May I suggest to the House that as Senator Quinlan's motion is wider than that of Senator Ross, the main debate will take place on Senator Quinlan's motion? I understand that Senator Stanford will second that motion and that he will then speak. After that, I suggest that Senator Ross might come in, if he wishes to, and he will be followed by the Minister. I think it follows from what I say that the Minister may have to intervene a second time. I think the House will appreciate the necessity for that.
Post-Primary Education: Motion.
Is it proposed to end this debate this evening?
That is for the House. We have two and a half hours.
We shall do the best we can——
——to finish it, if possible.
We shall take up that matter again later on when we see what progress is being made.
I move:
That Seanad Éireann would welcome a statement from the Minister for Education on post-primary education.
In discussing this motion, the Seanad is given an opportunity to discuss one of the most important subjects we could discuss. It is a subject on which the Seanad should be in an excellent position to give a very balanced viewpoint, whether from the side of the teachers, the various schools, the universities or the Members in general. Therefore, I am happy that at last we have reached this motion, though, of course, it is a matter of concern to us that it has remained for almost 12 months on the Order Paper. We should have liked an opportunity of discussing many of the topics much earlier.
In approaching this—I know we have all given a great deal of thought to these topics—I am afraid that I, personally, anyway, shall have to speak rather firmly and strongly on many of the points at issue. I do so after great consideration and I hope the Minister or his Department will not misunderstand some of the rather severe criticisms I will have to make during the course of this debate.
We ask the Minister for a statement on post-primary education. I think it reasonable that we should exclude the university. As post-primary is generally understood, it excludes the university. In any case, the Commission on Higher Education is sitting at the moment.
We come, then, to the topics on which we should like the Minister to make a statement. These are dominated, I think, by this whole idea of comprehensive schools, an idea enunciated by the Minister almost one and a half years ago and which has been given a place in the Second Programme for Economic Expansion as a major contribution to our progress in the coming decade. Its introduction and the statements and so on we have had since then have been rather nebulous and have left many of us wondering what this is. I cannot decide whether this is the greatest piece of window-dressing that has yet been done in Irish education or whether it is one of the most sinister attempts made to impose a further taint of statism on secondary education. I do not know which, but as it stands we have very contradictory statements.
We had a statement from the Minister in the Dáil yesterday that the comprehensive schools would absorb any existing vocational school within the area of their operations. It goes without saying that they would similarly absorb any secondary school. That is very serious. We want to know why. At the start these were presented to us as merely catering for some out of the way backward places which no existing school organisation would touch, to which no secondary school, lay or clerical, would go or in which the county council could not be prevailed on to open a vocational school. We seem to have swung away from that. Certainly the example of Cootehill does not bear that out as there is already a vocational school and a lay secondary school there. We are left wondering because, after all, this is fitted into the Programme for Economic Expansion.
In talking about education and economics, we should have two guiding principles. First, we should be concerned that our children are cherished equally, in other words, with seeing that each has an opportunity of proceeding to the educational level for which he is best suited, and secondly with the economic fact that we want to ensure that our scarce resources, financial and otherwise, are used to the maximum efficiency. To do this, surely we must have some idea of pupil costings? We want to know what will this new system cost, how it compares with the cost of the present secondary system, and also, in fair play and in justice, we would expect the Minister and the Government to say: "We desire that the school curriculum should have ample opportunities for science and for trades" and that any existing school will be given full grants or full provision on the basis proposed for the comprehensive schools to set up science labs or anything else required, that they will be given equal treatment for payment of teachers and all the rest, that they will be allowed to compete freely and be given the tools to do so.
That is the system that prevails in Holland, and that commends itself to all men seeking natural justice, but the position is that any figures we go into show that we are getting a bargain basement bargain in secondary education in this country and, I am afraid, not appreciating it. Any figures we can take show that the average cost per pupil is something in the order of under £40, whereas in vocational education, which is the other arm, it is about £90. I am not using these figures to suggest that vocational education is over-endowed. I am merely using them as a yardstick to show that the pupils in the secondary schools are costing only half as much as the pupils in the vocational schools. Therefore, we must conclude that we are getting a real bargain in secondary education, as it is today. The Christian Brothers and the others, who have so nobly, throughout the centuries, built up our secondary school system from nothing, are providing a self service.
I am sorry, but it appears to me that in the days of our affluence we are certainly becoming ashamed of our upbringing and we are beginning to believe that it would be far better for us to wipe them all out and produce State education. If there are questions of difference between the lay teachers and the clerical teachers they should be ironed out. Edmund Burke laid down as his standard for a statesman a disposition to serve and the ability to improve. When these two things are taken together they give a definition of a statesman, so the Minister for Education or the Department of Education should be able to build on the foundations we have.
We should build up from what we have got and face the task of education in the most economical way we can. We should like the Minister to elaborate on the question of our two streams of education. There is the stream coming through the secondary schools and the stream coming through the vocational schools. I feel, being connected with education in some way, that this is a very dangerous concept. Apparently all have to do the intermediate certificate. The big change to be made is that the vocational schools will now have to turn aside from the work they have been doing for so long. In future, their success, too, will be judged by their achievements in the intermediate certificate, which will be put in the papers. We are about to turn the vocational schools away from their real function, which is the training of young people who have to work with their hands and who provide the skilled technicians for which industry is crying out at this very moment.
It is acknowledged by all that about 70 or 80 per cent of our children reach the intermediate certificate standard. Consequently, I am afraid that the idea of trying to make a common intermediate certificate cannot succeed. A great number of our pupils are not gifted in the literary sense but they are gifted manually. We will have to hasten very slowly in this matter and watch carefully that we do not disturb a system which has worked very well up to now.
With regard to the changes that have been made and the major alterations announced, I cannot see the pattern of consultation and research associated with any such major decision. We all know that the Department of Education are not geared to be a research institute. I came across in the Irish Times, of December 8th, a very worthwhile letter on this matter by Mr. Bittery, who was for quite a number of years a senior inspector in the Department of Education. In this letter he says:
With reference to research I want to say this. I served for many years in the secondary branch. It was then under-staffed and over-worked. Its essential duties were carried out with commendable efficiency and despatch: but research was hors de question. Research is something for a separate body of experts. It cannot be done by officials who are fully engaged on the exacting, responsible, and harassing duties of day to day administration.
That is quite rightly stated. The Department of Education have no facilities for research. Consequently, where was the research done that led up to the decision to make all of those changes in our school system? I contend it was not done and that it should have been done. We have got to be very careful in this regard about the position of the university vis-à-vis secondary education because universities may be in a position to give an opinion but they certainly should not, in any way, be allowed to be the deciding factor on what courses are carried out in secondary schools. By and large most of our university people were in the top line of the secondary schools when they were going through. Consequently, their ideas of what the average secondary school pupil could assimilate are often very exaggerated or very unreal.
The university is the custodian of its own standards. Universities would resent very much if any outside body came in and handed them a curriculum and told them to teach it. That fact is acknowledged everywhere. Once a body is competent to carry out work, that is the body which is in the best position to decide what major changes should be made. This concerns mainly the secondary school teachers and the vocational school teachers. They are the people who are actually doing the job and they should be the deciding voice on what the pupils know and whether a new course is practical or not. I am afraid secondary teachers and teachers in general have very good cause for grievance in their day to day treatment. That should change. I cannot think of any body of our citizens who have the same high level of education and hold such responsibility as the teachers. They are there by education, training and everything else. They are marked out and singled out in that way. Consequently they should be treated as befits such a body. I am afraid that has not been done and I should like the Minister to give the reason why or else to show why this cannot be done.
