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Seanad Éireann debate -
Thursday, 2 Feb 1967

Vol. 62 No. 9

Report on Investment in Education: Motion.

I move:

That Seanad Éireann notes the Report on Investment in Education.

I welcome this opportunity of having a discussion on education and especially on the contents of the Report on Investment in Education. I hope that we can approach it in a constructive manner, that we will forget about Party politics or anything else and that all of us will join together in a common endeavour to examine at this stage the multiplicity of documents on the Irish educational system and the many comments we have received. I hope we will act as a deliberative Assembly worthy of the name of Seanad Éireann and that we will try to put forward some general principles and guidelines that will be of use in the future. Above all, I hope that Seanad Éireann will justify its existence by bringing some fresh points of view to bear on this problem and that out of this debate will emerge certain useful guidelines and certain new ideas that may influence the development of our educational system in the years ahead.

We must welcome all the studies that have been made. They are all evidence of the great interest taken in education in this country. Of course, that is part of the international pattern and part of the recognition that today a country has to develop its educational potential to the fullest. In fact, advancement through education is the country's greatest source of economic advancement. We are getting away from the era of the unskilled worker and today a man must be complemented with the necessary equipment, if he is to earn a competent livelihood in the modern world. Therefore, we are glad of all these studies, and I hope that at the end of the debate I shall be able to suggest to the Seanad, and perhaps to the Minister whom we all know as a man who is not afraid to take the initiative, the setting up from this Assembly of an Educational Committee to act as an Oireachtas Committee on the subject. If we can do that, our debate will have been very well worth while and the Minister will go down in the history of this country as having taken one of the most progressive and farsighted decisions that any Minister has been called on to take. I hope he can face that.

When we come to the question of education, we are all conscious of the fact that some have got it and others have not; in other words, there is disparity in opportunities. Most of us who were fortunate enough to get those opportunities can say that we got them through the help of either our parents or some scholarship body. I am proud to be in that group. But for the help of my parents and a scholarship, I just could not have got a university education in 1938.

We all have a common problem and approach to it. Therefore, let us join forces and make a really constructive approach to this problem. The specific motion in my name deals with the Report on Investment in Education. Here I face a very difficult task because I want to be scrupulously fair to the Report and to acknowledge the great pioneering work it has done. On the other hand, I want to encourage Senators, and people outside, to take a very critical approach to this Report and to all other reports that come our way. It is only by adopting the attitude of open, fair and constructive criticism and elaboration of the Report that we can carry on the work that has been initiated by those who produce it.

The first thing to get straight is, I think, to realise that this Report is really nothing very unusual in the educational world. It is unusual in this country but it is quite commonplace elsewhere. I have here three volumes of statistics on education which are produced annually in England. I have the 1964 volume which was published within a year of the statistics being available. These volumes deal with all, and a lot more, of the type of statistics we have in the Report on Investment in Education. I commend Senators to study these. I take it they are available in the Oireachtas Library. The report, Statistics of Education, is produced by Her Majesty's Stationery Office. There are similar productions in Northern Ireland.

What we have done is really to make available what we were long seeking. Of course, I know blame has been attached to the Department of Education for delays in producing statistics in the past. We have, however, arrived at a completely new situation in that regard with the advent of computers. While in the past, due to shortage of staff or other limitations, it was not possible to produce figures for perhaps two years or more after the statistics had been taken, now with the computer, these figures can be put on cards and produced quite rapidly. Consequently, any difficulties we had in the past in that regard are now gone and we can expect—indeed, I confidently hope—in the years ahead that our statistics will be available just as quickly as they are available elsewhere.

The public seem to have been overawed by the size of the Report and by certain features of it. One of the features which is novel in this Report is the use of computer strategy. That seems to have completely baffled most of those examining the Report, who did not seem to look at whether the results obtained by the computer were in accordance with commonsense or not. I will at a later stage return to this and show that some of the large gains contained in this Report are indeed illusory.

We must take the Report for what it is worth. It is primarily the work of a team of four set up in co-operation with the Organisation for European Co-operation and Development and the terms of reference given are wide. They involve facets of international comparisons and the impact of the decisions on the economic future of this country. This marks, then, a breakaway from the old type of commission of which we have had many in the past, the old type of commission, whether it was the Commission on Emigration or the various commissions on education we have had or, indeed, the Commission on Higher Education who are sitting—all of these were the old pattern and the old style. You combined together in the one unit a secretariat and a discussion group so that what emerged was the responsibility of this highly representative and carefully selected commission itself. Therefore, it represented, at that stage, a very broad consensus of opinion on the work—the facts that had been unearthed about whatever the committee had been investigating and, to that extent, when it came before the public it was a balanced appraisal of the system.

The main fault with that type of approach, especially in the modern day, is its slowness and the difficulty of getting conflicting views together across the table or at least evolving some compromise or some majority view—and, now, this type is something new. In other words, the secretariat, those who do the actual professional side, the collection of the figures, and so on, have really taken control of this project and of all similar projects. I think there is grave danger in this type of approach because it means that the steering committee, as such, have no responsibility for the final conclusions or, indeed, for the opinions expressed in the report. That is made quite clear.

Of course, the steering committee have a valuable function to perform in giving certain guidances or directions to the research effort by the secretariat. But the final report indeed could be and probably is very different from what would have emerged had the steering committee of this or any similar body been, in effect, a commission in the full sense of the word and had the responsibility of writing the report that emerged. This is the danger I see and, therefore, I suggest and counsel that, in all further uses of this approach, it should be complemented finally either by the steering committee or the steering committee with certain additions made to it. These should get together and produce a report on the work as submitted by the secretariat, especially the recommendations for actions, the question of value judgments on what had been unearthed and, in general, comments on the policy changes that would be entailed in carrying out what the commission regarded were desirable features or desirable innovations based on the report. This I think could be done quite quickly and quite reasonably. I had the pleasure of taking part in one such type of commission——

It was not the Commission on Higher Education, then.

——in Paris two years ago organised, again, by the OECD. There, the national secretariat did their work over a two-year period. They collected facts, figures and all the rest. Then, for ten days, the representatives from the various countries were brought together to write the report that represented and brought together the findings in the various national groups. I can testify to the hard work we put in during that ten-day period. First of all, we had open plenary sessions on the report divided into four or five major parts. Then we had the working parties set up to prepare draft reports on these which came before the full commission, again in plenary session, as often as it was necessary to bring them back until we finally evolved a document. That was done in ten days.

I believe, in relation to this present Report on Investment in Education, that, when the work has been done, if the steering committee or an enlarged version of that had been taken somewhere—Killarney, say—cut off completely from their homes, businesses and work and put down to hard work, they could have produced in ten days a really first-class set of conclusions and recommendations based on the facts that had been given here. But, as we get it, on the one hand we have the claim made again and again by the secretariat and re-enforced here—by the survey team—that they avoided all value judgments and all comments on policy issues so that their main reference went into justifying the term "economic" in the name of the organisation that put up most of the funds, the OECD.

Now, I might say that, in the group in which we were in Paris, we were under the same pressure. This pressure was: "The funds are coming from a body that is sponsoring economic development" and, therefore, you have to try to stress that at all times. I think nobody, for one moment, could hold that the report as it has emerged has not influenced policy. Even by the figures it has given about the economic advantages—with which I shall deal later—of amalgamating small schools or the economic advantages of getting money for educational development by removing income tax allowances in respect of children over the age of 16, nobody, for one moment, can conclude that the parts in the report referring to these and many other issues have not influenced public thinking and policy. I say they have a perfect right to do so, provided the public receive, side by side with these recommendations that were based on value judgments, comments on the inadequacy or otherwise of present policies, or recommendations for changes in policy. Surely, all those should have come together? It is a frightening thought that the economic aspects of something must be the first to hit the public and that, in fact, they must have the field practically to themselves over a year or more, while those who place reliance on value judgments and who believe that it is not by bread alone that man lives, belatedly, try to catch up with the supposed wonders of the economic advantages that are proposed. Had there been any type of commission at the end of it, as I suggested, then, of course, these value judgments would have been put in their proper setting and they would have been made with a full consciousness of the economic advantages that the survey team claim they found for those various recommendations.

These are general points and I hope that in future the Government, while using this type of survey team, will balance it. Otherwise, we are indeed heading into the era of economic man in this country, an era that would disregard our past, would disregard everything but man, the economic instrument.

There is another point about such survey teams about which I am not over-happy, that is, the influence of the Department concerned. I make this point without in any way making any implications against any Department. I would make the same point against the university if there were a survey team and if the work were done within the university and one of its members were a leading university person. It would be open to doubt, to say the least. Above all, the lack of criticism in this Report of Department policy is rather striking. The Fine Gael document which I have read seemed to read far more criticism of past policies of the Department into the Report than I have been able to read into it. For instance, if we take the question of increased numbers of teachers, the obvious answer, if the present output of teachers is not sufficient, is to increase the capacity of the training colleges. Yet, in this document, whether feeling that they were bound by policy decisions or not, the team accepted the fact that the Government, in 1962, increased the capacity of the training colleges from 1,100 to 1,200 and that that was the end of the increase and that all other means of getting teachers were explored, and so on, but the obvious measure and the one that will have to make the greatest contribution to increasing the number of available teachers is that the capacity of the training colleges must be stepped up to meet their contribution.

Again, I do not want the Department to take this criticism as in any way personal to that Department but I do think that if a survey committee are set up in future, they should be located outside of any Department of State and should be given its own offices. Probably, the Economic Research Institute might fulfil that role. It is a body that we know is neutral and impartial in making an assessment of whatever situation is being investigated. If the team that made the present Report had been located in the Central Statistics Office under the Department of the Taoiseach, it probably would have been more correctly located.

Of course, the statistical and the factual work involved deserves our highest praise and has been done in an exceedingly competent manner but it is, as is usual with such work, interspersed all over the place with assumptions. Of course, one has to make a start but different assumptions in the case of different parts of the Report could very significantly alter conclusions. Any group are entitled to make their own assumptions and to work out conclusions on those assumptions but the assumptions should have been underscored and clearly labelled as assumptions.

I come now to the main difficulty I find in the Report itself and I am trying to suggest means to broaden out what we have in the Report. The main glaring fault is that there are no international comparisons whatsoever within its 410 pages. It baffles me completely how you can investigate an educational system without seeing how that system compares even with the system across the Border, or in England, or in the small countries in Western Europe. It is a pity that that comparison was not made. I did think that the terms of reference in at least two or three places would have allowed that. Clause (b) of the terms of reference included, "and also the experience of other countries" and (c) again made a reference to international experience. We have got, then, to try to provide that information for ourselves.

Another point which should strike the reader of this Report very forcibly is the segregation of the primary, secondary and vocational systems. While the ultimate aim is to bring the vocational and secondary arms closer together and to provide a type of what is called comprehensive education, the Report keeps them segregated, and especially when it comes to financial matters. While it is chasing pence and half-pence at the primary school level, it has no interest whatsoever in finance at the vocational school level. In other words, the obvious figures that stand out are that the average cost at present per pupil in the national school is £25, in the secondary school, £40 and in the vocational school, £90. If we are concerned with value for money, the question of whether we are getting the same value in all branches at least deserves an answer.

The short answer to that is, I think, that it is a miracle how any of the branches do such excellent work on the funds available to them. I do not want to suggest for one moment that the vocational school, with its £90 per pupil, is either extravagant or is getting too much money for the work it is doing. I do not think it is getting enough. I want to point, however, to the poorer and more heavily criticised branch here, the national school system with its £25 per pupil. Why be so concerned with figures that suggest for one type of school, the two-teacher school, there is something like £21 to £25 per pupil while in the three-teacher, or higher school, there may be £2 less per pupil? The fact is that both are grossly inadequate and obviously calling for much greater expenditure on them. It would be highly constructive had we been given a table of comparative costs in other countries. It would emerge, I believe, that especially at the secondary school level, because of the sacrifices made over many years by the religious communities, we are getting secondary education at an absolutely bargain price. No country in the world could produce secondary education at anything like the cost at which we are producing it here. I hope we will be given these comparisons.

There are two main problems. The first is the raising of the school leaving age from 14 to 15. We hope that by the mid-1970s the school leaving age will have been raised to 16. The post-primary training involved is a man-sized job for this country over the next decade. I regret that this was somewhat clouded and obstructed by the fact that the Report drew an enormous red herring across the trail with all the small school controversy that was stirred up. The Government are to be congratulated on shifting away from that controversy, a controversy which was doing no good to the schools or the teachers or, indeed, to the united effort to improve our educational system. Obviously there is work to be done—I shall come back to this at a later stage—and that work must be fitted into the general context of our major problems.

There is a fault in our thinking today that we should all be white collar workers and the aim of everyone seems to be a leaving certificate and a job based on that certificate or the attainment of a university degree. We all talk about equality of educational opportunity, the idea being that anyone who is capable of being directed into a white collar job or into a university should be put into that stream, regardless of national demands and requirements. I venture to suggest that what we are propounding there contains a fallacy. We are confusing equality of educational opportunities with equality of livelihood opportunities.

To my way of thinking, the skilled technician is every bit as valuable as, or more valuable than, a clerk with a leaving certificate in a white collar job. We have not faced up to giving the right equality. If we did, we would not be so concerned about whether a man becomes a technician or a clerk. Make no mistake about it, brains are called for every bit as much in the technician crafts as they are in any white collar job and the country will be in a sad state if we adopt the attitude that our technicians are to be regarded as second-class. Provided you provide the basic recruitment grade with comparable standards and comparable livelihood opportunities, there is no fundamental difference. Training as a technician involves a certain number of years at a technical school, achieving the proposed technical school intermediate certificate, followed by a rather arduous apprenticeship extending over four or five years. At the end of that period, the technician has made as great an effort to train himself as has his colleague who trained for his honours leaving certificate and the technician, therefore, deserves comparable livelihood opportunities. It is the man of real ability in the technician stream who ultimately branches out as a contractor afterwards. Once the stream is started, there are in it, as in all other walks of life, opportunities for the man of exceptional ability to prove himself and, in doing so, to give a really first-class service to the country in his chosen walk of life.

