I feel bound to say from long experience of speeches introducing the Vote for Education that I do not think I have ever heard a bleaker one than the Minister for Education offered us on this occasion. If anyone hoped to hear him philosophising on the general policy of education, he must have got a rude shock. When you compare the contribution the Minister made with those of Deputy P. O'Donnell, Deputy Barron, or Deputy Declan Costello, I cannot help believing that the Minister must have felt constrained to blush. It is a pity that the Minister, when introducing his Estimate, should not have availed of the occasion to make a more comprehensive review than he felt it his duty to make. I hope, when he is concluding, he will have somewhat more to say to us about the general prospects of education.
When his manuscript was circulated, it consisted of 16 pages, nearly two and a half pages of which are devoted to a list of 20 summer courses arranged this year for teachers and which he offered as evidence of the improved level of teaching in the vocational schools. I cannot imagine that that list is any adequate substitute for the kind of review we would like to hear from him as to the progress made.
I want to compare that with some of the facts relating to education in the constituency I represent. The Minister spoke of providing the best possible education for children in the primary schools and said that the big problem was that of classes becoming too big. Does the Minister realise that in rural areas like Monaghan, where the population is declining, the number of one-teacher schools is growing every year? There is one parish in the constituency I represent in which there are now four one-teacher schools, where there were all twoteacher schools five or six years ago. In each of these schools, one teacher is trying to teach all the classes, boys and girls, and despite his best efforts, it is impossible to give adequate and reasonable education to children in schools so inadequately staffed.
The special problem of these counties has been recognised recently by the Minister for Industry and Commerce who extended to them the Undeveloped Areas Act but what is more urgently needed is that the Department of Education should suspend the rule relating to the ratio of teacher to pupils. It is not possible for one teacher to teach all the classes in a one-teacher school and there ought to be a special dispensation that two teachers should be provided, even though the total of pupils falls below the requisite number.
If the number falls altogether too low, then the schools should be amalgamated. If an amalgamation is necessary to permit the employment of the minimal number of teachers and if amalgamation is necessary to establish a parochial school, there ought to be an arrangement for a concomitant bus to gather the children from outside areas, bring them to school and bring them home at night. I know of cases where children are still walking three miles to school. That seems to me to be completely unreasonable and a situation which urgently requires remedy.
The larger problem would be solved if in the scattered areas and areas of declining population, there were parochial schools with concomitant transport provided. That is the practice in other countries and here it would provide a solution to the urgent problem. While steps are being taken to provide a permanent solution, I suggest that it is urgently necessary to amend the regulations so as to provide two teachers in the schools in areas where declining population has reduced a school to the status of a one-teacher school. It is not reasonable that children in the depressed areas should be deprived of a reasonable standard of education because of old rules which no longer apply in our present circumstances.
It is very advisable that we should open our eyes to the facts relating to secondary education in this country. There is a lot of obscurantist talk about secondary education but the plain fact is that anyone who has any experience of employing apprentices or training young people has the same story to tell. Although in many characteristics, a boy who never went beyond the sixth book can be a most excellent apprentice and businessman, the boy with two or three years in a secondary school, when it comes to the point of ultimate promotion, is always the one who gets it. When you are training the two young people to any job or craft or trade, the ease with which the people with secondary education can absorb training is quite dramatic.
There are, of course, exceptions to both rules. You will find the genius from the national school who will outstep 95 per cent. of the secondary school pupils and you will find the dull boy or girl coming from the secondary school who does not seem to have got any benefit from it. However, generally speaking, the experience of people concerned with the training of the young after leaving school is that secondary education gives them an advantage which is truly dramatic.
When you come to statistics with regard to this question, it is hard to find satisfactory statistics but certain such have been made available by the World Survey of Education by UNESCO published in Paris in 1962. Although it relates to a period as far back as 1955 and 1957, I think it is true that, for purposes of comparison, the figures are still relevant. They take the estimated population between 15 years and 19 years of age inclusive and they then take the average enrolment in secondary schools which is deemed to include secondary education, vocational education and teacher training.