The major change in the school programme is in the mathematics programme. Speaking as one closely connected with mathematics and probably as one is more concerned with its application and its use through the electronic computer than anything else, I cannot see the logic behind a new course. I am at the moment engaged on a very deep study of that with others of my colleagues in the university. We hope early in the new year to be able to bring the benefits of our full views on it to the public, but at the moment we are dubious about it.
I should like the Minister to say something on the recruitment of teachers. Very often in the university we find ourselves in the unenviable position that when a bright young student comes along, the last thing we can suggest to him is that he should go in for teaching, although we see how much needed are such good pupils in mathematics to man the mathematics departments in the major schools. When we show him the figures, he says: "I would be far better off as a junior executive officer, and I would have some opportunity for promotion", or: "I would be better off if I were employed in the meteorological service." To use a modern term, we must give teachers a status increase to ensure that there is something for them to aim at. We should have something in the nature of posts of special responsibility in our schools so that those teachers would have a goal at which to aim. Ultimately they should have not a munificent salary by our standards, but at least should have a salary comparable with that of an assistant principal in a Department. Unless we have something like that, we cannot advise our students to go into the teaching profession.
I have outlined the main points on which we should like to hear the Minister's opinion. We should like the discussion to range over those, and any other related points, so that on this our one opportunity in 12 months, and perhaps our only opportunity for the next couple of years, we may even at this late stage be able to exert some influence on the course of education, and make sure it contributes its share to the Second Programme for Economic Expansion.
I second the motion. Its aim obviously is to give us an opportunity of hearing what the Minister has to say rather than to make pronouncements ourselves. I personally do not intend to say much on the motion. I shall just mention very briefly one or two lines of thought which the Minister might explore in his statement. I agree with Senator Quinlan that it is probably desirable that the universities should be excluded from the debate.
The universities are excluded by the terms of the motion.
Thank you, Sir. I should first like to hear what the Minister has to say on co-operation among our schools, especially with a view to meeting the very heavy cost that our new scientific equipment will demand. It will be virtually impossible for many schools in our underpopulated areas to find the money for scientific laboratories, language laboratories, and other modern scientific equipment of that kind. The State will have to pay a great deal more, or voluntary contributions will have to rise, which is unlikely, though I shall be making a suggestion on it later, or we will simply have to pool our resources.
Does the Minister envisage a greater degree of co-operation between schools of various kinds in the underpopulated areas in the west or south of Ireland? Suppose there are three or four schools in a district—a boys' school, a girls' school, a convent, and a lay school. The rational thing to do is to have a very good laboratory for all the schools, a first-rate, single, scientific laboratory, superbly equipped. Is he prepared to move towards that? I hope he is. I know in this country there are particular difficulties in co-operation of that kind, but I think it is our only hope, really, in view of our underpopulated areas, three or four schools will be using certain forms of equipment and certain forms of buildings together. That is the first aspect on which I should like to hear the Minister's views.
I do not entirely agree with Senator Quinlan's fears about the comprehensive school. I think that, properly introduced, and properly handled, it may be the best solution for some of our problems. I hope the Minister will press on along those lines. He is too wise to ride rough-shod over many of our historic traditions. As we all know, the times have greatly changed. The ecumenical age is here now and I think the time has come when certain sharp cleavages which resulted from the past will be healed. There are creedal and social barriers, perhaps, which I hope we will be able to overcome. I should like to see the time when our schools are much nearer to the schools of the United States of America, or Canada, or France, with citizens of all kinds going to school together. I know this is full of the most tricky problems for any Minister for Education, but I firmly believe it is the ideal at which we should aim.
I hope the Minister will consider the question of the curricula in some subjects. Senator Quinlan mentioned mathematics. I am still unhappy about the languages in general. So far as I can judge, it seems that there is still far too much emphasis on sheer memory. There has been an improvement, but there have not been sufficient improvements. So far as I can make out, it is still the position that a boy or girl can pass in Latin or Greek by making up a crude little key. It may be necessary to know perhaps a minimum of grammar as well, but generally I understand that is still the situation. That is certainly not a classical education. It is not education at all.
I was horrified to find—this was some years ago and it may not entirely apply now—when my own daughter was taking the Leaving Certificate examination in Latin, that she was more or less given to understand that all that was necessary so far as a knowledge of Virgil went was to learn a vile key. That is the only word I can use: a "vile" key. It was an abominable piece. It was not even good English, and was far from being anything like the masterly language of one of our greatest European poets, Virgil. It is horrifying to find it is still possible for children to qualify in Latin, and to some extent in Greek, on such terms as those. I shall not emphasise it any further. I know certain improvements have been made, but I would plead with the Minister to consider the abolition of set books —that is the real test—or to get as close to that as he can so that a genuine knowledge of the language and some genuine appreciation will be necessary before any child can pass in Latin or Greek.
Another topic on which I should like to hear from the Minister is whether he would take steps to introduce education in good citizenship in the secondary schools. We have talked about this in the House before but I shall mention it very briefly again. It is of vital importance for the future of our country. It is vitally important for this House and for the other House: it is vitally important for politics as well as for industry and commerce that children should at an early age see the good side of the organisation of the State instead of reading some of the sensational reports in the newspapers and learning it first in that way. I would urge the Minister to give the most serious thought to this development. A good booklet, good practical work in class or some other method would make our children genuinely well instructed and good citizens. I think they would enjoy it and it would very soon be reflected in the life of our country in general. I especially think not of the recruitment of teachers here, though that is most important, but of the recruitment of politicians which in some ways is quite as important for our country.
One aspect I am pledged to mention this fortnight—I made a pledge to the Minister for Local Government —is road safety. It is an aspect of good citizenship which could save lives. It would improve the organisation of our country, manners on our roads, and the intelligence of our drivers. It is a kind of education that children could learn very quickly if they were properly taught. It is something they would not find boring or tiresome. Of course, the difficulty is finding room in the curricula, but good citizenship should have at least one hour every week in every school.
Finally, I shall be particularly interested—I imagine other Members will be as well—to hear any statement the Minister may be prepared to make about expenditure on necessary improvements in both the staffing and equipment of our secondary schools. Obviousy, much more money is required from the State. I shall not labour that point because it has been pleaded again and again.
There is one thing I would add. I do not think we should assume that all the money must be found in the future from the taxpayer. In the future, we can still look for some contribution from public-spirited people who want to be associated with some school or who feel a debt of gratitude to a school. I come from a very small school in County Waterford, Bishop Foy School, and one of the past pupils has guaranteed £500,000 to that school for development. I do not know the exact terms. That is munificence of a rare kind in this country but I believe there could be much more of it, and one way to encourage it, as was suggested to the Minister for Finance last week by a small deputation, is to give relief from taxation on covenant to subscribers to secondary schools. It would be quite a small thing which would not cost the State more than £50,000 on average; yet it would give that extra encouragement to public-spirited people to put their money into education.
Many people are proud to see their names on a plaque in, for example, a library and some people pay tens of thousands—some are prepared to pay hundreds of thousands—of pounds for that type of thing. A little more inducement may loosen many more purse strings and I hope the Minister will induce his colleague in the Department of Finance to encourage this. It would be a very sad thing if the tide of charity dried up entirely. I promised I should not speak at great length. The main purpose here is to hear the Minister.
Senator Quinlan said he put down his motion about 12 months ago. I put mine down in July of last year, 17 months ago, and it seems to me a pity that one is so frequently told the Minister is unable to come into the House to hear a motion of this kind and of this importance.
The Chair must point out that the Minister was available on certain occasions and that the sponsors of the motions were not.
Including Senator Ross, since he seems to be anxious to develop that.
