Madam, - David Limond (September 27th) warns taking Patrick Pearse's own descriptions of his educational work at "face value". However, Dr Limond's observations rest upon a similar apparent gullibility.
He describes St Enda's as inspired by "the Edwardian militarism and masculinism in which fascism had its roots". Schools throughout England and Ireland engaged in boy-scout type trooping and drill in this period. Clubs for young people were an offspring of the massive growth in local history, walking, reading, naturalist and study groups that had evolved in Victorian times.
That St Enda's was a "single-sex" school was utterly in accordance with the times. Co-education at post-primary level was almost unknown and the founding of a single-sex school was culturally and socially typical.
Strangely, Pearse is never credited with founding one of the first "lay" schools in Ireland, the result of pragmatism and pioneering spirit. Commentators also ignore the fact that Pearse founded an all-girl's school, St Ita's, whose pupils regularly attended dances at St Enda's.
Dr Limond is incorrect in ascribing monolingualism to St Enda's: Pearse consistently encouraged bilingualism. Again, that St Enda's was a " de juremono-denominational school" ignores the fact that schooling operated along these lines at the period. Brevity prohibits dealing with his assertion that St Enda's was not "progressive or pioneering". However, Pearse's insistence upon a school council (officially unknown in Irish education policy until the 1990s), a school magazine run solely by students (often parodying staff) his insistence on bilingualism as a means of language acquisition, his inversion of the British school system to create a model of dissent at St Enda's, his provision of a wide range of subjects, his refusal to prepare boys for the Intermediate Examination (the "Murder Machine"), his belief in the notion of learning by doing, his employment of the modern teaching aids available and his faith in the principle that children should be encouraged to develop on their own terms whatever physical or intellectual talents they possessed all point to St Enda's as a progressive and pioneering school in early 20th-century Ireland.
To describe the operation of St Enda's as "fascism" is to reveal a striking lack of familiarity with what Pearse actually wrote, said and did there. The accusation does not have its origins in fact; rather, in the tired excesses of commentators that began in the 1970s, possibly informed as much by the tragedy of Northern Ireland as by objective criticism.
Surely the time has come to move away from the casual assumption of Pearse as a republican ogre. Desmond Ryan, Pearse's most successful student, joined the British army at the outbreak of the first World War, an act which Thomas MacDonagh, school vice-principal and participant in the Easter Rising, referred to as "consistent" with the spirit of patriotism he and Pearse tried to instil at St Enda's - not to one nation, but to one's nation. - Yours, etc,
Dr BRENDAN WALSH, School of Education Studies, Dublin City University, Dublin 9.