At the moment we seem, I am afraid, to be drifting towards placing too much reliance on certificates. We are reaching the stage at which we are in danger of meriting the criticism made by a former chancellor of the University of Chicago, who said that he hoped every American in future could be born with a B.A. after his name and then they could begin some real education. In other words, we must diversify and develop with a proper regard to the economic requirements of the country and we should not over-emphasise certificate qualifications alone.

To deal specifically now with the Report, as one who fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on one's point of view, spent his early school days in a two-teacher school, I thought the Report unduly harsh. It found many alleged deficiencies in the system not apparent to those of us who went through it. On the other hand, we have the criticism of a teacher handling so many classes. We have the development of group teaching in relation to which the previous Minister initiated some experiments in some schools in Galway. The group teaching idea is really quite old. It is the foundation of the American educational system. There every class is broken up into groups and the groups are busy learning by doing. I hope that irrespective of the size of our schools this type of education will become more and more the pattern in the future.

We should encourage initiative rather than cramming by a very set pattern. There is a great deal we can learn from the American educational system in that regard. Many things which may be regarded as novel are working well and proving their worth. I am glad to see, in regard to primary education, that there is much more the approach now of "Let us examine the situation as it is and make whatever changes are required". It might be possible, in regard to two-teacher schools, to consider omitting the sixth class from certain schools and letting that class travel more than others. Flexibility should be the keynote of the system.

One strong criticism has been in regard to the lack of facilities in our schools, especially in rural schools. Here the lack of running water and toilets has been greatly criticised. Obviously this is a disgrace but it is not the fault of the schools. It is rather like starving a man and then mocking him because he is weak. Irrespective of what the future holds, and because this situation is a blot on our nation, we should set ourselves a three-year or four-year programme to remedy the situation, irrespective of whether the schools in question will be in existence for a further three years, five years or ten years. We can do this. We can put in running water because we have even done that in cow byres and provided grants for doing so. Why not step up the tempo in this regard and also avail of the voluntary effort? Indeed, the local voluntary effort could carry a good deal of the cost involved. We could reduce the percentage contribution, cut the red tape and leave the local groups to their own initiative to get on quickly with the job with the minimum of interference.

Another point in regard to the lack of teaching aids. A great deal is said about this on page 250 of the Report. The percentage of schools with various kinds of equipment—such as a sound film projector, which is becoming an essential—ranges from .4 per cent in the case of one-teacher schools to 12.4 per cent in the case of four-teacher schools. In other words, if 12.4 per cent have got them, it means that 87.6 per cent have not got them. Therefore, in effect, there is no such equipment available in our schools. Again, that is something that could be put right fairly quickly. Teaching aids are a must today and we can provide them irrespective of whether the school is to be renewed or not. If the school is only to remain for a couple of years, then afterwards the aid can be transferred elsewhere.

Then we come to another gap that has been discovered. This concerns the D 1 and D 2 pupils in our national schools. Some are retarded one year and others are retarded two years. The retardation, of course, is one of age. Any pupil under the age of seven on 1st February in the year in which he was in the first class is regarded as a normal pupil; if he is one year older, he is D 1 and if he is two years, he is D 2. I have checked with many people, including an eminent secretary of a Department and many university professors, and I was amazed at the number of pupils who fit the label D 2. It is a label which I too fit. It is of course a measure of the fact that in the country children tend to go to school much later, for one reason or another. In the cities many of our children are going to school much too early merely for the sake of getting them out of the house and giving the mothers some relief.

To my mind, it is a greater problem to know at what age formal learning should begin. At present it begins at the age of four but we should have far more playschool approach, the type of approach common in the United States and, of course, elsewhere. There is also the need which we all recognise for developing parent-teacher associations which are really a means of harnessing all the voluntary effort in the school district. If these associations were operating, then the members would quickly see that many of the matters which could be put right by voluntary effort would be put right. The Department could provide a small subsidy, cut the red tape as far as possible, and let us get on with these necessary district projects on a voluntary basis.

There is also the question of uniformity in education all over the country. The Fine Gael document has done a good job in stressing the necessity for trying to introduce a certain amount of flexibility, a great deal more than we have. If you examine systems in other countries, you find that this is the case. In fact, the United States is divided into at least 1,000 school districts and every district is guided by a parent-teacher association which, by and large, is in charge of education. They appoint a superintendent and working with him, evolve their educational system. Perhaps that may be a bit too democratic but it is better than the other extreme of rigid centralisation, which is our system. We should make way for experimentation and for adaptation; we should at least be prepared to accept that the problems of Dublin are not those of the small villages and towns in the west and south-west.

I want now to come to the point on which the newspapers seized as being the solution to many of our problems. It involves the strategies of replacement, going from smaller schools to larger schools. The strategy involved here was a computer strategy and the result of it was that it claimed that at the date in question, if all the schools that were obsolete were treated in accordance with the strategy proposed, it would release 1,225 of the 1,757 teachers involved—the balance of 532 teachers being sufficient for staffing new schoolrooms where these were required locally together with reducing the chronically over-large classes in the city schools to a maximum of 40 per class. It was found by means of the computer programme that this could be done and that 1,225 teachers could be saved in the process, saving the Exchequer a calculated sum of £1.6 million in current costs. That of course is spectacular and it was seized on by commentators and writers as showing what really could be done by rationalisation of the system.

Having had considerable experience in computer programming—in fact, I would venture to say that I have more experience than anyone else in the country in this field; at least very few have more experience—I have always found that the results of computer programmes have always to be checked against the yardstick of commonsense because the possibilities of error in a computer programme are enormous. In this case I went through the figures very carefully. The first figure that caused me to wonder was that there are 470,000 children in the schools concerned and it was held by the computer that these were capable of being taught by 12,252 teachers, on subtracting the saving of 1,225 teachers. That gives an average of 38.5 pupils per teacher. To ensure that you have a maximum of 40 in any class and yet arrange that the average is 38.5 is, frankly, a very improbable situation indeed, and is one that is not accepted in English planning. In English planning, where they aim at having a maximum of 40 in any class controlled by a teacher, they reckon that to do this on a national scale the national average would scarcely be in excess of 30, compared with the 38.5 average given by our computer!

I have figures worked out and I can give the Minister a copy of them. The figures show that no matter what assumption you make on how the pupils of the schools that are now obsolete are to be disposed of, whether they go to local two-teacher or three-teacher schools and these are upgraded in the process, or any other assumption you make, you find that, having provided for the balance of the one, two and three-teacher schools, you are left with an impossible average figure for the remainder. As I work it out, the remainder would have 5,786 teachers for 256,500 pupils—an average of 44.3. In other words, by the test of commonsense leading to the argument sketched here, which I regard as giving absolute conclusive proof, it is clear that there must have been an error somewhere in the strategy involved. The setting up of a computer programme is a very highly complicated and a very highly technical job and the possibility of error is always there.

The Minister, I know, is an engineer and therefore is a man who can approach a problem like this with an engineer's mind. He will want to get the facts and the figures and will recognise and understand a proof when it is given to him. I will have pleasure, at any time at his convenience, in producing those figures to him and showing him my proof of this absurdity. This shows, I think, that you cannot place your trust completely in computers or anything else. You must always get back to the yardstick of commonsense.

We come now to the post-primary education. Here the main difficulty is the provision of teachers, teachers with the specialisations that are required. If the Minister comes to the universities and has talks with them, I think the universities will not be found wanting in their contribution to this major problem, seeing that the Arts Faculty constitutes almost 40 per cent of university students today. Therefore, a source of teachers is available, provided the Department and the universities get together and work out any modifications that are necessary in degree structure or degree programmes necessary to produce students better suited to what is required, and that the Minister will simultaneously make the conditions sufficiently attractive to attract the resulting graduates. If that is done, the teachers will be forthcoming.

I know the short-term approach the Department has adopted in the past of trying to train special groups of students by means of extra university courses, rural science teachers and others. These students get neither a diploma nor a degree and it is something that should be discontinued because if the effort put in by the students over the period were properly channelled and co-ordinated, a suitable university degree could be awarded. Such a degree course would provide the required teachers and would give them more professional standing, thus avoiding the creation of further divisions within our teaching body. The aim should be towards a more unified teaching body with the possession of a degree a sine qua non for any teacher. At present the cost involved to the State of these crash programmes is rather high because, the students themselves have a full allowance while they are in training of £350 or £400. That is all right, but I suggest that if these teachers were recruited from university degree holders, the money concerned could be spread much more widely and at least three scholarships could be provided for every full maintenance award made today, thereby providing a much wider recruitment base.

In regard to the very large amount of finance that is required for all education, and in our anxiety to make the best use of our limited financial resources, I do not see why a certain number of student grants should not involve a commitment to spend a period teaching within this country. We do not have national service and we are thankful that we do not have to shoulder this onerous burden, but I do not think it would do any harm to any graduate, especially those who have benefited considerably by grants and scholarships, to spend a couple of years as a teacher. This contribution in the teaching field could well be made on a part-time basis. All authorities are conscious of the lack of science graduates, and especially graduates with some ability in mathematics, in our secondary and vocational schools. Yet we have a very large number of science graduates, engineers, chemists and others in various positions within the country. Their services are being used at night time in some of the Dublin technological colleges and technical schools. It would help to get over some of our difficulties down the country if county councils and corporations were encouraged to give graduates time off during the day to teach a science, or mathematics, class in a local school. I think this is well worth considering.

In regard to secondary schools, there is a certain amount of confusion, due to the idea of the comprehensive school. Our aim should be to make all schools comprehensive in the light of what the word "comprehensive" really means, that there should be some choice of subjects available and that the programme should not be strictly confined to the subjects that are usually identified with secondary schools today. The aim should be, rather than to create another division within our schools system, to encourage the liberalisation and the development of the schools we have. Indeed, some of our better secondary schools can rightly claim that their programmes are both liberal and comprehensive, and they are doing a very fine job in providing a liberal education. However, we want to see that same excellent service made available also in the poorly-financed schools.

We benefit enormously in this country by the sacrifice that is being made by the religious orders, and the Christian Brothers. It seems to me a pity in the task ahead that this great potential is not used to greater effect; by having as many religious as possible serve a few years abroad, be it in England, America, Australia, or elsewhere, anywhere they have houses of their Order, where they can fit into the system and where they can, merely for the cost of passage, get what is really invaluable post-graduate experience. When they came back, they would then play a vital role in liberalising and giving our system the dynamic push forward that we all desire. The same applies in equal measure, in fact even more so, to our lay teachers, but it costs more to send such lay teachers abroad. It is not as easy to make the necessary transfer arrangements and there would probably be a higher proportion of loss from this group, some would probably stay abroad permanently on finding opportunities greater than at home. However, it is something that should be encouraged by every means possible. It is by going and seeing what is happening elsewhere that teachers can return —not copy what they have seen—but to use their experience to improve our system.

That brings me to the vocational schools. The only basis on which I should like to see the comprehensive idea coming in is not in a new comprehensive school but in what one might call a comprehensive district plan. I should like to see each district, say, a small town with 700 or 800 population and a hinterland around it, setting up a committee representing the parents and those interested in making a contribution to education in that area, with the guidance of officers of the Department and of the teachers' association, and planning for the district as a whole. If, for instance, there is a lack of science facilities in the district, why not put up a science laboratory—one science laboratory, not three or four—and let it be shared by all the students in the district, whether they are from the boys or the girls secondary school, or from the vocational school? Let the committee work it as a unit and let the one teacher be responsible for all the classes. As to where it would be located, I do not think that is a matter of very great importance. The teacher probably could be employed by the local school board or committee.

The biggest gap that has been found by the survey team is the lack of technicians. That has been emphasised again and again for many years by the Engineers' Association, Cumann na nInnealtóirí. So far, we have made no significant advance in filling that gap. The new apprenticeship laws and the raising of the school age are all designed to further the recruitment of that grade. On it depends our success or failure in meeting the challenge of the Common Market, if we get in. Industry requires quite a large number of technicians for every one technologist employed. Modern industry is a team effort. Our Leas-Cathaoirleach has contributed a great deal to the thinking on this problem. I hope we will realise it is this grade above all others we are concerned with recruiting. It is a grade which will have to be given status commensurate with clerical position obtained via the honours leaving certificate.

In recruiting and training technicians, there is one pitfall we have to watch very carefully, that is, the position of mathematics in the school curriculum. We are in a dangerously unbalanced position with regard to mathematics in this country. This is due to the fact that in the early part of the century a large section of applied mathematics was split from physics and was called mathematical physics. Today all applied mathematics is done under the title mathematical physics and Irish mathematics is confined to pure mathematics. If the Minister for Education and his Department wanted to get advice on mathematics in England, they probably would turn to a department of mathematics in one of the universities. In an English university, consisting of from 3,000 to 4,000 students, its department of mathematics would probably consist of two professors of pure mathematics, one professor of applied mathematics, one statistician, one professor of engineering mathematics and one of computional science. The view available to the Minister would be the balanced view of this composite group. Indeed, I would venture to say that, if asked what mathematics should be taught to technologists and to technicians, it is the view of the professor of engineering mathematics that would carry most weight. In this situation the view of the professor of pure mathematics would carry only a very minority weight in the final assessment. It is a pitfall we have to watch here in deciding on suitable mathematics courses in all our schools.

In this context I wish to refer to the Report on Applied Mathematics for Engineers recently issued by the OECD. This concerns the future engineers, technologists and technicians about to be trained in our secondary schools, vocational schools and comprehensive schools. It is essential that these get a fully modern type of mathematical education which will equip them to be technologists. What is a technologist? He is a man who understands the physical world, who produces figures and quantitive measurements for the various quantities with which he is concerned. Therefore, the emphasis has to come back to this side of mathematics. I do not want to detain the Seanad on that but I think I should quote from the Report which has just been published, the following resolution concerning school mathematics, passed unanimously.

