REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE CONFERENCE ON SCHOOL CULTURE AND ETHOS CITY WEST
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE CONFERENCE ON SCHOOL CULTURE AND ETHOS CITY WEST HOTEL, SAGGART
Tá gliondar orm bheith anseo libh inniu ag an comhdháil oideachais seo agus ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a chur in iúl don Bráthair Donal Leader as an chaoin-chuireadh.
It is a great pleasure to officially open this conference on School Culture and Ethos, and I warmly commend the Marino Institute of Education for the lead role it has taken in instigating the School Culture and Ethos project, of which today’s conference is an important part.
Ask most people about the culture and ethos of the school they attended, and the chances are that you will be told that it was a Catholic school or a Protestant school or a non-denominational school, a multi-denominational school or a gael-scoil, as if those labels alone set the agenda for culture and ethos. With a little more probing you may discover that it was a single-sex school, a co-educational school, a brand new community college, an old, fee-paying school, a small country school, a huge urban school, each element layering up towards the totality of a particular school’s sense of itself and its pupils’ experience of the school. No two schools are the same and no two pupils are the same. But each school has a common mandate - to be a safe and trusted place of education and formation for life of the children who are placed in its care.
No school should be asked nor should it attempt to take on that role of life formation on its own. It is a complex role involving personality, luck, bad luck, parents, families, neighbours, peers, community, society and nation as well as school. There is little doubt though that the school as part of that partnership of care for the growing child or young person plays a crucial and potentially life-altering role. The stronger and more fluent the partnership, the more developed the relationships between each of the partners, the better the outcome for the child.
For many children, school helped develop self-esteem and self-confidence; it nurtured their gifts, brought them carefully to the surface; it allowed children to take the first steps in that journey into self so crucial to a fulfilled and contented adulthood; it gave them the skills, the certificates which became passports to work; it nurtured in them values to see them through a lifetime as colleagues, friends, spouses, partners or as parents in their turn. They are the success stories of the school and each school has them. But there are those whose story is very different and for them their schooldays were a litany of wasted opportunities, their potential shrivelled, their self belief became a paralysing self-doubt, the dreams of the bright-eyed five year old hardened to cynicism or defeatism by early teenage - a life sentence of under-achievement leading to a tragic legacy of loss not just to the individual but to society. And in between successes and failures there are those who survived and even prospered but whose memory of school is tinged with enough bitterness or hurt to raise questions about the experienced ethos as opposed to the stated ethos.
There are many reasons for such different experiences. A child can be defeated by family circumstances, by his or her own immaturity, by big cataclysmic things and by an accumulation of small things - a bitter word from a teacher, a culture of bullying within a school, a feeling of being looked down on, given up on, being regarded as less valued than the next student.
Whatever about the denominational or non-denominational, the selection or non-selection, the single sex or co-educational, designation of a school, whatever the values it seeks to impart or inculcate it is absolutely axiomatic that no school worthy of the name exists exclusively as a recruiting agency for a particular worldview but exists first and foremost as a service wrapping itself around the manifold educational needs of the child. The relationship works best when student and teacher meet each other half way, when the teacher is committed and communicative, when the pupil is hungry to learn and comfortable at school. Any school which can convince a child that he or she matters, which can make a child feel comfortable and happy at school, is a school which can convince a child about most things of importance. Sincere and worthy words written in mission statements are tested day in and day out by the lived lives of countless tens of thousands of children. They know whether the words stack up, whether they mean what they say. They intuit deeply any divergence between the stated ethos and the actual experienced culture. How many of us grew up deeply confused by stories of a patient, gentle, loving God, transmitted by teachers capable of unprovoked spontaneous combustion and terrifying displays of wrath? Such people probably also made difficult employees and difficult colleagues but their capacity to subvert a school’s ethos, to warp a child’s experience of the gospel as well as school, is a not unfamiliar story. On the other side of the coin, the hard work and the humanity of the teacher are often poorly understood or acknowledged by students. A student culture of ingratitude or dismissiveness or carelessness can de-energise a teacher and make it difficult to get the fullest potential out of those precious school days.
Too often these issues form the subject matter of staff-room discussions by staff, and cloakroom conversations among the students but each remains hermetically sealed from the other. Often too the pre-set value system of the school offers the student no formal opportunity to contract into it, to help develop it or to comment on its working and its workability.
A very welcome aspect of the project of which this conference is a part, is that it seeks to open up these hermetic circles to each other. It respects the huge diversity of experience from school to school and doesn’t seek to impose a rigid, formula-driven blueprint on schools. Rather, it encourages management, teachers, parents and students to define what their school’s values are, what they should be, and how to implement them in the daily life of the school. I have no doubt that there will be a few surprises along the way: it is easy to outline a wonderful set of inclusive, progressive values in the school brochure, but a lot more difficult to realise those ideals in practice. But that journey can be an invaluable one challenging students, parents and teachers to think about what the aims of education should be, to assess how well their school is meeting those aims, and to decide what they can do to create a better fit between aspiration and reality.
The journey may be uncomfortable at times as schools face up to the question of whether what is preached is practised. When a school says it values participation, does it creates effective avenues for students to be consulted in decision-making? When a school says it values all forms of accomplishment, does it reward only the academic and sporting high-fliers? When a school says it outlaws bullying, does it deal with it convincingly from the bullied child’s perspective? It takes no small amount of courage for schools to develop this type of questioning, open approach. But it is clear from the enthusiasm with which the pilot schools have participated in the project, that there is an enormous reservoir of interest in these issues and a great deal of commitment to examining relationships, structures, policies and practices in order to bring them in line with the school’s ideals. This can only be a healthy development, involving greater participation by parents, students and the wider community, in ensuring that our children’s schooldays are days we use well, days we can remember with pride.
I particularly welcome the cross-border dimension of both this conference and the project as a whole, which has involved schools from Lisburn and Belfast, as well as Dublin and Sligo. Many of the challenges faced by schools, regardless of type or location, are similar, and each can benefit from hearing about the different solutions and strategies that others have put in place.
I would like to warmly congratulate the congregation of Christian Brothers who, as trustees of the Marino Institute, have invested so much resources and commitment in this very forward looking, imaginative project. So much of our past educational success we owe to the Christian Brothers and other religious congregations. Their work, their circumstances are changing rapidly. This is a time when the order faces the problems of ageing and lack of vocations. It is a time when they could be forgiven for an absence of energy for renewal and yet here they are at the forefront of debate about how to secure the most successful all round school experience for all our children.
It is a far cry from the days when the shop next door to the Christian Brothers School that my husband went to, advertised the proven potency of its doublethick leather straps. It was not a time when students or parents or even staff were likely to be invited to share their thoughts in the way that this project does. This is a different time. We are grateful for these fresh new times, built as they are on those old times and wiser, much wiser, because of them. We wish this project and conference well as it helps build the new times.
I would like to pay particular tribute to the Project Committee and especially the Project Team: Fr Luke Monahan, Noel Canavan and Dr Catherine Furlong, who have approached both the project and the organisation of this conference with such energy and enthusiasm.
I wish all of you well in your deliberations and discussions over the course of this Conference, and I hope that your insights will inform and inspire the all important work of discerning, upholding and developing school culture and ethos in the years ahead.
Guím rath Dé ar bhur gcuid oibre. Go raibh maith agaibh.