Patrick Pearse's progressive ideas on education will get a fresh airing this week during Ranelagh Arts Festival in Dublin, writes Joyce Hickey.
In a large, bright room with sunlight beaming in through four tall Georgian windows, young schoolboys sit spellbound, listening to distinguished visitors who have come to see an educational experiment in practice. It's 1908, and Patrick Pearse's pupils at his new school, St Enda's, are being addressed by the likes of WB Yeats, Douglas Hyde and Maud Gonne.
In that year, when Pearse was 29, his family bought Cullenswood House, on Oakley Road in Ranelagh. Having taught for some years, as well as writing plays, short stories and poetry in English and Irish, he was the editor of the Gaelic League newspaper, An Claidheamh Soluis, in which he published his ideas on education. According to Dr Elaine Sisson, author of Pearse's Patriots: St Enda's and the Cult of Boyhood, he was particularly concerned about the nature of the colonial education system, which emphasised the dissemination of information rather than knowledge and had such counter-productive measures as the payment-by-results scheme. This "murder machine", Pearse wrote, left little room for intellect, freedom, personal development or creativity, and was far from the old Irish system, which was "the best and noblest that has ever been known among men".
Pearse, says Dr Sisson, was flawed and naive, and some of his ideas are best consigned to history, but he was an astute, surprisingly modern thinker on education. His writings on education, she says, display "a lucidity of thought that is often missing elsewhere in his work".
Opening his own school in Cullenswood House gave Pearse the facility to create the educational ideal that he had long dreamed of. At St Enda's (named in honour of the Aran Island saint), says Dr Sisson, his objective was to provide a modern, child-centred, bilingual education for Irish boys, and he was fascinated by the question of how an Irish boy is made. To discover that, he looked to the ancients and "placed their ideals in a modern setting". He subverted the imperial model, he was influenced by contemporary educational thinkers such as Maria Montessori, and he drew on aspects of cultural debates on history, masculinity and citizenship to make them relevant. And at St Enda's, he taught those boys - who included the sons of James Larkin, William Bulfin, Eoin MacNeill and WP Ryan - hurling, Latin, Greek, maths, dancing, cleanliness and, of course, Irish language and culture. It was a Catholic school, but it was outside the administrative and intellectual control of the church.
This boys' nirvana, set in acres of grounds that included a theatre, was full of cultural riches. The upstairs landing of the house is still decorated with monochrome Celtic Twilight wallpaper. Jack Yeats designed the school Christmas card. Sarah Purser created a stained-glass panel for the front door. It is evident, says Dr Sisson, that St Enda's happened alongside the Celtic Revival and the foundation of the Abbey Theatre, and that the school, as a cultural as well as an educational experiment, is central to all the debates that raged at the time. Pearse's brother Willie taught art there and three other teachers - Thomas MacDonagh, Con Colbert and Joseph Plunkett - were also executed after the Easter Rising.
This Friday, Dr Sisson will give a talk, entitled The Republic of Cullenswood, in the very classroom that was the hub of St Enda's. In 1910 the school moved to a larger premises, the Hermitage in Rathfarnham, which is now the Pearse Museum, and it moved back to Ranelagh after 1916. In 1960 Pearse's sister Margaret left Cullenswood House to the State, but it fell into disrepair and was saved from ruin only by the work of a local restoration committee, set up in 1987.
The ground floor is now occupied by Gaelscoil Lios na nÓg, where many of Pearse's ideals are carried on, with its child-centred approach to learning and its prize-winning intercultural ethos. Its founding committee, according to the principal, Áine nic an tSíthigh, had two aims: to establish a gaelscoil and, when the school was fortunate enough to move into the building, "to keep alive the restoration committee's aspiration to have the building as a cultural centre for the community".
An ad-hoc cultural committee, composed of school board members and Lios na nÓg parents including Victoria White, is determined to make this happen. Staff and parents have toiled long and hard to make the school work, but a lot of effort is needed to bring it up to modern standards, and to incorporate the upper storey into the school. The house is to be refurbished soon, and when this happens, says White, it will be "an amazing tool to unpick and explore our national identity in a multicultural context". It embodies the history of an idea, says Dr Sisson, and gives context to the story of a radical experiment.
Dr Elaine Sisson's lecture, The Republic of Cullenswood: Patrick Pearse in Ranelagh, will take place this Friday at 7.30pm in Gaelscoil Lios na nÓg, Ranelagh. Admission is free
