PRESIDENT MARY MCALEESE DELIVERS THE ANNUAL LECTURE OF THE GENERAL TEACHING COUNCIL FOR N. IRELAND
PRESIDENT MARY MCALEESE DELIVERS THE ANNUAL LECTURE OF THE GENERAL TEACHING COUNCIL FOR NORTHERN IRELAND
Madam Chairperson,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a real pleasure to have been invited to deliver the Annual Lecture of the General Teaching Council for Northern Ireland and I thank in particular your Chairperson, Sally McKee, for her kind invitation.
Anyone talking to a teachers’ conference has a wealth of subjects to choose from. There are the current controversies over selection and pay. The core curriculum could keep us here for a week, not to mention all the added responsibilities we so easily expect schools to deal with - sectarianism, racism, sex education, career advice, suicide prevention, reporting of neglect or abuse, bullying, drug and alcohol awareness, the school ski trip, the cultural visits, the cross-community, crossborder cross- European Union relationships, the green flags, the recycling, the fund raising for charity------- I am going to stop the list because it is endless and I am not for obvious reasons going to throw my oar into any area of ongoing controversy but what I am going to do is to set out my stall with regard to the inestimable value and importance of education and so of teaching to the past, present and future of all of us on this island.
The legendary French American cultural historian and teacher Jacques Barzun, once said
“Teaching is not a lost art but the regard for it is a lost tradition.”
Barzun is now over one hundred years old. He has seen a lot of convulsive change over his lifetime, most of it heart rending and some of it heartening and he is insightful enough to acknowledge that some of the most inhuman ideas as well as the most humanly uplifting were generated in the brains of intellectuals but he is also experienced enough to remind us that teaching is a fundamental, a sine qua non of human progress. Those who teach children invest in the individual. No two are the same. No two have the same mix of personality, context, talents, passion. No two will go the same life’s journey and yet all those individual educated lives can accrete somehow into a power that can lift a community out of poverty into prosperity, out of conflict into peace, out of powerlessness into opportunity. They say that what is learnt in childhood is engraved on stone - a chilling reminder that this art of teaching is only as effective as the engravers and there are many engravers on children’s lives, many teachers. The most significant and influential are their parents. Your job as teachers within the formal education system is made easier or more difficult to the extent that parents take seriously their own profound obligations as teachers of their own children - teachers of values, of manners, of regard for themselves and others, of curiosity about the world and the contribution they can make to it, teachers of regard for the tradition of respect for education. Those who are role models for children are teachers too whether they are civic leaders or sporting legends or pop stars – they impact on the mind and mores of our children and they too sometimes need to be reminded that this teaching function, subtle and at a remove as it may appear to be has profound and lasting consequences in the lives of strangers. Your role as formal educators is also made easy or difficult to the extent that these external forces work coherently with you or create a context that pulls against you.
For the vast majority of the world’s children, formal education is a rite of passage to fulfilling their potential that is still a distant dream. Wherever people are mired in abject poverty you can be certain that there is educational poverty. Wherever people have transcended poverty and disease you can be sure education was the engine of transcendence. For those of us who share this island, formal education is something we are particularly good at. It is an accessible resource that we can too easily forget is one of the fundamental building blocks of this present we enjoy and this future we aspire to.
When people ask me about the transformation in life South of the Border, how a poor underachieving country with endemic poverty and generations old emigration turned its fortunes around, I begin the story not in 1973 with membership of the European Union, or 1987 with the construction of social partnership, or with the introduction of a benign corporate tax regime but with a decision taken at the end of the 1960’s to extend free second level education to everyone. There is no mystery here - educate half your people and you only realise half your potential. From the 1970’s onwards those who committed to the vocation of teaching were in fact participating in the biggest social revolution in the history of Ireland, the harnessing for the first time of the brain power of all her people. It would be twenty years or more before the benefits of their teaching would manifest themselves in the Tiger economy, the end of high unemployment and emigration, surging inward migration, the growth of foreign investment in high-tech industries, the rapid development of an indigenous entrepreneurial sector, a political and cultural confidence and vibrancy that helped recalibrate relationships with Great Britain and contributed to a successful Peace Process.
This journey we have come began in our schools and they remain critical players in positioning us where we aim to be in the coming years.
The people who share the island of Ireland are now living in a radically altered environment, one replete with opportunity and with hope. These are not things which are self-generating and they have been constructed at enormous cost and against a backdrop of dreadful waste. They need the fuel of human effort to bring them to life, to give them stories, to make them real. Now we need people to stay, especially here in Northern Ireland. The haemorrhage of young brains leaves a legacy of loss. Now we have to encourage them to stay or to plan on returning with their new found skills and experience gleaned from around the world, for applied brainpower is the key to prosperity, to attracting investors, to native entrepreneurship, to good problem solving, to contented citizenship.
