I suppose this is one of the most important of all the Estimates that come before this House for consideration—and that is particularly true at the present time. We have had reports from a variety of bodies that have been considering education, which I suppose are engaging everybody's attention. However, there are some matters in relation to this Estimate which I think fall for comment and if possible early action.
When you get a multiplication of reports pouring forth on various aspects of education, there is a very great danger that this House and indeed the Minister himself will forget the fundamental fact that all education ultimately is founded on the national school. If we have not got a good system of primary education with which to start all our children on the road to higher education, the children start with a fatal handicap.
We have built up in this country over the years a body of national teachers who I feel are showing every year and every decade an improvement on the decades that have gone before. I look back to the old teachers, whom I remember as elderly men when I was young, with admiration. Recalling all the handicaps under which they worked, I often think this country does not sufficiently acknowledge the debt we owe those men and women working for tiny salaries under extremely difficult conditions and yet showing a degree of devotion and dedication which produced phenomenal results.
Now we have a new generation of teachers, probably with a much higher standard of education, who have passed through training colleges which have been able to equip them with a great deal which their forebears did not have. I am happy to think that the vast majority of them have inherited the spirit of dedication and service for the children that the old men had. But no matter what spirit of dedication men and women have, no matter what passion they have to serve and do their best for the children, they cannot do it if the equipment at their disposal is hopelessly inadequate.
In all the thunder of reports that are rolling around our ears at present I urge Dáil Éireann not to forget that there are classrooms in the national schools in this country with up to 80 pupils. That is by no means characteristic but it does exist and there are overcrowded classrooms all over the country. No teacher however zealous or however excellent he may be, can provide children with a proper education if he is faced with a class of 60, 70 or 80 children and we are deceiving ourselves if we believe that we are providing for our children reasonable standards of primary education so long as that situation is tolerated. It is a great reflection upon us that that situation could exist at present.
We are rebuilding our schools in rural parishes but it is quite manifest that in the past seven or eight years, we have not been building schools fast enough to eliminate the very great evil to which I now refer and we should not rest until we are satisfied we have effectively abated it. I have read with interest the statement which the Minister circulated to us about what he describes as his new departure with regard to post-primary comprehensive schools for certain areas. I cannot say that these proposals move me to much enthusiasm and I cannot say that I am very clear in my mind as to exactly what the Minister has in mind except that it is some kind of elaboration of a restricted number of the existing vocational schools and expanding the programme available in those particular schools. It has given rise to one evil at once. Some of the Minister's colleagues in his Party are dashing around promising to build one of these comprehensive schools in their particular constituencies. That is a kind of activity which is regrettable and foolish. I do not understand what revolutionary concept the Minister appears to believe this idea of a comprehensive school enshrines. What is the exact difference between this proposal and simply extending the programme of a vocational school? I cannot see it and I do not think that is a very effective answer to the problem with which we have to contend. I believe quite simply that the objective towards which we ought work is that every child, irrespective of his parents' means, should have made available to him that kind of education most suitable to the gifts God gave him, whether secondary or vocational education and subsequently university education. I do not think any modern society can rest easy until they have attained that objective.
We have got to face the fact that we are a relatively poor community and it may take us longer to reach that objective than some of our neighbours but we had better open our eyes to the fact that Britain is almost there and I imagine that similar advantages will accrue to our neighbours in Northern Ireland. Certainly the United States of America has substantially arrived at that end and I imagine that most Continental countries will achieve that objective within the next decade in any case. If we could clarify in our minds that objective as being agreed amongst us, it would make it easier for us to proceed effectively towards that ideal.
Now we are faced with the rural community. So far as our urban communities are concerned, it is merely a matter of providing the schools and the teachers, which in itself is quite a formidable problem, but it is relatively simple as compared with the situation which obtains in the scattered rural areas. I want to keep the people on the land. I believe one of the great stabilising elements in our society, as it is in France and Germany, are the small farmers who live on the land they themselves own. I would like to keep them there and therefore I would like to provide and have available to them the educational facilities which we desire as an ideal for all our people.
That leads me to ask the Minister whether a more constructive approach to the provision of that kind of education than his proposed comprehensive school is not to be found in what he is actually evolving at present in rural Ireland? You will find in the past 20 years a system has been growing up which originally produced itself as secondary tops to primary schools but now has evolved in many cases into a secondary school functioning side by side with the existing primary school. I know of one such in Banada Abbey, near Tubbercurry in Sligo, which was started by the Irish Sisters of Charity. It seemed at first difficult to believe that nuns would actually operate a secondary school for boys and girls in a rural area but in fact it has operated very well. Then one remembers that in the United States of America it is a common experience to find nuns operating primary schools and high schools for boys and girls, but what strikes me about it is here you had a large national school catering for a wide area and to that was added, without serious dislocation, secondary facilities and you have now this secondary and primary school functioning side by side in a rural area.
