The Coming Revolution E-Book

Patrick Pearse

• Herausgeber: Mercier Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 315

Beschreibung

Pearse's skill as an orator is indisputable. His fiery idealism was one of the key motivators that brought the rebels to the GPO in 1916. This collection of his wrting showcase's this skill, but also the complex philosophy that underpinned it. Ranging from his theories of education articulated in 'The Murder Machine' (1912), through his orations on the great Fenian leaders of the past: Wolfe Tone, Emmet and O'Donovan Rossa; to his writings on 'The Separtatist Idea', 'The Spiritual Nation' and 'The Sovereign People' in the months leading up to the rising; this is a crucial collection for the library of anyone with an interest in Irish history.

Leseprobe

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© Text: Mercier Press, 2012

© Foreword: Gabriel Doherty, 2012

ISBN: 978 1 78117 064 9

Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 135 6

Mobi ISBN: 987 1 78117 136 3

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Gabriel Doherty

The Murder Machine

Preface

I The Broad Arrow

II The Murder Machine

III ‘I Deny’

IV Against Modernism

V An Ideal in Education

VI Master and Disciples

VII Of Freedom in Education

VIII Back to the Sagas

IX When We Are Free

How Does She Stand?

Three Addresses

I Theobald Wolfe Tone

II Robert Emmet and the Ireland of Today I

III Robert Emmet and the Ireland of Today II

An Addendum (August 1914)

The Coming Revolution

The Psychology of a Volunteer

To the Boys of Ireland

Why We Want Recruits

O’Donovan Rossa

A Character Study

Graveside Panegyric

From a Hermitage

Peace and the Gael

Ghosts

The Separatist Idea

The Spiritual Nation

The Sovereign People

FOREWORD

‘When the legend becomes fact print the legend.’ These oft-quoted lines from John Ford’s classic, mischievous western, The Man who shot Liberty Valance, are all too apt when one surveys the range of biographical studies of the life of Pádraig/Patrick Pearse (what a depth of significance can be read into those alternative renderings of his Christian name). This was, as certain historians have never tired of saying, evidently true of large swathes of the earlier works, perhaps most notably Desmond Ryan’s wonderfully empathetic study, but, and ironically, the tendency to attach legends – perhaps myths is a better word in this context – to the name of Pearse is also by no means absent from more recent work on this most beguiling of the founding fathers of the Irish state.

For these, and other, reasons, the liberation of Pearse from the traps set by his interlocutors and interpreters, and the making available in a single volume of the political ideas espoused by him towards the end of his life, in his own words, is to be warmly welcomed – all the more so because of the long years that have passed since the last publication of the same compendium. The intervening period has not been particularly kind to Pearse, as both his political philosophy and personal reputation have come under sustained attack – in the latter case on the flimsiest of evidence and most contrived of reasoning. For whatever reason, his star has certainly waned in the firmament of independent Ireland, strangely enough at the same time as that of Michael Collins has waxed – a change partly attributable to an understandable reaction against the earlier cult of personality that attached itself to Pearse (over which he had, of course, no control), partly to political factors (Pearse, by belonging to all political parties in the state, is the possession of none), but mainly to Neil Jordan’s hugely popular and highly influential biopic of Collins (on which subject, what a screenplay could be made of Pearse’s life!). It is to be hoped that this reissue will serve to bring Pearse back to centre-stage in Irish political discourse, both in time for the centenary of the 1916 Rising but also, and more importantly, because the mire of modern Ireland cries out for original thinkers such as he undoubtedly was, inspiring words as his clearly were, and – yes – heroic deeds, such as he most certainly performed.

