The effect of this amendment, as I tried to explain last night, will be to set forth that so far as the Legislature is concerned, it is to be enacted that every person up to sixteen years of age will be expected to undergo a course of instruction. It is not an amendment which will prevent boys or girls from obtaining employment for pay after fourteen years of age. Some of us may wish that that will, eventually, be the case, but the effect of this amendment will be to require that every boy and girl shall undergo a systematic course of instruction of some sort, up to the age of sixteen years; that is to say that, if employed after fourteen years, they will be required to undergo some instruction of a systematic kind, of a kind approved by the Minister, for a number of hours per year, notwithstanding the fact that they are in employment. If a boy or girl is apprenticed to any trade or business or profession, then also that would be taken to be a course of systematic education and they will not be required to attend the ordinary school. If attending a technical school or a post-elementary school, that also would be considered to be part of the instruction which is required for every boy and girl. The effect will be—what I think everybody in theory supports— that systematic instruction shall be the lot of every boy and girl, up to sixteen years of age at any rate. It also requires, if this amendment is carried, that being allowed to leave school at fourteen should be subject to a certain standard of proficiency in education being reached. That, I take it, is a matter of very general acceptance. We are not going to assume that children who have attended school up to the age of fourteen are in a position to leave school without having attained a moderate standard of efficiency. Otherwise no advantage is being derived from any proposal to compel children to attend school.
I think it is accepted, very generally too, that the years from 12 or 13 to 16 or 17 are the years when it is particularly necessary, for the fuller development of the character and brain of the child, that there should be regular instruction, and that the habit of learning—if one may put it that way —the habit of application should be and can only be engendered during those years. It is because we have been loose in that regard that so many of the boys and girls of the elementary schools in the past have lost all touch with tuition and educational methods, and when, at the age of sixteen, they come to trades or occupations, they are found to have lost very much of the education they acquired up to the age of 12 or 13. It is during those three or four years that retrogression takes place. I hope that it will be generally accepted that a different standard should be the normal. We know, as a matter of practice, that very large numbers of the boys of the country do go to school up to 16 years of age, especially in rural areas. In practice, this particular provision will have effect more in the towns than in the rural areas. There is no hardship entailed upon anyone by this unless you are going to argue that boys of 14 to 16 should be allowed to run wild or free, whether they are employed or not.
The real effect of this amendment would be to ensure that if boys are not in employment, they will be at school, and if they are in employment that they should, in addition, be receiving some systematic instruction. I think that that proposition should commend itself to the Dáil, and I think that it is of the utmost importance that it should be laid down in this enactment that that is the intention of the Legislature. It is better to do it by that means and leave any remissions or adjustments to meet the particular state of the country and to meet the educational facilities of the country, to be relaxed somewhat by the Minister for Education, rather than, as has been suggested, that we should limit the compulsory attendance to fourteen and then allow tightening up at later stages.
It is much more important that the Legislature should lay down that the normal period of systematic instruction should continue to sixteen years of age and then if, to meet temporary and local circumstances, there is any modification of the rigid application, it should be by the Minister's action rather than the other way round. I hope the Dáil will affirm this proposition that in the future the children of this country will be expected to undergo systematic instruction until they arrive at the age of sixteen.