I remember bringing to the attention of the Minister for Education on many previous occasions the idea that instead of multiplying the number of one-teacher schools in every rural parish— which we have a tendency to do now— where a parochial rebuilding scheme is called for, the Minister should suggest to the parochial authority instead of building three or four new schools in his parish, two or three of which are fated to become one-teacher schools at an early date, building a parochial school at the centre of the parish, with a bus service to bring the children in every day, and with the prospect that we would associate the parochial school with the existing vocational school, on the one hand, and a new secondary school on the other, and have in the centre of the parish an academic centre consisting of primary, secondary and vocational education all functioning together, leaving it to the parents to determine whether the children, on leaving the primary school, would be routed to the secondary school or the vocational school?
We get so solicitous for our neighbour's children that I think there is a great danger we may all come to the conclusion that we are better able to judge how they should be educated than the parents are. The fact is Almighty God has ordained that parents shall be responsible for their own children and it is the right of parents to determine what is the best educational schedule for their own children. Some of them do not make the right choice but, on average, it will be found, I think, that they make a better choice generally than strangers do. In any case it is perfectly clear that it is the parents' prerogative and one which we should scrupulously respect.
Would the Minister not agree with me that, instead of this proposal to have three or four comprehensive schools scatered over the country, which will merely scratch the surface of the problem, a much more constructive and enduring policy would be to have in every parish an educational centre providing for primary, secondary and vocational education, to which transport would be available for pupils coming more than a certain distance? I do not believe for one moment that you can hope to cover the whole country in a year, or two years, or even in ten years, but, by a slow process of development on the lines I suggest, would we not be travelling much nearer the objective of making available primary, secondary and vocational education to all the children who can benefit from it as compared with dotting down a limited number of what the Minister describes as comprehensive schools in whatever areas it is ultimately determined to put them?
I see that the Minister contemplates in regard to these schools a very comprehensive system of transport to bring the pupils to them over distances of up to ten miles. That will require considerable organisation and I imagine you would not find many parishes in Ireland in which there is not some fellow very glad to operate a bus to a school. In the creamery areas now you find three or four most anxious to bring the milk to the creamery and bring back the skim. There is very keen competition. Is it reasonable to doubt that similar facilities would be readily available in any parish where there was a central school and a transport problem for the pupils attending it?
I suggest to the Minister that, keeping in mind the fundamental principle that without sound primary educational facilities all the rest of our hopes are illusory, he should seriously consider the question of centralising educational facilities in rural parishes and expanding them on much the same lines as those at Banada Abbey, with the additional vocational facilities I have outlined, and a suitable transport service similar to that available in every rural area in the United States of America to bring the children to and from school. At the same time the Minister should recognise his very grave obligation, on which he is at present falling down, to put an end to a situation in which, in some of our primary schools, there are up to 80 pupils in one class. That is a grave scandal and it is the Minister's clear duty to put an end to it.
In regard to secondary education, I think there are certain matters to which we ought to have regard. One is the well nigh inescapable fact that, if we are to have an expansion, which appears manifestly necessary—not merely desirable, but manifestly necessary—in the accommodation for secondary education, we shall have to provide some form of grants to help in the erection of the necessary schools. The Minister is on record as saying that the capitation grants contain in them a capital element. It is alleged that high officers of his Department, speaking on his behalf, have said that it is manifest that these grants do not contain such an element and this is a fundamental distinction in the relationship between the Department of Education and the primary and vocational schools, in regard to which the Department does provide a substantial part of the capital cost, and the relationship between the Department and secondary schools, in regard to which there is no element of capital in endowment. These are finesses which I do not think it is profitable to pursue.
The plain fact is that all secondary schools in the country are happily bursting at the seams. It is becoming a problem to get a child into a secondary school. If we aim to expand very drastically the secondary school population, then it is manifest more schools must be provided. The old idea was that you could not have a secondary school at all if you did not build a structure like Blenheim Palace, a vast and elaborate structure of a residential character. If we are contemplating, as I hope we are, a very much wider secondary education we should bear in mind that a great part of that education will not be provided in boarding schools. It will be provided in good day schools. To parents who have a number of children I certainly would give the advice to keep their children at home and send them to a good day school rather than send them to a boarding school. I went to a boarding school myself, although I was one of six. On balance, I think for children who have a good home, with plenty of brothers and sisters for company, a good day school is much better, with their parents directing their general education, because it will be forever true that what you learn at school is relatively unimportant; what you remember is what you learn at home. It is the parents who give the really fundamental and enduring education to children.
We ought to face the fact then that a great deal of secondary education will normally be given in day schools. There will continue to be a need for boarding schools of one kind or another and, if these have to be erected, then there will have to be some State assistance towards the capital cost of doing so, but that need not be excessive, unreasonable, or burdensome. It should consist, I think, of building largely in the modern concept. That is it will not be designed for eternity but designed as most modern buildings are in the knowledge that, in 20 or 30 years, they will be obsolescent. The world is changing rapidly and most institutional buildings require now to be changed within 20 or 30 years of their construction. This business of building for eternity is, therefore, out of date. Therefore, the buildings need not be excessively expensive and a great part of them need only be of the character designed to cater for the day pupil. It was never more true of any situation than that of secondary education today to say it is much more important to have golden teachers in wooden schools than wooden teachers in golden schools. I do not believe the capital costs, urgent as it is to make provision for it, will present any insuperable difficulty. One of our great difficulties, however, will be to get an adequate number of competent secondary teachers.