The Conference, recognising that School Mathematics is at present in a state of rapid change, a change which has not yet had time to affect the standard, at entry, of students to the University,

Urges that the situation should be kept under close and continuous review by, amongst others, the relevant Engineering Institutes, Institutions and Faculties, and the national study groups,

Counsels that major changes in curricula should, at national level, be preceded by adequate group experimentation, and that immediate steps should be taken to provide the necessary body of skilled teachers,

—this is all in relation to school mathematics—

Stresses that considerable inservice training will be necessary to ensure that teachers get the adequate knowledge of practical Applications of Mathematics, to match their mastery of the fundamentals of Modern Mathematics.

—in other words, you must tie in with the practical applications—

Requests that suitable courses in practical Applications of Mathematics including probability, statistics, numerical analysis and computer training be provided without delay in University courses for teachers,

—today, these are almost non-existent, although we have taken a step recently in UCC which will make some of these available—

Calls for the introduction, as a first priority, of introductory courses in calculus probability and statistics, where these are not already available,

—the Department are to be congratulated in getting both of those under way in the recent new course and on introducing probability and statistics into the leaving certificate—

Suggests that a close liaison be established between teachers, scientists and engineers, both at local and national level as the most effective means of assisting the teachers in motivating and developing the new courses by practical examples drawn from the real world, and

—this is what I want to underscore—

Strongly recommends that a balanced approach between the development of understanding, reasoning and the ability to formulate and manipulate problems, should be adopted to curriculum reform in Mathematics to meet the challenge and opportunities of the computer age in furthering economic cooperation and development.

In our search for technicians we have to make sure they have a balanced approach and that they are trained to face the problems of the world into which we are heading in the '70's and '80's

One of the most interesting features to emerge from the recommendations in this Report, Investment in Education, was that for a development unit within the Department of Education. Steps have been taken to get that under way, although I think many of us are not happy with the unit as it has evolved. The unit is in danger of becoming just another part of the Department of Education, whereas in effect it should have pretty well separate standing, much like the Central Statistics Office has in its attachment to the Department of The Taoiseach. Above all, it is necessary that the presentation of the results of the professional work of the development unit should remain in professional hands right up to the point at which they enter the administrative machinery of the Government. In other words, it is a professional job right up the line. That brings up the conflict of which we are all only too acutely aware, between the professional and the administrator in the Civil Service. This unit should be treated as a pioneer unit and should be given independent status.

The question of the professional may lie at the root of most of our troubles in that a professional person is not someone who has not got a degree and thereafter loses contact with his profession and, therefore, becomes very much out of date. By and large, an administrator even though he has no contact with the profession concerned is, I think, better than a professional who is ten years out of date in his thinking. At least an administrator is capable of appreciating the modern professional view on a subject if that is presented to him. There is a danger with the professional that his point of view will be largely conditioned by the professional training he had himself and, therefore, unless he has developed as a fully professional man he is more of a menace than a help in such a unit.

That brings me to the point that undoubtedly we need professional people in this unit but we must take every possible step to ensure that they keep up with their professions in the years they are connected with this project. That can be done in two ways, both of which are complementary. First, a great many of the professionals in this unit, I believe, should be on a loan basis from the universities here or elsewhere or from professional institutions. Probably half the staff could be got on that basis whether for one, two or three years secondment. It would mean that they have come because we know they are up to date specialists and accordingly would contribute an up to date external viewpoint. We must see that the regular full-time people involved are given the opportunity to keep up with their professions. If we have statisticians there we must see that they keep up with their professions. Likewise, in the case of economists. The only way that can be done is to ensure that these people, every four, five or six years get leave of absence for periods ranging from six months to a year to go back into their professional field or into the research field and thereby re-invigorate and renew themselves. If we do that, we can build a first class development unit; if not, the unit will start out well but will eventually deteriorate as time goes on and become conservative and unimaginative.

I might point to the work of the prototype, the statistics unit in the Department of the Taoiseach. We are all aware of the great work it has done. That has been largely due to the fact that we were very fortunate in the two directors we have had, Dr. Geary and later, Dr. McCarthy. These were fully professional in the highest sense of the word before they entered the Civil Service and took up their positions in the Central Statistics Office. They had established reputations in their field and both had the enthusiasm and courage to work long hours outside their office hours keeping up with their subject, after joining the Statistics Office. Consequently during their period in office, they remained professionals of the highest type. If we can get men of that calibre into this development unit all will be well but we cannot expect very much if we appoint men of lesser calibre who are not provided with opportunities to keep abreast of their profession.

I have only touched briefly on many items and I do not want to go into any greater detail at this stage. I have tried to contribute some suggestions that may be new and may help to contribute something to the formulation of educational policy. We must be very careful to keep education out of politics and, above all, keep it out of the distorted type of propaganda and smear campaigns that come, unfortunately from both Telefís Éireann and the Irish Times at the present juncture. I want to warn about how pernicious this campaign can be. Many of you may have seen over Christmas the criticisms of University College, Cork and later of University College, Dublin, about which a student said that the professors were never on time and did not turn up for their lectures and so on, presenting an appalling picture of what was happening in the universities, a picture that is, of course, totally untrue.

What are the facts behind this? The facts are that a motion was being debated in the College Philosophical Society at that time, one of the usual motions: "That the College does not provide a university education for students." This was a typical debate, for and against. A Telefís Éireann reporter appeared to interview students shortly afterwards but he was only interested in interviewing one side, those who were for that motion. The candidate who made all the strictures on the universities spent two years in First Arts, without passing an examination, followed by a short period in Commerce. Now he has left the university. That is the type of "representative" student used to denigrate the universities. At the same time, another student was interviewed. He was president of the Students' Council of the previous year, a most outstanding student not only in the hurling field but academically, Mr. Jim Blake——

I thought you were going to say the Taoiseach.

This student contributed much to the universities. He had been president of the Irish University Students' Association. He was interviewed but that interview was not given to us by Telefís Éireann. Perhaps, for the record, I can give his words. These were:

I think we do get a university education. This College has produced some of the finest academics, who have won renown in many countries outside Ireland and also, of course, in this country. Thus, we surely get a good academic education.

We have in this College all the facilities for a broad university education. We have societies and clubs similar to those in other universities, including those in Great Britain. These societies—of a cultural, historical and political nature—hold meetings almost weekly to which all students are welcome and many attend. These certainly broaden our university education.

This is a small College—2,500 students—very compact and thus almost all students meet regularly. The restaurant is an ideal meeting place—usually full—and here many ideas are swapped and exchanged. The size of this College is a significant factor in broadening our education. The facilities are there just to be availed of and this is as much as any other university can offer.

Why did not Telefís Éireann give that to you and to the public? Why did they not interview students with reasonable scholastic records instead of relying on chronics to smear the university?

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

While I hesitate to interrupt the Senator while he is defending an institution to which I belong in another capacity, nevertheless, I must point out to him that he is going somewhat beyond the scope of the debate.

I am only pointing out the necessity of ensuring that Irish education is not presented to the public by Telefís Éireann, or by any newspaper, in this fashion. We should do everything we can to expose this type of distortion. Indeed University College, Dublin, was subjected to the same distortion. I am precluded by the Chairman's ruling from giving the details but they are just as lurid as the details I have given of the treatment of my own college.

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

The Senator will have another opportunity to deal with that.

The other point I want to make is in respect of the newspapers' approach to education. Again, while our national dailies—the Irish Press, the Irish Independent and the Cork Examiner—have presented a reasonably balanced job on this matter, we fear and we see that the Irish Times, not content with dragging Irish politics into the mire by means of spying tactics, is now trying to employ the same type of smear tactic in relation to the National University of Ireland. Trinity College, Dublin, is exempt from such treatment. I think it should be exempt, but it is a bad day for this country when newspapers stoop to this——

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

The Chair must again deprecate the spread of the debate into the area of university education.

We could have a motion on the Irish Times, perhaps, later.

I think it is relevant here. I have appealed to Fine Gael as well as to the Government to keep Irish education out of politics; it is far too serious a subject. I congratulate Fine Gael on the document they have produced; there are many parts of it with which I would disagree and many parts I would endorse wholeheartedly. It is an excellent contribution to the topic, as it is, but I am appealing to all to keep education out of politics. Surely it is in order in this Assembly to appeal to the newspapers to treat Irish education in the way in which it should be handled and not to try to employ journalism and sensationalism——

Appealing and attacking are two different things, Senator.

There is very little else I want to say. Might I ask the Minister and Senators during this debate to consider the contribution the Seanad can make to the development of a policy on education? In his contribution to the debate the Minister might indicate to us his intention to set up an Oireachtas committee—drawn from the Seanad, if possible—to act as an Education Committee. Such a committee is commonplace in Holland and Belgium. If this committee were set up very good work could be done. I would welcome it and I think many of us would join very sincerely in the work and feel we were justifying our position here as a vocational body—a body organised on vocational lines. Indeed, I think we could make this contribution. I appeal to the Minister to do that and I hope that in the debate we will concentrate on education and will not allow politics to obtrude unduly.

I have pleasure in seconding this motion and also in joining with the proposer of the motion in welcoming the opportunity this gives us for a full scale debate on education in the Seanad. I join with him, too, in hoping that politics will be left out of this, that we will all put the shoulder to the wheel, as it were, and try to contribute what we can to this debate on education and that the Minister will be receptive to views and suggestions without prejudice as to where the views and suggestions came from. We have from time to time cavilled at the delay in bringing this motion forward—it has been on the Order Paper now for approximately 12 months—but I really feel it was worth while having it left over until now. The present juncture is probably the most appropriate time at which it could be taken because in the interim—between the publication of the Report and now—we had some very enlightened comment on it. I refer particularly to the document produced by the NIEC on Investment in Education and, of course, we had the Fine Gael Policy statement. But I suggest—more important than those, I suggest is the fact that we have had time to assess the reactions of the Department to the Report and to what it conveyed. The proposer of the motion has analysed it very carefully. He has found certain faults with it, in the method of compiling statistics but, of course, he is himself an expert in that field and the ordinary layman cannot follow him down that line of country.

I propose to go on from there and see what effects this Report will have on the pattern of our education in the future. In order to do this, we have, first, to take a look at the background of the Report—that is to look at the educational scene into which it was launched and to consider the slow awakening of social conscience in the matter of education, the budgetary parsimony with which education was treated for a great number of years and as Senator Quinlan said, the tendency also to rely on the voluntary sacrifice of religious Orders. All these were features of the education scene prior to the issue of this Report. All these have, between them, resulted in stagnation in education. We had a situation in which fee-paying in schools was encouraged and, by that means, privilege was maintained. In fact, higher education would have been put beyond the reach of a great many people were it not for the sacrifice of the religious proprietors of schools who kept fees at a very low level— actually far below the economic level.

It seems now that a major change is imminent in the financing of education in general, and particularly in financing of second level education. At this point in the history of education, it is only fitting that some tribute should be paid to the people who kept the ship afloat all these years and who, by their unremitting sacrifice, made it possible for us to maintain the levels that we did maintain in spite of the difficulties. They have done everything humanly possible to ensure that no human talent went undeveloped. If they did not reach out to everyone, that was not their fault. They were frustrated in that by bureaucracy and financial starvation. At this stage I should like to pay tribute to what has been done by those schools all down the years. We hope that all the faults we had to find are now in the past, and that we are on the threshold of a new dispensation.

On reading this Report, Investment in Education, one of the strongest impressions one gets is that the delay in coming to grips with our problems has been too long. The fundamental issue, I suppose, in education for us and for all countries down through the years, has been whether educational policy should be designed basically to cater for the individual or for the needs of the State. For the past half century, particularly after the First World War, the tendency has been to design educational policy to cater for the needs of the State. This was rather a new idea then. That tendency has been accentuated since the conclusion of World War II. That is over 20 years ago. It is only now that we are, as it were, making up our minds about this. Up to now we have been regarding education primarily as a social service based on the belief that education up to a certain minimum standard was a basic human right and that human dignity demanded that everyone should get this basic education. After that it was left to the individual himself in accordance with his aptitudes or resources to fend for himself. That idea is now almost completely outmoded and outdated. The pity is that it is only recently that we seem to have come to realise that this is so.

The totalitarian states which emerged after the First World War provided proof of the value of State orientation in education, the value of adopting a policy designed mainly for economic advancement and, therefore, a policy which postulates a large measure of State control. There is a tendency here to resist State control in these things. I do not in principle or in the abstract welcome an increase in State control in education, but I do in practice welcome the increased subsidisation which it involves, and in the economic straitjacket in which we find ourselves, no other course seems open to us but to develop to the full our human resources.

If we are to maintain a comparable standard of living with that of other people with whom we come in contact we must rely entirely on our human resources and try to develop them with an economic target in view. When we look around the world today, we see that economic development, or affluence, and educational standards go hand in hand. Often it is not easy to see which came first, like the chicken and the egg. In America because of its vast natural resources, it would seem that affluence preceded the attainment of high standards in education, whereas in Federal Germany the reverse would seem to be the case. Affluence would seem to be based on the high degree of educational attainment which was traditional in that country. In any case, we are not likely now to discover any hidden resources which would give us an easy way to affluence so we must fall back on our human resources. Unfortunately, we have acquired an appetite for affluence and we have not the educational pabulum to satisfy that appetite.

What have we been doing over the past 40 years? We have been waffling and talking a good deal, and vacillating between the old classical idea of educating for the development of the individual personality without reference to any economic targets, and the production through a type of vocational education of an individual whose aptitudes are moulded and designed to fit into a pattern of employment with overall economic targets in view. The realisation that this state of affairs should not be allowed to continue came to us rather slowly and it came, it seems, in the course of our economic planning, and the programming for which this decade has been remarkable. At some point in this planning, it appears it had to be admitted that no plans would come to fruition unless the basic educational needs were first attended to. Now, this point of decision seems to have been reached early in 1963. It was followed by a burst of activity in the Department of Education. There was, first of all, the announcement of the intention to establish comprehensive schools for educationally neglected areas and the setting up of the survey team who produced this Report. This was followed by operations on the syllabuses in science and mathematics. Other things were done as regards the content of the course of studies. We were working up to a position where this new idea of educating people with an economic end in view would be brought about.