‘I am old-fashioned enough to be both a Catholic and a Nationalist.’ Thus wrote Pearse in October 1913 (see p. 141). It is strange to think that almost exactly a century later the same bodies of ideas and practices are again deemed passé, if for radically different reasons than those that seemed to apply all those years ago. Reading the texts anew one of the things that is most striking, and challenging to many in Ireland under the age of thirty-five, is the extent to which Pearse’s political and religious philosophies were intertwined – or, better, conjoined. This was not, contra to today’s prevailing orthodoxy, simply because Pearse (and others of his and subsequent generations) had in some way been indoctrinated in the traditions of ‘faith and fatherland’ from birth, and that his outlook was preconditioned, derivative, anti-intellectual, or – what is far more insulting – unthinking. Quite the opposite – his observation on page 179 that ‘Like a divine religion, national freedom bears the marks of unity, of sanctity, of catholicity, of apostolic succession’ betokens not just an individual who had thought long and hard about his political and religious first principles, but also offers a unique perspective on how those twin pillars of modern Irish identity offered mutual reinforcement to each other for so many years – and why the deliberate attempt to sunder that bond in recent decades threatens to create more problems than it solves. Innumerable other reflections on the same subject permeate the book and form its most stimulating passages – now perhaps more than ever.

The reference made above to the fact that this work contains the views held by Pearse towards the end of his life is important, for it draws attention to the point that the publication of his collected works (which first occurred only a year after the 1916 Rising) was itself a key element in the making of his personal legend. By focussing solely on Pearse’s political views and writings from the year 1913 onwards, the inevitable impression was and is created that his outlook on the national question had been ever thus – and, of course, this was not the case. This focus on the terminal phase of his life and career did not amount to misrepresentation per se, for, after all, his final will and testament was that of an unapologetic doctrinaire Irish republican. Ironically, however, this determination to preserve Pearse in the aspic of the 1916 Rising ultimately did a double disservice, both to him and to the republican cause he served nobly (arguably too nobly), for it inferred that at neither the personal nor the ideological level could or did growth happen, change occur or understanding deepen. Of course this was not the case, and Pearse was a better republican from 1913 to 1916 for having been a home ruler for a longer period earlier in his life, and a better political activist for having his roots in the fractious cultural nationalist movement, for he was both forced – by the Ulster crisis in particular – and, more importantly, was able, to reconsider his fundamental beliefs and reformulate the manner in which they could be applied to a changing external situation. Would that today’s politicians could show the same daring, and what better place to start this journey of rediscovery than The Murder Machine, Pearse’s call to arms to all those involved in education in Ireland – which to him meant, and to us should mean, every citizen, of any age, anywhere in the country. Enjoy.

Gabriel Doherty

University College Cork

THE MURDER MACHINE

PREFACE

This pamphlet is not, as its name might seem to import, a penny dreadful, at least in the ordinary sense. It consists of a series of studies of the English education system in Ireland. The article entitled ‘The Murder Machine’ embodies an article which appeared in the Irish Review for February 1913. The article called ‘An Ideal in Education’ was printed in the Irish Review for June 1914. The rest of the pamphlet is a collation of notes made for a lecture which I delivered in the Dublin Mansion House in December 1912.

P. H. Pearse.

St Enda’s College,

Rathfarnham,

1st January 1916.

I  THE BROAD-ARROW

A French writer has paid the English a very well-deserved compliment. He says that they never commit a useless crime. When they hire a man to assassinate an Irish patriot, when they blow a Sepoy from the mouth of a cannon, when they produce a famine in one of their dependencies, they have always an ulterior motive. They do not do it for fun. Humorous as these crimes are, it is not the humour of them, but their utility, that appeals to the English. Unlike Gilbert’s Mikado, they would see nothing humorous in boiling oil. If they retained boiling oil in their penal code, they would retain it, as they retain flogging before execution in Egypt, strictly because it has been found useful.

This observation will help one to an understanding of some portions of the English administration of Ireland. The English administration of Ireland has not been marked by any unnecessary cruelty. Every crime that the English have planned and carried out in Ireland has had a definite end. Every absurdity that they have set up has had a grave purpose. The Famine was not enacted merely from a love of horror. The Boards that rule Ireland were not contrived in order to add to the gaiety of nations. The Famine and the Boards are alike parts of a profound polity.