The quite extraordinary strides that have been made in the political arena were made against a tide of hurt and cynicism and disbelief. Today’s global economic landscape has its own tide of discouraging news but with entrepreneurship deep in its DNA I am quite sure, Northern Ireland will make equally legendary strides in the social and economic spheres. The goal of creating a leading-edge, knowledge-intensive economy, serving a tolerant, respectful, creative cosmopolitan community is achieveable but it will not be built by accident but rather by design and teachers are important members of the design team.
The Troubles had a predictably depressing effect on entrepreneurship in the North while down South, a stagnant economy provided a similarly infertile landscape for entrepreneurship. Yet in the case of the latter, once education had flooded the reservoir of talent, the old intractable problems started to be scrutinised and dealt with more effectively and a new problem solving generation quickly showed its innate entrepreneurship. David Varney, in his December report on taxation, drew attention to a particular obstacle he perceived to enterprise in Northern Ireland: what he described as the “crowding out” effect created by the public sector’s employment of almost one-third of the workforce, in particular its employment of “a disproportionate number of graduates and highly skilled people”. This legacy of the troubles is quite a hurdle to overcome but teachers will have a front line role in overcoming it, as they promote in their students the kind of self-belief and confidence that unleashes the risk-taking ambition that underpins entrepreneurial talent and the confidence to strike out in new directions.
Schools all over this island are today turning out thousands of dynamic, able new problem-solvers. They are the best educated generation ever and for the first time ever they are emerging into adulthood without the shadow of violence hanging over them, threatening their futures and diverting their potential from the creation of a better livelihood. The old context saw crossborder relations characterised by mistrust, cross community relations characterised by sectarianism and British/Irish relations skewed by the politics of colonisation and partition. That context has now been completely recast and is in the process of a radical reconstruction characterised by growing warmth, partnership and collegiality. It was Jung who said that “warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.” In a complex and sometimes cold world, schools have often been the stable, reliable supplier of warmth both for the fragile plant of mutual tolerance and respect and the fragile psyche of the growing child.
For newcomers to Ireland, North and South, schools are often their first point of intersection with a new culture. The welcome they and their children experience, the support they receive, will colour and shape their new lives among strangers, speeding up the settling process so that they can maximise their contribution and their potential. The cosy backdrop of a relatively homogeneous society has suddenly given way to a stunning new and young heterogeneity that implicates us deeply as citizens of Europe and of the world. Schools have been in the very frontline of adapting to these changes in demography. I want to acknowledge with deep admiration and gratitude the extraordinary efforts made by school staff in coping effectively and caringly with the range of human, psychological, cultural and educational issues these profound changes have wrought.
You are also in the frontline of other less welcome social changes. Children live in all sorts of circumstances. Some things shield them while others exploit them. There are predators of all sorts, ready to shut down their young lives whether by abuse or with drugs, through bullying or neglect. Those predators can be in their families, their schools, their streets, their magazines, their computers, their role models, or their televisions. They can be familiar or strangers. This generation enjoys a freedom like no other but that very freedom exposes them to many powerful forces over which a child can have little or no control. Some phenomena let children be children, while others make mere consumers of them.
All of us but especially our teachers, have a sacred stewardship of their young lives, and through them, of our own future. A profession to which is delegated the welfare of children is one that enjoys huge trust and respect. You have brought us safely thus far, through times of turbulence and relentless change. Now as the mood music all around moves from cacophony to harmony, it will be your leadership which will gently, subtly, unobtrusively open this island’s children up to the enormous potential that charges, infuses this moment in our shared history, this unique confluence of peace, prosperity and partnership.
We have no idea what the future holds but we have some idea that it could be and should be considerably better than the past. It has often been remarked that the benefits of education roll out over a lifetime and that teachers have to wait many years before the full value of their impact is revealed. You are patient people, painstaking people, professional people. Yours is assuredly not a lost art, but a relentlessly working art, conscientiously building up the human person day in and day out and through that person strengthening home, family, community and country. It was Nelson Mandela who remarked that “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
Away from the daily drama of news broadcasts, away from the world of politics, in classrooms all over Northern Ireland teachers dreamed of a changed homeland. They saw the pain of fear and loss, the waste engendered by hatred and ignorance, they nursed hurt, wounded, frightened, unsure children through horrors and nightmares both internal and external, encouraged them to self-belief, introduced them to new talents and skills, refused to give up on them and on all of us and somewhere, somehow over these past difficult years a critical mass of people grew for whom the repetition of the past was just not acceptable. They took risks to broker peace. They showed courage and confidence that other generations failed to find. They will now find the creativity to make the most of this historic moment and when the story of how they did it is written, we will I hope find again the tradition of regard for teaching for in these times we see the harvesting of seeds you sowed and tended, of weeds you cleared by hand, of peace built by you one child at a time and of a prosperity and partnership to come that you inspired those children to believe in.
Go raibh mile maith agaibh.