REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE INAUGURAL ADULT LEARNING BY LECTURE SERIES ALL HALLOWS COLLEGE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE INAUGURAL ADULT LEARNING BY LECTURE SERIES ALL HALLOWS COLLEGE, DRUMCONDRA
Dia dhíbh a chairde inniu. Tá áthas orm beith I bhur measc inniu.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am delighted to be here at All Hallow’s College to mark the first anniversary of the adult learning BA for personal and professional development and I am particularly honoured to be asked to deliver the very first of your annual lectures. I would like to thank Reverend Mark Noonan for inviting me. I was sixteen when I attended my first Conference at All Hallows and I hope to be still attending conferences here when I am ninety six for like so many people who have discovered the sheer fun and friendship offered by adult education I am hoping that Henry Ford was right when he said ‘Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.’ He could also have said that anyone who keeps learning is never bored. Over the years since I officially became an adult, learning has been such a faithful, exciting and useful companion, often a life-changing companion- from early typing classes to computer programming, from classes in Irish, Spanish, Italian, German, dressmaking, upholstery, yoga, meditation, set-dancing, keep-fit, canon law, philosophy, tin–whistle, bodhran, cookery among others, I have gathered a set of sometimes dubious skills and a lot of happy memories, enough to fill out a life with curiosity and relish. But even more important than my own story of how adult learning adds to my life, has been the story of how adult learning adds so much and so profoundly to the lives of those who did not get the chances for second and third level education that came so easily my way.
Two people gave me a first hand and first rate insight into the transformative effects of adult education. I met them both through NALA and they had both left school unable to read or write. One was a woman who had reared a large family. She had never known the joy of reading her children a bed-time story. She had never known the hassle of helping them with homework. Never filled out a job application and so never had a job, never filled out an application for a driving licence and so never had learnt to drive, never filled out a passport form and never travelled. She once bought yellow pack tins of what she thought were beans and discovered at home that they were in fact dog food. She told me what it is like to live trapped and so low in self-esteem in that world surrounded by books and newspapers, signs and forms that were inaccessible to her. She told me of her first tentative and fearful visit to NALA where on a blank sheet of paper in her forties, she began to write the alphabet like a four year old in junior infants. And then she described the joy and confidence that grew incrementally as she mastered one hurdle after another. By the time I met her she was doing post-graduate university studies. She was an excellent, articulate and remarkable woman but she told me that until she opened herself up to adult education she lived a half life and had no idea who she truly was or could become.
The second person I met through NALA was a man who had a job but could never socialise with his workmates for fear they would ask him to pick a horse from a newspaper or fill in a line for a charity sponsorship form. So he was regarded as reclusive, even odd. Through his children he began to see their joy in reading and writing and he began to feel so deeply the awful loss and absences in his own life that illiteracy had conferred. He turned up at NALA and on the night I met him he read to an audience the most moving poem I have ever heard – one he wrote himself about the sheer wonder and beauty of being able to write the names of his wife and children on a blank sheet of paper.
If ever there were two people who could articulate the value of adult education and life-long learning it was those two good Dubs. It changed their lives, opened them up to themselves and their potential, opened them up to the world around them and beyond them, put happiness in their hearts, skills in their hands, information in their heads and opportunities on their plates.
None of this means that a return to formal learning after years away from the classroom cannot be hard and a bit intimidating at first. Adults have lives that are much more complex than kids. A lot of them have kids. They have jobs, responsibilities and a limited amount of free time. They have self doubts and a bundle of very persuasive reasons why they should not take on the burden of studying. Yet talk to those who decide to give it a go and a different picture emerges. Earlier this year we had the first ever graduation ceremony in Aras an Uachtarain when members of Household staff received a range of high-level FETAC diplomas. Many had been years away from formal studies and started their courses with reservations. The studies and course requirements were challenging and testing but not impossible, not insuperable and there they were with their qualifications in hand and much more. For they had their own pride in themselves, the pride of their families and colleagues, they had new skills and qualifications to open up new opportunities, they had fresh, enhanced and well founded confidence in their own abilities and they also had a hunger for more. None of them wanted the education experience to stop for it was an experience that had given them so much and left such an imprint that life without it lacked the colour of the friendships, the lectures, the books, the panics, the projects, the stress, the help, the encouragement, the doubts, the aliveness that taking on the challenge of adult education brings into a life. They were not five year olds or fifteen year olds with little life experience to call on but adults whose lived lives had been a useful resource in the classroom and whose lives and overlooked talents had been validated over and over again in those classrooms.
So here we are in a time of economic retrenchment and high unemployment. We will not always be in this uncertain and rather miserable place but how do we move through it and beyond it as individuals and as a society? We will need new businesses, new industries, new skills, new ideas. We will need the dynamism that comes from the doers in our society and many of them are doing the obvious thing - they are returning to education because the return on that investment is never in doubt in the long run. Just as personal development is driven by knowledge, skill and experience, our country’s future economic development will be driven by our adaptability, our willingness to unlearn and relearn, to be an active part of today’s knowledge economy. We also need people who have the intellectual confidence and knowhow, to interrogate the values and attitudes which underpinned the failed economic models which let us down so badly nationally and globally for a future knowledge economy will need to be anchored in a very different value system - one which cares first and foremost for the common good. So we need an educated and articulate public whose lifelong learning has kept them bang up to date and well equipped to drive the debates and dialogues we need to get our values, our practices and our systems working in more credible and sustainable ways.
Here at All Hallows those who are undertaking the Adult Learning BA for professional and personal development are giving terrific leadership in what it takes to be an active citizen. Here your past experience is values. You are not on your own, there are mentors to encourage and support. This is not a return to a drawing board but part of an onward life journey. It isn’t like school was in the old days. There is collaboration, there is direct involvement by the student in curriculum design, there is customisation of courses around your unique needs and there is the Vincentian charism of respect for the dignity of the individual at its core. That Vincentian charism is a key part of the success of this model both here and in DePaul University, Chicago. It has not only been successful but has garnered international acclaim for its focus on the rounded development of the whole person.
Congratulations to the partnership between All Hallows, DePaul University and Dublin City University that sustains this Programme, and especially to Mark Noonan, President of All Hallows, Oliver Maloney, Chairman of the Board, Dean Ronan Tobin, the ALBA team and the ALBA teaching staff. I congratulate the religious congregations and individuals who have guaranteed funding for the first four years to make this programme a reality. I would like to mention Kevin O’Higgins and the personnel from the Jesuit University Trust in Ballymun. I am told that, without their sound advice, this idea would have remained a dream.
Finally can I thank the students who took this opportunity for you are its ambassadors, its showcase and without you there would be no success stories and no hope of any. You get the biggest applause. Enjoy the experience and the places it will lead you.
Go raibh maith agaibh go léir. Thank you.