A reply to Dr. Starkie's attack on the managers of national schools

Preface

The contents of the following pages appeared week by week as articles in The Leader, from about the time of the publication of Dr. 8tarkie’s Belfast Address to the middle of last May. They have all been written in the night time, and in more or less haste. They were undertaken at the suggestion of a few friends ; and they are appearing now in a pamphlet at the request of persons, lay and clerical, from different parts of Ireland and Great Britain. In the preparation of them I consulted nobody, and I am alone responsible for whatever they contain. It may be well also to say, that I neither asked nor received information from any official of the National Board. The only information which I owe to persons, and not to public sources or to personal observation, is what I give in No. 10.

I was to have made some important additions and changes in the articles before their publication in pamphlet, but I have been prevented by severe illness ; so I let them go as they were originally written.

The articles appeared over my initials in Irish characters (mop), not that I wantad to conceal my name, but I wished that what I had to say in answer to Dr. Starkie should go before the public on its own merits. By the advice of persons whose opinion I value, they are now published with my name.

I first set myself to defend the Managers from the unjust charges of Dr. Starkie. Having done that, I had established the right to turn to himself and criticise his own shortcomings in relation to the responsible position which he holds. Again, he is Manager of the Model Schools, and I have inquired into the management of these. I was thus led to point out the enormous amount of public money which they have cost, and the little value which they have given for it. And, finally, one wild paragraph in his Address brought me to examine the working of the National System from the beginning, and the action of the Early Commissioners. They persistently trammelled the Managers as closely as they dared.

Let it be borne in mind that the Managers hitherto have been allowed no effective influence on the educational work of the National Schools. That is a fact which is not sufficiently brought out. If, therefore, primary education in Ireland is not as satisfactory as it might be, those to whom Government have given supreme control

PREFACE.

shall have to answer for it. Dr. Starkie tries to put the blame on the Managers ; but he has been throwing stones out of a glass house.

As to the buildings, I am quite ready to believe that some of those which are vested in local Trustees are not kept in as good condition as those which are vested in the Commissioners. But, the Commissioners have only to make known their needs, and public money comes at once and without trouble to their aid. Local Trustees have to spend their ingenuity in providing money from private sources — a very difficult thing to do. And the Commissioners have made it more difficult, since, by the introduction of free education, they have taught the people that as Government pays for everything they have to pay for nothing.

It is for the Commissioners to examine their consciences as to whether the people value education more which they are supposed to get for nothing. It is not my business. I merely express the conviction that, even from an economic point of view, free education means in the last analysis that the poor contribute towards the education of those who can well afford to pay for themselves. I am concerned here only with school repairs ; and I own I cannot see why those schools which are vested in local Trustees should not be kept in repair by the Board of Works as well as those schools which are vested in the Commissioners. They do the same work, and in the same way. The action of the Commissioners in the past, as I think I have shown, gives them no special claim to public trust, whilst their action has taught a lesson of distrust, to Catholics at any rate, which it would be unwise to forget. I know that local Trustees, in order to keep possession of their schools, undertake to keep them in repair ; and, of course, they recognise the responsibility. But, I think it is an unfair condition to impose. The inequality should be levelled away.

Those observations indicate the argument which runs through the following pages.

M. O’li.

Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross , 1903.

Index

I. Introductory,

II. How the Resident Commissioner reasons, ...

III. How the Resident Commissioner misrepresents the

Inspectors by “ Cooking ” their Reports,

IV. The Resident Commissioner censures the Managers

for not doing what is not their duty,

V. The Resident Commissioner makes a sweeping charge which is falsified by facts,

VI. The Resident Commissioner betrays an ignorance of educational matters which one in his position should know, ...

VII. How the Resident Commissioner manages the Revised

Programme — London School Board mismanagement and extravagance a caution to Ireland, ....

VIII. How the Commissioners built the Model Schools,

IX. How the Commissioners have managed the Model Schools,

X. How Dr. Starkie and the Commissioners manage the Model Schools according to the Revised Programme. They neglect as Managers of the Model Schools what Dr. Starkie abuses the Managers of National Schools for not doing, ...

XI. How the Commissioners provided for the Training of the Teachers before they were driven to do it properly,

XII. How the early Commissioners managed the National System. How Dr. Starkie shows that he has never read their first Reports, which he professes to have read,

PAGE.

A REPLY

DR. STARKIE’S ATTACK

ON THE

MANAGERS OF NATIONAL SCHOOLS.