I have spent the greater part of my life in immediate contemplation of the most grotesque and horrible of the English inventions for the debasement of Ireland. I mean their education system. The English once proposed in their Dublin Parliament a measure for the castration of all Irish priests who refused to quit Ireland. The proposal was so filthy that, although it duly passed the House and was transmitted to England with the warm recommendation of the Viceroy, it was not eventually adopted. But the English have actually carried out an even filthier thing. They have planned and established an education system which more wickedly does violence to the elementary human rights of Irish children than would an edict for the general castration of Irish males. The system has aimed at the substitution for men and women of mere Things. It has not been an entire success. There are still a great many thousand men and women in Ireland. But a great many thousand of what, by way of courtesy, we call men and women, are simply Things. Men and women, however depraved, have kindly human allegiances. But these Things have no allegiance. Like other Things, they are for sale.

When one uses the term education system as the name of the system of schools, colleges, universities, and what not which the English have established in Ireland, one uses it as a convenient label, just as one uses the term government as a convenient label for the system of administration by police which obtains in Ireland instead of a government. There is no education system in Ireland. The English have established the simulacrum of an education system, but its object is the precise contrary of the object of an education system. Education should foster; this education is meant to repress. Education should inspire; this education is meant to tame. Education should harden; this education is meant to enervate. The English are too wise a people to attempt to educate the Irish, in any worthy sense. As well expect them to arm us.

Professor Eoin MacNeill has compared the English education system in Ireland to the systems of slave education which existed in the ancient pagan republics side by side with the systems intended for the education of freemen. To the children of the free were taught all noble and goodly things which would tend to make them strong and proud and valiant; from the children of the slaves all such dangerous knowledge was hidden. They were taught not to be strong and proud and valiant, but to be sleek, to be obsequious, to be dexterous: the object was not to make them good men, but to make them good slaves. And so in Ireland. The education system here was designed by our masters in order to make us willing or at least manageable slaves. It has made of some Irishmen not slaves merely, but very eunuchs, with the indifference and cruelty of eunuchs; kinless beings, who serve for pay a master that they neither love nor hate.

Ireland is not merely in servitude, but in a kind of penal servitude. Certain of the slaves among us are appointed jailors over the common herd of slaves. And they are trained from their youth for this degrading office. The ordinary slaves are trained for their lowly tasks in dingy places called schools; the buildings in which the higher slaves are trained are called colleges and universities. If one may regard Ireland as a nation in penal servitude, the schools and colleges and universities may be looked upon as the symbol of her penal servitude. They are, so to speak, the broad-arrow upon the back of Ireland.

II  THE MURDER MACHINE

A few years ago, when people still believed in the imminence of Home Rule, there were numerous discussions as to the tasks awaiting a Home Rule Parliament and the order in which they should be taken up. Mr John Dillon declared that one of the first of those tasks was the recasting of the Irish education system, by which he meant the English education system in Ireland. The declaration alarmed the Bishop of Limerick, always suspicious of Mr Dillon, and he told that statesman in effect that the Irish education system did not need recasting – that all was well there.

The positions seemed irreconcilable. Yet in the Irish Review I quixotically attempted to find common ground between the disputants, and to state in such a way as to command the assent of both the duty of a hypothetical Irish Parliament with regard to education. I put it that what education in Ireland needed was less a reconstruction of its machinery than a regeneration in spirit. The machinery, I said, has doubtless its defects, but what is chiefly wrong with it is that it is mere machinery, a lifeless thing without a soul. Dr O’Dwyer was probably concerned for the maintenance of a portion of the machinery, valued by him as a Catholic Bishop, and not without reason; and I for one was (and am) willing to leave that particular portion untouched, or practically so. But the machine as a whole is no more capable of fulfilling the function for which it is needed than would an automaton be capable of fulfilling the function of a living teacher in a school. A soulless thing cannot teach; but it can destroy. A machine cannot make men; but it can break men.

One of the most terrible things about the English education system in Ireland is its ruthlessness. I know no image for that ruthlessness in the natural order. The ruthlessness of a wild beast has in it a certain mercy – it slays. It has in it a certain grandeur of animal force. But this ruthlessness is literally without pity and without passion. It is cold and mechanical, like the ruthlessness of an immensely powerful engine. A machine vast, complicated, with a multitude of far-reaching arms, with many ponderous presses, carrying out mysterious and long-drawn processes of shaping and moulding, is the true image of the Irish education system. It grinds night and day; it obeys immutable and predetermined laws; it is as devoid of understanding, of sympathy, of imagination, as is any other piece of machinery that performs an appointed task. Into it is fed all the raw human material in Ireland; it seizes upon it inexorably and rends and compresses and re-moulds; and what it cannot refashion after the regulation pattern it ejects with all likeness of its former self crushed from it, a bruised and shapeless thing, thereafter accounted waste.