I have the answer to that. The answer is that I know the Minister on occasions was available to come to the House, certainly in July of this year, and the Leader of the House promised me he would give me a week's notice before this motion came up. He did not give me a week's notice and twice he told me the motion would come up. On both occasions, I admit quite frankly, I told the Leader of the House I was not ready because I had relied on his good faith and expected to have been given a week's notice.
He told me that whether I was ready or not, I must make the best of it and go on with my motion. Last July, when the motion was due to come up, it so happened I was ready. I was prepared to go on but the debate in the House on other matters continued until 10 or 11 o'clock and the Minister, naturally, did not come in at that late hour, nor would the House ask him to. A fortnight ago, exactly the same thing happened. The Leader of the House rang me up a couple of days before and told me, without any other warning, that the motion would come up. I told him I was not ready. Unfortunately I was completely engaged on the two following evenings. He told me that whether I was ready or not, the Minister was coming in. In fact I got ready a fortnight ago to move my motion and the Minister was not able to come into the House at 4.30 in the evening. Both these motions were then adjourned until today. The point that I was not ready is therefore not valid.
After 17 months, the Senator says he is not ready.
The point is not valid because whether I was ready or not, the motion was to go on regardless of me. I do not think the Leader of the House can possibly charge me with obstructing the House. The point is he was going on with it whether I was ready or not. He had given me an undertaking and he broke it. I do not want to take him to task but I do not wish to be taken to task for delaying the House. It is 17 months since my motion was put down and a year since Senator Quinlan's motion was put down. This is a House of the Oireachtas and as a House of the Oireachtas, surely it deserves better treatment from the Minister and the Government?
I do not wish to be personal because the Minister for Education is not by any means the only one who has delayed the House in this way. It is the normal practice of the Government not to come here for these motions. It seems to me that is not treating the House with the respect with which it ought to be treated. A motion should come before the House within a reasonable time after it has been put down.
If the Senator is not ready, what happens?
Then the motion must fall by default.
Perhaps Senator Ross will be allowed to come to the terms of the motion.
I think it is fair to say that this is an important motion. All motions put down are important and I do not think the Government are treating the House with respect, but are treating us as a debating society, putting us off until such time as it is convenient. I do not want to make this a personal matter in any way. My motion is narrower than Senator Quinlan's, calling on the Government to give greater financial help to secondary education. By secondary education, I mean the recognised secondary schools, of which there are 557 in this country. I want to confine my remarks strictly to these secondary schools and do not propose to follow Senator Quinlan into the wider aspects on which he has chosen to speak.
Since my motion was put down, there have been many changes in the treatment, by the Department and by the Government, of secondary education and there has been what I would like to think are, and what I see as, the beginnings of a drastic new look of modernisation. At this stage the important thing is to see how far these or other steps of modernisation actually go. My appeal is for greater financial help and, while the amount of money given to purely secondary education by the State has increased considerably since my motion was put down, I think my motion is still completely valid.
May I take the points which were valid 17 or 18 months ago and consider them in the light of what we know today? I should like to add to Senator Quinlan's questions to the Minister because there are a number of developments which appear to me to be somewhat undefined at this stage. If the Minister is to make a statement, I should like him to deal with these points. The points which were so valid a year and a half ago were; firstly, the need for capital grants for buildings; secondly, the need for equipment grants for a greater number of faculties; thirdly, the need to increase capitation grants; fourthly, the need to increase teachers' salaries; and, finally, the need to increase scholarships.
It may seem a little strange that I should call on the Government to give more money to secondary education two days after a Supplementary Estimate has been passed in the Dáil for secondary education in the amount of £926,000, largely for incremental salaries and to some extent for educational and television services and equipment for modern language teaching. I hope to show that while this is a step in the right direction, it is still not nearly enough and still does not compare with the amount per head of the secondary schoolgoing population in other countries.
It is a notable increase, of course, because the total Vote for secondary education now is over £5 million, nearly £5,200,000, whereas last year it was £3,745,000 and in 1961-62, £3,130,000, so there have been very big increases indeed. Yet, the amount spent on secondary education is still only a fraction, approximately one-third, of the amount spent on primary education. Two days ago in the Dáil, there was a Supplementary Estimate for primary education. This brought the total expenditure for primary education for the current year to £16,800,000 approximately, so that our £5,200,000 on secondary education is still only about one-third of the amount spent on primary education.
If we compare these figures with the figures in England and Wales, roughly the amount spent—and I do not think the exact amounts are important—on a child at a secondary grammar school is about £160, whereas the average spent on a primary school pupil two years ago was about £65. I cannot quite tie up these figures but I think the inference from that is that more money should be spent on secondary education than is spent on primary education. Possibly it should be something like twice as much. At any rate, we appear to be considerably out of proportion in that the amount spent on primary education is still about three times the amount spent on secondary education.
If I may go from the general to the particular and look at the position with regard to capital grants for building, six months ago the Taoiseach told us that the Government were setting aside £500,000 for capital grants for buildings and secondary schools. This is a tremendous step forward and is very welcome. As I said earlier when speaking about the 557 recognised secondary schools in this country, it involves little arithmetic to divide the number of schools into the amount of money at present available and arrive at a sum of approximately £1,000 per school. Not all schools will want buildings at the same time but there is a prime need for new buildings in the vast majority of secondary schools in the country.
Perhaps I might read a letter which I think is not untypical and which I received from a schoolmaster in the country:
My school has two main buildings. One is about 250 years old and the other is a converted private residence about 150 years old. What we require is a block of modern classrooms.
Now, £500,000, spent as it is, will not be enough to provide many schools with the type of classroom which they need. I hope the Minister will tell us this is only the beginning of a very much larger grant because it is much larger grants that are needed. When the Minister makes his statement, perhaps he will give more details on how these actual capital grants will be administered. I do not think it is quite clear yet whether this is an outright capital grant or whether it may be in some part loan, and, if it is a loan, whether it is interest-free or not.
It is not clear what the position of a school may be which has not waited for the announcement of these grants but has gone ahead on its own initiative, in the years perhaps not so very long gone by and raised the money and mortgaged its property to build new buildings, on its own, and is now heavily in debt and trying to pay off the mortgage that was created for that purpose. Is the Minister prepared to extend the grants that are to be given for buildings to schools which have anticipated the grants but which had initiative and went forward to do what they ought to have done even at considerable capital cost to themselves?
Again, some clarification is needed as to the conditions under which a school will qualify for these grants. Is there any question of any strings being attached to grants? Is there any loss of independence by a school which gets the grants? I think this must be clarified.
One of the conditions, I think, that has been announced by the Minister is that the grants will be restricted to schools with not less than 150 pupils and this, I think, must bear rather heavily on the Protestant schools. I am not making a special plea here for Protestant schools but I mention it by the way because it is a fact that, particularly on the west side of Ireland Protestants are fairly thinly spread and, therefore, their schools tend to be rather small ones. A possible way around this for not merely Protestant schools but for schools in areas in which children are spread might well be for the Minister to follow for secondary schools the project he has outlined for his comprehensive schools, namely, providing some form of transport to bring children from outlying places into bigger and more efficient scholastic establishments.
I was amazed quite recently to see all over the States of New England and in the Province of Quebec, in Canada, buses provided to take children from outlying districts to and from school. These were special school buses, beautifully painted yellow, with "School Bus" inscribed on them. Obviously, we could not afford this sort of thing but it would be possible for the Government to subsidise school transport to some extent where there are difficulties in maintaining small schools and schools which may not get this capital grant.