I

It has been suggested to me to make an examination of the position taken up towards the Managers of National Schools by Dr. Starkie in his address before the British Association last summer in Belfast, and recently published as a pamphlet, with explanatory notes and an appendix. I am not a manager, and have not, therefore, an intimate knowledge of the National System and its workings but so thorough a knowledge of its details is not, I think, necessary for one to lay the ghost raised by the Resident Commissioner. I had set about the proposed examination when I found, to my surprise, that the Inspectors’ Reports, on which Dr. Starkie has based hi9 charges, are not yet open to the public, whom he asked to believe his presentation of them. But it appears they will be very soon within our reach, and whilst we are waiting I introduce some thoughts which, though apparently irrelevant, contain a lesson in the light of which it may be useful to read what Dr. Starkie has written.

There must be something special and strange in the life and action of the Irish priesthood, since, in

B spit© of s© many onslaughts from so many quarters, the confidence of the Irish people in them has survived so long. Landlords, Protestants, English Catholics, Irish Catholic place-hunters, Irish patriots of military propensities, and politicians of many colours have, in their turn, made them the object of calumny, of pious scandal, or of vituperation ; yet in their public prestige, setting aside their spiritual character, they seem to renew their youth. That is a curious fact ; and one well worth considering. If its cause were dispassionately sought it should bring a searching of conscience to many. English Catholics looked up with admiration to the Irish priest standing on the political platform whilst he was helping O’Connell to emancipate them, but they piously turned away their eyes from that same priest, standing on the same platform, beside the same O’Connell, to emancipate Ireland. Irish Catholic place-hunters thought that a priest was in charity bound to the political platform whilst the people had a religious or a civil wrong to redress ; but when the place-hunter had caught his quarry he began to think it very improper for a priest to co-operate with, or in any way to countenance any public action that tended to disturb the equanimity of respectable citizens wishing to live in peace, although the same wrongs of the same people had still to be redressed. Twenty years ago certain politicians used to tell the people that it was the sacred duty of the priests to come out from the sacristy and plead their cause from the platform ; ten years ago some of the same politicians told the same people that the business of the priest was in the sacristy, and that he had neither duty nor right outside it. It would, indeed, be a strange kind of duty that veered about according to the interest or humour of politicians. But the priests followed their own notion of duty, and the calmer judgment of the people has already ratified their position, whilst many a political reputation has meanwhile dissolved, and many a prominent politician has disappeared from public life. The fact is — the priests have considered the interests of the people as a whole, not the interests of a party or a class ; and that they have been misunderstood, abused, or hated by parties is the surest sign of it, as it is also a sign that their action is felt to be an effective factor in public life.

The Irish bishops and priests have been accused, from time to time, of killing the Irish language, of killing Irish industries, killing Irish patriotism, killing the Irish nation, even of betraying Catholic interests — of all sorts of religious negligences and social misdeeds. In fact, if the charges became accumulative, they would not leave the bishops and priests a single virtue, natural or supernatural, to justify their existence in rerum natura. But they are never accused of all those enormities at the same time or by the same assailants; and it amuses as well as instructs one to note that those who blame them one day praise them the next, often even covering their character with so gorgeous a cloak of adjectives as almost to hide from us the dogmatic fact that Irish bishops and priests, like the rest of mankind, have inherited the original sin of the human race. The truth is that praise and blame are usually bestowed on them not by any law of public duty, but according as the wind blows the weathercock of party purpose or personal interest. John, Earl of Shrewsbury, who thought them brave champions of the faith before Emancipation, called them “political priests” when he had been emancipated, although the nature of their public action had not changed. The present Duke of Norfolk, at a meeting held, I think, at Islington to protest against the Home Buie Bill, said that the conduct of the Irish bishops was scandalous.

I also note how Lord Robert Montague, Judge Keogh, and others passed from praise to blame according as the action of the priests served or opposed their purposes.

I remember hearing in my boyhood persons, whom I then looked up to as having sense, say that the Young Irelanders, in 1848, and the Fenians, in 1867, would have unquestionably freed Ireland by force if the priests would only have let. them fight. One day in 1890, according to an Irish newspaper, the priests were saintly, their character was sacred, and the Times a brutal liar for calling them “ surpliced ruffians ” ; the following day they were an unrighteous lot, self-desecrated by “ the language of the virago and the drab.” In a few weeks they had become saintly and sacred once more, and a beneficent power in the land; whilst according to. another newspaper which arose to take the place of the former, they not only never did anything for Ireland, but, according to one of its philosophers; did not know how to do anything unless to send round the hat.