I believe the major difficulty arose in the effort to integrate second level education into one unit. This is the feature which has provided the most acute problems for the Minister. It was obvious that without the integration of the second level education into one unit, first of all, the social justice aim could not be achieved and secondly, the task of ensuring that our educational system would subserve our economic needs would be made doubly difficult. As we know, the Minister, in this area, is faced with a very clearcut dichotomy. First of all, there is the public sector, represented by the comparatively young vocational schools and now supplemented by the comprehensive schools. There is the private sector represented by the privately-owned secondary schools which command a large measure of public esteem, enjoy considerable autonomy and are subject to no control with regard to the standard of their fees.

This was the situation facing the Minister who had as his primary aim, I would say—perhaps a dual aim—to ensure that a second level education was made available to all comers, irrespective of means and also to establish such a measure of control over the second level sector in general as would enable him to direct the whole system towards subserving our economic advancement. I suppose this position is actually peculiar to this country. I do not believe that there is any other country which has a problem of this sort, where all the secondary education is entrusted to private owners. We were, for that reason, unable to borrow from the experience of other countries. We have become in this matter victims of our history and victims of our previous parsimony towards education down through the years.

I should like, before going on to discuss how this situation is being met, to say that for anyone in close touch with education in this country there is very little in this volume Investment in Education that surprises. We were all generally aware of the weaknesses it has revealed. We were aware that our educational system lacked cohesion, continuity and purpose, at least as far as wordly aims were concerned; that every secondary school was, or could be, a law unto itself and that social implications were deeply involved at every stage, that it was completely unrelated to national aims, not even excluding the national aim of the restoration of the Irish language. It was clear, therefore, that a patch-work device could no longer suffice, that a complete overhaul was due, both in the interests of efficiency and economy, and, more particularly, in the interests of social justice.

We had, therefore, the two forces converging on the one point of time. We had the urge to fulfil our economic aspirations and our constitutional obligation at the same time to provide equal opportunities in education for all the children of the land. As I said, both of those forces were at one and the same time clamouring for attention. Those forces have been at work in all the other countries for quite a number of years. They are the outcome, of course, of all the changes that are coming about in what is called the silent social revolution that has been going on due to the increasing complexity of our economy, the accelerated pace of scientific advance and all the other things we associate with modern life. Education has to accommodate itself to all those changes and has to serve the new demand in social justice and economic efficiency.

Other countries have experimented with their educational systems in an effort to gear them to these new demands. We are fortunate in that we can have the benefits of the experimentation that has been going on for quite a number of years. We know that some of those experiments have turned out to be dismal failures. Therefore, we are made aware of the pitfalls which we must avoid in redesigning our educational system. Our efforts at reform, it appears, began with an assault on the social aspect of the problem. This, as far as I can see, falls into three phases. The first reaction to the realisation that a section of the community was being denied second level educational facilities was to set about establishing comprehensive schools to cater for those areas. This was the originally announced purpose. Certain specifications were laid down as regards those schools. The decision to do that came about because statistics were paraded here to show that the rate of participation in post-primary education varied very much in parts of the country and that the facilities provided varied very much.

The Minister was driven to do something about this matter. His reaction to this was to set up comprehensive schools in areas that were neglected. This was laudable in the circumstances as an emergency measure while we awaited the report of the survey team. It is significant that only one of the schools which have come into existence conforms to the specifications originally laid down. They were not to displace any existing post-primary schools. I think, in all cases but one, they have displaced existing schools. It appears that the idea of comprehensive schools has now, more or less, been abandoned and that the four schools we have in being and in embryo will remain more or less as educational experimental stations rather than as any real effort at a solution of our educational problems and our problems in social justice.

Speaking on comprehensive schools, we were assured that only highly qualified teachers of experience would be appointed to posts in these schools, that the greatest care would be taken to ensure that these were excellent teachers of their kind and in their subjects, and we were all interested to see what form of recruitment would take place to those schools. Recruitment was by way of public advertisement, and I must comment on the timing of the advertisements because no advertisement about posts in comprehensive schools was inserted in the papers earlier than the month of May.

The Department and the Minister are aware that in these circumstances no experienced secondary teacher, for example, could have applied for any of these posts. These teachers are under contractual obligation to give three months' notice and the Department insist that contracts held by secondary teachers are terminable only on three months notice, taking effect at the end of a term. In the circumstances in which these advertisements were issued for our comprehensive schools, a secondary teacher could not, without infringing his obligations, have applied for these posts. Therefore, one whole category was excluded from applying for these jobs.

The Minister may perhaps have thought that no existing secondary teacher was eligible or good enough but I hardly think that was the reason. If he wanted to recruit into these schools highly qualified teachers—a corps d'élite of teachers as I think his predecessor told us they were to be— for whom there would be a new special salary scale he should have given reasonable notice so as to give secondary teachers aspiring to these jobs a reasonable opportunity of applying for them. On the basis of the timing of his advertisement, I do not think he could possibly have recruited the type of teacher he wanted. As a matter of fact, advertisements have been appearing for these schools all during the summer, autumn and winter. Indeed, only three weeks ago, I saw an advertisement for a teacher for one of the comprehensive schools. It is ridiculous to think that at this time of year you will get teachers of the calibre the Minister told us he needed for these schools.

There is another aspect of this. The issue by the Minister of a new salary scale for teachers in comprehensive schools, in excess of what is given to other teachers, seeing that they cannot be of the calibre which the Minister sought and that the standard of work required of them and the other conditions of service are more or less the same as apply to the ordinary teachers, is an admission of the inadequacy of the salaries of the other teachers. That is a matter that would better be left to the various associations dealing with salaries on behalf of their members. That, then, was the first phase, with its limited target of local facilities.

The second phase came when Deputy Colley was in office as Minister for Education. He appealed for voluntary sharing of school facilities and teacher facilities all over the country. This came after the issue of the Report and, apart from the establishment of the Development Unit in the Department, was the first reaction to this Report and was of course a highly logical one. The first thing anyone would think of doing was to invite and test the goodwill of the various interests in education and ask them to share the facilities and see how far one would get. I doubt if there was any real confidence behind this move. It was politically necessary and highly logical. But there were too many practical difficulties in the way for it to be any great success. People were not prepared to forgo their rights. While they might discuss what might be done, they were not prepared to come to decisions about it. Since it involved new decisions, such as co-education, it was not likely to be acceptable all over the country.

This was a necessary prelude to embarking on phase three, which is the regional planning that is going on at the present time and which was described in its aim and operation very elaborately and clearly in an article in the Irish Press of January 25th. That is the first, I think, the public knew about it. It is a pity the public were not taken into the confidence of the Minister in the matter because this is really a very genuine effort to bring order out of chaos, as it were, and to get down to the ground roots of the problem. It will, I think, have a very real effect on education all round because it will serve to lay a lot of the bogeys that are prevalent at the moment and it will get people to consider education out of the context of the social implications involved in it. However, it is imperative that we walk warily; here in other words, there are a lot of corns on which one could tread if one were not careful.

The procedure evidently is to formulate proposals in the Department based on statistics available to the Development Unit and to submit these to the local interests in education. In theory, that is excellent but proposals emanating from the Department of Education have so often turned out to be decisions that it is little wonder that umbrage was taken at proposals in certain instances. No decisions should be taken hastily and without due consideration of all the circumstances. I am not suggesting that decisions have been taken but, if we instance the case of the Derrybeg School in County Donegal, it must have been made to appear there that a decision was taken and this led to a local demonstration of protest. In this particular instance, it was a source of gratification to me to see people take such pride in their local institution and show such zeal for the retention of this thoroughly Irish school in a thoroughly Gaeltacht area. This is an attitude then, that is to be commended. I only hope that the cold hand of rationalisation will not reach out and deprive this community of this facility which they have built up for themselves. After all, what is rationalisation but the application of reason to the solution of a problem or to a process? We should fail to apply reason if we did not take into consideration all the factors and all the local sensibilities. Otherwise, rationalisation would just become another ugly word.

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

Does the Senator wish to conclude now?

I just want to say that, to my mind, this idea of catchment areas is excellent. I hope the public and the educational interests will accept it for the good idea it is.

Business suspended at 1.05 p.m. and resumed at 2.30 p.m.

Before the business was suspended, I was expressing my warm approval of the principle that is being implemented in the regional surveys going on at the present time and of the design in the pattern of education which it is hoped will eventuate from it. I was also warning against too hasty decisions and, perhaps, failure to take local sensibilities into consideration in arriving at decisions in these areas.

Any plan of rationalisation, such as this is, is of its nature bound to create a redundancy problem, and as a member of a professional organisation, I am very seriously concerned at the prospect of some of my colleagues becoming disemployed or displaced in the process. The danger of their becoming disemployed is only very slight because we are to have many more pupils in the second level when the Minister's plan comes into operation but the danger of displacement is real. Displacement can occur in one of two ways. It can occur on a geographical basis where a man is asked to change from one town to another within the area or where a man may be asked to go from one type of school to another in this process. One of the considerations the planners should keep in mind is to reduce this disturbance element to a minimum and where displacement must take place, to ensure that adequate compensation will be made for loss and disturbance.

Great concern has been expressed for the industrial worker in this regard and there is a Bill before the House to safeguard the interests of workers in industry who are displaced but I have not heard such concern expressed, as yet in any case, for the teachers who may be affected in the planning of education.

I have indicated how vitally teachers are concerned in the planning of this new dispensation. Yet, representatives of the teachers' organisations have not been invited to participate in any of the conferences at which the Department's proposals were considered. The proposals that were considered and discussed at these conferences vitally affect the livelihood of the teachers. Not only were the teachers' organisations not invited but managerial organisations were not invited. It was only after strong representations were made on this matter that representatives of Cumann na Meán-Mhúinteóirí and Cumann na nGairm-Muinteóirí were permitted to attend but then only in the role of observers. I regard this as an obscurantist attitude on the part of the Department.

In all these matters, teachers should be taken fully into the confidence of the Department and there should be maximum consultation with them. They are, after all, a responsible body and I can assure the Minister they are highly organised. I hope that under the new dispensation there will be a change of attitude and that teachers will cease to be regarded as pawns to be pushed around the educational chessboard by knights and bishops. Indeed, this is a feature of the Fine Gael policy statement in relation to education which appeals very strongly to me; I refer to their insistence on upgrading the teacher in the whole process of education.

I have been dealing with the assault on the problem of social justice in the field of education. While this assault was being mounted, while all the resources of the Department were being taxed to the full, as I believe they were, in an effort to have the scene set for the raising of the school leaving age in 1970, out of clear skies came the bombshell from the Minister. I refer to his announcement in Dún Laoghaire that from September, 1967, the opportunity of free secondary education would be available to all up to the completion of the intermediate certificate course. This was really short-circuiting the whole process and the Minister has been lauded highly for his step. I took a hand in that myself and I say now all credit to the Minister for taking that step. He ignored all the difficulties and all the obstacles, the teacher training schedules regarded as necessary before anything like this could be done, the building programme, the balance of payments deficit. All these were swept aside and the Minister comes along and says: "This is something that will have to be done, so let us do it right away." All credit to him for that. It was the Government's responsibility and it was the Minister's responsibility and the Minister accepted his responsibility. He should have our warmest thanks for doing so.

The announcement itself was a bare outline of the target to be achieved in a much shorter time than would have been the case normally. We had to wait some months before the plan was unfolded on the occasion when the Minister brought his Estimate to the Dáil a few months back. In the meantime, speculation was rife as to how this could be accomplished. A great number of people predicted that, because of the financial difficulties, which were highlighted at the particular time, some form of means test was almost unavoidable. A means test is something repugnant to all of us. When the Minister revealed his plan, I, for one, was very glad that he was able to announce that this free scheme applied to everyone who wished to avail himself of it. There was no reference to means. That was a great achievement. We had become so inured to the idea of education being rated so low on the scale of financial priorities that we found it hard to anticipate that the Minister would succeed in extracting sufficient money from the Exchequer to finance a free-for-all scheme. I suppose we failed to reckon with the persuasive powers of the Minister.

With regard to the plan, we must remember that the Minister is young in his Department and he can be forgiven if he has not yet familiarised himself fully with the thinking that goes on in the circles in which he now finds himself. It is a pity, therefore, that a scheme of so much intrinsic merit, designed for such a worthy purpose, should be vitiated by the introduction of so many discriminatory measures. I appreciate the Minister's difficulty. He was restricted to a certain over-all figure and he tried to tailor his scheme to fit that figure. In doing so, he has, consciously it seems, excluded from benefit what he estimates to be 25 per cent of the second level schoolgoing population but which I think will be a much higher percentage. Social justice does not in fact demand that he provide free second level education for all. There are very many parents who are not only able and willing to pay for their children's education but who would even prefer to do so and who would regard it as much a parental obligation as the provision of food and clothing for their children.

It may not be without significance, too, that some of the moderately priced boarding schools, say, those charging around £120 a year, are already in receipt of applications for September, 1967, far in excess of what was normal in previous years. There is an indication there that perhaps people are not yet ready for free education, or certainly a lot of them are not. There is, I suppose, a sort of purple streak in a great many of our people and it is probably a little wider and deeper than the Minister suspects. They are inclined to shy away from this free scheme. They are afraid, unjustifiably of course, but the fact is there. This type of selective discrimination in education tends to differentiate people into classes and to perpetuate social divisions. The primary aim of free education should be to eliminate and eradicate social divisions rather than to perpetuate them, as this scheme in its present form most assuredly will do.

The Minister has, as I said, consciously discriminated as between 75 per cent and 25 per cent, and as if this was not bad enough, the Minister now proceeds to riddle the free side of the scheme with differentiations based on the difference in the level of fees actually being charged, as between £15 and £25. To my mind, this is a monstrous provision. In a free education scheme, the Minister proposes to pay £15 in respect of one child and £25 in respect of another from the same street, and perhaps from the same home. This is surely creating first, second and third class citizens within the particular category with which he is dealing. You may say that the Minister is only paying what the parents would have been asked to pay anyway, but you must remember that in all cases of schools charging low fees, the fees were geared to the parents' ability to pay and not to the standard of education being provided. In the vast majority of cases, they were uneconomic and they were kept as low as they were by the voluntary sacrifice of people who really owe nothing to the Department of Education. Is it, as it seems to be, still the policy of the Department to perpetuate this reliance on voluntary sacrifice?