Our common parlance has become impressed with the conception of education as some sort of manufacturing process. Our children are the ‘raw material’; we desiderate for their education ‘modern methods’ which must be ‘efficient’ but ‘cheap’; we send them to Clongowes to be ‘finished’; when ‘finished’ they are ‘turned out’; specialists ‘grind’ them for the English Civil Service and the so-called liberal professions; in each of our great colleges there is a department known as the ‘scrap-heap’, though officially called the Fourth Preparatory – the limbo to which the débris ejected by the machine is relegated. The stuff there is either too hard or too soft to be moulded to the pattern required by the Civil Service Commissioners or the Incorporated Law Society.

In our adoption of the standpoint here indicated there is involved a primary blunder as to the nature and functions of education. For education has not to do with the manufacture of things, but with fostering the growth of things. And the conditions we should strive to bring about in our education system are not the conditions favourable to the rapid and cheap manufacture of ready-mades, but the conditions favourable to the growth of living organisms – the liberty and the light and the gladness of a ploughed field under the spring sunshine.

In particular I would urge that the Irish school system of the future should give freedom – freedom to the individual school, freedom to the individual teacher, freedom as far as may be to the individual pupil. Without freedom there can be no right growth; and education is properly the fostering of the right growth of a personality. Our school system must bring, too, some gallant inspiration. And with the inspiration it must bring a certain hardening. One scarcely knows whether modern sentimentalism or modern utilitarianism is the more sure sign of modern decadence. I would boldly preach the antique faith that fighting is the only noble thing, and that he only is at peace with God who is at war with the powers of evil.

In a true education system, religion, patriotism, literature, art and science would be brought in such a way into the daily lives of boys and girls as to affect their character and conduct. We may assume that religion is a vital thing in Irish schools, but I know that the other things, speaking broadly, do not exist. There are no ideas there, no love of beauty, no love of books, no love of knowledge, no heroic inspiration. And there is no room for such things either on the earth or in the heavens, for the earth is cumbered and the heavens are darkened by the monstrous bulk of the programme. Most of the educators detest the programme. They are like the adherents of a dead creed who continue to mumble formulas and to make obeisance before an idol which they have found out to be a spurious divinity.

Mr Dillon was to be sympathised with, even though pathetically premature, in looking to the then anticipated advent of Home Rule for a chance to make education what it should be. But I doubt if he and the others who would have had power in a Home Rule Parliament realised that what is needed here is not reform, not even a revolution, but a vastly bigger thing – a creation. It is not a question of pulling machinery asunder and piecing it together again; it is a question of breathing into a dead thing a living soul.

III  ‘I DENY’

I postulate that there is no education in Ireland apart from the voluntary efforts of a few people, mostly mad. Let us therefore not talk of reform, or of reconstruction. You cannot reform that which is not; you cannot by any process of reconstruction give organic life to a negation. In a literal sense the work of the first Minister of Education in a free Ireland will be a work of creation; for out of chaos he will have to evolve order and into a dead mass he will have to breathe the breath of life.

The English thing that is called education in Ireland is founded on a denial of the Irish nation. No education can start with a Nego, any more than a religion can.* Everything that even pretends to be true begins with its Credo. It is obvious that the savage who says ‘I believe in Mumbo Jumbo’ is nearer to true religion than the philosopher who says ‘I deny God and the spiritual in man.’ Now, to teach a child to deny is the greatest crime a man or a State can commit. Certain schools in Ireland teach children to deny their religion; nearly all the schools in Ireland teach children to deny their nation. ‘I deny the spirituality of my nation; I deny the lineage of my blood; I deny my rights and responsibilities.’ This Nego is their Credo, this evil their good.