Of these, we find the rather remarkable figures that the percentage so enrolled of that population of from 15 to 19 years of age is 36 per cent, in Ireland, 88 per cent. in England and Wales, 69 per cent. in Scotland, 75 per cent. in Northern Ireland, 50 per cent. in Norway, 82 per cent. in Denmark, 70 per cent. in Sweden and 87 per cent. in the Netherlands. It is 79 per cent. in the Federal Republic of Germany; 98 per cent. in Japan; and 73 per cent. in the United States of America. Those figures have been further broken down by our Department of Education. The figures I now quote come from the Report of the Department of Education for 1958-59 published by the Stationery Office and the Census of Population, 1951, published also by the Stationery Office.
This covers the enrolment of pupils over 12 and under 18 years of age as full-time pupils in secondary and vocational schools in the Republic of Ireland in the school year 1958-59. The tragic element in this is that the average enrolment over the 26 Counties is 30.1 per cent. That goes from, I think, a maximum of 38 per cent. in Clare to a minimum of 18.7 per cent. in Donegal, 21.4 per cent. in Cavan and 22.8 per cent. in Monaghan. I would ask Deputies to note that the figures I have given cover the school population from 12 to 18 years, whereas the previous figures I gave cover a group of children from 15 to 19 years, inclusive. The point I want to make here is that there is something radically wrong when you find in three counties of Ireland that the average total numbers in vocational and secondary schools are 18.7 per cent., 21.4 per cent, 22.8 per cent., while the national average is 30.1 per cent.
The facilities for vocational and secondary education in these areas appear to be deplorable and yet I cannot imagine — I know it is not true — that children in these areas are less susceptible to education than they are in any other area in Ireland. Any of us who have any knowledge of the people of Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan know that in these areas you have as bright children as come from any part of Ireland. Yet for all the facilities, they are getting a very much poorer chance of higher education than is available in the rest of the country. That is something to which, I think, the Minister for Education should turn his attention at the earliest possible time so as to ensure that that obvious anomaly is rectified.
These certain basic facts are the kinds of things which, I think, should engage the attention of the Minister for Education, and so I propose to offer another statistic which, I think, may surprise some of our colleagues in the House. It refers to the expenditure per head of the population on education and is taken from the World Survey of Education, No. 3, published by UNESCO at Paris, 1962. The total expenditure per head of the population in Ireland on education is £5.6. In England and Wales, it is £13; in Scotland, it is £19; in Northern Ireland, it is £12; in Norway, it is £14.7; in Denmark, it is £12.1; in Sweden, it is £14.6; in Belgium, it is £16.6; in the Netherlands, it is £13.3; in the Federal Republic of Germany, it is £10; in Japan, it is £5; and in the United States of America, it is £32.7.
That figure has been worked out as a percentage of the national income of these several countries. When you come to study it from that point of view, our educational expenditure, as a percentage of national income, is 3.4; England and Wales, 3.9; Scotland, 6.5; Northern Ireland, 5.4; Norway, 4.5; Denmark, 3.9; Sweden, 3.1; Belgium 5.2; the Netherlands, 5.1; The Federal Republic of Germany, 3.5; Japan, 3.5 and the United States of America, 4.3. Making due allowance for the fact that this country is a relatively poor country, it is still true to say that we spend less of the national income on education than any other country in the world, with the exception of Sweden, which has, of course, notoriously a very high national income relative to its population.
Therefore, I suggest to the Minister that one of the most urgent needs of our time is to take effective measures to prevent classes in the primary schools being improperly staffed. I say it is improper staffing in any school to ask one teacher to teach all the pupils in it. The minimum ought to be two teachers and, where possible, three.