Investment in education was no novel cliché to these people; they had the courage and the patriotism to invest in education long before the Government came to regard education as an investment and they have incurred debts down the years of several million pounds because of their faith in the future of an educated Ireland. While doing that, they have been subjected to all sorts of frustrating and domineering attitudes. Now they are handed this allegedly free education scheme, cheesepared, as I said, and riddled with discriminatory measures. Really they are entitled to a much better deal. On top of that, they are asked to serve as assessors of the means of parents under the free book scheme. They are asked to be the operators of a means test in each school.

This again is an indignity for the heads of schools and I hope the Minister will reconsider it. Actually, the discrimination does not end there because there are other types of discrimination. Diocesan colleges are to get special treatment and a package deal has been prepared for Protestant schools. I do not grudge any of these people all they can get but I wonder if the Minister has investigated his constitutional position in relation to what he proposes. He is dispensing public money. Is he entitled in so doing to sectionalise the second level schoolgoing population and arbitrarily to dispense to each section according to his whim? Surely equality of treatment must be a first principle here. I wonder if any State has attempted to finance its second level education in as many different ways and at so many different levels as we are proposing to do here.

We have the comprehensive schools and the vocational schools. We have the diocesan colleges, the Protestant schools, the nondiocesan colleges which participate in the scheme, the non-diocesan colleges which do not participate in the scheme, the day schools which participate in the scheme and the day schools which do not participate in the scheme. So we have eight categories, eight levels for the financing of second level education in the country. Within the category of day schools which participate, we may have several grades ranging from £15 to £25 so that even within this category of day schools which, I suppose, would be the lowest category, we are going to have not only first, second and third class citizens but first, second and third rate schools so designated by the Minister.

The Minister has estimated that the cost of paying school fees would be £1,630,000 and he has estimated a further £1 million for transport. That means that there was somewhere between £2½ million and £3 million available for the whole scheme. I should like to make this proposition to the Minister: he should forget about transport. I know the Minister gives a high priority to transport. I suggest that he should forget about financing transport in this way from the central office in Dublin. I think the idea of a nation-wide school transport service run by the Department of Education is a bit outlandish. It will be subject to remote control here in Dublin and I am sure it will be abused and the Minister will be exploited in all this. I would suggest that the transport issue be left entirely to local initiative, that committees be appointed in every catchment area to look after the transport in that area. The fact that there is local responsibility will ensure that there is less exploitation. Our civics course will not have been long enough in operation by then to ensure that strict honesty will prevail in the operation of State services of this kind. The local control will do something anyhow to obviate that kind of thing.

Anyway, I would not favour free transport. I feel that people ought to be asked to pay something for the transport and that only in exceptional cases should a subsidy be called for. There may be catchment areas which will cover a big area but there will be other catchment areas which will not and the amount of transport costs involved in a lot of these should not be very great. I feel parents ought to be very thankful that they have got free education, free tuition, shall we say, in the schools and that possibly a lot of them would be very happy to pay where a contribution is necessary for transport.

If one were to divert the £1 million that is estimated for transport to the tuition side of this scheme the Minister would then be able to pay a flat rate of £25 to everybody. In other words, let £25 be paid in respect of everyone attending a secondary school, whether it be Glenstal Abbey, Clongowes Wood College or Ballydehob. Arrange with boarding schools that they take £25 from the pension payable and let everyone be equally in receipt of State charity. Then nobody can point a finger and in addition, it will obviate the rancour that is bound to arise when people find themselves taxed for the purposes of this scheme and the people who are still paying for the education of their children will have a definite grievance. If this money is paid in respect of all children in secondary schools, that rancour will be obviated.

Even when this is done, if it is done, the per capita costing of the secondary school pupil will still be lower than that of the vocational school at the moment. We got the figures this morning: £40 for the secondary school pupil and £90 for the vocational school pupil so that the addition of this £25 per capita will still not bring it up to the level that is now being paid in respect of the vocational pupil and I will bet anything that it will not even approach the level of the per capita costs for comprehensive schools for which we have not got any figures yet. Perhaps the Minister would be able, when he is speaking, to give us figures of per capita cost in comprehensive schools. I appeal, therefore, to the Minister to revise his plan in the light of what I have said.

I do not profess to know what has been the reaction of school authorities to the plan but I would be surprised if it were other than one of disappointment at the haggling devices that have been resorted to in order to save a little money. As I said, their service to the country is worthy of better.

I do not think the Minister has ever claimed for his plan that it is a plan for education. It is really a plan for schooling and when it is in operation it will eventuate in having all children up to a certain age at school. That in itself, of course, is a major achievement but it involves as a first priority that places be available in schools for all the children.

I know that there is feverish activity in regard to that aspect of the scheme and that schoolroom facilities all over the country are being surveyed but I hope that in this race to accommodate all the children in the schools, whatever kind they may be, that nothing will be done which will lower the standards of efficiency through encouraging any tendency to overcrowding. I hope too that neither now nor in the future will any pressures be brought to bear on school authorities to lower their traditional standards of entry to schools. The Minister has, in his Dáil speech, guaranteed autonomy in this matter to the schools and I am glad that he has done that because this measure of autonomy at least is essential if the scheme is to hold any attraction for the school authorities. I mention this because I know that some schools are apprehensive as to whether this scheme of the Minister's will interfere with their regular methods of recruitment. In order to allay any fears, I should like the Minister to give a further assurance that notwithstanding the official abolition of the entrance test into secondary schools, the school will be free to demand its normal standard of entry provided it uses its capacity to the full.

Having got all the children to school we have, to some extent anyhow, fulfilled our obligations in social justice, and we must then plan their education. Their education must be planned having regard to the employment opportunities that are available and that are going to be available. I have already spoken about priorities in a limited context, but the over-all priority in all this planning must be the availability of employment. Estimates, or projections as they call them, have been made in the Report on Investment in Education as to the numbers that will be required in various categories of employment in the years to come. It is predicted that there will be grave shortages in certain areas of employment. I cannot say how valid these predictions now are. They are based on the assumption that the interim targets in the Programme for Economic Expansion would be achieved, and since those targets have not been achieved it is likely that the projections will have to be adjusted.

Leaving out all that, the general message is clear, that our education must be designed to equip people for employment that is planned to be available. If that increased employment is not available, then all the Minister's well-meaning efforts will result only in further crowding the employment market, in increasing the number of malcontents and possibly the number of emigrants. This is why we cannot view the Minister's scheme in isolation. This is why it is inexorably bound up with our economic advance, and this is why it is prudent to preserve some sort of balance between economic productivity and investment in education.

If our educational system must be redesigned to meet the economic challenge, we have to establish certain priorities, and among the first of these I would regard the recruitment, the training and the re-training of teachers. This is an aspect of the matter which I do not propose to develop at great length for more than one reason: first, it is probable that it will be dealt with specifically in the Report of the Commission on Education which is due very soon and which I do not wish to anticipate; and, secondly, I am aware that a representative committee has been set up by the Department and is at work in investigating the whole position of teacher training; my own association is represented on it and I can, therefore, have representations made to that committee. I know also that a motion on that subject is on our Order Paper. Therefore, I shall be content, on the matter of recruitment, simply to reiterate the old warning that an efficient and a suitably qualified teaching corps cannot be recruited at cut-price rates.

This may not be the most appropriate occasion on which to develop this subject, but it cannot be too often repeated that the qualities that go to make a good teacher, scholarship, skill and personality, are the most important factors in shaping our youth and these are commodities that must be purchased at a fair price in the open market. However, the over-all point I want to make in relation to it is that the Minister is now investing a substantial amount of money in education. It is public money and he has an obligation to ensure, as far as he can, that it shows a return. This he can do only by designing a system to subserve the economic needs of the country.

With a complete system of comprehensive schools this could be relatively easy, though very costly. It would obviously be much less costly to use the existing facilities and still be generous in equipping existing schools. In that context may I suggest that the building grant scheme for schools should be revised to enable, first of all, a higher proportion of the repayment to be made by the State, and to remove the provision whereby deduction from capitation is made in perpetuity from schools which have allegedly benefited from the scheme.

Furthermore, to come back to something I mentioned before, when a new dispensation is with us, let teachers be treated as reponsible people and not as ciphers. I would appeal to the Minister to consult them on all matters, on policy, on curricula and methods, and to treat them as colleagues in a common task, and be advised by them as to how the newly proposed educational unit is to be developed and as to the basis on which a streaming system is to operate in the senior cycle of schools.

I am glad to say there is a fair measure of consultation on these matters at the moment. There has been an improvement in that respect, but as the terms of the Fine Gael motion suggest there are still areas of education, particularly the examination area, in which the professional educator is denied any responsibilty. Another method of up-grading the teacher that I want to suggest here is the establishment of posts of responsibility in the schools with suitable emoluments attached to them. This would enhance the status of the teacher. There is one other reform for which I would plead and that is that no teacher should be permitted to teach a subject in which he has not a university qualification or its equivalent. This is not the first occasion on which I pleaded in this House and elsewhere for a reform of this kind.

My association has on several occasions made representations to various Ministers for Education about it, but nothing has been done. It would be particularly important in the senior cycle of the school that only highly qualified people in their subjects be entrusted with the teaching of those subjects. People from other countries think it is a most ridiculous state of affairs when you tell them that a person who has a primary degree in, say, economics can teach Latin, Greek, Mathematics or anything at all. This was always important, but it is going to be more important now that education is assuming a new purpose. I hope the Minister will consider this and that, even though his predecessors have been slow to accede to this request, he will see the justice of it and set it right. My association has actually proposed that teachers in the Leaving Certificate classes should be confined to the subjects which they have done for their degrees, and below that teachers should have some university training in the subject which they are teaching, not necessarily a degree subject.

I do not want to detain the House any longer. I would renew my appeal to the Minister to remove from his plan the sources of irritation and vexation to which I have referred. It would be a great pity if the under-privileged sections of the population, for whom the plan is really designed, did not get the chance the plan proposes for them simply because there may be a difference of opinion between the Minister and the school authorities as to the best type of provision with regard to the level of fees to be paid. I personally wish the scheme in its purpose every success. I hope it will be amended so as to be acceptable to all and that the Minister will give due consideration to the suggestions I have made.

Lastly, I want to pay a short tribute to the survey team who brought out this Report. I thought Senator Quinlan was sparing enough in his praise of them. I should like to point out they were working in what was, for all practical purposes, a statistical vacuum. They made reference in the course of the Report to several areas of investigation in which there were no records. They had to devise means to come to a statistical decision, and this would not have been necessary had proper records been kept. The volume is, of course, of inestimable value. Now, with the suggestion Senator Quinlan has made, I hope they will find it easier in the future to provide us with statistical information which will be up to date. This Report will be the basis for it. I should like to pay a tribute to this team—numerically small but obviously high-powered in ability and energy— who have in a relatively short time made these massive volumes available to us.

This is the first occasion upon which the Minister has appeared in this House as Minister for Education. I should like to welcome him here and to express the hope that in the course of this debate—which I rather think is going to be somewhat more lengthy than the Minister and indeed many of us may have bargained for—he will find much that will be of value in the consideration of the very serious problems with which he, as Minister, is and will be confronted.

The Minister has, so to speak, hit the headlines by the dramatic announcement he made last September about free post-primary education. The objective is one with which we all agree. It is another day's work as to how quickly it can be attained. I hope in what I have to say I will not unduly weary the House. The subject before us involves many considerations and can be approached from many angles. Indeed, it is a very wide field. One can see the benefit of the rules of debate in confining the House to specific matters and keeping people within the terms of reference. On the motion we are discussing, I would say it would be very difficult to be out of order as far as relevance is concerned. Nonetheless, I hope it will be possible to narrow the field, especially the area of difference between the people on this side of the House and those on the other side.

In trying to come to grips with the subject of education, it seems to me that our policy for the future will be determined by the kind of environment in which the child, as adolescent and as adult, will have to live. The policy of the Minister and of the Government has yet to be revealed, I think. The Minister for Education, on the occasion of the Estimate in the Dáil last December, indicated that that was not —although many would have thought otherwise—the appropriate time to unfold his policy. I am sure this debate will not be as lively and as purposeful as it can be until the Minister has spoken and outlined the policy of his Department and of the Government in relation to education.

One of the things that come across to one reading the Report, Investment in Education, is the continual insistence by the compilers on the necessity for using scarce resources to best advantage. In education, as in everything else, it does not matter how laudable or how desirable the objectives, or how anxious we may be to achieve them, we are going to be limited by our economic and human resources as they are at present. It seems to me that, in trying to narrow down the picture for the moment and in order to focus our attention to the point of the immediate problems of education, it is necessary to consider the kind of society in which the children of tomorrow will have to live. It is very difficult to predict what that society will be. However, I think it is true to say it certainly would be the hope of all of us that it is likely to be one marked by a greater increase in wealth and a greater choice of goods and services which the people of tomorrow compared with those of today, will be able to have.

It is a truism to say in 1967 that the future will be marked by rapid and far-reaching economic and social changes. The implications of the Common Market, the displacement of workers, the necessity for people to have foreign languages that they do not require now, the necessity, perhaps, of emigrating not to the United Kingdom as they do at present, but to France, Germany or Holland, may be realities in the 70s and 80s, things that are now not dreamt of. With the growth of economic progress and the introduction of automation and computerisation—to use a new word— there will be more leisure. Even now, with the progress we have made through the agency of economic factors, the pressure of trade unions and through commonsense as well, we have the five-day week. That is for people who are employed; it does not apply to people like myself who work nearly seven days a week. We shall have more leisure and that poses its own problems. A child of today will be the adolescent and the adult of tomorrow and will need some guidance so as to use his leisure to best advantage so that it will not become a bore and a burden to him.

