THE

FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW.

No. CLXXVI. NEW SERIES.-AUGUST 1, 1881.

IRISH GRAMMAR SCHOOLS.

IN 1796, the year before his death, when the political prospect for the people of Ireland seemed desperate, and all political struggle on their part useless and impotent, Burke wrote to an Irishman as follows:—

"I should recommend to the middle ranks, in which I include not only all merchants, but all farmers and tradesmen, that they would change as much as possible those expensive modes of living and that dissipation to which our countrymen in general are so much addicted. It does not at all become men in a state of persecution. They ought to conform themselves to the circumstances of a people whom Government is resolved not to consider as upon a par with their fellow-subjects. Favour they will have none. They must aim at other resources, and to make themselves independent in fact before they aim at a nominal independence. Depend upon it, that with half the privileges of the others, joined to a different system of manners, they would grow to a degree of importance to which, without it, no privileges could raise them, much less any intrigues or factious practices. I know very well that such a discipline, among so numerous a people, is not easily introduced, but I am sure it is not impossible. If I had youth and strength, I would go myself over to Ireland to work on that plan; so certain I am that the well-being of all descriptions in the kingdom, as well as of themselves, depends upon a reformation amongst the Catholics. The work will be sure and slow in its operation, but it is certain in its effect. There is nothing which will not yield to perseverance and method."

Whether a sumptuary reform in the habits of the middle classes in Ireland is a crying need of the present hour, I will not judge. If it is,. it is not a reform which we can well isolate from other needs, and pursue by itself alone and directly. It is a reform which must depend upon. enlarging the minds and raising the aims of those classes; upon humanising and civilising them. Expense in living, dissipation, arethe first and nearest dangers, perhaps, to the Irish middle class, while its civilisation is low, because they are its first and nearest pleasures. They can only cease to be its first and nearest pleasures by raising its standard of life, by extending and deepening its civilisation. True, the improvement of Ireland, the self-government of Ireland, must come mainly through the middle class, and this class, defective in civili

sation as it is, is not ripe for the functions required of it; its members have indeed to learn, as Burke says, "to make themselves independent in fact before they aim at a nominal independence." Not Ireland alone needs, alas, the lesson; we in England need it too. In England, too, power is passing away from the now governing class; the part to be taken in English life by the middle class is different from the part which the middle class has had to take hitherto different, more public, more important. Other and greater functions devolve upon this class than of old; but its defective civilisation makes it unfit to discharge them. It comes to the new time and to its new duties, it comes to them, as its flatterers will never tell it, but as it must nevertheless bear to be told and well to consider-it comes to them with a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners. The characters of defective civilisation in the Irish middle class are not precisely the same as in the English. But for the faults of the middle class in Ireland, as in England, the same remedy presents itself to start with; not a panacea by any means, not all-sufficient, not capable of working miracles of change in a moment, but yet a remedy sure to do good; the first and simplest and most natural remedy to apply, although it is left singularly out of sight and thought and mention. The middle class in England and Ireland is the worst schooled middle class in Western Europe. Surely this may well have something to do with defects of civilisation! Surely it must make a difference to the civilisation of a middle class, whether it is brought up in ignoble schools where the instruction is nearly worthless, or in schools of high standing where the boy is taken through a well-chosen course of the best that has been known and said in the world. I, at any rate, have long been of opinion that the most beneficent reform possible in England at present is a reform about which hardly anybody seems to think or care-the establishment of good public schools for the middle classes. Most salutary for Ireland also would be the establishment of such schools there. In what state is the actual supply of schools for the middle classes in Ireland, we learn from a report lately published by a very competent observer, Professor Mahaffy, of Trinity College, Dublin. I propose to give here a short account of what he tells us, and to add a few thoughts which suggest themselves after reading him.

Professor Mahaffy was appointed by the Endowed Schools Commission in 1879 to visit and report upon the Grammar Schools of Ireland. He inspected the buildings and accommodations, attended the classes, examined the pupils; and he also visited some of the principal Grammar Schools in England, such as Winchester, Marlborough, Uppingham, and the City of London School, to provide himself with a definite standard of comparison. Professor Mahaffy

is a man, as is well known, of brilliant attainments; he has had, also, great practical experience in teaching, and he writes with a freshness, plainness, and point which make his report very easy and agree

able reading.

The secondary schools of Ireland are classified by Professor Mahaffy as follows: the Royal Schools, the lesser schools managed by the Commissioners of Education, the Erasmus Smith's schools, the Incorporated Society's schools, the Protestant diocesan schools, the schools with private endowments, the Roman Catholic colleges, and the unendowed schools. He visited schools of each class. In all, or almost all, of them he found the instruction profoundly affected by the rules of the Intermediate Schools Commissioners. His report is full of remarks on the evil working of the examinations of this Intermediate Board, and he appears to consider the most important part of his business as reporter to be the delivering of his testimony against them. The Board arose, as is well known, out of the desire to do something for intermediate education in Ireland without encountering what is called the religious difficulty. "The Liberal party has emphatically condemned religious endowment; the Protestants of Great Britain are emphatically hostile to the endowment of Catholicism in any shape or form." Schools were not to be founded or directly aided, because this might be an endowment of Catholicism; but a system of examinations and prizes was established, whereby Catholic schools may be indeed aided indirectly, but so indirectly, it seems, as to suffer the consciences of the Protestants of Great Britain to remain at peace. Only this system of examinations and prizes, while good for the consciences of the Protestants of Great Britain, is very bad, in Professor Mahaffy's opinion, for the Irish schools. He insists on its evil effects in the very first page of his report, in speaking of the Royal School of Armagh, the chief of the Royal Schools, and the school with which he begins. He says:

"Under the rules of the Intermediate Commissioners it is found more advantageous to answer in a number of unimportant subjects of which a hastily learned smattering suffices, than to study with earnestness the great subjects of education-classics and mathematics. Hence, boys spend every leisure moment, and even part of their proper school time, in learning little text-books on natural science, music, and even Irish, to the detriment of their solid progress. This is not all. Owing to the appointing of fixed texts in classics and the paucity of new passages in the examination, the boys are merely crammed in the appointed texts without being taught real scholarship. When examining a senior division in classics, I observed that they all brought up annotated texts, in fact so fully annotated that every second clause was translated for them; and upon observing this to the master, he replied that he knew the evil, but that he could not get them through the intermediate course in any other way."

