Remarks by President McAleese on the occasion of the Graduation of Students
Remarks by President McAleese on the occasion of the Graduation of Students from The Church of Ireland College of Education
Is mór an pléisiúr dom bheith anseo i bhur measc inniu. Go raibh míle maith agaibh as ucht bhur bhfáilte chaoin.
Your grace Archbishop Neill, governors, staff, graduates, parents and friends, I am delighted to be here with you today to join in celebrating the achievements of the 28 students who are graduating today from the College and I want to thank Principal Sydney Blain for the kind invitation to be here.
I am happy to say this is not my first visit to the College. I was here some years ago in a former role as Professor of Law at Trinity College. On that occasion, I was here to discuss and share memories of schooldays in the company of some well known Irish personalities among them Nell McCafferty, Geraldine Kennedy, Gemma Hussey and the late columnist, John Healy.
I agree with the American author, scholar and teacher Dr. William Arthur Ward who said :
“The mediocre teacher tells,
The good teacher explains,
The superior teacher demonstrates,
The great teacher inspires”
I met them all during my schooldays and I am sure you did too but our verdicts on or assessments of our teachers were generally shared only in martyred glances in the classroom or cynical comments in the schoolyard, or told in nostalgia sessions with old school friends, or simply kept deep in our own hearts. We never marked their homework or ticked boxes to let them know what standard they had reached and sad to say we probably rarely thanked them. As you start your professional teaching careers, I have no doubt that if asked each of you would aspire and profoundly wish to be the inspirational teacher. Our shared wish for you today and for all those whom you will teach is that you will be.
We ask a lot of you don’t we? We trust you with our children and even more importantly we trust you with their individuality, their utter uniqueness. We ask you to work every day with twenty or thirty children, no two the same, not even identical twins. We ask you to introduce them to the great adventure that education is, not a journey into books or encyclopaedias, or sums or alphabets, but a journey into themselves. For each has an untapped reservoir of gifts and aptitudes which you must carefully lay the pipeline to, so that many years down the road when schooldays are long over that young child, now a man or a woman will have blossomed into a skilled, confident, literate, articulate, strong human being, strong citizen. We trust you with our community and with our country for fulfilled individuals make strong, resilient communities and successful countries need a wild mosaic of diverse genius acting and interacting to give it dynamism, to give it an edge. Your work seed-beds the release of that genius. We ask you to customise your response to every child so that his or her individuality finds its pathway to benign expression. We ask you to watch out for days when the child needs a little extra care, to develop an intuitive antennae which allows you to read a complex child like you would an open book and to respond with exactly the right set of answers. We ask you to help each child to accept the giftedness of schoolmates, with generosity and not with fear or self-doubt or begrudgery.
Yes we ask an awful lot of you, but today is the day when we acknowledge that you have been tried and tested and you have earned our trust. And what a comprehensive test you have been through as you grew in proficiency across a primary school curriculum wider than any in the history of education on this island. Now you join in partnership with school, community and parents, in a team effort to make childhood the best it can be. For some of the children you meet, childhood will be a dream, for others a nightmare. They will be sitting side by side, maybe dressed in the same uniform, their life paths already set on hugely different trajectories. And you can make all the difference. Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí - says the old saying and for some yours may be the only voice they ever hear giving them praise and encouragement. Those words can last a lifetime. You may be their best chance to grow up safely into healthy, well-balanced adults. Those students don’t yet know how lucky they are that they will meet you at a crucial time in their lives. But they are lucky, for we in Ireland are exceptionally fortunate that primary teaching attracts the brightest and best of our young people. We are exceptionally fortunate that our Colleges of Education are acknowledged centres of excellence training and preparing our teachers to the very highest level. The evidence is in that we owe our teachers and their teachers a lot. Contemporary Ireland’s renowned economic and cultural vibrancy which has changed how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others in ways unimaginable a generation ago is directly linked to the high standard of education we enjoy in Ireland. The self-confident, entrepreneurially talented new generation did not happen by accident and we as a society owe a huge debt of thanks to the hardworking and dedicated staff of all our Colleges of Education, among them this distinguished exemplar, the Church of Ireland College of Education.
Enjoy your careers as empowerers of children and as changers of a country’s future. May you be fulfilled and may you be inspirational.
I congratulate you all once again and wish you every success and happiness in the years to come.
Go n’eirí and bóthar libh agus go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.