There will be need for more adaptability. People may have to change from one occupation to another. The turnover in America is extraordinarily high even in terms of residents. It may well be that when we become part of the community of 280 million people, about which the British Prime Minister spoke recently at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, there will be more changing of occupations and greater need for adaptability and flexibility on the part of the workers of tomorrow, whether clerks or managers, than there is today. These are the things, it seems to me, that our educational policy and system must take into account and towards which the training and development of attributes of our young people today must be directed.

In another sense, the society of tomorrow is one which holds out great hopes for all of us and we wish these hopes to be realised in the fullness of time. Every nation is advancing today, making social progress, becoming more civilised and more Christian in its approach at home to it own citizens and abroad to other nations. At present we do not have any great number of foreigners within our shores. In the next 20 or 30 years, we may well have substantial cadres of foreigners who will become resident minorities and we shall have to develop new attitudes and a broader outlook towards these people who will differ from us in many ways. We shall have to understand and sympathise with their difficulties as we have long since in this part of the country learned to understand and sympathise with the differences between fellow Irishmen.

In the society of tomorrow, it also seems that we must have more regard for those among us who have not been endowed by nature with the qualities of the average child. The problem of the mentally handicapped, apart from the categorising of children who suffer in that way, is growing by reason of advances in gynaecological techniques. I understand the position is that because fewer children are dying at birth at present, more children are coming into the world mentally handicapped because of accidents that occur in the process of birth. That is the sort of problem we must do more about. It is an increasing problem. I have expressed the view before and I again do so now, that these children, the slow learners, the mentally and physically handicapped, are as much entitled to the fullest education from which they are capable of benefiting, as the average child. Our Constitution guarantees free primary education to all our children and we are not giving free primary education or anything like it to the mentally handicapped. One can see parents and friends of these children organising functions of one kind or another in order to provide schools for them. The necessity for that is the kind of thing we must eradicate and in a very short time.

When one listens to Senator Ó Conalláin one is inclined to have a certain sympathy with the view he is expressing. I do not think he crystallised what he had to say but there is a certain fear in his mind that giving everything free to the children of today and tomorrow will not be good for them. I think that is an old-fashioned view. If children get a really good education, they will be no less independent, no less strong willed, or any more dependent on society or the State than they would be if allowed to continue in their own way. On the contrary, what is likely to happen if our children do not get as much education as their cousins, children of uncles who have emigrated to England, is that our children will go about with a chip on their shoulders that they have not the advantages the children in Britain have got. They are not given these advantages at present. Education is not compulsory even up to the age of 15.

In England, if one reads the Newsome Report published in 1953, the stress is on the urgency of the problem of declaring that from 1965 on children who enter the secondary schools will have to go to school until they reach the age of 16. The Newsome Report regards that as absolutely urgent if the English children and the English nation are to keep pace with developments on the Continent and in America. Here, the need is even more urgent and at a later stage we look forward to hearing from the Minister how it is proposed to accommodate, and in what time it will be possible to accommodate, the 7,000 children who leave school each year at 14 and have no further continuation education.

Another factor, and one that will be with us in the future and must be taken into account in formulating our policy on education, is the effect of mass media and the way in which they form opinions and persuade people into accepting certain views and opinions. I hope the children of the future will not take their opinions in the same way as their parents take a bag of carrots from the shelf in the supermarket and that we shall have children who will be independent and able to think for themselves economically and politically, children who will appreciate the kind of things the State has provided for them and who above all, will be able to live full lives, of the kind those of us who think we are cultured and civilised believe we are enjoying. The more these aims are achieved the more surely will we develop ourselves as a nation and the more likely we are to achieve the greater economic progress that is so urgently necessary.

So that one may not be charged with overlooking a very important factor in education, I suppose it is necessary to say this. We must always bear in mind the influence which religious teaching and instruction will have in the schools. That is outside the scope of this House to deal with but, of course, one sees the continuation of the system of religious education in an even more enlightened way than in the past. In that line, of course, the Church is taking the appropriate measures.

The Minister for Education has, at the present time, a most challenging problem. If I had a choice of a Ministry of the Government, the position I would choose, and always would have chosen, would be that of Minister for Education. There is so much to be done, so much he can do and, in trying to do what he wants and achieving the objectives which, no doubt, he shares with all of us and we share with him, he can rely on the full cooperation of all political Parties and all sections of the community. There are very few Ministers in the position of having that wholehearted support— which sometimes may be too much— but there would be no lack of goodwill, no holding back from anybody— citizens, politicians, professional educators or anybody else—in helping the Minister achieve the objectives we all share with him. It is for that reason the Fine Gael Party have spent a very considerable time in formulating their own thoughts, putting them into print and giving them as much publicity as possible. In doing that, I want to say quite frankly that we have been greatly assisted by the two volumes of Reports got out by the team which made a survey, now entitled Investment in Education. Anybody who reads our policy will see there are numerous references to the contents of those documents. Indeed, one must be enormously grateful to the team for the manner in which they did their work.

I remember, when the Fine Gael Party—in 1958-59-60—were trying to formulate their proposals on policy somewhat along the lines that have emerged in the present document, at every stage we were bedevilled for want of statistics. One could look at the Reports of the Department of Education and there were no statistics to be found in them; they contained most uninformative and useless statistics. In any event, they were always two or three years out of date at the date of publication. I remember when I was at school in the early 1940s it was customary for the Irish Independent every year without fail, on the appearance of the Report of the Department of Education, to comment that it was two or three years out of date, and share the Committee Stage eye of Senator Sheehy Skeffington to point out the bad grammar in the Report issuing from the Department of Education. To me, as a student in the secondary school, it was a matter of satisfaction to know that those who deducted marks from me for Irish or English in the intermediate or leaving certificate—the great educators—were not without fault. I am sure, if the Minister peruses closely our document, he will find what they call errata; one finds them in every document nowadays, due no doubt to the printers.

Forestalling.

We are all indebted to the team who compiled this Report because now at least we have got some of the facts on which we can form a judgment. I do not join with Senator Quinlan in the strictures he has made on the team for any of the deficiencies he may find in the Report; I think a very good job has been done in very trying and difficult circumstances.

In the motion down in the name of the Fine Gael Party here, we are taking out some of the things we think are urgently needed and, on examination of them, it will be found that the cost of some of them will be negligible in comparison with the benefit they confer and will confer on education. To me, it is a matter of puzzlement and of deep regret that in one fell swoop, in the amendment, the Minister proposes, through the acting Leader of the House, backed by Senators Cáit Bean Uí Eachthéirn, Michael B. Yeats and Seán Browne, to reject every single thing we propose in our motion. I trust the Minister does not accept that, because it would be deplorable that some of the things set out here—which are commonplace in other countries, which long since have been regarded as desirable by commissions and councils on education in Scotland, England and other places—should be denied to education in this country.

The number of documents one is able to find in this country dealing with the day to day matter of education is extremely limited. I have tried on occasions to find out various sources of information in relation to the system of education. You cannot find any document which gives you the origin of the managerial system, unless you read the Council of Education's Report, which merely gives a summary of that system. If you want to find out what are the rules and regulations relating to the secondary branch of education, as to whom decides the curriculum, as to how the system is financed, you will have very great difficulty in finding any publications. If you want to know what guidance is given to teachers in the primary branch of the Department of Education, you get these undated documents—Notes for Teachers in English, Programme of Primary Instruction, Notes for Teachers in Geography and Nótaí Daidí Gaeilge, a document which I think was published in the 1920s, and still the only document available for the guidance of national teachers in this country in relation to Irish. No doubt the Minister will tell us that Buntús na Gaeilge is sufficient and the results of that study will be made available shortly in relation to the teaching of Irish, but it illustrates the delay that has been so rampant in the Department of Education for so long to say that those are the best that the island of saints and scholars can produce in 1967. I do not say that in anger; I say it in sorrow. It implies the necessity for the Minister for Education and his Department to listen to the views of other people and to bring into the stream of thinking all of those who are only too willing to lend their hands and co-operate with the Minister and his Department in the formulation of an educational policy for the future.

Even in relation to the Rules for National Schools—a document we had before us on another occasion on a motion relating to corporal punishment—it is difficult to know when that document was published. The only way we could get a clue from it was to refer to some kind of thing at the bottom, like a requisition reference, where we see something given under the hand of the Minister for Education on 22nd January, 1965, and we conclude that it must have been some time in 1965 that those Rules were made. But this is the dreadful approach to documentation, to providing information to the public, one finds and has found in the Department of Education up to date. Therefore, it behoves us in this House to consider well before rejecting out of hand, as invited so to do by Senator E. Ryan, the proposals we make in relation to the various matters set out in our motion.

I want to say at once that the staffing of the Department of Education has for years been deficient in numbers, in quality and in the type of individual it is necessary to have in that Department. That may not be the fault of successive Ministers for Education. It may be that the Department of Finance said: "No, you cannot have any more staff." That is one of the difficulties which arise. Here in this latest directory of services for 1966, we find that the technical people in the Department are not up to full strength. There are many people who would say that even full strength is not anything like the adequate corps of professional and technical advisers there should be in the Department. One finds in the secondary branch that there is a vacancy among the 30 inspectors: in the vocational branch, there are four vacancies for Grade A inspectors, and three vacancies for Grade B inspectors. One is impelled to ask how can a Department which is so lacking in the minimum professional staff do the job that is necessary in this day and age.

We in the Fine Gael Party do not think that the professional staff, even at full strength, is the appropriate set of persons to lay down the methods, the curricula and the examinations for the various schools. That system has been done away with in Northern Ireland. We believe that the framing of the curricula for the different levels and the different cycles in education should be passed over to people who are expert in these matters. If one looks at the qualifications of the inspectors in the Department, one finds that they are not necessarily educational experts. So far as I am aware, that applies to the inspectors of the primary, secondary and vocational schools. Indeed, even if they were experts, it is correct to say that far too much of the time of the inspectors is taken up in policing duties rather than in the formulation of educational policy and the thinking out of the curricula that should be followed at the different ages in the different schools.

We believe these matters should be taken out of the hands of the Department and given to the teachers, with the assistance of the inspectors. They should be given to people who are expert in particular subjects and in the formulation of the programmes that should be followed. It may be that instead of having one programme, there should be a variety of programmes relating to the needs of the child living in a city or a rural area. It may be that there should be an experimental programme for a period instead of what one finds in this miserable and dry document which merely gives headings and does not give any proper assistance to the teachers in the light of the changing circumstances in which we live.

It is true to say that in the Department of Education, no less than in any other Department, it is not the professional staff who have the final say. The dominating influence in most State Departments is the administration, and one hears complaints about this at dinners of Cumann na nInnealtóirí and from people like that. There is a certain justification for the administration having a big influence because the professional and technical people are apt to take their own side of the story only into consideration. It is necessary to have a balance and to have, so to speak, a political judgement. It seems to me—and I have heard this from inspectors of the Department—that many of the decisions and the policies they wanted to put through were completely over-ruled by the administration side. The administration side, no matter how intelligent and well-intentioned it may be, cannot appreciate all the things the technical experts have done and are still doing.

It is only recently that the Department has recruited a statistician and psychologists. They have four psychologists. They were recruited, I think, after the debate we had on corporal punishment. During all those years the Department has denied itself—or been denied by the Department of Finance: I do not know who is responsible—the benefit of what I would regard as this essential expert advice in the field of education. I hope the Minister will give us some indication as to whether he proposes to continue matters as they are, or the kind of technical staff he proposes to recruit, the number, and when he proposes to recruit them.

So far as I know there is no economist attached to the Department, and there is no sociologist attached to the Department. I do not know what research workers are available to do research into the various aspects of education, including the teaching of the Irish language. Buntús na Gaeilge gives certain distinctions only. I do not know what kind of technical experts the Minister has or whether he has it in mind to recruit such people. I hope he will be able to give us some indication about that in the course of his speech.

The next thing we suggest in our motion is that the State should encourage and assist the establishment and growth of parents' committees to assist the running of national schools. There is nothing at all new about that. I always go back to the basic document on which the laws of this country are based, the Constitution. One finds in the Constitution something that is not new, something which merely states what we all accept as a fact, that is, the State accepts that the parent is the primary and natural educator of the child. That is a truism which is incorporated in our Constitution, and it is good that it is there. It indicates, too, that the State has certain rights where the parents do not fulfil their obligations. The State undertakes to provide free primary education for all its children. The State is right to say that in the case of Protestant children who live in sparsely populated areas and cannot therefore avail of this free primary education, more money will be provided. The same applies to mentally handicapped children who cannot benefit from free primary education unless more money is devoted to providing them with special facilities which will help them to benefit from the free primary education to which they are entitled.

Having said that and having recognised that the principal educator of the child is the parent, we have wiped the parent off the slate and he is not heard of any more in our educational system. Mind you, in 1943, the Council of Education in Scotland were dealing with this particular problem. It appears this must be a deficiency of the Celtic races because the Scottish Council of Education were rather apprehensive about participation by teachers in the education of their children—I should have said parents.

It is all right.

The Scots apparently were very diffident in approaching the teachers and it was felt that to change the system rapidly overnight and have some kind of parent/ teacher committees, the pendulum might swing the other way and that they might become too domineering and too interfering. However, that particular aspect of education has been revised both in Scotland and in Britain. For a long time in England there have been parent/teacher associations and there has been regular contact between parents and teachers.

This valuable document, Rules for National Schools under the Department of Education, provides in Rule 13, on page 11 that:

Any person may, with the manager's permission, visit a national school during school hours for the purpose of observing the ordinary working of the school but such visitor may not interfere with the business of the school or divert the attention of the teachers or pupils from their work.

I was in a national school and there never was a time when anybody came in to visit a teacher or a classroom that we were not all diverted from our work. Apparently, the parents under this rule are to go into the class room like the ghost of Banquo and only be seen by the teacher and not by the pupils and not divert the attention of the teacher or pupils from their work. The Rule further states:

Visitors are not permitted to examine any of the school records and should a visitor seek information which is not available from observation of the working of the school it is the duty of the teacher to refer him to the manager.