All through the report this is Professor Mahaffy's great and everrecurring complaint: "the multiplication of subjects supported by

the Intermediate Board, which suit inaccurate and ill-taught pupils far better than those who learn the great subjects thoroughly.” Everywhere it struck him that "the boys, even when not overworked, were addled with a quantity of subjects. They are taught a great many valuable truths; but they have not assimilated them, and only answer by accident. I have found this mental condition all over the country." He calls the intermediate examinations "the lowest and poorest of all public competitions." The more intelligent of the schoolmasters, he says, condemn them :—

"The principal (of the French college at Blackrock) has very large and independent views about education, which are well worthy of serious attention. He complains bitterly of the low standard of the prize and scholarship examinations at the Queen's Colleges of Cork and Galway, boys having obtained distinctions there, whom he had resolved to send home to their parents on account of their stolid and invincible ignorance. He objects altogether to the intermediate examinations, and says that his profession is ruined by the complete subjugation of all school work to the fixed programme, which is quite insufficient to occupy the better boys for a year, and which thus seriously impairs their progress. He also protests against the variety of unimportant subjects which produce fees for results, and thinks that a minimum of at least thirty-five per cent. should be struck off the answering if these subjects are retained."

However, "the false stimulus now supplied in the system of intermediate examinations established by Government" is too strong to be resisted :

"So strong a mercenary spirit has been excited both in masters and parents by this system, that all the schools in Ireland with one exception (the Friends' School in Waterford) have been forced into the competition; every boy is being taught the intermediate course, every error in the management of that course is affecting the whole country, and the best educator is unable to stem the tide, or do more than protest against any of the defects."

Professor Mahaffy is a hearty admirer of the great English public schools. He is of opinion "that what distinguishes the Englishman all over the world above men of equal breeding and fortune in other nations is the training of those peculiar commonwealths, in which boys form a sort of constitution, and govern themselves under the direction of a higher authority." But he thinks that the over-use of prize competitions and examinations is doing harm in the great English schools too, though they are not enslaved by it as the Irish schools

are:

"I find that by the spirit of the age and the various requirements of many competitions, both English and Irish Schools have been driven into the great vice of multiplying subjects of instruction, and so crowding together hours of diverse teaching that the worst results must inevitably ensue. There is, in the first place, that enervating mental fatigue and consequent ill-health which is beginning to attract attention. When I visited Winchester it was easy to distinguish in a large class the boys who had won their way into the foundation by competition; they were remarkable for their worn and unhealthy looks.

This evil, however, the evil of over-work at examination courses, has already excited public attention, and is, I trust, in a fair way of being remedied. Nor did it strike me as at all so frequent in Irish schools as another mischief arising from the same cause. It rather appeared to me all over Ireland, and England also, that the majority of boys, without being over-worked, were addled by the multiplicity of their subjects, and instead of increasing their knowledge had utterly confused it. Whenever I asked the masters to point me out a brilliant boy they replied that the race had died out. Is it conceivable that this arises from any inherent failing of the stock, and not rather from some great blundering in the system of our education? The great majority of thoughtful educators with whom I conferred agreed that it was due to this constant addition of new subjects to the cry after English grammar and English literature, and French and German, and natural science, to the subdivision of the wretched boys' time into two hours in the week for this, two hours for that, alternate days for this, alternate days for that-in fact, to an injurious system of so teaching him everything that he can reason intelligently in nothing. I cannot speak too strongly of the melancholy impression forced upon me by the examination of many hundred boys in various schools through England and Ireland. I sought in vain for bright promise, for quick intelligence, for keen sympathy with their studies. It was not, I am sure, the boys' fault nor the masters'. It is the result of the present boa-constrictor system of competitive examination which is strangling our youth in its fatal embrace."

Professor Mahaffy finds fault with the Irish secondary schools as too often dirty and untidy, and ill-provided with proper accommodations. 66 Whitewashing, painting, and scouring of floors are urgently needed; indeed an additional supply of soap to the boys would not come amiss." He notices the Jesuit College of St. Stanislaus, and a school at Portarlington, as signal exceptions. In general "the floors are so filthy as to give a grimy and disgusting appearance to the whole room; people are so accustomed to this in all Irish schools that they wonder at my remarking it." At the chief of the Erasmus Smith's Schools, the high school in Dublin, "I was detained," he tells us, "some time at the door, owing to the deafness of the porter, and thus having ample leisure to inspect the front of the house, found that the exceeding dirt of the windows made it pre-eminent, even among its shabbiest neighbours. I learned, on inquiry, that most of the window sashes are not movable. It is surprising that the members of the Board are not offended by this aspect of squalor and decay. I found the playground a mass of mud, which was carried on the boys' boots all through the stairs and schoolrooms, thus making the inside of the house correspond with the outside." He finds fault with the "wretched system of management" which prevails in the Endowed Schools, a system which prevents needful reforms, and perpetuates inefficient arrangements and incompetent teachers, "old and wearied men." Those who elect the master, he says of the Clonmel School, “are two absent lords, and I suppose a more unlikely Board to select a good schoolmaster could not easily be found. In the present case a rule has been followed the very opposite of that which prevails in England.