MOTION FOR A RETURN. (Hansard, 3 July 1874)

§ LORD EMLY
, in drawing attention to the number of untrained teachers employed under the Irish National Board of Education, said—I trust that your Lordships will consider the deep interest I have taken for many years in the Irish National system of education as a justification for my venturing now to call attention to the qualification of its teachers. That system has conferred greater good on Ireland than any other institution founded there by the Imperial Parliament. It has overcome religious difficulties which appeared to be insuperable. Through the elasticity of its rules it has accommodated itself to the different parts of Ireland; and after many years of conflict, its principles have received the approved and even warm support of almost every one of its opponents. Yet, no one who impartially investigates the quality of the education it gives can doubt its inferiority to the quality of the education given in the English and Scotch primary schools. A momentous consideration; in these days inferiority in education means inferiority in wages, in lodgings, in food. It means that Irishmen are to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to their fellow-countrymen; it means the absence of that peace without which the resources of Ireland cannot be developed—for ignorance is the soil in which agitation flourishes; and those who in the battle of life are unsuccessful, those upon whom, perhaps, no ray of hope shines from their cradles to their graves, are not likely to be contented. The Report of the Royal Commission, over which 971 the noble Earl who usually sits opposite (the Earl of Powis) so ably presided, described the progress of the children in the Irish national schools as much less than it ought to be. That decided, though gently expressed, condemnation is more than borne out by the Reports of almost all the Sub-Commissioners—gentlemen of great intelligence, with a thorough knowledge of English and Scotch schools, who inspected the Irish schools, and reported on them to the Royal Comissioners. Mr. Richmond regretted that the system should permit so many inferior schools. Mr. Laurie described their marked inferiority to kindred schools in England; Mr. Cummins says that Irish schools are inferior to British schools; Mr. Jack describes them as unsatisfactory; Mr. Balmer laments that intelligence in them is but little developed; but I invite your Lordships special attention to a letter I have received from one of these Sub-Commissioners—Mr. Le Page Renouf. He is, and has long been, one of the Privy Council Inspectors here. I need not tell your Lordships that he is a man of distinguished ability. He describes clearly both the evil and its cause— While examining schools in the counties of Waterford, Wexford, Tipperary, and Kilkenny, I was careful to bear in mind the very different circumstances under which I was accustomed to examine and report upon the whole of my own district in England; but every allowance being made for the difference of circumstances, it was altogether impossible to avoid perceiving that the efficiency of the Irish schools was not only inferior in degree but even in kind. The teachers and children were everywhere fully as intelligent as the teachers and children in England, yet not only did the children break down in the examinations of the mildest character, but their teachers seem to be totally ignorant of the amount, and still more of the quality, of instruction which might fairly be expected from those under their care, especially from the lowest classes of these schools. The first school which I inspected on my return to England (the St. Patrick's, at Walsall) was almost as thoroughly Irish a school as any I had seen in Ireland—the priest, the teachers, and the children being all Irish Catholics. But the amount of work done by the first standard children, and the accuracy of the style of it, were such as perhaps not one of the teachers I had seen at the other side of the water had a conception of. How could it be otherwise? The teacher in Ireland had—in general at least—not been taught how to teach. These, my Lords, are painful facts. I now must ask your Lordships' attention to the last Report of the National Board, from which it appears that out of 9,802 972 national teachers only 3,518 were trained. This is sufficiently startling, but not one even of these 3,518 have been trained in the sense in which the word is used in England and Scotland. Parliament, with ungrudging liberality, has provided funds for Irish education. During the 27 years I passed in the House of Commons, the Irish Education Votes were constantly on the increase. They now amount to.