I also have tabled a motion to refer back this Vote and my reasons for doing so I hope to make clear in the course of the debate. In listening to the Minister's opening speech, I did not know whether to be amused or amazed at the attempts he made to defend the record of this Department. Unfortunately, there has been in our country for the past 35 years a reprehensible tradition for successive Taoisigh to appoint to this most important Department of State, probably the most important Department of State, the intellectual light-weights of the different political Parties, and the consequence of that policy over the years has been the end product of the Department's record in the education of our society and the creation of an educational system in our society.
I say I was in doubt as to whether I should be amused or amazed at the Minister's attempt to defend the Department of Education. It has without a doubt created as ramshackle. manifestly and demonstrably unjust an educational system as probably exists in Europe and in civilised societies generally. Last year, the Minister clearly had little or no responsibility for the Estimate that faced him and the policy he had to enunciate. Since that time, he has had an opportunity of bringing himself up to date on the facts of the position in his Department and so it has been all the more disappointing that a man such as he, whom all of us know to be a humane and sensitive person, an intelligent and educated man, after his 12 months' study of the position in his Department, should come in here and try to defend what I think I will show is indefensible, that is, the record of his Department's activities over the past 35 years.
It has been an unfortunate development in our political history that the younger generation seem to feel — I listened to the former Minister for Finance, Deputy Sweetman, express this view — that they must appear to be willing and anxious to take on the burden of explaining away the product and results of the blundering leadership of the older generation over the past 35 years. I do not think they need necessarily do that. As I say, the disappointment in these circumstances is all the greater in that the present Minister, a young man, should appear to be content to follow in this tradition, that the Department of Education should be accepted amongst us as a sort of political Limbo. The penny catechism tells us that Limbo is a place or state of rest in which we suffer for a time before we pass on. The Department of Education is a place or state of rest in which one need do little, or perhaps nothing, except allow time to pass.
In this brief, the greater part of which was clearly a Departmental brief, the Minister discussed the evolution of the whole educational system here and mentioned, in passing, how little those of us who criticised it seemed to understand the intricacies and delicacies of that process of evolution. I am afraid I am one of the people not particularly impressed by this question of evolution. I think it was Henry Ford who said that all history is bunk, and Napoleon said something about history being a collection of lies agreed on by society.
It seems to me that all these things are irrelevancies. Detailed analysis of the reasons why a particular system has evolved is irrelevant and certainly unimportant compared with the importance of the question of what the system evolved into. We are more concerned with that because what it evolved into affects too closely the daily lives of too many people, young children, young adults, young people generally and society as a whole. Just to preoccupy ourselves with what the Minister describes as the valiant struggles of his predecessors, the late Senator Moylan, Deputy Mulcahy and others in the Department of Education, is irrelevant. We are not concerned that they struggled valiantly. We admire their valiant struggling and wrestling with the problems, but we must consider here whether they succeeded or failed. My contention is that they failed. They failed in the primary function of an educational system which, it seems to me, is to develop the latent talent of the whole population to the maximum.
Admittedly the Minister is correct when he says that the problems — I have no illusions about this, either — in the Department of Education, the problems facing us in this country, are problems which will not be solved overnight, but 35 years is a very long night. We have not even begun to solve the problems of our educational system. One of the most frustrating and irritating things about the Minister's statement is the appalling complacency which has epitomised these pronunciamentos so long as I have been interested in the question of education, at any rate, and probably for long before that also.
I want now to deal with Departmental responsibility. I do not join with those who talk of Departmental policy. Government Departments, as such, have no direct influence or power in the final determination of Government policy or Departmental policy. That is the very special function of the individual Minister and he must not derogate to his Department the responsibility which he himself must shoulder. The civil servant in a democracy has no direct power or function in the final determination of policy and the general tendency which has developed in recent years of talking about Departmental policy and putting the blame for the defects in that policy and the failures of that policy on the Department is, in my opinion, a mean attempt to evade putting responsibility where it really belongs, namely, on the shoulders of the Minister concerned, be he the present Minister or a former Minister in some other Government.
The Minister must take responsibility for policy. The failure of the language revival is due to ill-considered Ministerial policy. If our children are semi-literate, or illiterate, it is because of ill-considered Ministerial decisions over the years. It is a cowardly thing for people to indulge in this forms of attack on those who are not in a position either to defend themselves or to reply. I make no imputation on the people in the background who have to carry out their function under the authority of the political head of their Department. Anything I say is directed against the failures of successive Ministers in successive Governments.