We ought to concern ourselves most urgently to expand the opportunities for secondary education for our people, whether it takes the form of general secondary education or vocational education. When I see all the elaborate buildings going up for vocational education, that may be an admirable thing but you can get very good secondary education without luxurious surroundings.
I was talking to a very enterprising secondary schoolmaster not so very long ago. He was telling me of his achievements in the sphere of secondary education. I asked where on earth did he get the money to provide the building. He replied that was the least of the expenses he had. If you get houses and keep them clean and the pupils come and do their daily classes there, they do not expect luxurious surroundings. They expect them to be clean and sanitary. Provided these minima are provided, it is not necessary to spend oceans of money erecting luxurious surroundings to provide secondary education. Suddenly, it dawned on me that there was a great deal in what he was saying. If money were invested in the teachers and certain minimal standards were maintained in the premises, we would be getting much better value than we get by spending huge capital sums to provide luxurious surroundings and then not providing adequate staffs to teach the children.
The figures I have read out to the House demonstrate very dramatically how far behind we have fallen in the provision of secondary education for our children when we realise that 36 per cent. of children between 15 and 19 years of age in this country are having secondary education of some kind as compared with Japan with 98 per cent. and, what is more important to us, countries with whom we will have closer contacts in the immediate future, the Federal Republic of Germany with 79 per cent.; the Netherlands with 87 per cent.; Sweden with 70 per cent.; Denmark with 82 per cent.; Norway with 50 per cent.; Great Britain with 88 per cent.
Unless we remedy that discrepancy in the very early future, we will get a mighty shock when our people are competing in the new economic world to which I believe we are rapidly moving, and if there emerges, as I believe there will in the lifetime of many Deputies now in the House, an Atlantic community of which we shall form part, unless the present Minister for Education or his immediate successor can make very striking advances in secondary education, then our people will be cast back into the role of hewers of wood and drawers of water which I do not think any of us would contemplate with equanimity. But as certainly as we fail to reach the same level in the provision of secondary education as other members of the Atlantic community have already achieved, so certainly shall our people be the hewers of wood and the drawers of water.
We have had experience of that before. We blamed it on maladministration by the British in this country when our people were driven out to America to become there hewers of wood and drawers of water, and to Liverpool, Scotland and elsewhere in the same capacity. We have seen what has happened in the past ten years — 250,000 of our people were sent out to look for industrial employment in England and have become in England the hewers of wood and drawers of water. They are the navvies, the building site workers, the rough workers in England — because they have not got secondary education and they have not secondary education because it was not available for them in this country or their parents could not afford it.
Two points of urgency present themselves. One is that we should make available secondary education, and two, that we should make it available on terms and under conditions in which parents can avail of it for their children. Otherwise, all our talk of progress is useless because progress really does not consist of pounds, shillings and pence. If it is of any value, it should consist of men and women and of giving them a better life. If they are to have a better life consistent with human dignity, then secondary education is urgently needed.
I often wonder where we are all going. When I hear a great deal of the talk of progress going on at the present time, I often wonder do those people ever ask themselves what is this progress to which we are all straining to attain. I recently stood in a big industrial city in Germany where all were congratulating themselves on the dramatic progress that had been made. They were very well off financially. It happened that my visit to one of the largest manufacturing units in that industrial city coincided with the leaving of one shift and the coming on of a second. It was a vast undertaking and there were three shifts.
I stood at the factory gate and from it I could see the flats buildings which are being built in all the industrial cities and I saw the men coming in for the second shift with their tin cans in their hands carrying their luncheons. And there passed me at the gate also the fellows going out of the factory from the first shift. The fellows going in were all pouring out of these big blocks of flats and those going off were all pouring into them. I stood for a moment contemplating this scene and I asked myself wherever had I seen the likes of that before. The only place I could think of was an anthill or a beehive. Then I asked myself what are all these people living for at all?