£550,000. Yet when I look to the Estimates of the present year, I find that while in England £95,200 is voted for 39 normal schools with 2,894 students, and in Scotland £20,500 for five normal schools with 707 students, in Ireland there is only one normal school with 200 students, and only £7,646 is taken for it; and recently the Chief Secretary for Ireland alleged the imperfect training of the Irish teachers as a reason, not for having them better trained, but for giving them small salaries. My Lords, "as is the school so is the schoolmaster," and I need not waste your Lordships' time by proving that without sufficient training you cannot produce good schoolmasters. Every authority on education in every part of the world agrees that the art of teaching—imparting as distinguished from acquiring knowledge—must be acquired like every other art—like medicine, law, and music. If it were necessary, I could cite the testimony of every English Inspector of schools—some of them now distinguished Members of your Lordships' House—to prove the absolute necessity of efficient training for teachers; but I will trouble your Lordships only with one or two of them. Mr. Harvey, Assistant Commissioner to the Commission on Primary Scotch Education, puts the whole case vividly— Those only," he says, "can appreciate fully between trained and untrained teachers who have seen and suffered much from visiting schools taught by untrained masters of hitherto little experience. It is impossible to imagine how great a contrast two schools may and do present. Precision and definiteness result from normal school training. Training is of more importance for female even than for main teachers, and, in point of fact, I need not remind your Lordships that these opinions have been acted on in England and Scotland, and that the normal schools in Great Britain supply annual demand for teachers. When the schools in England were multiplied by recent legislation, there was a difficulty in getting a sufficient number of trained teachers; but efforts were made to meet this new demand, and these efforts have, I believe, been adequate to the occasion. 973 Mr. Renouf writes to me his experience of the Irish National teachers— The only kind of training some of them ever received consisted in listening to the remarks made by the Inspector during the short evenings of their schooling, as evidenced by the results of the examination. These remarks are, no doubt, always of the most judicious, instructive kind. But it would be ludicrous to say that they can in any way compensate for the absence from regular systematic training, beginning as it does here, with an apprenticeship of four or five years, and completed by one or two years' instruction in a training-school; nor, again, can any number of examinations compensate for the want of it. The possession of knowledge is certainly one important qualification of a teacher, but it is not the only one. The amount of knowledge which has been taught in our elementary schools is hardly greater than that which is possessed by every man and woman of the middle and upper classes of society. But it is a most fatal mistake to imagine that those who are possessed of it are thereby qualified to be teachers. Teaching is an art, the theory and practice of which have to be learned, like those of every other art, from competent masters. The best of the 'adventure' schools in this country, though sometimes conducted by persons who have had a very good education, cannot stand a moment's comparison with those taught by our certificated teachers. The teachers of ragged schools are sometimes almost as well informed as the certificated teachers, but their schools break down whenever examined even according to a low standard. There is a very noticeable difference, too, between two classes of the certificated teachers themselves. All our certificated teachers have not been trained. The English Code allows teachers who have obtained a favourable Report from an Inspector, or served as assistants for at least six months under a certificated teacher, to present themselves at the Christmas examination for certificates. Now, although some highly gifted teachers have in this way come into the profession, I do not for an instant hesitate in saying that it would be most disastrous if the great supply of teachers ceased to be derived from the training schools. The result of my experience is that school managers who find themselves tied by their engagements to teachers who have not been systematically trained, are perpetually in danger of seeing the efficiency of their schools dwindled down to the lowest degree. I could mention some very striking instances in proof of this. It was part of my duty while reporting to the Royal Commission, to discuss the question of training schools. That question, if I rightly remember, was reserved for two very competent members of the Commission; but I had no more doubt in 1868 than I have now in 1874, that the schools in Ireland will never attain the efficiency of English schools in connection with the Education Department, until they are conducted by masters and mistresses who have gone through as completely systematical a course of training as the immense majority of the certified teachers of Great Britain. If I were to stop here I might ask your Lordships, how can the Irish, two-thirds 974 of whose teachers are untrained, compete in the battle of life with their Scotch and English fellow-countrymen? But, my Lords, we have not yet sounded the depth of the inferiority of Irish teaching power. What does training mean in England and Scotland, in Europe, in America, everywhere except in Ireland? With hardly an exception, in every country except Ireland, two years in a normal school is required; in many countries three, and sometimes even four years' residence is insisted upon. I will not weary your Lordships by describing the training of foreign countries; I will confine myself to Great Britain. Here the future teacher has to pass five years as a pupil teacher, and two years in