Irish Books and Irish People

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

Three or four points may be noted in relation to these schools. One is, that in all classrooms and playgrounds, a master is always present. Comparing this with the system in vogue at many English schools, under which a boy out of school hours is always forced to live in public by rules which compel him either to be playing some game or looking on while others play, I prefer the system of frank supervision, as leaving more individual freedom and choice of pursuits, and as making serious bullying impossible. Generally, the idea that it is good for a boy to be knocked about without stint is foreign to Irish ideas. A pleasant and characteristic feature of Jesuit schools is the habit of telling off some boy to act as companion and cicerone to a newcomer for his first week or fortnight; and the ridiculous English fashion which prescribes that the smallest fag should be described as a "man" is unknown. Christian names, not surnames, are used generally. The unpopularity of boarding schools in Ireland is due to the great value set upon home life; and an Irish boarding school is far less distinct from home life than an English one.

English eyes would be surprised and a good deal shocked by the presence of a billiard table in every playroom; yet it may fairly be argued that it is wise to limit the number of things that have the fascination of the forbidden. A more serious criticism would address itself to the permitted slovenliness. Untidiness amounts to a national vice in Ireland, and, though one may overstate its gravity, the secondary schools could and should do much more to remedy this national defect than they are at present doing. At one first-class Irish establishment—admirably equipped with buildings, playground, and all other appliances—boots used to go unblacked from one end of the month to the other. The boys who come here come largely from the well-to-do farming class, in whose homes, in many ways so pleasant and worthy of respect, there is often a lamentable lack of that charm which comes of notable housewifery. The young men who return from this school will be less apt than they should be to value good housewifery in their wives and mothers.

But of all sinners in this regard the State is the chief offender. Under the Code of the National Board of Education a national schoolmaster or mistress is bound to teach cleanliness and decency by precept and example. He or she is paid an average wage (without allowances) of thirty shillings or one pound a week according to sex; and out of that an appearance befitting superior station has to be maintained—for in Ireland the schoolmaster has always a position of some dignity. For the school the State provides four bare walls, a roof, not always weatherproof, and a few desks. Firing is not provided. Decoration is subject to inspection, and any picture which can be held to have a religious or remotely political bearing is a gross offence against the Code. It follows, in practice, that bare walls are kept bare, though not clean; and let it be remembered that Catholicism, if left to itself, in education always trusts greatly to the appeal to the eye. In every Catholic school uncontrolled by the State the emblems of religion are everywhere present. National schools under State control, even in places where there is not a Protestant child within twenty miles, are rigorously forbidden the use of any such embellishment. On the other hand, Protestant schools which would gladly, and, as I think, most laudably, furnish themselves with pictures recalling such memories as the shutting of the Derry gates, come under the same tyranny of compromise. Taste and culture are the expression of an individuality, and individuality is forbidden to Irish teachers in State employ. The State puts a schoolmaster into a schoolhouse, without adequate payment for himself, without adequate provision either for building or the upkeep of building; it bids him to keep it clean, but pays no servant to wash or sweep; and, while enjoining the absence of dirt, it checks and hampers that desire to decorate, which is the positive side of order and taste. The result is, broadly, slatternly schools.

There could hardly be a better moral influence in Ireland than tastefully and brightly decorated schools, cleanly kept. But to secure this the State must provide money, and must give individual freedom. Instead of that, it adapts its institution to the lowest standard of living; and the raggedest child out of the dirtiest cottage will probably be in full keeping with his environment when he takes his place in class.

The same tyranny of compromise sterilises the whole teaching on the moral side. Nothing must be taught anywhere which could offend any susceptibility—except in the hour licensed for the teaching of denominational religion. There must be no appeal to Irish patriotism, whether it be of Protestant or Catholic. Irish history may not be taught as a subject, and, until lately, anything bearing on it, however remotely, was tabooed. The poem Breathes there a man with soul so dead was struck out of a lesson book, lest it should encourage sedition. To-day certain accepted books on Irish history may be used as readers; the Irish language may be taught, and is taught; and gradually with these changes new moral influences are coming in. Irish children are being encouraged to remember their nationality. Yet, meanwhile, the teacher, who is to instruct them in the duties of a good citizen, is debarred from taking any part in local politics, from serving on any local council. He is forbidden, in fact, to be himself a good citizen; forbidden to be anything more than the colourless instrument of a system of compromise and countercheck. Nothing is more certain than this, that to get a good teacher you need a man's whole personality; you must enlist all his beliefs and his feelings in the exercise of that moral function of education which can never be fulfilled by a mere machine for imparting the rudiments. Man everywhere, but especially in Ireland, is, as Aristotle said, a political animal. The State in Ireland, when organising education, tries as far as possible to eliminate the man and produce the pedagogue.