The Minister's main contribution in this Estimate is confined to the removal of the ban on married women teachers. That is his sole contribution to the creation of a just, equitable and efficient educational system in our society. He has been critical of his critics. He appears to be irritated by his critics. He says in the course of his speech: "It begins to be a matter of concern that persons who should know better rush into print or engage in public outpourings without first ascertaining the facts." I hope to give him a number of facts, facts upon which I shall base my case against the Minister.
We politicians are prejudiced in many of our political views. In order to support my contention as to the failings of the Minister, I shall quote an authority for which the Minister appears to have a considerable regard. He has referred in his statement to the I.N.T.O. attitude on the language as being a definitive one in relation to the language. I am sure he will equally accept it as being definitive in relation to the whole question of education to-day. We all have a right to our political opinions, but they may be biased, and I should like to quote now a few statements made from time to time by the I.N.T.O. to support my contention that our system of education is much more seriously defective than the Minister appears to think.
The I.N.T.O. compiled an excellent little booklet called "A Plan for Education" and some of the things they said in it are, I think, relevant. At page 15, they said: "There must be a reform of our educational system if we are to survive as a nation with a distinctive culture." They say: "Other countries have found it necessary to recast their educational system" and they mention Britain and Northern Ireland. They say: "Ireland needs a new deal in education." Further: "Primary education should be the foundation stone and not the poor relation with the largest classes, the poorest buildings and equipment, the worst paid teachers." They go on to say: "There must be a natural progression from primary to post-primary based on the aptitude and ability of the pupil." Further: "There must be an extension of compulsory schooling for all to the age of 16, with the provision of further education for those who wish to avail of it."
I do not think anybody could controvert those statements. They also say, and I think this is significant in view of the persistent complacency of successive Ministers for Education in relation to our educational system: "Our whole educational set-up still suffers from the hardships which beset it all through a century ago." But the most serious of all the charges is: "For the vast majority of our citizens formal education still ends at the primary schools." That is probably the most serious failing of our educational system and the egregious complacency of successive Ministers for Education in face of those facts is something I find it difficult to accept. It was in some ways understandable in a generation which had grown up in different circumstances. They interpreted conditions of life as they were in their own time. They might be forgiven for having a different attitude to education generally.
I do not think there can be any defence for the Minister's self-satisfied apologia for the Department of Education. He has been critical on foot of the suggestion that there have been critics of the educational system generally who have not bothered about the facts, "without first ascertaining the facts," as he said. May I let him have some facts about our educational system? A few Departments lend themselves more to this reproof of the failure of the Department than the Department of Education. However, plenty of facts are available to demonstrate clearly to anybody with an open mind, an objective mind, that the Department has more failures than the Minister was prepared to concede.
The first and most important recommendation made by the Council of Education, which does not appear to have influenced any Minister in the Department of Education, is the perfectly reasonable suggestion that about 30 children is the most reasonable size of a class. The I.N.T.O. carried out a survey. They found that there was universal agreement on the question of the size of classes. As far as its planning is concerned, and certainly as far as the Minister's recent declaration of policy is concerned, it would appear that the Department of Education is relatively unconcerned with that recommendation or with the reasons why it was made, that is, that the desirable figure for a class should be in the region of 30 children.
In 1947, the average number of children in a class was 35. In 1956, far from the Department of Education or successive Ministers attempting successfully to deal with the high figure for classes in schools, the number was 37. This is not a simple question. There has been a very widespread depopulation of rural Ireland and, consequently, there are many rural schools with a relatively small number of children in the class. Consequently, the figure in city areas such as Dublin, post-war, does not hold. In the Dublin County Borough, the average figure in 1957 was 47. An average figure of 47 means that there are classes in which there are 50, 60, 70 and possibly more than 70 children.
I tried to find out by way of parliamentary question the greatest number of children in any class in the country or in the cities. The Minister has given me to understand that he has no knowledge or that he cannot find out if there is a class, say, of 100 or 110 children. I think that is very wrong. It amounts to irresponsibility on his part that there could be such a class in the city area and that he is unaware of it. I do not know of one myself. However, where you have an average figure of 47, I think any figure is possible. Consequently, under circumstances such as those, the Minister should take pains to find out whether there is an excessive number of children in any particular class in the city area so that, in that particular case, he might take very special measures to deal with it.
