Page:EB1911 - Volume 08.djvu/997

 Ireland.

The full development of a system of public education in Ireland has been hampered and retarded by the general difficulties inherent in the problem of Irish government. In consequence of the fundamentally different social, religious and political conditions in the two countries, the English and Irish systems have developed down to the present time upon divergent lines. In England, popular education was founded in the first instance upon individual initiative combining in organized voluntary effort, and, though the voluntary agencies have been first supplemented and latterly to a large extent supplanted by public action, the tendency has been in the direction of municipalization rather than in that of central state control. In Ireland, on the other hand, education has suffered in the past from the general absence of individual initiative and local interest almost as seriously as from the mistakes of the English government. These causes, more directly perhaps than the prevailing poverty of the country, made it necessary to throw the burden of supporting the schools to an increasing extent upon the state, while the want of local self-government precluded any devolution of powers and duties upon municipal authorities.

State intervention is actually of earlier date in Ireland than in England. From the reign of Elizabeth onwards, English Protestant schools were founded by the government in a sporadic and intermittent fashion in pursuance of its Anglicizing policy. To mention briefly one or two historical features, the great religious educational enterprise of Edmond Rice in founding the well-known Irish Catholic order of the Christian Brothers in 1802 forms an exception to the general lack of initiative among the people themselves. About the same period the Kildare Place Society (founded in 1811 while the first commission of inquiry into Irish education was sitting) attempted to grapple with the peculiar difficulties of the religious situation upon lines somewhat similar to those just laid down by Lancaster and his followers in England. This organization comprised both Roman Catholic and Protestant schools upon a common religious basis of Bible reading without note or comment, and received government grants which rose to £30,000 a year before they were discontinued in 1833. The religious compromise which the system embodied broke down in consequence of Catholic dissatisfaction, and that it was at first fairly successful may seem extraordinary in view of the later attitude of the Catholic Church towards the question of common schools and combined religious instruction.

In 1833, as the result of a second commission of inquiry (1824) and a select committee of the House of Commons (1828), Mr Stanley inaugurated the national system of elementary schools under a board of commissioners nominated from the different religious denominations. The government appears from the outset to have aimed at combined secular and separate religious instruction for Roman Catholics and Protestants. At the same time, an attempt was inconsistently made to provide an ethical basis for the secular instruction by means of Bible extracts. The story of the preparation of these extracts by an ingenious compound of the Protestant Authorized and Douai versions of Scripture is in its way one of the curiosities of religious history. The extracts were designed to meet the recognized Catholic objection to the indiscriminate reading of the Bible without note or comment. In practice they were chiefly used in the Protestant schools (in which their use is now practically extinct), and the growing Catholic objection to the policy of the National Board in this respect found authoritative, though somewhat cautiously worded, expression in a decree of the Roman Congregation De Propaganda Fide of January 11, 1846, declaring that non-sectarian religious instruction was dangerous to youth. “Tutius multo esse ut literarum tantummodo humanarum magisterium fiat in scholis promiscuis, quam ut fundamentales, ut aiunt, et communes religionis Christianae articuli restricte tradantur, reservata singulis sestis peculiari seorsum eruditione. Ita enim cum pueris agere periculosum valde videtur.” The religious difficulty in Irish elementary education may be said to have been solved in process of time by the conversion of the national system in practice, though not in theory, into a system strongly denominational and therefore widely different from the design of its founders, combined Biblical instruction being discarded, and separate schools for the most part taking the place of common schools for the two creeds. In the latter respect the like tendency has been noted in the case of Germany.

The following are the chief specific points upon which the Irish system of elementary education differs from the English.

Finance.—The state still makes building grants to the extent of two-thirds of the cost. Such grants are only made to what are called vested schools, that is to say, schools of which the premises are vested in trustees or in the commissioners themselves. The state further pays in the case of all national schools the entire cost of maintenance except only the upkeep of the building, and the provision of books after the exhaustion of a first free grant.

Appointment and Payment of Teachers.—For the purpose of promotion the state through its inspectors undertakes the duty of classifying the individual teachers in four grades, passage from one grade to another being secured by examination. Appointments of teachers to schools are made by the school managers subject to the approval of the commissioners. Rights of dismissal are reserved to the local managers and also to the commissioners independently. Lastly, the teachers’ salaries are now paid directly by the state. The old system of payment by results was abandoned in 1900, and the teacher is paid (a) a fixed salary according to grade, (b) a continued good service salary which may be increased triennially, (c) a capitation payment.

Convent Schools.—In addition to the national schools supported as above, there are a considerable number of convent or monastery schools which receive capitation grants after the English plan, but not direct salaries. There were 308 such schools in 1908, with an average attendance of 70,003. There were also 83 other convent or monastery schools paid by personal salaries, with an average attendance of 11,075.

School Attendance and Free Education.—The Irish Education Act 1892 provided for compulsory attendance in towns and for the adoption of compulsion in other districts. In virtue of the financial sections of this act, which provided an increased grant for salaries, most national schools have become free.

General Elementary-School Statistics.—In 1908 the average number of scholars on the rolls of all the schools was 708,992, and the average daily attendance was 494,662, or 69·8% as compared with the number on the rolls. As regards religious denomination, 74·42% of the scholars on the rolls were Roman Catholics; 28·6% were in schools attended by both Roman Catholic and Protestant children and 71·4% in schools attended solely by Roman Catholics or solely by Protestants. The total expenditure on the schools and teaching staffs was £1,591,214, of which £1,451,139, equivalent to £2, 19s. 3d. per scholar, was contributed from state grants, and £140,074, equivalent to 5s. 9d. per scholar, from local (i.e. voluntary) sources, the rate per scholar from all sources being £3, 5s.

Training of Teachers.—Salaried monitors are employed in the Irish schools, but, unlike the English pupil teachers, are not explicitly recognized as forming part of the school staff. There are now seven training colleges, viz. one undenominational college maintained by the commissioners, five Roman Catholic colleges, and one college in connexion with the Protestant Episcopal Church of Ireland. Of the scholars in the undenominational college, 73 out of 312 were Roman Catholics. The total number of students in training was 1189, viz. 514 men and 675 women. The percentage of trained teachers to the total number of teachers was 64·7. A special training college for the instruction of teachers in Irish has been recognized.

One of the chief desiderata in Irish education is a single central authority for all branches of education, elementary, secondary (or “intermediate”) and technical. There are two