There were plenty of television masts on the flats buildings but there did not seem to be very much else. One must acknowledge that one cannot be familiar with the inner workings of these people's minds and intellects but their activities seemed to be divided between these immense barrack-like blocks of flats — very modern, very upto-date — and these factories. I asked myself is that the kind of life we are all seeking to purchase for our people? If it is, it is hell. I would sooner be dead than Red but I would sooner be dead also than live under conditions of life analogous to that.
I have a feeling that a great many unthinking people in this country and elsewhere are obsessed and dominated by the idea of the apotheosis of success which would be responsible for the creation of that situation here or anywhere else. Nobody asks: "Suppose we do succeed in creating that position here, where do we go from there?" I think one of the functions of the Minister for Education is to try to promote a standard of intellectual equipment in this country which will get our people to ask themselves the question: "What do we want?" I think the answer should be: to save our souls and to be happy.
In many industrial countries at the present time, and indeed in America, they can do almost anything for their people, except provide them with those two essentials — a chance to save their souls and to be happy. I want to see our people happy and equipped to live in the world, with the prospect of saving their souls. I want to see them happy, not necessarily rich. I am not at all sure that riches will provide them with the key to either of the things which I consider to be the essentials to the survival of the human race. While I do not want our people to be part of the anthill which I saw in that industrial city, I want them to be able to hold their own in the new world into which we are moving, which I foresee as an Atlantic community comprising the whole of free Europe, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Two things are urgently necessary. The first is that we should be versed in Continental languages. One of the most dramatic things I have noticed in the Council of Europe and at other international gatherings where I represented Ireland, was that all Scandinavians speak English. When I speak of all Scandinavians, I do not mean all delegates from Scandinavia at these conferences but the entire population of Scandinavia — Swedes, Norwegians and Danes. They all learn English and can speak it quite freely. I spoke to a child of 14 or 15 years who spoke English quite well and I asked her when she had been to England. She said she had never been there, that she had learned the language at school.
It is the same with the Dutch, though it may not be true to the same extent of the Belgians and the French. It is very widely true now in Federal Germany — not as strikingly as in Scandinavia, but nevertheless very widely true. But in Federal Germany, although there may not be a widespread familiarity with English, there is a widespread familiarity with French. It is nearly true to say that all the Germans have a good working knowledge of some language other than their own. How far is that true of our own people? I do not think it is true at all. If you gathered together all the students of the National University and Trinity College, Dublin, I doubt if you would find that 20 per cent. of the boys would be able to speak a foreign language with any degree of fluency. You might find 20 per cent. of the girls who would at least have such a knowledge of a foreign language that, if they could spend a year abroad, they could build it up very quickly to a good conversational user of it. But that is very poor in comparison with the standards obtaining in the countries to which I have referred.
In this new world into which we are going, it is pathetic to meet civil servants, or people whose business brings them into contact with foreign people for the normal transaction of business, if they are unable to speak French or some Continental language. Of course, it is grotesque to talk about our expanding trade and looking for markets, unless we have Irish people who are fluent in Continental languages. There is no use getting a German agent to try to expand Irish business. He may be doing an excellent job in his own particular sphere of trade in Germany, but he does not know the situation in Ireland as somebody born and bred here does. He does not know what is possible here and he does not know the difficulties that arise and have to be overcome.
Unless we equip our young people to speak Continental languages in the new atmosphere of an Atlantic or European community, on the threshold of which we are now standing, we will be in a most unenviable position. Remember, we will be in competition with the Scandinavians. I concede that in a place like the Council of Europe, you meet pretty expert operators, but you can meet any number of Scandinavians who speak English as well as I can. I do not suggest for a moment that constitutes the average, but I suggest that the average child educated in Sweden and Denmark can speak English, as can the vast majority of those educated in Norway. Can anybody seriously suggest that we approximate to that level of achievement here? It is urgently necessary that we should.
