsibility of the community as a whole and should not be left to devolve on any individual person within that community.
On this matter again, the excellent booklet published by the I.N.T.O. makes a considered investigation into the educational system and then, in the form of the "Plan for Education" which they compiled, they say this:
"Equality of educational opportunity, it is quite clear, is still denied to the majority of our people, and both secondary and university education, which in practice are denied to the vast bulk of the population."
Further on, they say:
"...the numbers of scholarships are so few as to be negligible."
Then they make the remark:
"Why, then, should there be ‘castes' in Catholic Ireland?" said the Bishop of Clonfert in an address, outlining a scheme of social services, during which he had to remind his hearers that ‘all kinds of work, if good and honest, are honourable'."
It also says that we are very far behind most of the progressive countries in the provision of adult education. As far as this country is concerned, most of the research and experience in other countries might never have taken place. That is all incontrovertible on the basis of facts available to the Minister. The position is that the vast majority of our children end their education at the age of 14 or 15 at the latest. As I said, there are about 20,000 of them who do not even reach the standard of education which we lay down to be achieved in the primary school. So you can imagine the 20,000 who leave our schools with nothing more than the fund of knowledge which would be available to a child of 14 or 15. That child has got to hew its way through the tremendously competitive world of to-day, earn its living, found a family, educate, clothe and feed that family.
The position is that 20 per cent. of our children go to secondary schools and 11 per cent. to vocational schools, so that 30 odd per cent. of our children get some sort of post-primary education. That leaves two-thirds of the 500,000 of our children ending their formal education at the age of 14 or 15. Surely that is a most disgraceful fact? Surely that is one of the indefensible truths about the ministerial educational policy over the past 35 years? Two-thirds of the children of our society are sent out into the world with a store of knowledge accumulated when they were 14. Cast your minds back to that time. They are sent out to compete for work against the children of Great Britain, the Six Counties, America and other societies. It is quite obvious they have no chance of competition on equal terms when their education ends at the age of 14 or 15 and when the young boy or girl they are competing against has had the advantage of the grammar school, continuation schools and technical schools in Great Britain or the secondary schools and the university education which is available to most of them now in the British Welfare State.
Equally, here at home, what chance has a child who completes his education at the age of 14 or 15 in the race of life against any of us who have been fortunate enough, through some unpredictable act of God, of faith or whatever it is, to acquire a profession? What chance has such a child of attaining success, creating any kind of wealth or opportunities for himself or for his children? Do we not know that the dice is loaded in the most unfair and unjust way against these children — two-thirds of the children, of the population of our schools who are turned out every year to try to earn their living? I believe it is a grossly unjust situation that gives some of us these tremendous opportunities and denies to thousands of other children the opportunities that a sound education would give them.
Pádraig Pearse said — and this was quite a long time ago — that our very division into primary, secondary and university crystallises a snobbishness partly intellectual and partly social. Of course it does. There is no doubt in the world that we are suffering to-day from a perpetuation of the idea wherein a certain class of our society is assured of a continuation education in secondary school or university, a tiny minority. From that, it is obvious that it has been decided and agreed to perpepuate this class-tiered society, this kind of social apartheid in which a child born into particular circumstances in life can never hope, except by a miracle, to leave that stratum into which it was born. The labourer's child will be a labourer; the doctor's child will be a doctor; the barrister's child a barrister, and so on. That stratification is inevitably perpetuated in the system enunciated by the Minister in his opening statement.
There is a complete rejection of the principle embodied in the Proclamation, a complete rejection of the principle of cherishing all the children of the nation. There is a complete rejection of the aims and objectives for which the Citizen Army fought and died and a complete negation of the democratic programme of the First Dáil. One can forgive the older generations for defects for which they were not, after all, responsible. I cannot easily forgive the Minister for accepting, as he seems to accept, this continued stratification of society into the unfortunate many and the privileged few, the unfortunate many who can never better themselves and who have no choice over the circumstances in which they are born.
The wealthy minority have the world open to them. They have the opportunity of advancing themselves and, in turn, of advancing their children. So it goes on. It is an acceptance of a system which is being rejected, or is in process of rejection, by most civilised countries to-day. Here, in this backwater, we continue to accept it and we continue to send out the thousands of children to whom Deputy Dillon referred yesterday, the emigrants about whom he said that it was possibly a good thing that they did emigrate. I do not want to enter into that issue.
To-day two-thirds of our children are emigrating to labouring jobs in Britain and elsewhere. It is a shameful thing they should go out unprepared, unqualified and without any technical ability or skill. It is a shameful thing that we should continue that system in our society. It is a shameful thing that we should replenish the pool of unskilled labour, taking our place with the backward countries like the West Indies and Africa. It is a shameful thing that our children should do the dirty work which the British, quite understandably will not allow their own children to undertake.
This educational machine has been built up over 35 years by successive Ministers. A society has been created in which two-thirds of our children have absolutely no chance to better themselves. That is a betrayal of our trust. It is a denial of the objectives of those who established this society. It is a retrograde step on the part of the Minister that he should be prepared to continue that system and quite unprepared radically or fundamentally to change it.
One of the ways in which autocratic or totalitarian societies seek to exploit cheap labour is through the medium of defective education. That is particularly so in the case of the Salazars and the Francos and of the British in the days of their Colonial Empire. The ambition was to foster a high illiteracy content. That had the result of making people resigned to their lot and resigned to doing coolie work, and it is coolie work our emigrant boys and girls are doing to-day. It is a disgraceful that our Minister for Education should perpetuate that system.
The system has another advantage. One of the sad truths to-day is the deterioration in the concept of democratic Government. One of the inevitable consequences of an illiterate electorate is a deterioration in the effectiveness and the efficiency of the whole democratic process. Democracy cannot survive in a society which is largely illiterate or only semi-literate. It connotes failure on the part of those who conceived the democratic ideal that the democratic process should not be given every opportunity to function properly. Where a semi-literate electorate is denied access to full knowledge and to the development of the full man, that electorate cannot use in the fullest and most perfect way the democratic process of Government. Indeed, it is a wonderful achievement on the part of successive Ministers for Education that they could take a people as talented, as intelligent, as gifted, as witty, as understanding and as resourceful as our people are generally accepted to be and to have created out of them this pool of halfeducated, semi-literate, untrained and unskilled people.