Recently a. series of letters were published in the New Ireland Review on the state of the country, in which the priests, as usual, get much blame for the social shortcomings and material wants of the people. This writer, spending smart, phrases, on the industrial and social defects of the people, reminds me that anyone can see holes in a garment or detect its seams unsewed, but not everyone can or cares to patch or stitch it. I suppose every priest, and every intelligent layman, sees those drawbacks, and sees what ought, to be, but it is another thing to find an effective remedy, and to apply it at once to. heal the social evils gradually engendered through generations of oppression. This writer had only to reel off platitudes, true enough and very smart, and then go out of the country, far removed from the drawbacks described, and from the difficulties of undoing them. If instead of picking holes this writer showed how to mend them, fixed, for instance, on a particular locality, went into conference with the priests and leading laymen of the place, pointed out the specific industry suited to the local circumstances, how it could be organised, and where a market might be found, etc., or said to them, “ 111 stay here for some time till we have the work fairly on the way,” one would begin to have confidence in such a constructive critic. But those who merely find fault and run away deserve neither confidence nor notice. Experience has put me in this frame of mind with regard to that class of benefactors, or rather benelocutors. When I was younger, I too had high ideals, and high a priori roads leading to them. The ideals have remained, but the experience of practical life has proved some of those roads, impassable, some of them built in the air; and some have given way under the first strain of actual test. I have come to have more sympathy with those who have to actually face the difficulties of finding a remedy for those social wants, and have come to have little sympathy or none at all with those heartless or brainless fault-finders who merely deal out destructive criticism, who glibly write and run away.

When the Irish revival movement began, the cry of “ Irish Ireland ” and “ no more emigration ” passed like lightning over the land ; and the cry arose on many sides, “ Why don’t the bishops and priests keep the people at home ? ” Those who never set their heads seriously to such a task imagine, in their1 thoughtlessness, that the bishops have only to write a pastoral, and the trade of the emigrant ship is gone. Those who have thought over the problem seriously, and have consequently realised the difficulty, feel that the bishops and priests can do a great deal to solve the problem, but that it is not to be solved by a pastoral or a sermon ; that it has to be come at by a more indirect and difficult way. Of course those who have not to d o a thing, or who are not going to try, find it much more easy to do it than those who have to do it, or' who seriously try to do it. I was speaking not long since to a very well-meaning and earnest, if not practical, man, and he said to me, “ T'is a pity the bishops and clergy don’t try to keep those poor people at home — (pointing to a, number of emigrants on their way to America) — they are the only power in Ireland able to stop emigration.” I agreed that they could do a great, deal. But I said, suppose that the parish priests of those people went to them yesterday and said,

“ Don't go to America ; it is a perilous venture for body and soul, etc.” ; and if the intending emigrants replied,

“ Very well, Father, we’ll stay at home; will you get employment for us.” “ Now,” I said, “ if you were the parish priest in the case, what would you say ? ” My friend shook his head and replied, “ Ah, ’tis a difficult question ! ” There are a great many other difficult questions, too, but all quite easy of solution for poets, idlers, gossipers, and professional magazine writers.

The latest charge which has been made against the priests of Ireland is that they have shown themselves indifferent to the education of the people. It has been made by Dr. Starkie, one of the Commissioners: of National Education. Of course Protestants, especially those of proselytising propensities, have always charged them with keeping the people in ignorance. That is natural. For if the Catholic Church is the mother of ignorance, the priest© of that Church would be undutiful not to keep the people covered with a, cloak of darkness. Moreover, since the priests of Ireland have warned the people not to drink or taste “ the Pierian Spring ” that flowed from the Charter Schools or from Kildare Street, or from the National system as distorted by Dr. W'hately, because proselytisers had poisoned the source, they have been accused of keeping out the light of knowledge for having advised the faithful rather to bear the thirst than slake it at a fount of religious and moral infection. Then their satellites, the “ Soupers,” who have had, of course, to work for their pay, have assured the public that the proselytisers are right. I refer to select “ Soupers ” — the O’Sullivans, O’Beirnes, Crottys, M‘Gees, Ryans, Murphys, Phelans, and the rest of the race. There is a lower order still of select “ Soupers.” For, to give those I have named their merit they openly declared that, frightened by the heartless oppression and the hideous darkness of Romanism they ran for refuge and rest into the arms of the “ Saints.” So far they preserved the appearance at least of conscience, and protected themselves from self-convicted inconsistency. So, descending the scale of select “Soupers,” we find the tribe of the Lowry Whittles and the M‘Carthys, who pretend to be Catholics, and unctuously write of “our Holy Mother Church” that they may appear abroad as domestic witnesses to the darkness of their own house and the corruption of their own mother. Of course, every Catholic knows that the Me Car thy s are not Catholic at all; and every Protestant of common sense feels that if the Catholic Church is as bad as the McCarthys say it is, the McCarthys must themselves be a very bad lot to remain in it.