I want to suggest to the Minister that one of the things which would materially contribute to that would be the abolition of the fantastic regulation under which nobody is eligible to be a secondary teacher, unless he is equipped to teach his subjects through the medium of Irish. With one stroke of the pen, we prohibit the secondary schools of the country from employing a Frenchman to teach French, a German to teach German, a Spaniard to teach Spanish or an Italian to teach Italian. You get excellent teachers here to teach those languages, but the plain fact known to most of us is that children taught by a good French professor or an Italian, or a German or a Spaniard, speak the language very much better afterwards than they can ever possibly do when taught by anybody but a very exceptional teacher who learned the language himself or herself.
In any case, it would invaluably supplement the resources of teaching foreign languages if secondary schools here were allowed to employ university graduates from foreign countries to teach foreign languages here and if such persons were eligible for incremental salaries, provided their scholarship was such as to commend itself to the Department of Education as indicating a sufficient standard of education to make them satisfactory teachers. It is well known — it is notorious — that the whole thing is a fraud. No teachers in the secondary schools, except a very few, teach through the medium of Irish. Yet they have all to go through the farce of pretending they do. It is becoming so ludicrous now that the Department of Education itself recognises it is a fraud.
The procedure for establishing the capacity of a teacher to teach through the medium of Irish is this. You walk down the avenue with him and say: "Conus atá tú?""Tá mé go maith,""Lá brea é?""Séa, go deimhin." He is then deemed to be qualified to teach through Irish and to conduct his relations with other teachers through Irish. That kind of cod is revolting, disgusting and fundamentally dishonest. Quite apart from anything else, it constitutes a very serious impediment to the employment of effective staff at a time when such people are urgently necessary.
Can you imagine a situation in which we, like every other country, find ourselves almost unable to get qualified teachers of science? In this country, as far as I know, a person has not only to be a qualified teacher of science but he is supposed to be capable of teaching science through the medium of Irish. Otherwise, he is not eligible for incremental salaries as a secondary teacher. That is draft, and yet we go on with it. I suggest to the Minister that the facilities for teaching science in most of the secondary schools are very poor. That is partly due, I suppose, to the difficulty of getting staff, because science teachers are snapped up by industry and so forth. That problem is being grappled with abroad and it will have to be grappled with here, however it is done. Maybe you will have to pay a premium for science teachers. If you have to, you had better do it.
I see there is provision in the Estimate — I think it is a new provision — for grants for the provision of laboratories and science teaching equipment. That is a very sensible proviso, but there is no use having the laboratories if there are no teachers to go into them. The urgent thing is that you should be able to get science teachers. Any schools with which I have any contact tell me it is virtually impossible to get them. Mark you, the Department of Agriculture had a spot of bother of that kind also. The Department of Agriculture set up such a magnificent salary scale — for which I was myself partly responsible — in connection with the eradication of bovine tuberculosis that it turned all the vest into quasi-millionaires, you could not get a veterinary inspector in the Department and the whole scheme nearly broke down.
To-day, the Minister, after some hullabaloo, strife and pandemonium, has to face the fact that both in Great Britain and here, there is an acute shortage of vest. He had to meet that situation and overcome it. Some elaborate formula was worked out with the Department of Agriculture that they would not get an increase in salary but would get an increase in honorarium. In that way, everybody's face was saved and the vest went back to work. We have now, I believe, a more or less adequate staff.
We are bound to be faced with that, too, in the sphere of secondary education and science teachers. Industry is so ready to employ them and so eager to pay them that I think some recognition of that fact is called for in order to attract a sufficient number of teachers for the teaching of science, in order that we shall not fall hopelessly behind, which at present undoubtedly this country is doing.
I see people in all sorts of exalted positions speaking of the necessity of giving a rural bias to education in the primary schools. I do not particularly want to give a bias in any direction in the primary schools provided I can be sure that the children are getting the best education possible. I direct the attention of the Minister for Education to the facts, and sometimes it is very difficult to sort the facts out from the propaganda.
Notice taken that 20 Members were not present; House counted, and 20 Members being present,
