FROM THE ARCHIVES:A conference of Vocational Education Committees in Cork in 1938 was given a negative picture of attitudes towards education and work in the Ireland of the day by Séamus Ó hEochadha, known as An Fear Mór, who was a member of the Seanad and principal of the Irish College at Ring, Co Waterford. – JOE JOYCE
IN HIS paper on Vocational Education and the Employment of Leisure, Mr Séamus Ó hEochadha (An Fear Mór) said that among the masses of the people, and particularly the rural population the idea was quite common that the best form of amusement, or of leisure-time activity, was unmitigated idleness.
Among those who had “no time to think” one of the most erroneous notions was that work, in any form, and the enjoyment of leisure were inimical to each other. If this was true of all those of the labouring classes in cities and large towns, it was much more the conviction of the leisured classes – the idle rich and the unemployed.
Perhaps, these false interpretations in the minds of the educated classes were due to historical causes. The hardships suffered by some of the people made it difficult to kill these erroneous ideas – that idleness was the best form of leisure; that work in any shape or form was hostile to the desire for recreation; that any attempt at their education was for the benefit of others rather than themselves; that there was some hidden or nefarious purpose behind it; or that those who sponsored any uplifting or educational movement were doing so from motives of self-interest. Such ideas might be excusable, or at least understandable, owing to the circumstances in which they germinated – such, for example, as bad buildings, cramming for examination ordeals, much sweated labour at unintelligible books, perhaps unsympathetic teachers, who were not always to blame – for an ill-housed man compelled to spend several hours a day in an unhealthy and trying atmosphere was not, as a rule, the most patient person in the world, nor was teaching in itself anything but a work taxing one’s capacity for other virtues besides that of patience.
If vocational education was to prove fruitful and expand more fully these false notions and convictions would prove the greatest hindrance to any progressive educational movement. Hence an organised effort through the medium of propaganda was necessary to give easy doses of medicinal knowledge, to the sickly-minded people, as well as to arrest, as far as possible, those causes which made many people speak with vehement dislike of their primary school days.
It is a pity that children did not look back with love on the years they spent in the primary schools. Much had been said at congresses of the ill-educated children who left them. The question of school buildings could not be ignored or emphasised to much. “The glaring monstrosities labelled national schools are a disgrace . . . No man can set a limit to the march of a nation, but unhealthy schools can convert the march into a retreat. How can we expect to cope with the adolescents and train them culturally when mostly the work on our shoulders is remedial work, trying to undo the harm of years? If dislike for school and education has been instilled into them, how can we expect to uproot that fear, that attitude?
“ Schools should be cheerful places; teachers should be cheerful and pleasant . . . for the best road to the mind of a child, as well as to that of the adolescent, is through the heart.
“The desire for self-improvement and the love of learning ought to be implanted in early days, and given opportunities of coming to fruit in the technical school years. Furthermore, to-day education is being hampered and impeded by so-called mechanical progress, for it tends to mechanise the factory employees, to make them automatons . . . This will become a retrogressive movement, an uneducating movement, and retrogression in leisure hours must be arrested and transformed into a progressive amelioration of conditions.”
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