Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001. Dr. Brown Terence

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СКАЧАТЬ the League in 1913 which had sought to have Irish taught to all pupils in National Schools and to exclude from teachers’ training colleges individuals who lacked sound knowledge of the language.

      The first Dáil in 1919, after the major Sinn Féin electoral successes of 1918, had created a Ministry for Irish, and as the new state was founded, the Gaelic League could be reasonably sure that any government emerging from only a section of the former Sinn Féin party would have the revival of Irish as one of its central concerns. So, an announcement of the government’s achievements and policies published in November 1924 included amid much matter on farming, drainage, rates, electricity, and railways, the following declaration:

      The Organisation and the Government are pledged to coordinate, democratize and Gaelicize our education. In each of these aims great progress has already been made. It is now possible for the child of the poorest parents to pass from one end of the educational ladder to the other, and the Irish language has been restored to its own place in Irish education. In addition, the condition of that important class, the Secondary Teachers, has been improved. The Organisation and Government intend to devote special attention to the problem of safeguarding the Language in the Gaeltacht by improving economic conditions in the Gaeltacht and developing Educational Institutions therein.³

      The references to democratization referred here to the government’s replacement of the intermediate and national education commissions by civil servants, thus, as one educational historian has it, “substituting for an academic and professional oligarchy, an unfettered bureaucracy”⁴ and the adoption of a system of government support for secondary schools on the basis of capitation grants for each child following approved courses. A system of incremental salary scales was also introduced, making teachers less dependent on local managements. The twenties saw, however, very little change in the Irish educational system, and certainly the claims that Irish education was being democratized ring rather hollow. For the state was content to maintain almost the entire educational structure bequeathed to it by the imperial authorities with its class-conscious, religiously managed secondary schools, its technical sphere generally thought socially inferior to the more academic institutions, and its universities almost the sole preserve of students from propertied or professional backgrounds. What was effected was a strengthening of the control of education by a central bureaucracy.

      The gaelicization of education was, in contrast, systematically attempted. It was determined that all teachers leaving training colleges should be expected to have a knowledge of Irish; preparatory boarding schools were established to prepare young people for careers in the teaching profession which would emphasize the language; school inspectors were required to study Irish, and no further appointments were offered to individuals who lacked proficiency in Irish; Irish was made compulsory for scholarships in the Intermediate and Leaving Certificates in the secondary schools; and financial and other encouragements were offered to schools and individuals alike to use Irish more frequently. But it was in the primary or National Schools that the linguistic policy was prosecuted most vigorously. In its initial stages this linguistic effort was presided over by Professor Eoin MacNeill, whose commitment to education as a means to revive Irish civilization (which for him included the Irish language) was made clear in a series of articles published while he was Minister for Education, in the Irish Statesman in 1925. There he asserted:

      Nationality, in the best sense, is the form and kind of civilization developed by a particular people and distinctive of that people. So understood, nationality needs no apologist…I believe in the capacity of the Irish people, if they clear their minds, for building up an Irish civilization. I hold that the chief function of an Irish State and of an Irish Government is to subserve that work. I hold that the principal duty of an Irish Government in its educational policy is to subserve that work. I am willing to discuss how this can best be done, but not discuss how it can be done without.⁵

      The National School teachers were enlisted in this crusade, their role to clear the minds of the nation’s children through intense exposure to the Irish language.

      Eoin MacNeill himself had a much more sophisticated understanding of the relationship of language to society than many others who supported revival, and he well understood that to depend on the schools alone to revive Irish would be unwise. But it was his ironic fate, busy as he was with other matters of state, to preside over the legislative steps that made such a dependence possible. In the absence of any coherent social and economic policy, particularly in relation to the Irish-speaking districts that remained, this dependence was, as events were to prove, almost entirely misguided. The schools alone could not perform a linguistic miracle while the social order was undisturbed by any revolutionary energies.

      Theoretical justification for this linguistic onslaught on the schools was supplied by the very influential professor of education at University College, Dublin, Father T. Corcoran, SJ. His claim to eminence in historical studies was work on the hedge schools of penal times (when education for Catholics was offered in barns and even out-of-doors by many dedicated spirits) and on the apparently baneful influence on the Irish language of the British-imposed National School system of the nineteenth century. It was his simplistic belief that what the National Schools had wrongfully done, they could now undo. He was certain that the National Board of Education had been “fatal to the national use of vernacular Irish”⁶ as he sought to ‘reverse a change that was made fully practicable only by the prolonged misuse of the schools.”⁷ In 1920 the Irish National Teachers’ Organization (INTO) at its annual congress, conscious that the Gaelic League had already set out a series of proposals for the gaelicization of the National Schools, responded by establishing a conference to consider its own position. Professor Corcoran, “while declining to act as a member…intimated that it would have at its disposal the benefit of his advice and experience.”⁸ He was available therefore as a consultant to the congress when it suggested in 1921 that all singing in the National Schools should be in Irish, that instruction in history and geography, which were taught from the third standard onward, should be through Irish, and that one hour a day should be spent in direct language acquisition. Such draconian measures meant that other subjects had to be eliminated from the programme. So, in Irish National Schools, drawing, elementary science, hygiene, nature study, and most domestic studies were dispensed with in favour of the language. Furthermore it was proposed that all teaching in the first two, or infant grades, should be in Irish. The new programme was accepted and set in motion in April 1922.

      Patrick Pearse, in a famous phrase, had once castigated the imposition of an educational programme on children by an external authority as “the murder machine.” Professor Corcoran was disinclined to see any analogy in the policies he encouraged. He was persuaded that because non-English-speaking immigrants to the United States could be taught English in grade schools, although it was not the language of the home, so in Ireland children from English-speaking homes could receive instruction in all subjects in Irish at school. The obvious point that European immigrants’ children in the United States were being introduced to the language of the wider community while in Ireland children certainly were not, apparently did not weigh with him. Nor indeed, one imagines, did the fact that children might endure some emotional and mental distress in their efforts to cope with the linguistic obstacle course he was setting them, for his vision of the educational experience had little room for such concepts as pleasure or the joy of learning. His dismal creed was formulated in dispiriting terms: “All true education must progressively combine effort with mere interest: it is the effort that enobles and makes worthily human.”⁹ Policies were developed to retrain teachers to take part in this educational enterprise; special courses were arranged for teachers to increase their knowledge of Irish; individuals whose mother tongue was Irish were encouraged to enter the teaching profession at the Irish-speaking СКАЧАТЬ