I mentioned Protestant schools and, perhaps, in parenthesis, I should say that I know the Minister has appreciated the difficulties which Protestants have experienced in organising their schools in certain circumstances. I think I can quite safely say that it is a matter of great appreciation by the Protestant community as a whole that the Minister has appreciated the difficulties with which we were faced. In making these points, I should like to make quite clear that I am not at all unmindful of, but on the contrary extremely grateful for, the attitude he has taken.
May I add all Ministers for Education of this State before him? It is only fair to say that. There has been a consistent policy of generosity to Protestant schools from the beginning.
I should not like to suggest that any Minister for Education prior to the present Minister was ungenerous: I concur in the statement made by Senator Stanford. I know that, recently, deputations have been to the Minister and I should like to place on record the appreciation for the reception given to the Protestant deputations.
My second point concerns equipment grants. A short while ago, they were restricted to science and domestic science. Here, a splendid step has been taken in making grants available now for television sets and language courses. Recently I was in Mountjoy Prison, going around as a visitor, and I went into the schoolroom there. I was surprised to see an extremely efficient and most effective form of projector whereby the schoolmaster sat or stood looking at his boys and what he wrote was thrown by means of this projector on to a screen immediately behind him. He had the great advantage that he could look at the people he was teaching and had not to turn around to the board while, at the same time what he was writing down in front of him was projected behind him. This is probably rather necessary in prisons but it is also necessary to have this sort of thing in schools. It is, perhaps, the wrong priority that we should have the latest equipment in prisons where we are trying to reform young men rather than in schools where we should be educating them so that they do not go into prisons.
There are a number of points on which I would hope the Minister would widen the scope of these equipment grants. They are already good grants and generous but I would hope he will widen the scope of them to cover projectors, the hire of educational films, slide projectors, slides, some of these new forms of three-dimensional maps for teaching geography, and, indeed, all the latest audio-visual methods of teaching which are so necessary.
My third point concerns capitation grants. Again a step forward has been taken. The age for the giving of these grants has been lowered from 12 to 11 years 4 months. I believe that this has made quite a considerable difference to a number of schools, particularly in the cities. At the other end of the scale, it has been extended to a post-Leaving Certificate year. This has had a very beneficial effect on young girls and boys who have got their Leaving Certificate but who want to go on for a further year, perhaps, before going to university or possibly to broaden their education usually before going into industry or business or the professions. But, once again, I think we have got to get the figures of the increase into some perspective.
The capitation grant for a senior child has now been increased from £16 to £19 and for a junior child from £11 to £14. When these grants were first introduced in 1924 the figures were £11 for a senior and £7 for a junior, so that in the period from 1924 to now these grants have in the case of a senior barely doubled and in the case of a junior just doubled. If you take the £ as being worth £1 in 1924 it certainly is not worth more than 5/- today, so that the real money which is going in capitation grants is very much less per student than it was in 1924 although a greater nominal amount is being given. In fact on capitation grants in terms of real money we are losing ground.
The post-Leaving Certificate year grant is specially welcome, and one which was looked for by many educationists, but I believe that there are strings attached to that which are somewhat stringent. I understand that it is necessary to study no fewer than five subjects, one of which must be Irish, to qualify for that grant. For a young man or woman studying for a university scholarship this may be somewhat onerous. I am not in favour of too much specialisation, but five subjects may be a bit too much. While I am in no way speaking against the teaching of the Irish language, and I do not wish to be misunderstood, I do not think that at this stage in the career of a young man or woman they should be forced to learn any one subject, be it Irish, mathematics, Latin or whatever it may be. I do not think that after the Leaving Certificate a particular subject, whatever it may be, should be put compulsorily on the curriculum in order that a capitation grant may be given. The plea, therefore, on the capitation grants is that there should be still greater increases, and that some of the restrictions attached to the grant for the post-Leaving year should be relaxed.
Fourth is the question of teachers' salaries. Here the complaint of teachers is quite clear, that the present rates of teachers' salaries in this country just qualified, just having got a higher diploma in education and a university degree, simply do not compare with the amount which he or she will get either in the North of Ireland or in Great Britain or elsewhere, and certainly do not compare with the figures he or she will get with a university degree in industry or commerce. As I understand them, the present figure for a single man or woman teacher in Ireland with a higher diploma for the first year will be somewhere between £250 and £550, probably around the £350 mark. Compare that with the same person going to teach in Great Britain, with say, only a third-class honours degree. He will start with £790. I know of a case a year ago of a young girl here with a university degree and the higher diploma in education who could not get a job in this country at more than £300 a year living out. She went up to Belfast and got a job almost immediately at £800 or £840 living in. There simply is no comparison between those figures and the case of a young man or woman leaving the university and going into industry. He will get at least £750 today in Ireland, and a young qualified professional man will probably get the same sort of figure.
If we are to get the best teachers we must compete with the cost of paying teachers outside the country and the cost of paying people who are going to industry and commerce. We are still, even with the increases recently given, miles and miles behind. This is terribly important because it is on our young teachers that we must build the basis of our teaching community.
Added to this is the question of reciprocity with other places. Now a teacher who has been teaching in the North can come back here and get the incremental rate for the number of years he has served as a teacher in the North. The same is true of certain of the African countries and, I think, of a teacher in certain countries of Europe who has been teaching modern languages and is coming back to teach modern languages here. This is all in the right direction, but I believe, the great majority of people qualifying here as teachers go to England, Wales or Scotland—particularly to England —but they cannot come back on that incremental scale. If they come back they come back at the beginning. This is a very sad thing because as time goes on in the years in which a teacher serves the incremental scales as between Great Britain and this country tend to even out. The real disparity is at the beginning and not at the end or in the middle of their teaching career. My own view is that it is very valuable if people go away for a year or two to another country, get other experience, learn things which they might not like to do here, and learn things which they would like to introduce here. They learn by their experience elsewhere and we should be able to profit. But these people who go to England, Wales or Scotland cannot come back here and get the incremental salaries which they would have got had they stayed or would have got if they had gone to the North and come back. It is time that the doors were opened to these people, because we can do nothing but benefit from the interflow of people from one country to another in the teaching profession.
My final point is on the question of scholarships. The Minister has time and time again said that his aim is secondary education for all. I would add that that should also be the aim of all of us, and I would certainly strongly support this, but this must mean the availability of secondary education to all who are fit to participate. If this is to be a reality then we will need very much more in the way of scholarships than we have at present. The figures I have have been quoted in the House before. They are probably old figures but I have no more recent ones. I do not think that they do any more than highlight the disparity between this country and other places.
In 1960-61 the expenditure on scholarships in Northern Ireland per head of the child population was £16 12s. and our equivalent expenditure was 11/2d. or 11/3d. Since then, of course, there have been considerable increases in scholarships made available by county councils and by the Government to the county councils. Let us suppose that the figure here has been doubled or trebled. If it has been trebled, it is still far less than one-tenth of the amount per head per child spent on scholarships in Northern Ireland. Probably the Northern Ireland figure itself has increased since 1961.
I would in part agree with Senator Stanford when he says perhaps not all the money to be devoted to secondary education must come from the State and that parents should make a greater contribution to their children's education. This is probably so. My concern is for the parents who simply cannot afford to send their children to secondary school, either because the value of the scholarships is not high enough or because in some sense they cannot afford to pay the cost of the books. Books still have to be bought and they are becoming increasingly expensive with every month that passes. This can be a very heavy burden on a poor family. In Northern Ireland, I think the books are provided as part of the scholarship.