a normal school. Can any part of that training be dispensed with? I might cite here the opinion of the Privy Council, as expressed in its minutes of the heads of the normal schools, of the Inspectors. It is sufficient for me to appeal to the high authority of the right rev. Prelate who presides over the diocese of Manchester. Listen, my Lords, I beg of you, to the weighty words of so competent an authority— The value," his Lordship says, "of a second years' training, morally and intellectually, is indisputable. It is the one fact in the entire range of educational questions, upon which there is an entire consensus of witnesses. Scotland, as my right hon. Friend Mr. Playfair informs me, not content with two years' training in a normal school for her schoolmasters, is about to recommend to the noble Duke the Lord President that the Scotch schoolmasters should be required to take out University degrees, and Professors of the Art of Teaching are about to be appointed in the Scotch Universities. Turn now, my Lords, I beg of you, to Ireland. The English and Scotch, with their minerals and their commerce, have many advantages over us. We require good education—not less, but more than they do. Forty-four years after the establishment of the national system, only 3,518 of our teachers, out of 9,802, have received any training. The 3,518 so-called trained teachers have been trained, not two years as in Great Britain, not even one year, but only four and a-half months; and this training they received, not before they became teachers, but afterwards. They have been taken from the schools they were teaching, and 975 sent up by the Inspectors to the one model school in Dublin. Only 70 per cent of the Irish teachers have been pupil teachers, or even monitors; and they have been so, not five years as in England, but for about four years on the average. The Royal Commission justly remarks that to spend 20 weeks in incessant occupation, wandering from one subject to another, is hardly the most promising method of training an inefficient teacher into an efficient one. The able men at the head of the Marlborough Training School deplore it. Mr. Keenan, the resident Commissioner, has in the strongest language recognized the absolute necessity of efficient training. With untiring energy training here is from year to year being improved and raised. Why are we drifting backward, instead of pushing forward? The effects, as I have shown, are lamentable. One of the most distinguished of our colonial statesmen told me within the week that the education of the Irish emigrants to Australia was inferior to that of the emigrants from other portions of the United Kingdom. I now, with your Lordships' permission, will state in a very few words the causes which have produced these most unhappy results. The Board was from the first fully alive to the importance of training their teachers. In 1835 they appointed two years as the period of residence in their training school, and required previous training in a model school as a condition for admission. They established no now training school, but they proceeded to establish model schools where pupil teachers were to be trained for normal schools, but most unfortunately they took these schools into their own immediate management. Lord Derby's letter had proscribed that all schools except the Marlborough Street schools were to be under the control of local managers. This was in accordance with the principle recognized very generally in this country, and laid down emphatically by Lord Brougham, in words which I will quote to your Lordships— I think that no Government should appoint masters, for if anyone were to give me the right of naming the teacher, I should not trouble myself to obtain the power of prescribing the course of instruction. In England, as many of your Lordships will recollect, the Privy Council attempted to establish normal schools 976 under their own immediate control. The only one founded was Kneller Hall. It failed. Public opinion pronounced emphatically in favour of local management, and governmental management was abandoned. Governmental management in Ireland was also protested against, but it was persevered in. Consequently, a great number of the model schools are empty, so far as the class they were intended for is concerned. They are frequented, as the Royal Commission informs us, by children who go to them in cars and carriages, and no new normal school has been founded. English public opinion is attended to, and. England is provided with first-rate normal schools. The wishes of Ireland, not surely unreasonable—for on the principle England and Ireland agreed—were set at nought, and in Ireland we have not at this instant one single teacher trained according to the English standard—a lesson and a warning to those who apply different weights and measures in questions of principle between the two countries. What, then, is the remedy for this scandal, which dooms the Irish, as long as it lasts, to hopeless inferiority to their fellow-countrymen at this side of the Channel? If your Lordships look for it with a single desire, as I am sure you will, to train the largest number of teachers in the best manner, there can be no difficulty in finding it. This simple remedy was proposed by my noble Friend near me (Lord Carlingford) in 1866. It was approved of unanimously by the National