To invent such a system of teaching and to persuade us that it is an education system, an Irish education system to be defended by Irishmen against attack, is the most wonderful thing the English have accomplished in Ireland; and the most wicked.

*Publisher’s note: Nego comes from the Latin verb negare: to deny.

IV  AGAINST MODERNISM

All the speculations one saw a few years ago as to the probable effect of Home Rule on education in Ireland showed one how inadequately the problem was grasped. To some the expected advent of Home Rule seemed to promise as its main fruition in the field of education the raising of their salaries; to others the supreme thing it was to bring in its train was the abolition of Dr Starkie; to some again it held out the delightful prospect of Orange boys and Orange girls being forced to learn Irish; to others it meant the dawn of an era of commonsense, the ushering in of the reign of ‘a sound modern education’, suitable to the needs of a progressive modern people.

I scandalised many people at the time by saying that the last was the view that irritated me most. The first view was not so selfish as it might appear, for between the salary offered to teachers and the excellence of a country’s education system there is a vital connection. And the second and third forecasts at any rate opened up picturesque vistas. The passing of Dr Starkie would have had something of the pageantry of the banishment of Napoleon to St Helena (an effect which would have been heightened had he been accompanied into exile by Mr Bonaparte-Wyse), and the prospect of the children of Sandy Row being taught to curse the Pope in Irish was rich and soul-satisfying. These things we might or might not have seen had Home Rule come.* But I expressed the hope that even Home Rule would not commit Ireland to an ideal so low as the ideal underlying the phrase ‘a sound modern education’.

It is a vile phrase, one of the vilest I know. Yet we find it in nearly every school prospectus, and it comes pat to the lips of nearly everyone that writes or talks about schools.

Now, there can be no such thing as ‘a sound modern education’ – as well talk about a ‘lively modern faith’ or a ‘serviceable modern religion’. It should be obvious that the more ‘modern’ an education is the less ‘sound’, for in education ‘modernism’ is as much a heresy as in religion. In both mediævalism were a truer standard. We are too fond of clapping ourselves upon the back because we live in modern times, and we preen ourselves quite ridiculously (and unnecessarily) on our modern progress. There is, of course, such a thing as modern progress, but it has been won at how great a cost! How many precious things have we flung from us to lighten ourselves for that race!

And in some directions we have progressed not at all, or we have progressed in a circle; perhaps, indeed, all progress on this planet, and on every planet, is in a circle, just as every line you draw on a globe is a circle or part of one. Modern speculation is often a mere groping where ancient men saw clearly. All the problems with which we strive (I mean all the really important problems) were long ago solved by our ancestors, only their solutions have been forgotten. There have been States in which the rich did not grind the poor, although there are no such States now; there have been free self-governing democracies, although there are few such democracies now; there have been rich and beautiful social organisations, with an art and a culture and a religion in every man’s house, though for such a thing today we have to search out some sequestered people living by a desolate sea-shore or in a high forgotten valley among lonely hills – a hamlet of Iar-Connacht or a village in the Austrian Alps. Mankind, I repeat, or some section of mankind, has solved all its main problems somewhere and at some time. I suppose no universal and permanent solution is possible as long as the old Adam remains in us, the Adam that makes each one of us, and each tribe of us, something of the rebel, of the freethinker, of the adventurer, of the egoist. But the solutions are there, and it is because we fail in clearness of vision or in boldness of heart or in singleness of purpose that we cannot find them.

*Publisher’s note: W. J. M. Starkie was the last resident Commissioner of National Education for Ireland. Andrew Bonaparte-Wyse was an inspector of national schools in Ireland.

V  AN IDEAL IN EDUCATION

The words and phrases of a language are always to some extent revelations of the mind of the race that has moulded the language. How often does an Irish vocable light up as with a lantern some immemorial Irish attitude, some whole phase of Irish thought! Thus, the words which the old Irish employed when they spoke of education show that they had gripped the very heart of that problem. To the old Irish the teacher was aite, ‘fosterer’, the pupil was dalta, ‘fosterchild’, the system was aiteachas, ‘fosterage’; words which we still retain as oide, dalta, oideachas.