Senator Stanford mentioned the case of a donor who gave £500,000 to his old school. This is a splendid gesture indeed. If we could have all schools with some sort of donors of that kind, the Minister's problem, and my problem, would be solved. In principle, I believe it is true that parents and, possibly, old boys and old girls should make some contribution to their schools. That is only a minor thing. The real truth of the problem lies in making sufficient money available through scholarships so that any child of sufficient ability can get education in a secondary school within its means. A far greater amount of money will still have to be made available to the local authorities which can be paid by them to deserving cases for a secondary education.
I know Dublin Corporation's grant for scholarships has considerably increased and is now up to £16,000. Again, there are strings attached to scholarship money by Dublin Corporation which may be reflected in most of the country. It seems to me that the wrong sort of emphasis is being placed on the subjects for which scholarships are awarded by Dublin Corporation. I believe the position there is that scholarships are marked on the basis of 1,000, and that 300 marks are given to Irish, 200 to English and 100 to each of the other subjects. I suggest this is a bit out of balance. Nobody wants to denigrate the teaching of Irish but there may be children who cannot learn Irish. I am not taking Irish particularly. Suppose the high mark is given to mathematics or the classics. If there is a child who cannot learn either of those subjects, it seems to me quite wrong to prevent that child from getting a scholarship, when he could be very able in other subjects.
We are doing the revival of the Irish language harm and the country as a whole, harm, in overloading the marks given in this way to the Irish language, so that unless you are really good at Irish, you will not get a scholarship. There should be other subjects with similar priorities. The greater needs of secondary education remain the same, in spite of all the progress made over the past 18 months or so. There are many signs of modernisation, and in bringing in a motion of this kind, I do not want to belittle the work which the Minister and his Department have done. They have made great strides.
We have a new mathematics course and a new science course. Biology has now become a subject in the Intermediate for the first time. I am not sure if it is a subject for the Leaving Certificate but I hope the Minister will make it a subject, if it is not. There has been a new approach to the classics and modern languages. Music appreciation now appears in secondary school courses. This is all very much to the good. I most strongly support Senator Stanford's appeal that citizenship be taught as part of the curriculum. It is very necessary that young people should know something of Government, local government, the Civil Service and so on, on which they are dependent, and that they should get this knowledge while they are young.
This new look is also needed in respect of one or two other subjects. I should like to see something done about the teaching of history. We teach Irish history and we teach European history but I should like to see a much broader development in this sphere. It seems to me Irish history is so interlinked with British history that we should learn something of British history, apart from merely European history. We should also learn something of the history of the USA with which we also have very close links. The teaching of history needs a new look and we should look further and widen the teaching of history in a number of ways.
The whole system of examinations is in need of revision; it needs drastic revision on the whole. Senator Stanford mentioned his daughter learning a bad translation.
On a point of fact, I discouraged her and she adopted a different method.
The point I want to make is that every child in a secondary school who takes the Intermediate and Leaving Certificate examination has to learn vast amounts of written English, possibly French, Irish and other subjects, so that the whole examination so far as the Intermediate is concerned is merely a memory test. I am not sure that the position is very much better in regard to the Leaving Certificate examination. We need badly to have a new examination system which will test our children on what they have actually absorbed and how far they can think rather than on what they have just learned parrot-fashion and merely throw out verbatim in a meaningless manner.
I think I have said enough to show the House that all this needs money. The money going to secondary education is not enough. We pour money into every conceivable object for development. In industry we make factory grants, and adaptation grants which we were discussing only this afternoon. We give grants for exports, for machinery, for roads, for hotels, for monuments. We give agricultural grants for new ditches, for farm buildings, for drainage, and even for pigsties. To my mind it is economic lunacy to spend vast sums on industrial and commercial development, on the reorganisation of the country in many capital ways, without spending equivalent sums on the foundation of all this development in industry and commerce, education. The trouble is we do not see the money which is spent on education in immediate terms of bricks, mortar or machinery, with the result that education is neglected. Education needs this money, and secondary education needs it vitally, if investment in education is to mean anything at all. Investment in secondary education today will, of course, produce the leaders of industry, commerce and the professions tomorrow.
In the Second Programme for Economic Expansion on page 13 dealing with education and training it is stated:
Better education and training will support and stimulate continued economic expansion. Even the economic returns from investment in education and training are likely to be as high in the long-run as those from investment in physical capital.
Those are strong, and important, and I believe true words, but they will not be a reality if we do not spend very much more on secondary education, and they will not be a reality until the points I have outlined are considerably supplemented by more and more money.
In my view the Minister is to be congratulated on the start which he made in transforming secondary education but, while it is a considerable start, it is only a start, and we have a long way yet to go. At a later stage I shall formally propose the motion that Seanad Éireann calls on the Government to give greater financial help to secondary education.
I think by agreement I am to speak twice. If the House permits me I shall leave the points raised by Senators to be dealt with when I speak later, because I am sure other Senators will speak and raise similar points, and deal this time with the invitation of the Seanad to make a statement on post-primary education. I welcome any help I can get in trying to solve the very acute educational problems which face our country, and if I have not been able to meet the Seanad on this before it has not been altogether my fault. Now we are together I must say I am very happy to be here.
I welcome the expression of a point of view by Senator Quinlan which is better out in the open if he thinks it at all. I want to assure him that I have suffered the "slings and arrows" and I will not be too sensitive on what he has to say about me. He seemed to have some fears on that point. Again, I think the expression of opposite views will be a help to me.
For me the problem about discussing education is that it is not widely understood, and very few people have a framework on which to base an opinion. Even those who have an idea of the skeleton on which the body of our educational system is built can be easily lured into very attractive side-issues and points of detail which in themselves could be debated for many hours. If I were not to guard against that, then the Seanad, which waited 17 months to hear me, would have to wait another 17 months to hear me out if I tried to deal with the whole question of secondary education, because I presume the motion involves post primary education in general. I shall try to make a statement which avoids details as far as possible. Starting with the background is the best way I think.
Not so long after I was born, at the beginning of this State, there were 25,000 children availing of the only form of post-primary education which was then in existence in the State. That was secondary education in the academic sense. I am sure no one could have the idea that that number was representative of the community as a whole. It was not until 1930 that the vocational branch, as it has come to be called, of the post-primary system was formally established by Act of Parliament. At that time there were about 1,000 whole-time pupils in technical schools.
The present position, which is rapidly changing—changing each year —is that about 90,000 pupils attend full-time at the private secondary schools, and 32,000 attend full-time at the vocational schools. That does not take into account the big number of part-time attenders at the vocational schools. We have, therefore, gone a considerable way towards catering for the post-primary education needs, but the system as I found it, and see it, stopped short of what I would deem to be the social rights of all our children. My leading principle as Minister for Education is that every child should have an opportunity of receiving some post-primary education and the corollary to that is that such post-primary education should as far as possible be that best suited to the aptitudes of the child. Other people might say this, but anyone who dreams it can be achieved without conflict with some other interest is fooling himself and anyone who says you can do it without taking positive action is again either fooling himself, or trying to fool others.
How to achieve this? I have said I decided it was not possible of achievement in the system as it existed. We had the academic stream available to children going to intermediate certificate, and beyond that for those who could afford it a leaving certificate course which in turn could lead to various posts and to the university.
On the other side, there was a two-year day course in vocational schools with a day group certificate examination which was and is useful but which did not lead further. I decided that this vocational course should be a year longer and should lead to an examination equal in standard and in esteem to the examination taken in the secondary school. In regard to subjects, there was no question of forcing children in vocational schools to do subjects which were completely academic.