There are many obvious objections, even by people who are not professional educationists, as I am not, to overcrowded classes. Incidentally, the average figure for secondary schools is relatively tiny. It is something in the 12-20 region; I am not certain, but I know it is very small, and rightly so. It is clear that, in an overcrowded class, there are many obvious consequences — the possibility of ill-health, the great strain on the children and on the teachers. A teacher has to face the difficulty of keeping order in a large class with a number of children of different temperaments, different backgrounds and different degrees of intellectual ability. That leads to the position where the teacher has a chance, it seems to me, of deciding whether he will bring the class along at the rate of the most backward or the slowest child or else go ahead with the brightest children in the class in order to try to get good examination results. The consequences are obvious. By going ahead at the slowest rate, the intelligent child is slowed-up unnecessarily. By going ahead at the rate of the fastest child, the backward child ends up illiterate. That seems one of the obviously serious consequences of the big class.
I understand that, because of the number of small rural schools which we have, in two-teacher schools in rural Ireland the teacher has the difficulty of trying to be responsible for a number of classes. Clearly, where there is a relatively small number of children and only two teachers he has to be able to teach the different classes in these schools. Consequently, there is even a greater case in the Republic for the small class than there is in many of the continental schools which are very big and where, because they are big, they can have more teachers and, because there are more teachers, they can break down the number of classes for which they have to be responsible. Everything is against the high figure we have at present for the average number of children in a class.
One of the by-products of overcrowded classes is that too many children do not reach the standard which is aimed at by our primary schools — and, God knows, that is not a very high standard. I understand that the number of children who do not reach the sixth standard or who do not pass the Primary Certificate, between the two of them, is something in the region of 20,000 children altogether. Twenty thousand and 500,000, presumably, is not relatively high but I think it is, nevertheless, too high. There is a good case why the Minister, on many counts, should try to deal with the question of overcrowded schools.
The other point, which I shall deal with later, is the fact that, out of the overcrowded school, follows the consequence that the teacher must rule, practically inevitably, be fear. That brings in the question of corporal punishment, and so on. The teacher can hardly be blamed. I am completely opposed to corporal punishment but it is understandable in certain circumstances if he is to prevent bedlam breaking out altogether and to keep some sort of order. Possibly he must resort to some form of corporal punishment. I could not agree with it under any circumstances, as of course he should not be placed in that position and, if he is, the child should not be the one to get hurt because we have failed to remedy that situation in the school.
The Minister's sole contribution to the solution of that problem has been the inconsiderable suggestion in relation to the married teachers. It is a relatively unimportant suggestion. He appears to be awestruck and overcome by the audacity of the suggestion that the ban should be removed. I have an open mind on this question and do not want to be dogmatic about it. However, the Minister has done it, for better or worse, and presumably it is acceptable.
I understand there are about 400 teachers who will be released, for the improvement of the average number of children in the schools. Am I right in saying that, if these 400 are put into teaching circulation, it will reduce the average number of children-teaching by about half of 1 per cent? There are 13,000 teachers and 400 injected will, if my mathematics are right, improve the position by about half of 1 per cent. Would it follow that the average number will be reduced from 37 to 36½ or 36? If so, it does not reduce the average to the 1947 figure. If the Minister thinks this is a particularly audacious achievement, he ought to accept that it is really a relatively unimportant one.
It seems to me that he has failed to give any answer or policy on the question of school building. He made a passing reference to the Board of Works and said, on page four of his statement:
"The only limiting factor is the capacity of the Office of Public Works in the matter of dealing with their end of the school building programme."
Their end of that programme, as shown in February, 1958, in replies to Parliamentary Questions asked by me, is that the grants sanctioned by the Department of Education but not spent by the Board of Works, in 1953, amounted to £1.9 million; in 1955, £3.2 million; and in 1957, £3.9 million — nearly £4 million. That was work which had been sanctioned by this Department but where the money was not spent by the Board of Works. Obviously, there is an important factor there — the incapacity of the Board of Works to deal with the matter of school buildings in the light of those figures. I do not know how the Minister can continue to accept complacently the complete failure of the Board of Works to deal with this question. It is clearly one which has not been dealt with by the successive Ministers. In 1947 — ten years ago — there were about 600 schools which needed rebuilding. In 1952, the late Senator Moylan said there were 400 schools absolutely derelict. In 1955, he said that 1,000 schools were unfit for human habitation and his break down of the figures then was 800 requiring replacement and 200 requiring major repairs. That still comes to the figure of 1,000 which would probably be accepted by most parents and medical officers as being unsuitable for use as schools. That 1,000 compares with 600 in 1947. If you take the smaller of the former Minister's figures, it means 800 requiring replacement in 1957 as compared with 600 in 1947. Those are incontrovertible Ministerial facts which add up to one thing, the demonstrated incapacity of the Board of Works to deal with this problem of school building, providing new schools where needed, and replacing those which need replacement.
