Winds of change are blowing

As a youngster, Aine Hyland was set for a career in teaching, which she would have happily relinquished on marriage. Fate, though, conspired against her. She went on to marry, raise a family of three girls and rise to become vice-president of UCC. Growing up, Aine Hyland always wanted to be a teacher. When she got the chance to train at Carysfort Teacher Training Centre, though, she couldn't stand it and left after three months. She joined the civil service and it was largely thanks to her husband, Bill, that she returned to third level and went on to become a progressive figure in Irish education. Hyland, most recently known for her chairmanship of the Points Commission, would be the first to admit that in her early years she was conventional and conservative. She wryly remembers a time when she forcefully debated - and fervently believed - that a woman's place was in the home. "I was totally conditioned by the environment of the time," she recalls.

Her background - the daughter of a school inspector, who was deeply committed to the Gaelic League - was Irish-speaking and traditional. Home was in a variety of locations in Meath, Louth and Cavan. Her secondary education - boarding at the Mercy Convent, Ballyshannon, Co Longford - served to isolate her from developments in the world outside. "We lived in an extended convent environment," she recalls. "We were very cut off. We only listened to radio once a week." At school, she was clever and hard-working, but unambitious. After her convent education, Carysfort - run by the same order of nuns, incidentally - came as a bit of a shock. "Unlike school, it was rigid and authoritarian. It wasn't an environment that valued difference."

Three months into her course, help arrived - in the form of an offer of a job with the Department of Education. "I loved the civil service," she says. "Looking back, it was a hugely valuable experience. I learned a lot about basic bureaucratic skills and about education and its administration." In 1961, Hyland was invited to work with the Investment in Education team, an OECD-supported project, which was to result in a seminal report. This laid the foundation for all the subsequent changes in Irish education, including the introduction of free second-level education.

Hyland describes her involvement with the project as "the biggest influence of my life". It was - in more ways than one. Not only did her views on the Irish education system change, she also met her future husband, who was to exert a profound influence on her life. "The experience totally opened my eyes," Hyland recalls. "I realised for the first time that I had been privileged in the education I had received and that my experiences were atypical." In those days, second-level education was a minority pastime. "The people I was working with were putting forward a vision of equality of educational opportunity and tying it in with the economic development of the State." Bill Hyland was a statistician working for the UN in New York who returned to Ireland on secondment to work on the Investment in Education project. He was 20 years her senior, unconventional, questioning and liberal. She fell madly in love and when the UN posted him to Geneva, she gave up her post in the Department, got a job with the International Labour Organisation in Geneva, and married him there.

By the end of 1966, the Hylands had two children and were back in Ireland where she pursued a night degree at UCD followed by a HDip and later by a master's and PhD at TCD. "It was Bill who encouraged me and gave me the confidence to continue," she explains. "Because of the difference in our ages, he was anxious that I would have a career." During the 1970s, when their youngest daughter was about to start school, the Hylands embarked on a major challenge against the State. They, along with a group of like-minded parents, fought for and won the right to establish a multi-denominational school in Dalkey, Co Dublin. It was, she recalls, the most difficult thing she has ever undertaken. Her nationalist background and the republican ideals of equality and respect for the individual, with which she had been imbued, did not prepare her for public vilification. She was, she says, shocked by the emergence of a threatening monolithic culture that resisted change. "We learned so much about intolerance and the lack of understanding and the extent to which bureaucracies can block rather than help you."

Ironically, Hyland spent some of her happiest years back in Carysfort. From 1980 until its closure in 1988, she worked there as admissions officer and lecturer in education. Following student protests in the 1970s, it had been completely transformed. When Carysfort closed, Hyland moved to UCD.

BILL Hyland was diagnosed with cancer the week his wife was interviewed for the job of professor of education at UCC. In 1993, Hyland applied for, and got, two professorships - in UCC and NUI Galway. They chose UCC over Galway simply because Bill was from Cork and a graduate of UCC. For Hyland, moving to Cork fitted into a pattern. "It gave me the opportunity to work with new teachers and encourage them to recognise and respect diversity, be it religious, intellectual or physical," she says. "It's important to get across to young teachers that children have a wide variety of intelligences and that they should tap into that diversity."

In 1994, Hyland met Dr Howard Gardner, the Harvard academic who has developed the theory of multiple intelligences. As a result, she embarked on a major collaborative project, which has resulted in her department working closely with local schools and individual teachers to ensure that children's different learning styles are accommodated in the classroom. Hyland ensured that the project's work would impact at national level by appointing a widely representative steering committee. Her approach to research remains highly practical. "My interest," she explains, "is in identifying good practice to effect good change - not change for the sake of change and research for the sake of research."