And is it not the precise aim of education to ‘foster’? Not to inform, to indoctrinate, to conduct through a course of studies (though these be the dictionary meanings of the word), but, first and last, to ‘foster’ the elements of character native to a soul, to help to bring these to their full perfection rather than to implant exotic excellences.

Fosterage implies a foster-father or foster-mother – a person – as its centre and inspiration rather than a code of rules. Modern education systems are elaborate pieces of machinery devised by highly-salaried officials for the purpose of turning out citizens according to certain approved patterns. The modern school is a State-controlled institution designed to produce workers for the State, and is in the same category with a dockyard or any other State-controlled institution which produces articles necessary to the progress, well-being, and defence of the State. We speak of the ‘efficiency’, the ‘cheapness’, and the ‘up-to-dateness’ of an education system just as we speak of the ‘efficiency’ the ‘cheapness’, and the ‘up-to-dateness’ of a system of manufacturing coal-gas. We shall soon reach a stage when we shall speak of the ‘efficiency’, the ‘cheapness’, and the ‘up-to-dateness’ of our systems of soul-saving. We shall hear it said, ‘Salvation is very cheap in England’, or ‘The Germans are wonderfully efficient in prayer’, or ‘Gee, it takes a New York parson to hustle ginks into heaven’.

Now, education is as much concerned with souls as religion is. Religion is a Way of Life, and education is a preparation of the soul to live its life here and hereafter; to live it nobly and fully. And as we cannot think of religion without a Person as its centre, as we cannot think of a church without its Teacher, so we cannot think of a school without its Master. A school, in fact, according to the conception of our wise ancestors, was less a place than a little group of persons, a teacher and his pupils. Its place might be poor, nay, it might have no local habitation at all, it might be peripatetic: where the master went the disciples followed. One may think of Our Lord and His friends as a sort of school: was He not the Master, and were not they His disciples? That gracious conception was not only the conception of the old Gael, pagan and Christian, but it was the conception of Europe all through the Middle Ages. Philosophy was not crammed out of text-books, but was learned at the knee of some great philosopher; art was learned in the studio of some master-artist, a craft in the workshop of some master-craftsman. Always it was the personality of the master that made the school, never the State that built it of brick and mortar, drew up a code of rules to govern it, and sent hirelings into it to carry out its decrees.

I do not know how far it is possible to revive the old ideal of fosterer and foster-child. I know it were very desirable. One sees too clearly that the modern system, under which the teacher tends more and more to become a mere civil servant, is making for the degradation of education, and will end in irreligion and anarchy. The modern child is coming to regard his teacher as an official paid by the State to render him certain services; services which it is in his interest to avail of, since by doing so he will increase his earning capacity later on; but services the rendering and acceptance of which no more imply a sacred relationship than do the rendering and acceptance of the services of a dentist or a chiropodist. There is thus coming about a complete reversal of the relative positions of master and disciple, a tendency which is increased by every statute that is placed on the statute book, by every rule that is added to the education code of modern countries.

Against this trend I would oppose the ideal of those who shaped the Gaelic polity nearly two thousand years ago. It is not merely that the old Irish had a good education system; they had the best and noblest that has ever been known among men. There has never been any human institution more adequate to its purpose than that which, in pagan times, produced Cúchulainn and the Boy-Corps of Eamhain Macha and, in Christian times, produced Enda and the companions of his solitude in Aran. The old Irish system, pagan and Christian, possessed in pre-eminent degree the thing most needful in education: an adequate inspiration. Colmcille suggested what that inspiration was when he said, ‘If I die it shall be from the excess of the love that I bear the Gael.’ A love and a service so excessive as to annihilate all thought of self, a recognition that one must give all, must be willing always to make the ultimate sacrifice – this is the inspiration alike of the story of Cúchulainn and of the story of Colmcille, the inspiration that made the one a hero and the other a saint.