I do not know why the Minister tolerates this position. The reason for this complete failure, for the fact that there are at least 200 — and more than likely 400 — requiring replacement now, after ten years of effort by the Board of Works, is the lamentably low rate of building. The figures for the output of the Department over the years, on a nine-year period, are 46 to 56. The average figure is between 46 and 50 schools a year built by the Board of Works in a nine-year period. Side by side with that, we must consider the fact that the average life of a school is about 100 years. I understand that the number of schools which come into need of replacement each year is about 50, so successive Ministers have been marking time and making no progress. It is no surprise, then, to find that the 600 in 1947 is 800 or 1000 in 1957.
All that surprises me is that the Minister, who must be much more closely aware of these facts than I could be, could come to the Dáil and try to defend the activities of his Department over 35 years and join with the late Senator Moylan and with Deputy Mulcahy in appearing as the people who valiantly wrestled with their job. It is up to him, surely, to alter the irrefutable facts which face him, that his Department has not successfully wrestled with the defects and has not succeeded in seeing that the children go to school in conditions of reasonable comfort in which their health will not be jeopardised, where it will be possible for them to study under good lighting conditions, good seating conditions and good and safe sanitary conditions, so that they may be properly educated and so that the unfortunate teacher may have an opportunity to teach in a school he need not be ashamed of, where he will not feel, as so many do, a sense of utter disillusion and frustration at having to teach in some of the hovels we see around us.
If there is a net gain of 50 schools a year — I understand there is not, but even if there is — and if 1,000 are needed, it seems to me that, without bothering with redundancies, it will take from 15 to 20 years before these derelict, dilapidated or defective schools will be replaced. That means, taking eight years for a child to go through, two generations of children who must sit in these schools and suffer. It also means these teachers must spend their lives teaching there. I do not know how a Minister with any sensitivity or understanding of human problems — as I conceive the Minister to be — could contemplate this position and give to us, as his contribution to this serious matter, the removal of the marriage ban.
There is the practical side of it that the children will be better and more efficiently educated and that the teachers will be more efficient and under less stress and difficulty. There is another consideration which would commend it. A lot of social building has been going on over the past 25 years, magnificent social building which the Minister for Lands recently regaretted because it had gone to vast slum clearance, the replacement with houses, the magnificent housing projects, due to the activities of successive Ministers, including the late Deputy Murphy, and also including Deputy MacEntee and Deputy Seán T. O'Ceallaigh when they were Ministers. This, together with the hospital building programme, is coming to an end. Therefore, there is a good case for a reconsideration of the rate of school building. It is social building, but the Minister for Lands would not care for it because it is non-productive capital investment; but most of us here on all sides would not share his point of view and would think it necessary and desirable building.
Since it is needed, first of all, on humanitarian grounds, as well as on grounds of efficiency, there is a good case for increasing the school building rate. Furthermore, there is a great falling off in the building trade generally. I understand all the arguments about too much non-productive capital development being undesirable in our society, but with the falling off in hospital and house building programmes, there is a good case to be made for reconsidering the whole question of the school building programme.
The building trade is going through a tremendous depression at the moment. Many fine building firms, small and large, are having a tough and difficult time. Unfortunately, in the past ten years we have lost many of our skilled craftsmen — builders, carpenters, painters and others — probably for good, and we are losing more. Many builders find they must go out of work altogether. Here is a sum of £3,800,000 sanctioned by the Departmen and presumably available. Presumably, the Government would find the money if the bottleneck of the Board of Works could be overcome. The work of building schools is necessary from the points of view I have mentioned, but it would help also to resuscitate the building industry and keep a hold on more of our craftsmen. I recommend the Minister to reconsider the matter. There is no difficulty in getting the work done. The building trade is waiting and can cope with it. The craftsmen will be found. Houses and hospitals were built and these schools can be built also, if the Minister really wishes to do it.
