GEORGE HOOKgot his chance in life from his hard-working parents, who scrimped to give him the best education they could. That's why he's a passionate advocate of fee-paying schools
AS A CHILD, only a handful of my neighbours on Albert Road in Cork did the Leaving Certificate. In fact, most of them left school with only a primary education. They were condemned in 1950s Ireland to emigration at best or unemployment at home at worst. There was a word for unemployed young men. They were known as corner boys, because every day they congregated at the street corner, playing pitch and toss for a few pennies, or passed the time bullying young kids on their way to and from school.
We lived in a two-up, two-down terraced house with an outside toilet and no washing facilities. My father was a wages clerk with the bus company; Micheál Martin’s father collected his pay packet from him every Friday. (The supposed socially inferior bus driver Martin earned more than the white-collared Hook.) My father handed over his pay packet, unopened, to his wife, who gave him back something for cigarettes and pocket money and then worked miracles with the remainder to feed and clothe her family.
She resolved that her son would get a better start in life than his parents, who had left school at 14. To that end, when I was seven she marched me up to Presentation College to meet the principal, Br Alphonso. The conversation is long forgotten, but the image of this strong woman in the parlour of the college with the forbidding cleric remains in my memory. She told Alphonso that she could pay the fees only in fortnightly instalments, as her husband was paid in that manner. To his everlasting credit the great man agreed, and I began 12 years of life at a fee-paying school that determined my future.
Arthur Scargill, the former leader of the miners’ union in the UK, used to boast that he went to school without any boots. I had boots, but the soles had holes, my feet protected by cardboard. One shirt lasted a week by the simple expedient of using two sides of the add-on collar and turning the double cuff inside out when dirty.
I was certainly the poorest boy in my class, as my classmates were invariably sons of doctors, dentists and lawyers. I have never forgotten the embarrassment of being unable to bring flowers for the altar. The houses on Albert Road did not have gardens.
Never once, however, was I made feel inferior by the brothers or lay teachers at the school, and I was given an extraordinary education that ultimately saved my life and gave me, albeit belatedly, a career in the media.
Br Athanasious gave me a love of Shakespeare in first year, which was subsequently fuelled by the great actor Dan Donovan. Freddie Holland and “Fox” Madden taught me the wonder of mathematics, and it was little wonder when their textbook became a staple for generations of students. Even looking back through somewhat rose-tinted glasses, I did not have a bad teacher.
Little wonder, then, that I am a passionate advocate of the private school. In a quirk of fate, my wife, Ingrid, reprised the role of my mother in scrimping and saving to send our children to Blackrock College and Mount Anville when her husband had failed miserably as the breadwinner.
Her commitment to private education came from her mother, a refugee from war-torn Germany, who had similarly slaved to ensure that her daughter got a chance in the dreaded 11-plus examination that decided the educational fates of British children before they reached puberty. The alternatives were grammar school and university or comprehensive school and a lottery in the British industrial workplace.
A GROWING BREED
Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn, a self-confessed atheist and socialist, would, I suspect, like to remove the €100 million State subsidy from the 56 private schools in Ireland. Certainly, many of his supporters would like to see private education banned outright, in order to have what they believe would be a more inclusive education system.
In Ireland, private education has been seen as walking hand in hand with elitism; the old school tie equated with some kind of Masonic rite; and the products of such establishments seen as subversive capitalists. But it is no longer a pursuit of just the upper class. The recent news that private schools are growing despite the recession should not surprise anybody. Modern-day parents are no different from their parents and grandparents in deciding investment in their children’s education is on a par with that in food and clothing.
Politicians are the enemy of education. Across the civilised world in their rush to judgment on so-called equality they have consistently dumbed down the system to the lowest common denominator. Yet time and again it is proven that parents want an education for their children that is different from the catch-all offered by their elected representatives. The public-school system in the US is a disaster, providing minimum education to a polyglot student population. There is a rush to enrol in Catholic schools because of their adherence to old but now derided principles of discipline, tradition and a code of ethics.
Conversely, every morning in the townships of South Africa and the filthy hovels of Haiti, in a miracle of make-do, scrubbed kids in immaculate uniforms make their way to schools certain that the only route to an escape from poverty is education. There may not be an option of private education, but education is given its due priority.
Race, culture and nationality are crucial in discussing education, but there is a fear to discuss it openly. For generations the classrooms were full of children who were white, Catholic and English-speaking. The minority schools differed only in the religious ethos.
Twenty five years ago I was astonished to discover that in the school system in Providence, Rhode Island, the smallest state in the US, there were 52 languages. It made meaningful teaching impossible. I never thought we would see a similar situation in Ireland. Teachers in certain parts of Dublin face the impossible task of teaching a class where many pupils do not have competence in English. For over a decade the teaching unions have attempted to convince successive governments of the problem only to be rebuffed by their politically correct masters. The answer is more not fewer teachers or the system envisaged by the Minister will descend into the chaos of the US.
Quinn, with the proposed new guidelines on school admission policies, wants an end to choice by parents and schools. No longer, it seems, will sons have a right to go to the school of their fathers, or siblings to the schools of their brothers and sisters.
IT’S WORTH THE SACRIFICE
Is the system elitist? Yes it is. But the world is based on elitism of talent, intelligence, hard work and willingness to sacrifice. Every day parents are making monumental sacrifices to give their children the best education possible. Quinn and his fellow travellers want a system that is doomed to failure.
Nowhere on the globe has it been proved that universal access works. The good Minister might reflect on the actions of the last Labour minister for education, Niamh Breathnach, who introduced free third-level education in the belief that the underprivileged would benefit. The result was an underfunded and dumbed-down university sector that Quinn must now unravel and return, too late to save our standing in the world rankings, to a fees system.
As the appalling figures for mathematics and science in the Leaving Certificate demonstrate, the Irish belief in a knowledge economy is as empty a boast as Mary Harney’s suggestion that we could have a health service and not pay taxes.
Like Harney’s hospitals, Quinn’s schools will be divided between those who pay for service and those who do not. Health preference is based on insurance; education preference will be based on savings and sacrifice. Quinn, like Canute, cannot stop the tide. He dare not dismantle State support of the fee-paying sector, because the unions will not allow him. Even if he could, and made the fees prohibitive, the parents would fall back on State schools and cause chaotic overcrowding.
This month the American collegiate football season opens, and next weekend the Solheim Cup for women professional golfers will take place in Killeen Castle. Christina Kim, the daughter of Korean migrants, will be part of the US team. Kim’s father, with little or no English, knew that he had to give his child his chance, so from age 10 she hit 500 balls a day to become a professional golfer. Across the black ghettos of the US, barely literate young black men will earn a living because at least one parent, invariably the mother, taught them to catch and throw a ball.
I am proud that Presentation College accepted Jewish boys when the State system was closed to them. I was uplifted when I learned years later that the parents had offered Jewish families to take the children and raise them as Catholics to save their lives, should the Germans invade.
The fee-paying sector has a proud and distinguished tradition. I will fight to retain it.
George Hook presents
The Right Hook
on Newstalk