Board. He went out of office; the Royal Commission was appointed; they also approved of his proposals. More exciting topics occupied the public mind when their Report was printed, and his scheme sleeps in the pigeon holes of Marlborough Street. It was not proposed to change the Marlborough Street training school. It is, I believe, admirably managed, and has a most efficient staff; but it was proposed that boarding houses should be attached to it, where the students, during the two years' residence, should have the advantage of domestic training under the guidance of masters and matrons of their own faith. This school could supply 300 teachers for Ireland; 700 annually would be required. Allow private individuals to establish normal schools on the same conditions as ordinary schools 977 are established; bind the patrons of those schools to observe strictly the rules of the Board; let the secular instruction be mixed, the religious separate; let the normal schools be conducted in Ireland as they are in England—on the same principles the schools are conducted on for which they are to supply masters and mistresses. As to the model schools, you would increase three times or even four times the number of their pupils if you placed them under the management of committees to be chosen by the patrons of the National schools in their respective districts; but I do not wish to mix up the totally distinct questions of normal and model schools. Let the latter be made as good as possible, still the teachers in training in them could not become efficient masters without passing two years in a normal school. And now, my Lords, I commend this question to your most serious consideration. The condition of education in each of the Three Kingdoms is a matter of paramount importance. Upon it mainly de-ponds our industrial supremacy; but I venture to think that Irish primary education has a special claim on your Lordships' attention. The rejection by the other House of the University Bill last year was, in my opinion, the greatest misfortune to Ireland that has happened in my time. It has left the higher education of the majority of Ireland scandalously bad. As regards the intermediate education of Roman Catholics, the State has absolutely abdicated its functions. There is hardly one Roman Catholic in an Irish endowed intermediate school. On the other hand, with exuberant liberality, primary education has been endowed. It surely then is the duty—as I am sure it will be the pleasure—of your Lordships; it is the duty of Government and of Parliament at once to insist on the Irish teacher being properly trained, and to compensate in some degree for the neglect of higher and intermediate education, by making the primary education you so liberally provide for as perfect as possible.

§ THE DUKE OF RICHMOND
said, that the Notice of the noble Lord who had just addressed the House (Lord Emly) had not led him to imagine that he intended to go so deeply as he had done into the whole system of National Education in Ireland. The comparison which the noble Lord had drawn between the education in the Irish national schools and primary education in the schools of England and Scotland was lamentably to the disadvantage of the former. The picture which the noble Lord had drawn was one, the fidelity of which, he was not in a position to either affirm or deny, because he had not the necessary documents before him; but might not the deficiencies as regarded trained teachers in Ireland be attributed to those circumstances which in Ireland had rendered the training of teachers by the mixed system difficult, if not impossible? The Normal School was started in Dublin under the Letter of the late Lord Derby 40 years ago, and teachers to the number of 3,000 or 4,000 had been sent out through all parts of Ireland. It could not be denied that four or five months was not sufficient for the training of a school teacher; but the monitorial system, by means of which inducements were given to masters and mistresses to bring forward teachers, had grown up in Ireland, and that system had, no doubt, in some respects made up for the want of sufficient training in normal schools. As for what the noble Lord had said about degrees and a professorship of teaching in the Scotch Universities, he believed there was a proposal to establish in the Scotch Universities an Educational "Chair"—he did not know that this proposal had been carried into effect, but he know it was in contemplation, and that when established all Scotch schoolmasters would be required to have gone through some description of University education. It must, however, be remembered that the arrangements in the Universities of that country were very different from those in connection with the Universities of this country, and a system which might be feasible in one country might be altogether impracticable in another. The promotion and elevation of education in all parts of the United Kingdom was what they must all have at heart, and the present Government were as anxious in the cause of education as any 979 Government which had preceded them. No man was better acquainted with the working of the national system in Ireland than the noble Lord. He had listened with the greatest respect to all the noble Lord had said; and he could assure him that the subject would receive the attention of the Government.