It is my intention that this should be a new comprehensive examination in which hand and eye subjects, if you like to call them that, other than the academic can be taken by pupils in vocational schools. Having decided to establish that, I thought it was also necessary to fill a gap in that branch of our educational system, and that was that there should be a course leading to a leaving certificate on the technical side towards which students could be channelled from either the secondary or the vocational school after the comprehensive intermediate certificate examination.
The leaving certificate course can lead to the universities, as I have already said. The technical leaving certificate course, too, should lead to some faculties in the universities and to technological colleges. There are other aspects of the comprehensive system. To my mind, comprehensive means a wide range of subjects to meet the aptitudes of different children and also means it would be available to all children.
This suggestion made here of maintaining the small school and at the same time cherishing all our children equally is a contradiction. A small school with a small number of pupils can only have a limited staff and perhaps five or six subjects. The children there are limited to what is available in that school and, therefore, they cannot be considered to be cherished equally with those who can get into a much larger school with a wide range of subjects from which they can choose, a wide range of teachers and all the other advantages.
The idea of the comprehensive school is based on this. The viability of the smaller schools in the thinly populated areas is doubtful. In our efforts to cater for a wide range of talents, it is necessary to have a wide range of subjects, which means a wide range of teachers. To justify all that, you must have a relatively large number of pupils, probably 225 or upwards. This is the basis of my thinking and, perhaps, at this stage I might say to the Senator who saw some sinister motive on my part, that the system of management which I thought suitable to the comprehensive school offers great promise for a continuation of the degree of independence which our academic people have enjoyed.
I do not know how I can get it into people's minds—I am not saying Senators do not know it—that an utter change has come about in what education means to the community and in our attitude to education. When there were 25,000 children in secondary schools some of them did not need education: they went back to a shop, to a business, to money; they could enjoy the luxury of education and lecture us that education was an end in itself.
Nobody can deny that most of the 25,000 enjoyed a privilege which changed their whole lives from those of their brothers and sisters who did not get this opportunity; and it is even more true now that the more education you get, the more obviously the better you enjoy an advantage throughout life. Education does mean something in terms of social standing and income of the person who gets it.
It is, therefore, a matter of social justice and if we want to cherish our children equally we must give them equal opportunities in education. This utter change I spoke about has been from a situation where the community at large was not concerned with our educational establishments. The demand was not very great. It could have been and was left then to private enterprise plus the activities, the excellent activities, of the vocational committees.
When we come to the stage where every child must be given an opportunity and where the community will be called on to spend vast sums of money to achieve this, then we must plan. If I seem to be looking for authority it is not because I want authority for its own sake, but because nobody can so deal with our educational system as to meet the needs of the individual and the community without having sufficient authority and co-operation from all concerned.
This utter change I have mentioned has brought about a situation where somebody has to take initiatives, somebody has to make the necessary changes to fit modern needs and this somebody has recently been me, as Minister for Education. Of all the things people might say about me, the most dangerous is that I had not done the research to bring about the changes which I thought were necessary.
Research is a fanciful word. I suppose people consider that Ministers would not have the resources necessary for research. People think in terms of very isolated and difficult activities. I tried to think of the alterations, as Senator Quinlan called them—others would call them reforms — of the changes that have been brought about recently which required research. I made a list of the things. The first was the 1961 Scholarship Amendment Act which for the first time brought the State in to pay into the scholarship fund of local authorities and which has had the effect of bringing the number of scholarships from 600 to 2,000 and increasing annually.
When I introduced that measure, I said it was a pattern. I still regard it as a pattern, for further development, but I do not know of any research that might have been necessary to make that change. It was an obvious fact that children should be given equal opportunity. It will take many years to give everyone this. In the meantime we had to take interim measures to try at least to give the clever children a chance. That is the position since 1961 when the Scholarship Amendment Act was introduced without a great deal of research. The knowledge is there for those who want to see it. Another change was the introduction of direct building grants for secondary schools. Research in this was not necessary because, indeed, there was a clamour for those who best knew the problems of those building secondary schools.
En passant, I think I would claim these building grants as a sign of our intention to see the secondary private schools flourish and continue to do the good work they have been asked to do. It was in earnest of our intention to do this that we introduced these grants, and I hope it will reassure the Senators who felt that there were some sinister motives behind the comprehensive schools idea. There are other changes, too, and I can say that not one of them was done without consultation with the people most concerned.
There is the extra year which will be recognised without any examination strings, capitation grants and quota consideration allowance. The extra year, I hope, and intended from the beginning, will be dealt with in a liberal way by the Department of Education. I think it was last year we relaxed the school staff quota by not counting in the headmaster of a secondary school and also by allowing the ratio of pupils to be, one teacher to 15 all the way up, instead of one to 20 after the first 60. Again, there was no research needed there. I have witnessed in my time changes in the curricula. Mathematics were changed, and physics and chemistry, again after many people had called for the changes. These changes were brought about by people who were constantly in touch with the teachers. They were brought about in consultation with the universities and I am amazed that a Senator of the university which passed the mathematics would not be aware of it.
The difference is what is meant by consultation.
Some people think that consultation means that I do nothing, but I am not dealing with the constant problem of consultation. I am dealing with the statement of the Senator that things were done without research. I think the people who deal with these courses could hardly be accused of being short of knowledge. However, I did not mean to go into details and this is an example of how one, in education, gets swamped down in details.
Perhaps, I should get back to the main issue again. If there was anything more than another that bothered me, having decided that somebody must take the initiative and that this was the duty of the Minister for Education for the time being, it was that I found, as in many other countries, if we were to give coverage to all the children and adequate facilities for them, we had not adequate information about the places available or the type of teaching and training we would need for the years to come. This was something on which research had to be done. This was certainly something on which we had little information and on which no country in the world had, I think, done any research. In co-operation with the OECD, we set up a team of economists, statisticians and educationists, guided by a steering committee, to investigate what should be our investment in education, what lines we should follow over the next ten to fifteen years.
Very detailed and very thorough examination has been carried out by this committee and their report will be available shortly. As I have said somewhere else, I understand their report will be regarded as a very important document, not alone nationally but internationally, because the Irish Department of Education was the first to start this type of research and will be the first to have a document of such importance available. This research, which was necessary and which is now near completion, will be for us the main signpost of Government expenditure and State activity in education over the next ten to fifteen years. It will also be the beginning of a great deal of expenditure on education because, even though we have stepped up almost double for some years in expenditure on education, you come to the stage where extra money does not bring extra results. One must plan one's spending and, with the publication of this study, which has been happily called "Investment in Education", we enter an era of further increased expenditure on all forms of post-primary education. We have also, of course, the Commission on Higher Education, which is not concerned with the matters under review in the Seanad tonight. You cannot however, altogether separate higher education from secondary and vocational education, because the social principles guiding the availibility of opportunity at post-primary level operate also at university level.
I would have wished to go to the Seanad and make a much shorter statement and to have avoided details. I would like to say my main interest in education must be social. I am not an educational expert, although I have much expert advice available to me. I should like to repeat, if there is any statement of mine the Seanad should like to debate, it would be that my leading principles, as Minister for Education, is that every child should have the opportunity of receiving some post-primary education. Again, the corollary of that is that such education should be that best suited to the particular child's aptitude.
I have taken every possible occasion recently to warn everyone associated with education that we are only six years now from the deadline set for raising the school-leaving age to 15. As well, the normal annual increase of pupils, due to the increasing appreciation by the public of the value of education, will bring about a situation by 1970 where we shall need 60,000 extra post-primary places. This requires a great deal of building, a great deal of activity and, above all, an avoidance of tripping ourselves up on technicalities when we all seem to be agreed on the main issue. I repeat again that you cannot have my main principle without some clashing of interests.
