This weekend the Master and Storyman, Bryan MacMahon, slipped gently into the great staffroom of the sky. Not since Oliver Goldsmith's portrait of a village schoolmaster has a writer celebrated the role and value of teachers in Irish society as well as Bryan MacMahon did in his autobiography, The Master. I read The Master at one sitting. It remains the only book I ever read that brought tears to my eyes. Until then I believed that no literary work could move me more than the final paragraphs of James Joyce's story. The autobiography is an antidote to the pressures of a points-mad education system and a magnificent testament to the work of teachers of his time, our time and for generations to come.
His short story, The Windows of Wonder , in the Inter Cert Exploring English 2 anthology taught generations of teachers how to teach. The story encapsulates the essence of teaching: the quality of contact between teacher and pupil and the critical role of the cultivation of a pupil's imagination and sensibility.
The story hinges upon a symbol of an old man releasing two butterflies from his closed fists to reassure a dejected young teacher that she had indeed opened the windows of wonder in the minds of her pupils. Many years ago, after a class reading of the story, a pupil asked me, "Are we your butterflies?"
Even as a young teacher he intuitively understood that if "I could only plant a seed in the imagination of each one that would fructify later in each individual; if only I could find the gift that I sensed was latent in each one of them: perhaps then I would have fulfilled the purpose of my being a teacher". He achieved his ideal and articulated the raison d'etre of our profession for the rest of us.
The claws of what we call the Celtic Tiger were honed by teachers like Bryan MacMahon who set more store on the imagination than on crude information. He didn't teach his pupils in the conventional sense; he taught them to love learning for its own sake, and for life. He regarded literary criticism as like cutting a skylark's throat to make it sing.
He wrote that for him "a great teacher was simply a great person teaching". That, as Keats might say to teachers, `is all/Ye know on earth, and need to know".
"Writing," he once remarked, "is a man or woman pausing to embroider life." Of Bryan MacMahon it can be truly be said that he wove tapestries of delight, the strands of which will be unwound with pleasure for ever. His spirit will endure in his marvellous stories, plays, ballads, essays and auto-biographies. The greatest Teacher of all Time will have a lot to learn from The Master and The Storyman.
A teacher of English at Loreto Secondary School, Bray, Co Wicklow