§ LORD CARLINGFORD
said, that though the noble Duke had expressed himself in general terms only, his observations must be satisfactory, as far as they went, to the friends of education in Ireland. He by no means blamed Her Majesty's Government or the party opposite, in regard to the subject which his noble Friend had brought before the House, except in this one respect. When, eight years ago, it became his duty, on the part of Lord Russell's Government, to propose a plan to remedy the state of things in respect of the training of teachers which had then become serious, and when that plan had been accepted unanimously by the Commissioners of National Education, then, unfortunately, the incoming Government of Lord Derby refused to give their consent to it, and instead of doing so appointed a Royal Commission. That Commission collected some very valuable evidence, but, owing to the delay at a favourable moment, nothing had since been done in the direction of the plan. For this no blame was attributable either to the late Government or to the present one. Certainly no one could accuse the late Government of having done too little in Irish affairs; and in the matter of education they did much. They had introduced the system of payment by results into the schools of the Irish Board, and they had added considerably to the scanty and still inadequate salaries of the teachers. But the question of training teachers remained unsolved, and as to it the state of things was even worse than in 1866. There could be no doubt that in Lord Derby's Letter a bonâ fide system of training teachers for the national schools was contemplated—and, indeed, such a system had been suggested by a Commision as far back as 1812. It was remarkable that whereas in England and Scotland, with denominational difficulties far less serious than those of Ireland, the Government had found themselves compelled to leave the organization and management of those training 980 schools to private enterprise in connection with denominations, and in aid of this private enterprise large grants were paid. In Ireland, on the contrary, with a mixed population of Roman Catholics and Protestants, the exclusive system was maintained in the single Normal School. If it had not been for the pupil teachers and the monitors, which was so valuable a part of the system, he did not know how the national system could have gone on in Ireland. There were pupil teachers in this country also, but they did not supersede the system of training schools. They ought not to supersede it in Ireland. In 1866 there were 7,472 schoolmasters in the service of the Irish Board, of whom 4,309 had received no training. Three years later on, in 1869, the Royal Commissioners reported that 58 per cent of the national teachers in Ireland were untrained. The Report of the Board for the year 1872, recently presented to Parliament, stated that of a large number of new teachers who came into office in that year, only a few had received training in the Normal training school at Dublin. The room in the school was so scanty, and the term for training so short, that the inconvenience was felt in every school in Ireland; but those who felt it most were the Roman Catholics, for though of the students in the Marlborough Street Normal School one-half were Roman Catholics, of the total number of teachers in the national schools about 80 per cent were Roman Catholics. An assistant commissioner who made an inspection of the schools in the county of Londonderry, where the schools were nearly all Protestant, found that nearly all the teachers were trained; while on an inspection of the schools in the county of Limerick, where they were nearly all Catholic, it was found that special training was all but extinct. His friend, Sir Alexander M'Donnell, the late Resident Commissioner, who had rendered the greatest service to the cause of national education in Ireland, asserted that the present system of providing trained teachers had failed to the root. His own proposal in 1866 was that grants be made to training schools established by private efforts, such grants to be made without regard to religious denomination, provided that the school submitted to all the educational requirements of the 981 Board, and was open to inspection. In this case the State must be liberal in Ireland as it was in England. Local support unaided could not be expected to maintain training schools. The question was one of great interest, and he hoped that no party feeling would be allowed to interfere with its satisfactory solution.

§ LORD O'HAGAN
said, that as a Member of the National Board, he should not be doing his duty if he did not say that his views were in entire accordance with those of the noble Lord who had preceded him. He would assert that though the present system had been assailed from all sides, it had been most successful. From the centre of Ireland to the sea, everywhere the anxiety of the people to obtain a good education was demonstrated. No one would assert that the Irish children were inferior in intelligence to those of England and Scotland; but there could be no good teaching without good teachers, and the want of proper training would nullify, to a large extent, the benefits of the noblest institution which Ireland ever owed to the Imperial Government. There were difficulties in connection with the denominational principle, as affecting family life. It had not the same relation to the clay scholar and the boarders, or to the teacher residing in community with his brethren and the scholar resident in his home. The distinction had been recognized by the Legislature in the cases of reformatories and industrial schools, and it would justify such a solution as had been proposed by his noble Friend, of which he entirely approved.

§ LORD LISGAR
considered that the salaries given to teachers were too small—so small were they that teachers were tempted to leave the public schools for the purpose of giving instruction in private schools, and of going to the Colonies. The salary of a teacher was £20 less than many gentlemen gave to some of the servants in their household. Unless the Government should be prepared to give an increase to the salaries of the female teachers, he thought that all efforts to improve the training system would go for nothing.