Ba mhaith liom a rá go bhfuil áthas orm gur tháinig an tAire chun an ráiteas sin a dhéanamh. Fear misiniúil is sea é agus ní bhíonn eagla ar bith air a chuid tuairimí a nochtadh mar a dhein sé go soiléir anso anocht.
We welcome the Minister and the important statement he made. He has propounded a new principle which he has introduced into Irish education. The new principle of comprehensive education which the Minister has referred to here tonight, was first introduced to the public by means of a press conference. On that occasion, I think, that the Minister made a tactical blunder inasmuch as he did not invite representatives of all educational interests to the conference. In saying that I am not criticising the content of his release on that occasion, I am just suggesting that he would have had more goodwill for his new plan had he first consulted with and invited the interested parties.
I remember that at the time the conference was about to take place a newspaper rang head office INTO asking if it was aware of the new plan for comprehensive schools and we had to admit that we were completely unaware of it. We then rang the Chairman of the Council for Primary Schools in Dublin diocese and he also informed us that he had not been consulted nor had he been invited to the conference. I think that it was a mistake to ignore a large number of people who have been asking for and have a keen interest in educational reform.
During the course of the press conference on that day, the Minister stated that he hoped to get agreement on the question of managerial control of comprehensive schools. Interested parties would also have preferred that he had been in a position to say that he had actually arrived at agreement on this important point.
There is a considerable amount of suspicion about the nature of the control of the comprehensive schools and whilst I myself am not in the slightest way suspicious of the Minister's intentions I have heard such suspicions mentioned. The existence of those suspicions and the lack of support for a scheme of comprehensive education must damage what in itself could be a very important educational development.
It is obvious to all that education must in the future continue to play a fundamental and vital rôle in the development of this and any other country. There is a changing pattern all over the world. For example, in France in the 1800's a survey was made in which it was established that 80 per cent of the people worked on the land whereas only ten per cent were engaged in industry and ten per cent in a tertiary sector, that is the sector which includes white collar workers, secretaries, lawyers, doctors, research workers, newspaper people, and so on.
The picture has completely changed. It was pointed out in a Unesco survey, a couple of years ago, that the 80 per cent on the land had dropped to 30; the ten per cent in industry has jumped to 35 per cent and the ten per cent in the tertiary sector has jumped to 35 also—a complete change of picture, which indicates that for the future more and more post-primary education will be required. Also according to the Unesco report, the Russian delegation stated that in Russia the use of muscle power is now somewhat outdated and that all types of work contain a high element of intellectual content. The opinion also that more and more education is required in this country comes from very responsible sources. For example, Most Rev. Dr. Birch, addressing a group last year said we must have more and better education and that we must adapt our present system to modern needs. The Minister also said we have to take into account modern needs but it is a question of how best to do that, bringing all the forces with one. That is why I suggested at the outset that a tactical blunder was made in the way this matter of comprehensive education was approached.
Further, the Minister did say that sufficient research had been undertaken and in certain cases research was not needed prior to the introduction of new programmes, new curricula and also in the matter of adapting existing facilities. The curriculum for secondary schools is as wide a curriculum as would be found in any country but it has never been fully operated. It ranges from languages, classical and modern, right down to manual work, includes all the branches of science, domestic economy, music and commerce. Those subjects are in the programme for secondary schools published by the Department of Education but that curriculum has never been operated to the full, and, as Senator Quinlan pointed out, the secondary schools of this country have been suffering from financial malnutrition and the whole secondary situation is completely anaemic. Sufficient money has not been poured into the existing facilities.
I think that the question of more financial aid should be looked at very seriously. Schools are not getting sufficient financial support to employ teachers to fully operate our existing system of secondary education which could be comprehensive if properly operated and would involve all the subjects which the Minister envisages for a comprehensive school. The ordinary secondary school at the present time just engages in a limited range of subjects. It cannot afford to employ professors to engage in the full range. It is well known that some of the outstanding secondary colleges in this country are deeply in debt, in some cases up to as much as hundreds of thousands of pounds. Were it not for the goodwill of bank managers and due to the fact that these schools are in the main run by religious communities they could not carry on at all. A lay person trying to conduct business in that way would not last any length.
I would say, in relation to the comprehensive schools, that an opinion seems to be abroad that they are a bad idea in themselves. They are not a bad idea. In Scotland and Northern Ireland comprehensive schools have been accepted as the ideal way of choosing children for academic or practical courses later on. The comprehensive idea is good in itself but I think that the people who are questioning the whole idea of the comprehensive school are doing so on the basis of a fear of undue State interference in education. I have heard it expressed in several quarters.
It is feared as a result of experience in other countries where the State did unduly interfere in the control and direction of education that similar abuses might arise in this country. Personally I do not think so but people who are objecting to change are raising these fundamental matters. In the matter of the expansion of post-primary education I would say that the Minister was wise in this respect that he avoided any idea of selection at 11 or 12 years of age. That type of selection has been thrown overboard in Britain and Northern Ireland following experience of its operation. It was found that testing was socially loaded against the under-privileged child and people who were selected at 11 plus did not always make the grade because of the test being made at such an early age. People in Northern Ireland have departed from the 11 plus mentality and gone over to the comprehensive school principle. In the recent White Paper issued in Northern Ireland that has been strikingly brought forward.
Reference was made to the question of scholarships. The Minister did state that in introducing a wider range of scholarships he had enough of research, but I would suggest that more research was needed on one particular aspect and that is on the scholarship age. We think that it is going to do a great injustice to children in rural areas because they will have to travel considerable distances at a much earlier age, otherwise they would be completely debarred from participating in the scholarship examination because they would be over age at the time they would have reached the sixth class.
I would like to see the whole idea of examinations scientifically examined in Ireland because the emphasis has been too much on the memorisation of so many pieces of knowledge which are useful for supplying answers to questions at examination time. This leads people into the position of being taught what to think rather than how to think. There is not enough individual freedom in the schools for the teachers or pupils; there should be a more liberal approach towards learning, and later when students would find themselves in the area where speculative learning is required they would not be completely at sea. We have known cases of people taking scholarships in the secondary schools and losing them at University level because they have been treated in a hothouse fashion in secondary schools. The Minister himself is completely against the whole idea of cramming, and he should make a public statement on it at some stage, because I have a letter which he has written, which incorporates a paragraph stating that cramming for scholarships over a number of years is educationally unsound. Too many children are being pressurised to obtain results.
I do not want to delay the Minister or the House, but I would like to stress that whilst we all agree that more education is required for efficiency, efficiency alone is not the complete answer. Fears will be allayed if the Minister avails himself of an opportunity to make a pronouncement on the fundamental philosophy of education rather than highlight the comprehensive schools only. An opportunity should be availed of to state that efficiency in itself is not the complete thing. The comprehensive school, due to the nature of its management and maybe the nature of its curriculum, might lead to undue emphasis on efficiency. While technocracy might produce a catalogue of dazzling results in the technological field, if it leads to spiritual bankruptcy, it is a complete failure. While the physical sciences are very much to the forefront in various curricula there should be a balance of broad humanism. If the Minister could enunciate an educational philosophy which would allay a lot of the fears he would bring with him many of the people who are now inclined to snipe at him.
I know that he is aware of criticism, but the House also should be aware of it, and if he did consult more with people who are engaged in the field of education on the managerial and teaching levels, he would bring about that harmony in education which is very fundamental. An educational system cannot progress with maximum potential unless there is complete harmony in all sectors. Understanding is absolutely necessary. Suspicions poison the atmosphere and damage the whole educational potential.
Mr. Desmond rose.