Anybody who knows rural Ireland knows very well that a parent will not go to the parish priest and say: "I wanted to see this or that record today but the teacher would not allow me". In the first place, the parent would not dare approach the manager in that way and in the second place, he knows very well that the manager would not receive such a request. That is rural Ireland and I think it is urban Ireland as well.

The Rule goes on to state:

Managers may give to visitors only such information regarding the school as would come within the scope of legitimate enquiry. Parents may be given such extracts from the school records regarding the attendance or treatment of their children as might reasonably be expected.

Therefore, if Johnny has been punished a number of times and it has been entered in the school records, only such extracts as the manager approves may be given. The last part of this Rule states:

Where any doubt or difference arises as to the information which may be supplied to visitors or parents the final decision shall rest with the Minister.

I am sure that is no substitute for what we propose in this motion and in our policy document, that the State not alone should get rid of the antediluvian approach to education but that it should encourage the establishment of parents' committees to assist in the running of the schools. We want to involve parents in the work of the schools, what is going on in the schools and everything else in relation to the education of their children so that parents can be usefully involved. If you get parents to do that kind of thing, they will have a greater interest in the education of their children.

What is the position at the present time? At the present time most parents will shy off going to the teachers to find out how their children are getting on because they feel that the teachers will regard them as prying, as being inquisitive and implying that their children are not being taught properly. That is the unfortunate position at present. The truth of the matter is that the only occasions upon which parents have contact with teachers is when they go to them regarding a complaint about either corporal punishment which the child has received or where the child has been beaten up by one of his companions going to school or coming home from school or something of that kind. That, to me, is a deplorable lack in our educational system.

There ought to be regular contact between parents and teachers. The parents only know the child at home and the teacher only knows the child at school. Neither knows how the child reacts in the other context. I have found it instructive to find out from time to time why it is that a child who is bright and busy at home falls far behind in school. The problem is how to deal with this kind of thing so that the parents and teachers can cope in order to develop that aspect of the child's character and development. At the present time none of that goes on. There is, to my mind, very little contact between parents and teachers. I feel that there should be much greater contact between parents and teachers. The Minister, in this amendment, proposes that this shall not be done. If the Minister is going to insist that that should not be done, I should like to know what he thinks should be done so that there will be some contact between parents and teachers and the parents will know how the child is getting on at school.

I believe, in relation to our national schools, that a regular written report on the child's work should be sent to the parents, certainly yearly, and perhaps twice a year, so that the parents who do not come to the school will have a written statement as to how the child is getting on. I do not care whether the report is based on an examination or whether the child is doing very good, good, poorly or how he does in the different subjects, or whether the report is based on the child's discipline, deportment or things of that kind, but there should be some kind of information given to the parents other than just a statement saying how the child is doing. The interested parent will see how the child is doing in relation to his homework and give the child some necessary advice at the particular time. Some of this contact takes place to a greater or lesser degree at the moment, depending upon the capacity and interest of the parents, the approachability of the teachers and the reputation of the school.

Indeed, I heard of a case recently which goes to show the urgent necessity for this kind of contact between parents and teachers. There was a particular child who was considered backward when a young teacher took over. The backwardness of that child was attributable to the fact that the child was deaf to outsiders other than its parents, brothers and sisters. Whatever wavelength they were on, the child could understand what was going on at home but could pick up nothing at all at school. The child was perfectly normal, other than this deafness at school. When this deafness was discovered, it was possible to make some progress with the child. All the parents knew in that case was that he child was going to school and that he was backward or slow. The reason why he was backward was that he was not hearing properly at school. This is the kind of thing which would tend to occur less frequently if we had more contact between parents and teachers.

In addition to the regular reports, it is desirable that there should be formal discussions between parents and teachers at the beginning, the middle or end of each year, whichever is the best time, to assess the progress of the child. Such a system of meetings should be under the aegis of the Department of Education and be approved by them and all help which they can give to the teachers should be readily available to them. What we are suggesting in our particular scheme is something that has been done in England and one finds it in the report, which was issued in the last few days, of an English Council for Education. This report is referred to in educational circles as the Plowden Report. At paragraph 130 of this Report it says:

All sechools should have a programme for contact with children's homes to include:

(a) a regular system for the head and class teacher to meet parents before the child enters;

(b) arrangements for more formal private talks, preferably twice a year;

(c) open days to be held at times chosen to enable parents to attend.

It goes on to deal with booklets in paragraph (d) and continues:

(e) written reports on children to be made at least once a year; the child's work should be seen by parents;

(f) special efforts to make contact with parents who do not visit the schools.

One finds that the same thing was advocated by the Scottish Council of Education in 1943. What we are advocating in our motion seems to be sanctified by usage and to be approved of by the latest commission that has investigated this particular aspect of education.

One of the great advantages of this particular proposal is that it will, as I have already said, get parents immediately interested in the education of their children. It will not add greatly to the cost of education in any school. Some of the best things in life are free. One of the best things we can offer in education is to bring parents into contact with the teachers so that they will know what is going on, and that will have a far-reaching effect on the attitude of parents towards what goes on in school.

Perhaps I can deviate for a moment and say that if there had been such a contact, and even now if there were such a contact, between parents and teachers and if there were to be meetings between parents and teachers two or three times a year in the school there would be an entirely different attitude by the people towards the learning of Irish. Parents require to be told a lot of things and teachers can tell them about their children's difficulties, and lack of difficulty, in learning Irish. Teachers can raise matters such as this and have them discussed and parents can get the attitude of other parents to them. Each parent would discuss his own problems and, therefore, problems shared in that way would not be half as oppressive to the parents and this would get rid of the attitude in relation to the teaching of Irish which we have experienced for so long in this country.

We entirely agree, of course, with the proposal made by the Government to provide free post-primary education for all children up to the age of 15, and, indeed, over that. The Minister is under a misapprehension as to criticism made here and there in relation to that proposal. What we shall be interested to find out is whether it will not be an untenable task for the Minister to accommodate 7,000 children who would not otherwise receive post-primary education after the age of 14 by the 1st September next. The proposal as announced in Dún Laoghaire seemed to imply that.

The Minister referred to 7,000 school-leavers and said that he proposed from the school year beginning September of next year to introduce a scheme whereby up to the completion of the intermediate certificate course the opportunity for free post-primary education would be available to all families. It may be that the Minister has creative powers which we never suspected. There is one political commentator who speaks of "instant O'Malley". The commodity which the Minister is capable of producing is a very vague and difficult thing to define. I wonder could we have these instant schools from the Minister, and these instant teachers. Can he produce these instantly? That is the only criticism we have to make. They will not be there and it will be a great disappointment. The scheme will get off to a bad start if there are, as there appear to be, a great many people looking forward to this by next September who will find no room in the schools.

We recognise, of course, the case of the child who is aged 14 who pushes a carrier bicycle for a local grocer perhaps to the age of 17. If you take him off that job he becomes a burden and it is too expensive to educate and clothe him. The income he provides to maintain him will be lost if he has to go to school for another year. That is a problem that will apply to many of the 7,000 who leave school at present. To deal with this situation the parents of these children should be provided with free grants while the child is at school to maintain him in the post-primary state. That is part of the cost of free post-primary education up to the age of 16. It is a necessary cost. It will, of course, involve a kind of means test. It would be absurd to say that a man earning £2,000 to £3,000 a year would be entitled to £100 a year in the same way as a man with £5 or £6 a week who is unemployed, in order to keep his child at school up to the age of 16. That is part of the debt the nation owes to those who are at a disadvantage because of the social circumstances of their birth and life. There is a reference in the Plowden Report which I think is not inept in relation to this matter. It occurs at paragraph 174 where it says:

As a matter of national policy, "positive discrimination" should favour schools in neighbourhoods where children are most severely handicapped by home conditions.

This is the "positive discrimination" that must be made available to those at a disadvantage because of social circumstances.

Part of the aim of free post-primary education should be to make good the deficiency of the child's background, to enable the child, who has been born in poor circumstances, through the medium of education to overcome these circumstances and to lead the full life his talents will enable him to lead in the same way as a child of equal talent born in better circumstances.

That is something the Minister invites the House to reject and I should like to know what other way the Minister will deal with that particular child, the child who is born in poor circumstances, whose parents have no income and who is now taken out of some employment in which he could perhaps provide for himself with a little over for other members of the family. Some arrangement should be made for that child. In the case of children who are living in scattered rural areas no transport service however adequate could cover children who have to go to boarding schools and they will have to be recompensed in that way too.

There is another aspect with which I do not intend to deal at great length. There are many others who wish to speak in this debate and I do not want undue repetition. The scheme for post-primary education which the Minister has mentioned, and which Senator Ó Conalláin is not too happy about, will, if he persists in the form of grants he has outlined in the Dáil, push certain schools to the position of the old public school in England which many people are now so anxious to get rid of, and to create this class distinction which hardly exists, which exists in the minds of some parents and some pupils. It hardly exists. A lad now from the Christian Brothers school feels he is just as good as the fellow from Glenstal or Rockwell or anywere else.

And he is, too.

He is. But what the Minister is going to do is to give these other schools which are not going to take part in his scheme a kind of social status and to create them in a class apart that is quite unwarranted in this democratic age. It is getting away from the whole trend of educational arrangements certainly in Great Britain and introducing an unnecessary complexity in our system here.

How are you going to rectify it, then?

There is a way of dealing with that. I have indicated that we do not agree with the Minister's way: other speakers will deal with that later on. I can go into that but I do not want to deal with every aspect of the matter in detail.

I want to come on now to the next matter in relation to teacher training. Senator Ó Conalláin has dealt with the position of secondary teachers. We advocate the integration of the teaching profession. That has been advocated by the national teachers for years and years. The suggestion that national teachers are of the same level as vocational teachers and secondary teachers is abhorrent to certain teachers. The Department of Education, aided and abetted by the Department of Finance, have, year in and year out, been stating in the most categorical way that national teachers are inferior to secondary teachers and vocational teachers. They have resisted this specific claim by the national teachers for parity of treatment, equal recognition and parity of salary scales before various boards of arbitration and conferences that have taken place in the Department of Education. I do not subscribe to that theory at all.

There are many people who will tell you that the most arduous and the most difficult aspect and part of teaching is that of dealing with the young, with children who know nothing or who know very little, and starting with them. One finds teachers from time to time worried and tormented at the end of a day from having had to cope with what, to me as a parent, seems the almost insuperable task of getting so much knowledge, apparently so easily, into the minds of children. I have always marvelled at the skill and competence of the national teachers of this country and at the manner in which they are able to inject so much knowledge in so short a space of time into the minds of those in their charge. We want to get away from this class distinction between the teachers of the children of the nation: we want to get away from that altogether. One way of doing that is to reorganise the system of the training of teachers.

Of course, the preparatory school system was a deplorable system of taking groups of children and putting them together for four years into a preparatory school. They were then taken out of that and put into a training college for another two years. They had no association with the outside world. They had no association with people doing arts, medicine, engineering. They had nothing of the experience that students in any faculty in a university have. They were taken in that kind of way, with a narrow and constricted view, a lack of association, and then they became the teachers of the vast majority of the children of this country. That was a deplorable system. It was condemned as early as 1943 by the Irish National Teachers' Organisation. I have a recollection of that system being condemned many years ago by the present Archbishop of Dublin who is not a man unnecessarily to conflict with the Government, with any Government of the day.

That is the system that has partly been got rid of because the preparatory school system ceased to work. We want to get away from that and into a system where national teachers will be regarded as being of the same status as regards their attainments and qualifications, as regards the importance of the work they have to do and the salary they are paid, as vocational teachers and secondary teachers in the other fields of our educational system.

It is not surprising to find what we advocate in A Plan for Education which was got out in 1947 by the Irish National Teachers' Organisation. On page 26 of that booklet, dealing with the training of teachers, under the heading “General Principles”, we read:

(2) Candidates for teaching should do their secondary course in the ordinary way, and should not be segregated in preparatory colleges at the age of 13 or 14.

(3) There should be a common basic training for all teachers, with the exception, perhaps, of teachers of technological or specific trade courses in vocational and technical schools, as these teachers, of necessity, are generally recruited from industry.

(4) The training course should extend over four years, the first three of these years leading to a university degree and entailing attendance at university lectures, whilst the fourth year should be devoted completely to professional training.

Significantly and surprisingly enough, one finds that the same system, broadly, is recommended in the Robbins Report on Higher Education in England which was published in 1963. There, they want to get away from this segregation of teachers into the different branches, depending on where they happen to teach, and to integrate them into the university stream with a certain amount of changeover from colleges to be known as "educational colleges" into the university and vice versa.

If one wants to see the advantages of that kind of system one has only to look at the various religious seminaries in Dublin. I suppose it happens in other university towns as well. The student priests get a certain amount of their training, education and instruction in the colleges and then they go out to the university for other parts of it. That seems to be a system that works admirably in the spiritual sphere and I do not think that is something that ought to be condemned. It was recommended by the Robbins Report. It was advocated by the national teachers. It is also advocated and long since has been and it has been crystallised into a clearly identifiable form by Fine Gael in their document on education.

This is something which the Minister for Education asks us to reject. What views has the Minister on the training of teachers if he rejects the system we propose?

Who is asking you to reject it?

If I understand anything at all about parliamentary procedure, and I do know something about it, the amendment says to delete all words after "Seanad Éireann" in our motion. If you delete all these words, you are left with this situation that the Fine Gael motion then becomes that Seanad Éireann welcomes the recent proposals for post-primary education announced by the Minister.

The effect of the amendment is that we are satisfied that Government policy will produce the effect.

I want to know why it is that you cannot say that because, if you accept what is contained in the motion, you could say, "Seanad Éireann is of opinion that... and further welcomes the recent proposals on post-primary education."

We cannot accept what is in the motion because it is quite inadequate.

You will have to adopt our policy in the long-run.

The motion is entirely inadequate.

I did not want to come down to anything of a political nature in this debate. Do not draw me into it because I do not want to and have scrupulously avoided Party politics. Everybody will agree that I have succeeded rather well in avoiding that. The temptation is great but do not put the flame to the oxygen.

