When I was in Secondary School the purpose of teaching was to pass exams, because jobs were scarce and without a Certificate of some sort, the future looked hopeless.
The teaching of poetry in Irish was not aimed at giving us an appreciation of a poem. We might learn eight lines of a long poem by heart. We were then given the prepared text of a few paragraphs to explain the theme of a piece and a summary of the poet’s development of it. So everyone in the class was expected to memorise them and reproduce verbatim on their papers. I was years left school before I realised that many of these pieces were composed as songs. Some were centuries old and still sung by native speakers who had heard them from their elders before they made their first visit to school.
Up to Intermediate Level, History and Geography were grouped together for the purpose of Exam Credits. We sat a History Paper and a Geography paper and a combined score of 60% was an Honours Score, 30% a Pass Score. I got Honours although I was useless at Geography. Our teacher, a layman and a cynic, who used go to the pub each lunch hour, used question us on a poorly prepared booklet, on such things as “the Three Fs” (Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent and Free Sale) demands of Davitt’s Land League. And he’d wallop you with a leather strap if you hadn’t got the formula word perfect. The booklet, although supposedly by a graduate, and from an established publisher, claimed that Cromwell’s success arose from his religious zeal, without recognising the old brute’s military genius and inspirational leadership. When he first took our class the teacher asked each of us, in turn, “What was the most important” I suppose meaning, ‘significant’ , “date in Irish History.” Everyone except myself said “1916” and I said “432.” “Twenty Republicans and One Christian ” said the teacher without asking each of us why we answered as we did. That annoyed me then, and rankles with me still. I would still give the same answer. For 432, Anno Domini Nostri Jesus Christi, is reckoned the date of the start of St Patrick’s mission to Ireland.
You will forgive the following wordy digression –
Christian writers wrote down the lore of pre-Christian Ireland, in Irish, and brought to Ireland the Old and New Testaments, Greek and Latin learning. They thus,introduced, without bloodshed,or even a leather strap, the world to Ireland and Ireland to the world. Irish Literature is the oldest literature North of the Alps, and predates the English and French languages – a fact that should be beaten into, if necessary, the wee Irish gobshites whose horizons are bound by the Anglosphere.Or would that be an example of flogging a dead parrot? Cambridge University recently published Volume 1 of a History of Ireland which, I gather from the review of it by Sean Duffy in the September/October issue of History Ireland, might have been transcribed from a Yokel in THE BULL in AMBRIDGE after the Yokel and the scribe had a few over the eight.
For Cambridge/ Ambridge, Irish History begins in 600 AD and its First Volume ends in 1550. Sean Duffy obderves that the human story in Ireland is at least 10,000 years old so that the Cambridge History of Ireland deals with, at most, one tenth of that time-span. By 600 A.D. the great dynasties who dominated Ireland for half a millennium had taken power. Some of Western Christendom’s greatest monasteries had been flourishing for decades
in Ireland,Colmcille was dead and buried, and Columbanus was an old man in Gaul defending Irish mathematicians’ calculation of Easter, before the Cambridge History of Ireland opens, and nearly another 600 years elapse before the Cambridge/Ambridge History attempts a political narrative – with the Norman Invasion. Hitherto unheard of Danes,Normans or English (amongst educated Irish people, or anyone outside Cambridge, probably) more notice than Brian Boru, Rory O’Connor, whose first names are still being inscribed on Birth and Baptismal Registers.
END OF DIGRESSION
Back to my schooldays –
It’s ironic that the then most often quoted 1916 leader, Patrick Pearse, wrote of that type of teaching as THE MURDER MACHINE, which was, surely inspired by Charles Dickens’s HARD TIMES and the GRADGRIND/BOUNDERBY philosophy of education. Pearse spoke of a parent who asked what he should do to a boy who only wanted to play a tin whistle. “Buy him a tin whistle, of course” was his answer.
I recall my father recalling how his father, a teacher, remarked on a silliness of his having to teach Latin to a boy whose only ambition was to be a ship’s Captain. When I was a clerk with Irish Shipping in Dublin, I met the former schoolboy, a veteran ship’s Captain who was still taking Ireland to the world and bringing the world to Ireland a couple of generations later.
It seems that in some academic institutions, in order to be awarded a degree, or a Chair in History, or a frequent appearance on television, candidates must slavishly tick boxes which serve agendas which have nothing to do with education, research or independent thought.
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