When I have got to the McCarthys I have got to the bottom. Coming up again into the fresh air I find F. H. O'Donnell, for whom, in spite of all his mental and political vagaries, I have not lost the regard I conceived for him several years ago. The worst I will say of him that he blows hot and cold in turn, and is always at extremes. It is now several years since I read his book on “ Mixed Education.” He had then taken his M.A. in Galway, and, with that experience, he said in the book that a student who could pass only for ‘ chubbery * in Maynooth might be superior to a Queen's College graduate. In his “ Ruin of Education in Ireland " he says that the Queen's Colleges were amongst the greatest successes in the history of education, and that Maynooth is about the greatest failure. Let me here say that I have never spent a day in Maynooth ; till two years ago was never nearer to the place than Hazelhatch, on the Great Southern and Western Railway. I did go to matriculate in the Queen's University several years ago, but was turned away by the force of the following words of sense spoken to me by a gentleman whom, by my father’s directions, I consulted— “ I suppose you think the knowledge of your religion which you have got as a boy will be enough for you in the higher education you aspire to ? At any rate, you will get no more where you are going to. So I'd advise you to bear well in mind that if you enter that place beyond, you will pick up many queer notions there, and you will then have to face life with your Penny Catechism knowledge of your religion.” Hisi plain words came as a revelation and an inspiration ; and I thank God I went home and never returned.

Dr. Starkie says of Mr. O’Donnell’s book on the “ Ruin of Education in Ireland,’’ that the “ effect of much excellent rhetoric has been weakened by the fact that men differ as to the precise cause of that ruin.” Let us now see whether much of Dr. Starkie’s own excellent rhetoric and smart sentences should not also be taken at a discount. When he speaks of the neglect shown by the managers of National Schools in Ireland towards education, he has of course chiefly in view the parish priests, for they are the managers of the majority of schools. When exposing that neglect he said, “ It is very painful to me, as Resident Commissioner, to make this confession.” I am sure that people in general will think that he felt more pleasure than pain in making the confession, or rather the exposure. If it was a painful confession, why did he make it? There was no need for it, because, as Resident Commissioner, he had the remedy in his own hands, if those managerial delinquencies are real, and if he is as ready to; do his duty as he wants the managers to do theirs. And if the ‘ painful ’ necessity of speaking was forced upon him, one would think he might have selected another place and another audience. However, it may be that his charges are well founded, and that he has told the truth of the managers, even though he chose the wrong place and occasion for it. Accusations might be founded on fact though the motive in making them might be animosity. Are the charges, then, true? Has he made out his case against the managers? If he has, it only remains for the managers to mend their ways, and to do their duty. One thing is certain. If Dr. Starkie takes as much pains with every other phase of his work as he has taken with this one, his punctilious care could not be surpassed by any Resident Commissioner. I hope to examine all these things.

II. How the Resident Commissioner Reasons

Dr. Starkie has cited and tried the managers on the Inspectors’ Reports of one year only — an unfair thing to do; and that the year 1901, when they had to deal for the first time with the New Programme — which makes the trial doubly unfair; and he brought up those Reports in evidence against them some months before they were published, thus depriving them of the power to cross-examine his evidence — which makes a, third element of unfairness. Since I last wrote I have received a copy of those Reports, and I now proceed to examine Dr. Starkie’s pamphlet with the light they throw on it.

However true or false hisi charges may be, the Catholic managers, i.e., practically the parish priests of Ireland, are marked out in the public mind as the chief object of his attack ; and that they have taken it to themselves is clear from the fact that they came out at once and protested against it. From the tenor of his address, as well as from the fact that they are the managers of the majority of National Schools, the thoughts of everyone reading it naturally turned to them. He delivered his address in the early autumn ; within the past few weeks his pamphlet was published, with notes and an appendix. In a note to the appendix he says: — “ To obviate misapprehension, I wish to say that my remarks on the managers apply no less to the E.C.* and Presbyterian managers than to the R.C.” ; and one who seemed to know has told me that he chiefly had in view nonrCatholic managers. I cannot say that it is so ; but if it is so, he is all the more blamable for his disingenuousness. As he struck out at all he should have consistency and courage to strike out straight and be definite.

* Dr. Starkie makes a mistake in writing “ E.C.” He shouldknow that there i9 no Established Church in Ireland since 1869.