An Leas-Chathaoirleach
Before Senator Desmond speaks, it is now a quarter to ten and I would like to ascertain the views of the House on the hour for adjourning.
I feel that we should adjourn at ten as there does not appear to be any possibility of getting a conclusion to the debate tonight. It would seem that there are other speakers interested in speaking.
I would agree with that.
Will we resume tomorrow morning?
No.
Tomorrow afternoon?
No.
An Leas-Chathaoirleach
We will adjourn at ten o'clock to the next sitting.
Could we have some assurance that it will be finished within some reasonable time? Could we sit tomorrow to finish it?
No.
Might we have an assurance that it would be taken first at the next sitting?
We will do our best.
We have been waiting for the past year and a half.
You have.
You have been missing half the time.
I have not been missing. I was prepared to take this motion at two hours' notice at any time whatsoever. The motion was put down by me in June, 1963.
When we adjourn at ten, can we finish it at the next sitting?
An Leas-Cathaoirleach
Yes, if that is decided by the House.
The position is as far as I see it that on one motion the Minister has made a statement as requested that he will spend more money. On secondary education also, he will do so. The only purpose of making another statement is to answer suggestions or criticisms. I do not see that it would do any damage to the position to defer that answer until we meet again.
The questions raised are of the utmost importance and it is no use closing the stable door when the horse has gone.
When we met today I had hoped that the debates on the earlier Bills would have given us a clear run to finish this, but unfortunately they were delayed, and now if there are other speakers wishing to participate in the debate, and I am sure there are, and if the Minister is to make a statement of any length on the criticisms which have been made, there is no possibility of doing it before midnight. I do not see any sense in sitting here till midnight in these circumstances.
Would it be possible to take this motion and have it debated as the very first item on the Order Paper at the next sitting?
I could not give that undertaking because there is a very important measure called the Land Bill coming to the Seanad in which many Senators are also interested.
Could the Seanad not sit for two days?
The people of Roscommon and Galway have given their verdict on that Bill.
People are complaining that this Seanad is not doing its work. We met on 18 days——
We are tired of listening to that.
Senator Quinlan has been absent half the time.
I have been here when Senator Ó Donnabháin was not here and I have contributed as much as anybody to the work of the Seanad.
That is the trouble, that the Senator contributes more and when his speech is made he clears away.
I beg the Senator's pardon. I do no such thing. I have been in this House continually since 3 o'clock this afternoon and I am in the House nearly all the time during any sitting.
Many other Senators are the same.
I wish to state categorically that the universities were not consulted by the Minister.
An Leas-Chathaoirleach
Would the Senators adopt the educational standard of taking notice of the Chair? Senator Desmond, to continue.
Something has been said which means that I have not told the truth. We have had a meeting—I have not had it but somebody else has —with the universities whereby consultations take place. I do not want to mislead the Senator.
An Leas-Chathaoirleach
The Senator will have to accept that.
I should like to say that I am in considerable sympathy with the motion. I would suggest, of course, that it is somewhat too narrow in its approach and is likely to cause more trouble and misunderstanding than is intended. In the first instance, the motion must be placed in its proper perspective. We all agree more money must be spent on education, but, we must decide on the priorities of expenditure and must decide how much money is to be expended on education. Are we going to select out a particular field of education or are the public likely to misunderstand that?
Firstly, we have to consider primary education in two ways. The first way is the provision of more teachers in order to reduce the size of classes, and the second is an increase in the number of new and renovated schools. We know how important it is to have new schools. The Minister has, to a very great extent, increased the number of new schools and it is wonderful to see the pupils in their new surroundings. We then go and see the old schools which were built, I suppose, 100 years ago. We see the atmosphere there and the sanitary accommodation and other facilities available. The old schools were built under a foreign Government and are very small. Against that, we have the new type of school which is bright and cheerful, with all the facilities that make a child happy and inclined to learn. All that costs money and is a slow process. Extra costs are involved in raising the school leaving age to which the Minister refers. I do not mind adjourning in the circumstances if the Minister has to leave.
The Senator may continue until 10 o'clock.
With regard to the school leaving age, I know the Minister has it in mind that after so many years, it will be raised. That is an important matter. It will cost money but not very much. There is no doubt that we want more money for secondary education. Then it may only bolster up the existing educational system in so far as it is confined. Fundamentals come first. If we are to spend more money on secondary education, let it be spent on a massive increase in all branches and include technical school scholarships so as to get a broad line where it will take all pupils who may be able to advance. They may be prevented from doing so at present because of lack of money, even though they have the inclination and the abilities.
Greater advances could be made to the parents who are moving along that line. I may mention one and a half years ago approximately the Labour Party published its policy on all forms of education. It was published in the public press and was available for anybody who wanted it. It covered all forms of education. I notice, while listening to Senator Quinlan and to the Minister that there was very little difference on the main principles. We said at that time.
The Labour Party considers that the provision of free post-primary education to all children is a social and economic necessity of the first importance. If we are to cherish all the children of the nation equally we must radically alter the system of secondary education by which in the past the financial contributions of the State have tended to endow the rich and buttress privilege. A system of selection for secondary education which depends on the financial resources of the parents is unacceptable. At present only one out of every four children leaving primary schools go to secondary schools.
That is a very serious matter. It continued:
We accept that all children must have some form of post-primary education, and that the transfer of children to the more academic forms of this education must be based on aptitude and ability rather than on the financial position of the parent. We should ensure that the system of secondary education is an integral part of a co-ordinated educational system reaching from primary to university education, allowing free transfer between secondary and vocational schools.
In some respects the problems facing the framer of educational policy in our secondary school system as it is today are greater than those to be found in either the primary or vocational systems. This may be one of the reasons why the recent Report of the Council of Education on the secondary curriculum was the universally condemned failure that it was. In the case of primary or vocational education, a rational framework provided for and watched over by the nation already exists. There are many faults and difficulties but the foundation is there. In the secondary school system, on the other hand, there is little in the way of coherent framework.
The distribution of secondary schools in this country is one of the most irrational features of the system. At present, owing to the uneven distribution of schools, in some counties a child has approximately one-third the chance of secondary education of a child in one of the better endowed counties.
Every Senator knows that that position exists in certain places throughout the country. A boy or girl in certain parts of the country who wishes to continue secondary education has, perhaps, to cycle eight or nine miles to get to the nearest secondary school. That child may have had to go only three miles to the primary school when first starting school. Now, because the child wishes to go to secondary school, he or she has to travel so much further. That is the hardship and the difficulty which has to be faced in the urban areas. It is a big problem and I was glad to hear the Minister refer to it. He covered various aspects of the problem and it would appear that it is a question of finance. If we are not prepared to provide the finance in relation to the children of the nation when starting in life, we just waste money afterwards, because we must approach it properly at the start.
As it is now 10 o'clock and I understand the Seanad agreed to adjourn at 10 o'clock, perhaps the Senator would move the adjournment.
I want to say how thankful I am that Senator Quinlan has brought this motion before the House.
Has the Senator concluded his speech?
I will leave it until the next sitting day.
The Senator is not concluding?
I had nearly finished.
Before we adjourn, may I make one last plea to the Leader of the House? These are two very important motions. Would it not be possible for us to debate the two motions and finish them—I believe we are sitting again on 20th January——
The matter has already been discussed and we cannot have any further discussion on it.
Debate adjourned.
Mar is gná, sul a gcuirim an Seanad ar athló, ba mhaith liom beannachtaí na Nollag agus beannachtaí na h-aithbhliana a ghuí do gach Seanadóir agus d'oifigí an Tí. Gach beannacht agus rath go raibh oraibh go léir.
The Seanad adjourned at 10.5 p.m. sine die.