The Minister stated that the report gave a general idea of Government policy in regard to significant proposals and I am particularly interested in the section that deals with education. I did not hear most of the contributions but I happened to hear Deputy Maurice Dockrell say that the report was a model of what such a report should be. This kind of urbane persiflage should not conceal the fact that the short section on education is totally inadequate and, in fact, though it mentions a very important report, the Janne Report, it picks on a few pieces from it which, in my opinion, are not the most important pieces and it leaves a large gap with regard to a very important educational matter, in fact, so important that it has been admitted by the present Minister for Foreign Affairs when he was a spokesman on education and has been admitted by people who are interested in education in general as being one of the most important items in the national life vis-á-vis the EEC. I am referring to the section of the Janne Report starting at page 30 and which is a discussion and a report of the views of various experts on Community aims with regard to the teaching of languages and the knowledge of languages. I said it was the contribution of a number of experts, and in so far as it is such it is somewhat of a potpourri, but some important findings are advanced in this report. It should have been given pride of place, not the very sparse treatment given to education in chapter 18 of this Second Report which is under consideration.
I am not blaming the Minister for Foreign Affairs for this but I ask him to see to it that his colleague, the Minister for Education, when he is getting his officials to make a contribution to the next report will deal with this adequately and not in the way it is dealt with in this particular report.
It is important that we discuss this problem and it is important also that we consider the various remedies that are suggested by experts.
In the Janne Report to which this second report makes reference, the importance of language as an instrument of communication is emphasised and also, of course, its importance as something formative, something which contributes to the development of the student on the intellectual level. Sometimes, rather unkindly to waiters, the first aspect is referred to as waiters' language, waiters' knowledge of a foreign language, and cultural knowledge is the second element. Needless to say, both these functions are important. Account has to be taken of both.
There is a complaint — and I suppose it could be levelled at many of us — that until comparatively recently there has been too much of the traditional effort employed in the teaching of languages. This is mentioned on page 30 of the Janne Report. One of the most important sentences in the report, again on page 30, is that what we should aim at is compounding the intellectual and the socio-economic advantages of language studies. What the report is doing in this section is asking what the Community should be doing with regard to the teaching of languages other than the mother tongue of the country: what it should be doing and how it should be done.
I am glad to say that the compiler of this report settles on persuasion rather than the issuing of a directive, or a ukase, or trying to compel people. The Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Education, if they get the opportunity, should advocate a study of the position. On page 31 of the Janne Report, the spheres of qualification of the Community are mentioned. One of the recommendations is that an inventory of the situation should be made, I presume, by a Community organ with Community funding.
The second point made is that the Community could — and this would be a difficult one I can assure you — decide on what the optimum age for starting a foreign language should be. There are big difficulties in that. The experts differ very much on it. The next point — and this is one I was particularly interested in some years ago in trying to develop a scheme at trade union level—deals with the exchange of teachers. In the next report I should like to get some information on how this is done, how many of our teachers are going to other EEC member countries, how many are coming here from those countries, how the salary situation stands, what the encouragements are, and so on. This was always important in my view but it has become particularly important since we joined the EEC.
The report also recommends that the mass media should be used in this field. I do not have to say that I think this is very important. The Eurovision theme song reminds our children of light music competitions and it is desirable that, when a certain tune is played, children should pleasurably associate it with the learning of a foreign language. All the points made in the Janne Report deserve consideration from us since we are, so to speak, on the perimeter of the Community. I am glad to say also that there is a sufficient breadth of vision among the experts consulted for the compilation of the Janne Report to warn EEC Europeans that there are other Europeans outside that circle and that mother languages with a great cultural spread and traditions such as Spanish has should be taken into account. They also mention Russian and Chinese.
Another interesting remark to be found in the Janne Report is that the country which uses a language which is very widely spread in the world is at a disadvantage with regard to learning another language. This is logical and natural because, if people find they have a world language at their command, the need to learn another language — the economic need if not the cultural need—is not felt to be so great. I am glad to say that, despite the fact that at times I was a little worried about various statements coming from the Commissioners of the EEC, persuasion and freedom of choice are opted for in this regard. Pupils should be encouraged at European level to choose a language, and facilities should be made available by subsidisation and promotion from the Community.
An important element which does not affect us in this century—it may have affected us in the United States and Britain in the past century — is the question of language for migrants. In this House and outside of it various people in political life expressed concern in the recent past about the social conditions if not the economic conditions of migrants in the new European Economic Community. The report takes cognisance of a problem which exists there and recommends that facilities should be made available at Community level for these people to learn a new language, the language of the country in which they are migrants, and also — and this is very important — that facilities should be provided for them to maintain contact with their own language and their own literature.
Shades of Irish language policy! There are some well-thought of experts who claim that the second language should be introduced at nursery level and more advanced courses should start at 11 or 12 years of age. One English expert in particular claims this. Had our policy in this regard been promoted vigorously and persuasively it would have had better results than it did. In the Janne Report it is recommended that the grammatical basis of a language should be left unmentioned until 11 or 12 years of age. The problem of providing teachers of foreign languages at the lower level is also mentioned and, according to the report, there are two possibilities: one would be to provide a team of specialist teachers. Very obviously they would have to be itinerant and move from school to school. The other possibility is an all-purpose teacher trained to teach the foreign language up to the level of the end of the ordinary stage.
It is also recommended — this is particularly relevant to Ireland — that all the technology developed for the teaching of languages to adults should also be available to younger people. Immediately after the last war, as the House knows, a great deal of research went into this problem of teaching languages to adults, particularly to people who had been fighting and who were availing of various grants and scholarships to study in some of the countries in which they had been fighting. The report recommends that the technology and expertise developed to deal with this problem at adult level should be available at ordinary school level as well. This, of course, has been happening. The difficulty is that all this is very expensive but, here again, the Community can play a part.