I have said so much about teacher training. I want to say that even with the best salaries that the economy can provide, there will remain a need to provide some form of promotional incentives and promotional opportunities for the teachers. History plays a great part in this matter. One remembers the Ballina dispute about the appointment of a member of a religious Order as principal of the Ballina national school. There are very few lay schools of any size in which the head is a principal, which would be regarded as one of the better appointments. Most of the big schools are reserved for the religious Orders. That is the fact. That is, perhaps, due to history. We ought to say this in passing, that this country has much to be grateful for, as Senator Ó Conalláin and Senator Quinlan said, to the religious Orders for providing us with a system of secondary education but for too long the system of secondary education has been financed by the vow of poverty. If it were not for the religious Orders and the vow of poverty, we would not have anything like the amount and the variety of secondary education we have had.

Of course, the Protestant schools have not been run by religious Orders. That is one of the reasons why it is necessary to give them higher subsidies. There is no vow of poverty on the part of religious Orders subsidising the education of Protestants. That is a fact and it is something that we have to take account of and, in order to give the children of these religions the same opportunity as is given to the children of the majority religion, we have to pay more to deal with that situation.

I do want to say that there is far too little promotional opportunity available to teachers in this country. The aim should be, where possible, to provide vice-principals or posts of special responsibility or posts in which a teacher in a locality can act as the liaison officer of a committee of education for a county or liaison officer between a number of schools and the Department of Education. Such opportunities should be seized upon and the people who are capable of filling these kinds of posts should be promoted and this in turn will create vacancies for other younger teachers.

Everybody knows that in a service such as the Civil Service, the local government service and the teaching service, promotion is the great thing. Promotion is the thing that people continue to work for, just as in industry people work for profit. We should try to recognise the service that teachers are giving and the monotony and the difficulty that they have in maintaining themselves at a high level of efficiency and we should provide as far as possible promotional opportunities which will keep them happy and contented and give them a sense of being well-rewarded for the work they are doing.

These are all matters which I would think and sincerely hope will be accepted by the House. There may be shifts of emphasis. Some of them may not be possible to implement straight away but I do hope the amendment to this motion will not be pushed in such a way that these desiderata in relation to education will be rejected by Seanad Éireann. That would be a very regrettable position.

Now I want to make some brief reference to the Report on Investment in Education. I do so because I recognise that there are quite a number of difficulties at the present time in relation to the position of school buildings and proper accommodation for children but I do want to impress upon the Minister for Education, who was in his time Minister for Health, that there are certain matters which must be attended to without delay, that cannot be allowed to continue in their present condition.

I want to refer to the Appendix at page 580 which contains some depressing reading in relation to the physical condition of a number of our national schools. One finds that of 4,779 schools, 3,000 are heated by means of open fires. I attended a national school in my time where there were only open fires and I can truthfully say that there never was a time when any of us who were down in the back seats was warm and we had to be taken up in relays in winter time to get heated. It is not good enough in this day and age to say that of 4,700 schools, 3,000 are heated in this antediluvian manner. I wonder how many of the children still bring the two sods of turf under their arms in order to provide fuel? We have just, perhaps, passed that stage. I do not think that is good enough at a time when there are storage heaters, electricity, new gas containers, that can provide some better heating accommodation. It is an urgent necessity that this matter should be attended to. It will not cost all that much. There is no reason why it should not be done immediately in order to provide the children attending these bad schools, these neglected schools, with some of the comforts that other children in this State are getting.

We have had the light on in this House all day. We are in a beautiful Georgian building, renowned for the windows and the lighting system provided in them. For some reason or other, we darken the portion of the chamber behind the Cathaoirleach. In any Government office at 11 a.m. tomorrow, there will be a light on. The same thing will happen on 17th November or 20th December. In the case of national schools we find that of 4,779, there are only 2,989 that have electric current. I am quite certain that they have not got oil lamps or gas lighting. It seems to me to be quite wrong, in this day and age, when so much money is available for so many other things, that we require the children to work and teachers to teach in schools that are inadequately lighted, as they are. We foolishly send medical officers of health to test children's sight while we do not provide the children with electric light and do not provide means whereby the windows in the schools can be cleaned regularly. I know one big four-teacher school in a rich agricultural area where the windows were not cleaned for five or six years. This is the kind of place in which we expect to teach our children.

The Minister for Education should have a look at the Office Premises Act that was passed in 1957 or 1958 and see the standards that are set down in that Act for office workers and forthwith require all persons who have children under their care, the owners of schools, to apply these standards to the small children of the nation, who are defenceless.

I want to turn to another point. I know quite well the difficulties of the Minister in this matter. He does not own the schools and he cannot put his nose in unduly but what is necessary in relation to office workers is equally necessary in relation to children who are attending primary schools. If the present managerial system is not to be upset—and there are some people who would wish to do so—then those who have responsibility for the maintenance of these schools, and there being no other power to enter into these schools, should discharge the responsibility they have as the owners of these private properties.

I want to turn to the table at page 583 which makes even more depressing reading. There we find that of a total of 4,358 national schools, 2,242 have dry latrines as a form of sanitary accommodation. That is what applies to the Catholic schools and I do not think the Protestant schools are a great deal better: of 437 such schools, 123 have the same type of dry latrines as sanitary accommodation.

There is a gentleman called Mr. Frank Hall who has been making great comment in relation to sanitary accommodation in our towns and villages. I only hope he does not get hold of these statistics and send his cameras out to some of the places which our children have to use. The problem is much more urgent now than it was ten or 15 years ago because children are now coming from homes where they have running water and flush toilets and are being compelled at school to use these dreadful, outmoded, uncivilised and barbarous amenities.

Provide me with a better word: "Facilities" is the word used in this document. I have been told by parents that there are children who seize up and refuse to use these things. It is injurious to the health of the children. In any event, it is quite uncivilised. I know one parent says to another: "Is it not terrible?" and the other parent says: "Yes, it is shocking". There is none of them would approach the manager of the school because none of them likes to offend, or annoy, or to incur the displeasure of the manager. I say quite deliberately that that system is not good enough and I direct my appeal to those in authority over the managers, who can do something about this, to do it because this is the kind of thing that is seized upon by the enemies of the managerial system, by the enemies of the Church, and it is employed by them to illustrate the kind of decay and neglect associated with religious domination in this particular sphere.

Who is in authority over the manager?

The Senator should read the reports of the Department of Education.

It is not the Minister.

No; I have said so. Those in authority over the managers are the bishops and moderators, the trustees of the various schools. They are the only people who have the right to enter and deal with a situation because these schools are private property. The Minister has his difficulties but he also has his responsibilities, and we should apply to these schools the same standards Oireachtas Éireann applies to offices for adults, adults who can do something about their conditions. I know very well that what I say may incur displeasure in certain quarters but it has to be said. I hope it will get the maximum publicity because it is an outrage and a scandal that such things should be permitted in 1967, the more especially as children now come from homes which have the facilities that ought to be provided in the schools.

The teachers have to grin and bear it too.

Of course, they have. I am quite sure the teachers will deal with the matter.

As a matter of fact, the Minister is entitled to withdraw recognition from any manager who does not comply with the Rules.

How often has he exercised the power?

A Parliamentary question on that would, I am sure, be very illuminating. I rather think it would not be hard to gather the statistics.

One final word about the Fine Gael document on education. I do not want it to labour under the vapour with which the Minister tried to surround that policy on education in his reply to the debate on the Estimate for his Department. Remember, he did that at a time when nobody could reply to him. The truth is this document was not got out in a matter of days or weeks. That is what the Minister tried to suggest. He tried to suggest it was something patched up and rushed out for the sake of a by-election. A responsible Party like the Fine Gael Party, interested in the wellbeing of the nation, do not do that kind of thing. Incidentally, the Minister made another mistake on another occasion on television when he said there was no reference to education in the document "Towards a Just Society". I should have brought that here and presented the Minister with a copy of it.

The kernel of the speech he made in Dún Laoghaire in September was contained in our policy published as far back as 1961. It was repeated again in our policy for a just society published in 1965. This was the outcome of nine, ten, or 12 months intensive work by a committee comprised of members of the Fine Gael Party, members of the Oireachtas, supporters of the Fianna Fáil Party who were so upset at the "Do nothing" attitude of the Government they were prepared to give any help they could in the preparation of this policy. They attended meeting after meeting of the committee and of sub-committees in order to get some kind of policy formulated on educational matters. There were no civil servants involved in this. We do not have civil servants to help us. Government Ministers have civil servants to do the work.

So far from this being a rushed document, it can now be told, as the newspapers say, that there are certain aspects of that document which were to my certain knowledge, the subject of seven drafts, passing from the committee to the Front Bench, to the Party, and back again, until we were satisfied the document accurately expressed the mind of the Fine Gael Party on education. I trust that will disabuse the Minister's mind once and for all of any suggestion that this was something rushed out at hoc. It was, of course, the timing of its publication that profoundly disturbed the Minister and I do not mind him giving expression to his annoyance from that point of view.

That is the truth about the document. The proposals we make are proposals resulting from continued and prolonged study and discussion with experts in all branches of education and with different shades of political opinion, I am glad to say. What we suggest in this motion, which I urge the House to adopt, is only part of what we have in our policy document.

I want to say a word to the Labour Party now about their policy. To their credit, be it said, they produced a written policy. People can read it. They may agree with it or disagree with it. It is of interest to note that they cover about half of what is covered by our document, but at any rate half a policy is better than no policy, and if all of that half had been implemented long ago, or if this policy had been implemented, or the various suggestions which we made from time to time had been crystallised and examined by the Minister, we would not now be discussing the kind of things we are discussing. Remember that the Commission on Vocational Organisation, away back in 1943, made some of the suggestions in their report that we are advocating now and I suppose if you went back further, you would find that there always were people interested in education who were advocating some of the things we are talking about today.

Although the Minister has issued no White Paper—the only statement of policy we have is this document which was published in Dún Laoghaire—I hope as a result of this debate he will have embodied in the Official Reports of this House the comprehensive policy of the Government and the Department on primary and post-primary education to the level of universities. I have been unduly long, much longer than I thought I would have been, and I hope I have not overtired the Members of the House with too long a speech.

I should like to propose the amendment: "To delete all the words after `Seanad Éireann' and substitute——"

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

I might point out that it is not appropriate to propose the amendment at this stage; rather should the Senator speak to the motion proposed by Senator Quinlan and outline the amendment which can be moved at the appropriate time.

The amendment which we will be moving in due course reads:

To delete all the words after "Seanad Éireann" and substitute:—"welcomes the recent proposals for post-primary education announced by the Minister for Education, and is confident that they represent a far-reaching and progressive step forward in our educational system."

Senator O'Quigley has taken some umbrage because we put down this amendment. He takes the line that Fine Gael have put down a motion in six parts and maintains that these parts are unexceptionable statements of policy with which anyone could agree and that it is a terrible thing to have the Fianna Fáil Party putting down this amendment which would have the effect of eliminating these six parts and inserting this expression of confidence in the Minister's policy. There were two main reasons why we felt it necessary to bring in this amendment. First of all, there are a number of points in this so-called unexceptionable Fine Gael motion which we felt were open to strong objection; secondly, there are some blatant omissions from the list of points in this motion which make it unsatisfactory and inadequate as an expression of a comprehensive educational policy. To take the first objection first, we have, for example, the first point in the motion that "the primary responsibility for teaching methods, curricula and examinations should be transferred to professional educationists independent of the Department of Education." We can all agree that to say the least of it there was an unduly conservative bent in the Department of Education in past years. There was a lack of adequate professional advice and a desire to move with the times. Under a succession of highly able and strong-minded Ministers, very great changes have come about and today the Department of Education is very different from what it was ten years ago.

Apart from that, to my mind, the only result of setting up this series of committees recommended by Fine Gael to deal with such matters as teaching methods, curricula, examinations and so on, would be that nothing at all would happen. We had an example of what could happen when well-intentioned amateur experts came together to deal with matters in the Commission on Higher Education. To my mind, the Council of Education in its day was not a good type of example either. We are likely to reach the position where outside amateur experts come together to sit on councils, committees or commissions, call them what you will——

Could I just ask the Senator to explain what he means by "amateur experts"? I do not quite understand.

An interesting concept.

I really mean people who are experts——

A teacher perhaps?

A teacher is an expert as a teacher but that does not mean that he is an expert administrator. My point is that this type of body is not in a position to make the sort of rapid, comprehensive education system which is required. It is composed of teachers and so on. I am entirely in favour of the Department seeking all possible advice from teachers and any other experts——

But not taking it.

——and in so far as that has not been done in the past, the Department deserves every possible blame. Headmasters or teachers have not got the time, and in certain cases have not got the ability, to run a wide administration of the kind which is covering the entire country. It is a grand theoretical concept but the only result would be that over the years there would be a considerable slowing down of the type of progress we all want to see and which could be——

I take it that the Senator is aware——

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

Is this a point of order?

——that this system has been working in Northern Ireland for the past six years to the satisfaction of all concerned, including the Minister?

Judging by some of the other heads of this motion, I suspect that what has been taking place in Northern Ireland is not as satisfactory down here. A further difficulty is that teachers in this country—I think Fine Gael will agree—have tended to be split, and in fact education has tended to be split, into different groups, primary education, secondary education and vocational education. One of the really good things that have come about in recent years is that the Minister and his predecessors in office have done a great deal to bring together the different branches of education. Nothing is more certain than this, that if there were these independent bodies of educationists, you would not have as of now a joint intermediate certificate examination. The vocational teacher and the secondary teacher would each be fighting his own corner.

I am very much afraid that this first part of the Fine Gael motion while it is highly desirable in theory, in practice it would merely mean that progress which can be made and should be made would not come about because those professional educationists would tend to look after their own corner only. The secondary teachers believe secondary education is the best system, vocational teachers tend to prefer that particular form of education and so on. I am very much afraid that they would split on a matter of this kind and that the very necessary pooling of educational resources would be considerably delayed.

Debate adjourned.
The Seanad adjourned at 5 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Wednesday, 8th February, 1967.
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