Take, for contrast with all this, the purely native institution, now unhappily extinct, of the old "classical academies" kept in the country parts of Munster by private laymen. In the eighteenth century, and on into the nineteenth, these men kept alive the tradition of Irish popular poetry, sometimes with a real gift. For good or for bad they were persons of character and of talent, and the last of them is alive, though he keeps school no longer. He taught boys who had learnt the rudiments at the ordinary national school, and who wished to carry on their studies with a view either to the priesthood or to medicine. He was paid only by the fees of his scholars, who were either the sons of farmers about him, or of men living at a distance, who sent their children to be part of the family in some farm where they had kinship or acquaintance. Thus existence for these scholars was divided between the home life of a farm and the hours of school. There was, however, a small element of what in Ireland were called "poor scholars"—boys from the less prosperous North and West, who came (sometimes walking the whole journey) to get learning gratis. To them teaching was never refused, and their board was provided by the farmers, who "would be snatching them from one and other," since they assisted the other children in preparing tasks.

Now, in the school which my friend has described to me, there was no formal teaching of anything but the prescribed subjects. But literature would be lying about—Haverty's History of Ireland, and the Nationalist papers of the day—and the teacher was there always ready to expound and answer questions. Himself a fighting politician (a member of the Fenian organisation, whose name is still sacred throughout Ireland), he was careful never to draw in or compromise his pupils; but to teach them the story of their country and discuss it with them was part of his natural occupation. He taught Irish also, the tongue readiest to him, for he held that Irishmen should know their own language; but the essential business of his school was teaching the simple old-fashioned curriculum, Latin, mathematics, and some Greek. Yet because he was a man who loved and valued knowledge for its own sake, and loved and valued literature, it is probable that he gave a more real training to the mind than is achieved by the most modern system of hand and eye culture and the rest of it. He taught neither religion nor morals, but his teaching assumed throughout, what his example showed, that a man should be true and thorough in what he professed to believe, and should be ready at all times to make sacrifices for principle. Such a school had the only moral influence which in Ireland has ever counted for much—the influence of a strong personality, acting in alliance with the influences of a fully realised religion and of an ordered family life.

I sketch a more concrete picture that always rises in my mind with a ray of hope, when I think of education in Ireland. Out of doors, winter twilight falling on a wild landscape within hearing of the Atlantic surf; the man of the house coming out to talk to me, a handsome Irishman of the old school, frieze-clad, with the traditional side whiskers, the humorous eye and mouth. We talked for a while in the cold, then "Gabh i leith isteach," he said, "for I hear you have the Irish." As I paused in the door to phrase the Gaelic salutation, more devout and courteous than would come to my lips in any other tongue, I was astonished at the company gathered in the long low room. Chairs were set by the wide hearth of course, and from one of them the woman of the house rose to greet me; a settle ran along the side wall, and its length was filled with men and women blotted against the dusk background. But the centre of the picture was a narrow deal table set in the middle of the room, with candles on it, and benches on each side, and on the benches fully ten children busy with books and copies. "Are these your burden?" I asked in the quaint Irish phrase. "A share of them," the man answered; and then I understood that some belonged to other neighbours, and that it was a mutual arrangement for friendliness and help. None of the children budged; there they were, drilled and disciplined at their work, in the middle of the room, while their elders sat and chatted quietly. I have never seen elsewhere anything which so filled my conception of what a home should be, as that farmhouse in Corcabascinn—so full of order and good governance, yet so free of constraint, so full of welcome, yet so lacking in expense or display. For, understand, we who were strangers were brought (much against my will) into the state-room or parlour beyond the party wall, and drink was pressed upon us hospitably. But the neighbours who had come there (and came daily, I fancy) came neither to eat nor drink (unless maybe tea might be brewing) but simply to sit and smoke and talk, and watch that their children got their lessons properly. And at the end, perhaps before they parted, perhaps when the family was alone, the rosary would be said by the turf fire, that made, winter or summer, the centre of all that pleasant existence.

It is a pity to think of how poorly the National school, to which those children would go with their tasks in the morning, seconds the help which this home life gives it. Easily could the school—which takes whatever real light it has from the home, just as it depends for warmth on the few turf which scholars bring daily along with their books—reflect sound and fruitful ideas on to the home through the children. It could teach the children and the parents, not only the political, but the economic history of their own country; it could teach them what has been done in Ireland, what has succeeded, what has failed, and why; it could teach them, who are already proud of being Irish, to have new reasons for their pride; it could teach them, who are already willing to do their best for Ireland, into what channels the driving force of that willingness may be poured.

Outside of definite religion, the only fruitful source of educational ideas connected with the moral order that I see in Ireland is the Gaelic League. This organisation, founded to save from extinction, and to revive into new prosperity the national language of Ireland, based itself entirely upon a moral appeal. It appealed to Irishmen as they were proud of their race, to save the most distinctive symbol of their nationality; and the appeal met with an extraordinary promptness of response. But to stimulate and promote the movement, it was found necessary to widen the propaganda. Irishmen were urged to learn Irish, and to speak Irish because of pride in their country; the same organisation soon began to teach that an Irishman who set an example of drunkenness, or gave an occasion of it, not only sinned against himself, but against his country. Vulgar and indecent literature was denounced as un-Irish; Irish dances were advocated, not only for their admirable grace and their historic interest, but also because it was held that dances like the waltz, departed from the austere standard of Irish morality. Irish men and women were taught to buy goods of Irish manufacture by the people who taught them to learn the language, on the ground that if the Irish nation continued to ebb away out of Ireland, nationality and language must perish together.