I was interested in Deputy Gibbons' very pertinent remarks about surpluses in the Community, the Community surplus of food while people are literally starving in Africa. There is great wealth in Europe and if a purpose is to be served by this great wealth, then this particular purpose could be subsidised from Community funds providing all the modern machinery and all the audio-visual aids requisite for the teaching of modern languages. Nobody can deny that in the context of a community which has a number of highly developed languages, charged with great traditions and great cultures, there is an onus on that community to make it as easy as possible for young people to acquire the language for socio-economic as well as cultural and educational reasons.
I was particularly interested, as I said earlier, in trade union circles some years ago in the development of the teacher exchange system. If there are difficulties at national level the resources of the Community should be available to help out. If there are financial difficulties or other difficulties, it should be the purpose of the Community to help Irish teachers, for instance, to get employment in France or other European countries and garner experience there for one or two years. There are problems about equivalent qualifications and diplomas and this tends at the moment to cannibalise all discussion about the movement of people in the professions from one country to another. Some experts say that too much emphasis is being placed on this aspect and it is the wrong end to begin at anyway. Profession by profession this problem will have to be dealt with. There will, of course, be a great deal of professional and national pride rearing its ugly head but surely there is no insurmountable problem in this sphere.
Another point made in the Janne Report — we are away ahead in the teaching of Irish here — is that the teaching of other subjects through the language being learned is a great aid to learning the language. A significant point in the report is that it is better that this should be something like mathematics or something rather technical rather than what could be described as the Humanities. In this way great strength is added to the learning process.
Exchange for one or two years is recommended. When dealing with the Department of Education on this all kinds of difficulties were raised. Now if one settles on an objective and regards that objective as worthwhile — namely, that your citizens are improving their knowledge of a language, gaining experience and acquiring techniques and coming back and benefiting the country — most pseudo-administrative obstacles can be brushed aside.
The question of mobility of pupils is also raised in the Janne Report. This is a more difficult matter. However, the tendency today, unlike a few years ago, for pupils to move around Europe is highly admirable in itself. I cannot stop admiring these 16, 17 and 18 year olds, how independent they are and how capable they are in solving various difficulties. Apart from learning a language, this experience has a very beneficial effect on their characters, it makes them more confident and self-assured. This, I suppose, is adventitious to the main advantages of students visiting other countries for a reasonably long period to learn the language. There have, of course, been the short periods of stays in continental countries for Irish pupils.
In my view we could do more study of schools in France, Germany and Italy that will take Irish pupils. We should try to invite into our system people from those countries also. One of the problems mentioned already was concerned with the equivalence of degrees. This is a problem not merely of equivalence between one country and another but often between different parts of the same country. Some years ago in a discussion in UCD with people who were on summer school there I discovered that there was no agreement, for example, in Germany at all about the Abitur or the final examination in schools. There was no agreement as to the equivalence of the Abitur in one section of Germany compared with another. Seeing that university places are allotted on the achievements of the Abitur this created great problems. It is no wonder there are problems between different countries if there are problems even within the same country.
The Janne Report which was mentioned in the Second Report on the Development of the European Communities raises the question of permanent education. This has been mentioned in the House already in the discussion on the Estimate for the Department of Education and it will be looming increasingly in the Community and in Ireland. If it is going to develop as a specific Community thing the Community should have something to say about it and have a responsibility for financing it also.
The question of the use of the mass media has been mentioned in a specific Irish context already. We are dealing with the teaching of languages at present and I have already referred to the possible use of Eurovision for the teaching of languages. In order to remedy an internal situation Italy used this system and succeeded, to some extent, in wiping out illiteracy there. Indeed, it was this that set the headline for the British who introduced the University of the Air at a different level from the one the Italians had been using, but following, to a great extent, the pattern laid down by the Italians.
The Janne Report talks about a study group on educational affairs in the European context. We could have a representative on this. Various views are well expressed by the contributors to that report on the desirability of this and the shape it should take. One of the most important points made by one man was that it should receive absolutely no publicity whatsoever if it was to do effective work. With a view to saving national sensitivities I believe he had a good idea.
The report under consideration, the Second Report on Developments in the European Communities, picks out from the general conclusions a number of details of the actions proposed at Community level. I should have thought that the discussion on the spread of knowledge should have been placed in Chapter 18. I am offering that, not as a criticism of the Minister for Foreign Affairs, except in so far as he is generally responsible for it, but as a criticism of the people who compiled Chapter 18 for him.
I should like to make some comments on what has been extracted from the Janne Report and incorporated in Chapter 18. The reference to the correction of history has become somewhat of a cause célébre in this country due to the fact that the present Minister for Education had to rescue the paean from the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs at one stage and claim it as his own. This problem has surfaced in the consciousness of the Europeans. I remember long ago, and this is something which was resurrected, refurbished and sold to us as something new quite recently, that the Germans and French, particularly, in the late forties, and in view of their sad experience before that, decided that something would have to be done about this problem. They have done a great deal of work on this already because one side of the Rhine would give you a different version of history from the other and north of the Pyrenees have quite a different slant from south of the Pyrenees.
Somehow or other, in an Irish context, when we start discussing this type of business we seem to think that it is exclusively an Irish problem. This may be due to what is called insularity but we do tend to get hot and bothered about it. I agree with the contribution of one of the professors of history to the debate which took place some time ago that we can leave the writing of history to the professional historians and politicians should not try to angle it or bias it one way or another. In the general context of history studies it is quite safe to so leave it.