When we come to that problem, I urge the House and the Minister to open their eyes to the fantastic anomalies we are stoutly maintaining. One of them is that a teacher who has gone to Great Britain—England, Scotland or Wales—and has spent nine or ten years teaching there and wants to come home, bringing with him or her all the experience and skill acquired in teaching in Great Britain, will be told he or she will not be accepted unless prepared to enter the service on the basis of a first-year secondary teacher in Ireland. None of their years of experience in Great Britain will be recognised for the purpose of increments.
We have slowly and gradually been pushed to the position of recognising teaching experience in Northern Ireland. We have made the gesture of recognising teaching experience in certain missionary countries. But for some strange reason we will not recognise teaching experience in Great Britain. I understand the theory is that the initial salary in Ireland is much lower than the starting salary in Great Britain, and if you allow people to come home having started in Great Britain and give them the benefit of their service abroad, they would all go to England and we would have nobody here.
That always reminds me of the bankers' theory they used to be most eloquent about that, if you ever allowed the rates of interest in this country to be lowered by one-quarter of one per cent below the rates in Great Britain, all the deposits in Ireland would disappear overnight. It is all cod. It was one of these delightful old theories that elderly gentlemen had been hatching on for half a century. They had even forgotten who propounded the proposition first. It was like the law of the Medes and the Persians. There was a differentiation of 1 per cent and nothing happened at all. You could feel the gloom settling down on all the traditionalist heads. The same is true here. You will always get a number of young people who want to go off and teach in England, but you will always get a very large number of teachers who just do not want to go to England. You will always get a number of young teachers stimulated and fascinated by the challenge of teaching in secondary schools in Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester and London, but you will always find a considerable number who do not want to go to England and who will not go to England.
We hope that over the years we will be able to bring our salary scales into closer approximation, although we have to face the fact that we are a relatively developing country while Great Britain is an immensely wealthy country, where salary scales for that kind of service are likely to be higher than ours. But for our own survival we will have to do our best to bring them more into line. In the meantime, I do not think the discrepancy will rob us of all our teachers. We are robbing ourselves of some of the very best teachers available by refusing to receive back those who want to come with their experience and skill, but who are prevented by our obscurantist determination to refuse them the status to which their years of service in Great Britain should entitle them. That is clearly a reform the Minister should have no hesitation in making without delay.
If we are to get more teachers and good teachers to staff the secondary schools, is it realistic to keep up the cod that every teacher in this country must be capable of teaching through the medium of Irish? A regulation still exists that every secondary teacher here must be capable of teaching through the medium of Irish and of conducting his social relations with the other members of the teaching staff through the medium of Irish. Everybody knows that the regulation is cod. The form of examination designated to determine that this is fulfilled is a farce. But it does operate to exclude a certain type of teacher who says: "I refuse to participate in a fraud of this kind. I am not capable of teaching through the medium of Irish or of conducting my social relations with my colleagues through the medium of Irish, and I am not going to pretend I am." There is no use saying that if he walks down the avenue with the inspector who says "Cadé mar atá tú?" and he replies "Tá mé go maith" they can come back and say it is all right. His answer to that is that he cannot teach or conduct his social relations through the medium of Irish and will not pretend he can do so. That man or woman is automatically excluded from the service of our secondary schools. Surely that is a grotesque fraud and should be ended?
We should seriously consider going a step further, although I recognise this will not command universal support. Deputy Coughlan and I have been attending meetings of the Council of Europe, as has my friend and colleague Deputy Dolan from Cavan. One of the things that struck us all profoundly was the astonishing extent to which people under 40 years of age all over Europe talk one or two languages in addition to their own. I should say that if one speaks French and English today there is no country in Europe—certainly it applies to France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden—in which you cannot move about perfectly freely and find boys and girls who converse with you quite freely in English or French. On more than one occasion, I have been constrained to ask them: "When were you in England or Ireland? Where did you learn your English?" They reply that they were never there in their lives, that they learned English at school.
That development in continental Europe is quite dramatic. It is not reproduced here. I suggest to the Minister we want most urgently to provide facilities in our schools for the teaching of continental languages, particularly French, probably German and very probably Spanish, which I think will become more and more of a world language as South America grows in importance and influence in the world. When I was learning a language, I learned the best French from a French teacher. When I was learning Irish, I learned more from listening to a native speaker or being taught by a native speaker than I could ever hope to learn from a teacher who had acquired a language. I know in respect of my own son I could tell instantly when a Frenchman had been substituted in his school for a highly-trained Irish teacher of French. The whole intonation, inflection and approach to the language was different when he was being taught by a trained French teacher from France. Yet our set-up is such here that a Frenchman cannot be employed to teach French in Ireland unless he has a Higher Diploma in Education which it takes two years to acquire, and unless he declares himself prepared to teach through the medium of Irish and to conduct his social relations with fellow members of the staff in Irish, he is not eligible for employment here on an incremental basis.