I have said that Dr. Starkie’s charges should be met on their merits. The imprudence and impropriety of selecting the occasion, place, and audience which he did select for his impeachment tells', I think, against his fitness for the responsible official position which he holds ; but that does not disprove the charges he makes. I assume also that all managers are not of equal efficiency, and that amongst several thousand some are not as diligent as they might be in fulfilling the duties they have undertaken Neither is the case satisfied by reminding Dr. Starkie, as one correspondent did, that he is paid a large salary for the work he does, whilst the managers do their work for nothing. The more he is paid the more closely he should watch over the interest of the schools; whilst the managers, having undertaken to do a certain work, even without remuneration, are bound to the public to do it properly. Dr. Starkie’s charge is : — “ Our Inspectors report that the majority of managers are quite indifferent to education, and that in many cases the schools are left well-nigh derelict, the only supervision given to them being that of the Board’s Inspector.” That plaint is categorical and comprehensive ; and the plaintiff, if left to himself, would probably have let it stand in all its baldness as he delivered it to his audience in Belfast. But he was at once' brought to book before the public, and he had to justify himself before a larger audience. How does he do it? He sets out by taking up another position before this larger and less partial audience by making the following explanatory foot-note in his pamphlet, viz.: — “They take no 'practical interest in the education given in their schools.” And to bring his changed position more under the eye of the reader he puts the word “ practical ” in italics, and then explains what he means by it — “ They neither control the course of instruction, nor adapt the programme to the needs of their localities, nor conduct examinations, nor give prizes, nor establish school museums and libraries, as suggested bv the new programme/’ That is an important modification of what he said' before his Belfast audience. Absolute indiffence to education, and want of practical interest in the details of school-work, are very different things.

Now, the first thing that strikes me is that either Dr. Starkie has only an academical anxiety for the improvement of the managers, or if he earnestly desires them to mend their ways, he has gone about it in a way which bears strong evidence of his own incapacity for the delicate and responsible position which he holds. As Resident Commissioner he has to deal directly with the managers. He sees and deplores their shortcomings ; but instead of using his position to influence them from the Education Office, which is his right and his duty, he goes before an audience made up mainly of Orangemen and foreigners, and tells them in terms of sweeping rhetoric what an incapable and neglectful lot he has to deal with. If a machine does not work well a sensible operator oils it ; an impatient one spends his time cursing it. A Resident Commissioner, thoroughly earnest and fit for his delicate duties would not do that which, as he might have foreseen, would put up the backs of the managers instead of getting them to mend their ways. Thus Dr. Starkie set about doing a work, and owing to the clumsy method he adopted, has succeeded only in undoing it. If the majority of managers are so bad as lie represents them he might have used the official authority with which he is invested to drive the delinquents to their work if he could not lead them. It may be thought perhaps that he feared such stringent measures would raise an outcry against him. But has the method he has adopted raised no outcry? It has indeed, and one which probably will not soon subside. Moreover, an outcry in the former case would grow faint before the justifying cause of his action and would soon be extinguished by his success; the outcry which he has actually raised gains strength from his indiscretion, blights every hope of his success, and may finally extinguish himself.

c

Whether the charges he has made be just or unjust, his plan of campaign puts a damper on all cordial co-operation between him and the managers, and puts a break to the progress of popular education which it was the ostensible purpose of his address to improve.

In a note before the appendix to his pamphlet Dr. Starkie bluntly tells the public : — “ In a few of the following extracts the language has been slightly abbreviated without injury to the sense, and, furthermore, in some of the extracts in section i., which deals with the use managers make of the initiative given them by the New Scheme, I have quoted only as much of the reports as was germane to my argument. I have occasionally omitted passages laudatory of the satisfactory general supervision which perhaps the majority of managers exercise over their schools.” Taking his words to mean what he wants us to understand by them, that is an extraordinary confession for a man to make of his own accord. But it is clever of him. It would be discovered later on as a matter of course, and he tries to take the sting out of the deed by telling us of it beforehand. But that does not make it the less unfair ; for the evidence on which the general public will form an opinion is just the Report as he has set it before them, not the Report itself, which few will ever see. Besides, he quotes from the Report of the year 1901 only. But the report of one year only, even though he had quoted from it fairly, is not evidence enough to sustain the sweeping charges he has made. If the reports of previous years are favourable to the managers they neutralize an adverse report of that one year. One swallow does not make a summer; and one year's report does not indicate the character of the managers. Thus, the only conclusion we could come to, taking the case against the managers at its worst, is simply that they have not been what they ought to be during the year 1901.