As to the suggestion that the shortage of trained teachers could be dealt with by the removal of the ban, it should be remembered that all the Minister is doing in rescinding this Order is the revocation of what was clearly a mistaken decision on the part of one of his pedecessors. This is really the removal of a mistake made by one of his predecessors. That is relatively unimportant, except that I think that it should be borne in mind, if the Minister feels that his name will go down in history as having made a notable contribution to the advancement of our educational system. It is merely rescinding a mistaken decision of one of his predecessors. I do not want to go into the question of its wisdom.
I welcome it because it seems to me it will ease to a very slight extent the serious need for additional teachers. On the question of the need for a greater number of teachers, the facts clearly show that the Minister in his decision has made only the most miserly contribution to easing this problem. The position is that there are 13,000 odd teachers altogether and of these, 10,000 odd are trained and the rest are untrained. That is a very high percentage of untrained teachers. Of these 3,000 untrained teachers, 60 per cent. have been teaching for 13 years or over. It seems to me that this is a very long time to permit that position to obtain. In passing, I should like to say that I know untrained teachers who are, so far as I can judge, of the highest calibre and excellent teachers in every way.
I think after 13 years of teaching, under the circumstances in which an untrained teacher must teach — of a relatively poor salary, insecure conditions of employment, and the conditions regarding superannuation and pension rights — that most of them tend to become very efficient teachers. Consequently, I do not want to be taken as criticising them in any way. There are, however, these 3,000 untrained teachers and the Minister has not suggested that he is going to discontinue this practice of recruiting untrained teachers into our educational establishments. He tells us that he will add into circulation about 400 married teachers and he has refused so far as I know to consider a suggestion which I made and which I would like to make to him again on this question of the untrained teacher.
We must accept one of two things. Either the untrained teacher is as good as the trained teacher, in which case it would seem to me that you should not ask anybody to train as a teacher, and if he is not as good as a trained teacher, then you should not continue to recruit him to teach our children. You have got to make a clear-cut decision on this question. I know that to a certain extent it is not as simple as that. I know that there has been this apprenticeship system in the past in most of the professions over the years. It existed in dentistry, law and medicine. It was a clear condition that one could apprentice oneself to an apothecary and then in time was accepted as qualifying.
That has held on too long in the teaching profession. I believe the time has come when the Minister must make a break and must come to his final decision that the trained teacher is obviously the only teacher who should teach our children, who should be allowed to teach our children. At the same time, there is a human problem in relation to untrained teachers and the human problem clearly cannot be dealt with in an autocratic or harsh way. Would he not consider that in the 60 per cent. teachers who have 13 years or more we must accept those who have ten years or more, as trained teachers, accept them into the category of trained teachers and give them the status of trained teachers? That would give him about 2,000 additional trained teachers, which is a substantial number. As to those who have not qualified after ten years, give them a period of five or ten years in which they must become qualified. The third point is to refuse to recruit any more untrained teachers.
I do think that there is an irrefutable case for some final decision on those lines, at this stage of the development of our educational system, to accept those ten years as being practical training and as adequate training in present circumstances, and those with under ten years' practical training should become trained in a formal way in the training schools, and lastly that we cease to recruit untrained teachers. If we continue to accept the — unacceptable to me — anomalous system that you have people teaching children who are untrained, who make no pretence at being trained, and who are working side by side with people who have gone through all the difficulties, expense and delay of the training colleges in order to become trained teachers, then, as I said before, either the trained teacher is the most desirable person to teach our children or he is not. If he is, then we must logically take this this decision in relation to the untrained teacher. If you do not take this decision, I do not think the decision in relation to the marriage ban will go near solving the problems, that is, if we are to bother ourselves about the recommendation of the Council of Education.
If we are interested in establishing a good educational system, and if we want to carry out what is the professional and well-considered recommendation of a responsible body like the Council of Education, that you should reduce the present overall average figure of 35 or 36 — 47 in the Dublin County Borough — in the school-rooms, down to the 30's, we will need 4,000 teachers in addition to the 13,000 who are teaching at present. The Minister's problem then seems to be that in addition to the 3,000 untrained teachers, there is also need for 4,000 additional teachers to carry out the recommendations of the Council of Education, so that the real needs of the Department of Education are that we should train an additional 7,000 teachers.