VI  MASTER AND DISCIPLES

In the Middle Ages there were everywhere little groups of persons clustering round some beloved teacher, and thus it was that men learned not only the humanities but all gracious and useful crafts. There were no State art schools, no State technical schools: as I have said, men became artists in the studio of some master-artist, men learned crafts in the workshop of some master-craftsman. It was always the individual inspiring, guiding, fostering other individuals; never the State usurping the place of father or fosterer, dispensing education like a universal provider of ready-mades, aiming at turning out all men and women according to regulation patterns.

In Ireland the older and truer conception was never lost sight of. It persisted into Christian times when a Kieran or an Enda or a Colmcille gathered his little group of foster-children (the old word was still used) around him; they were collectively his family, his household, his clann – many sweet and endearing words were used to mark the intimacy of that relationship. It seems to me that there has been nothing nobler in the history of education than this development of the old Irish plan of fosterage under a Christian rule, when to the pagan ideals of strength and truth there were added the Christian ideals of love and humility. And this, remember, was not the education system of an aristocracy, but the education system of a people. It was more democratic than any education system in the world today. Our very divisions into primary, secondary, and university crystallise a snobbishness partly intellectual and partly social. At Clonard, Kieran, the son of a carpenter, sat in the same class as Colmcille, the son of a king. To Clonard or to Aran or to Clonmacnois went every man, rich or poor, prince or peasant, who wanted to sit at Finnian’s or at Enda’s or at Kieran’s feet and to learn of his wisdom.

Always it was the personality of the teacher that drew them there. And so it was all through Irish history. A great poet or a great scholar had his foster-children who lived at his house or fared with him through the country. Even long after Kinsale the Munster poets had their little groups of pupils; and the hedge schoolmasters of the nineteenth century were the last repositories of a high tradition.

I dwell on the importance of the personal element in education. I would have every child not merely a unit in a school attendance, but in some intimate personal way the pupil of a teacher, or, to use more expressive words, the disciple of a master. And here I nowise contradict another position of mine, that the main object in education is to help the child to be his own true and best self. What the teacher should bring to his pupil is not a set of ready-made opinions, or a stock of cut-and-dry information, but an inspiration and an example; and his main qualification should be, not such an overmastering will as shall impose itself at all hazards upon all weaker wills that come under its influence, but rather so infectious an enthusiasm as shall kindle new enthusiasm. The Montessori system, so admirable in many ways, would seem at first sight to attach insufficient importance to the function of the teacher in the schoolroom. But this is not really so. True, it would make the spontaneous efforts of the children the main motive power, as against the dominating will of the teacher which is the main motive power in the ordinary schoolroom. But the teacher must be there always to inspire, to foster. If you would realise how true this is, how important the personality of the teacher, even in a Montessori school, try to imagine a Montessori school conducted by the average teacher of your acquaintance, or try to imagine a Montessori school conducted by yourself!

VII  OF FREEDOM IN EDUCATION

I have claimed elsewhere that the native Irish education system possessed pre-eminently two characteristics: first, freedom for the individual, and, secondly, an adequate inspiration. Without these two things you cannot have education, no matter how you may elaborate educational machinery, no matter how you may multiply educational programmes. And because those two things are pre-eminently lacking in what passes for education in Ireland, we have in Ireland strictly no education system at all; nothing that by any extension of the meaning of words can be called an education system. We have an elaborate machinery for teaching persons certain subjects, and the teaching is done more or less efficiently; more efficiently, I imagine, than such teaching is done in England or in America. We have three universities and four boards of education. We have some thousands of buildings, large and small. We have an army of inspectors, mostly overpaid. We have a host of teachers, mostly underpaid. We have a Compulsory Education Act. We have the grave and bulky code of the Commissioners of National Education, and the slim impertinent pamphlet which enshrines the wisdom of the Commissioners of Intermediate Education. We have a vast deal more in the shape of educational machinery and stage properties. But we have, I repeat, no education system; and only in isolated places have we any education. The essentials are lacking.

And first of freedom. The word freedom is no longer understood in Ireland. We have no experience of the thing, and we have almost lost our conception of the idea. So completely is this true that the very organisations which exist in Ireland to champion freedom show no disposition themselves to accord freedom: they challenge a great tyranny, but they erect their little tyrannies. ‘Thou shalt not’ is half the law of Ireland, and the other half is ‘Thou must’.