The Christian Brothers have been indispensable partners in the tasks of nation building in Ireland, writes Br Michael Murray.Rite and Reason
Edmund Rice was Ireland's first great social entrepreneur. In the unforgiving world of 18th-century trade, he built up a very successful marine chandlery business serving the North Atlantic.
A committed social philanthropist and devout Catholic, his lifestyle was never that of the Regency nouveau riche social climber. A profound and practical conviction that life could be better for people inspired him to found the Christian Brothers.
He saw education for all as the way forward. Deeply influenced by the work of Nano Nagle for girls, he saw that he could do the same for boys. This was his "big idea". He invested his life and energies in social transformation through education.
A pragmatic realism underpinned the Brothers' educational thinking. A Catholic theology asserting the spiritual worth of the person and offering the overarching vision of the potential for fullness of life provided such education an assured philosophical inspiration and framework.
Against this background, Christian Brother education was about maximal access to the knowledge and skills that equipped a person to earn a living, achieve independent personal and social goals, and contribute to the common good of society.
In some ways, the Brothers' approach bears a family resemblance to what we would nowadays call the "Protestant ethic", a belief in the value of hard work, concern for others, and a positive attitude to the rewards that accompany social, professional and personal success.
This very grounded, practical and realistic approach to education was particularly well-adapted to the needs of societies undergoing rapid social change, as was the case of 19th and early 20th century Ireland. It translated well to the contexts of the Catholic immigrant working class of America, England, Australia, and South Africa.
Wherever Catholics were socially mobile and motivated to claim their place in the sun, Christian Brother education was an effective mechanism for social advancement and transformation. It was particularly well adapted to the circumstances of the urban poor and still is today.
The Christian Brothers and their schools in Ireland have been indispensable partners in the tasks of nation building. In their secondary schools, the Brothers were the educators of the State's public servants, its teachers and administrators, its priests, technocrats and business entrepreneurs. Their primary schools, established in almost every Irish town by the late 1950s, educated the vast majority of the tax-bearing, mainly urban and male populations.
In the post-Lemass years, this emerging cadre of skilled and productive workers, in whom the Christian Brother primary-school education had instilled a form of practical and civic patriotism, served well a nation transitioning from a rural and agricultural base towards a broad-based manufacturing economy.
In the second phase of development, in the years since the 1967 OECD report Investment in Education, the Christian Brothers' post-primary system played a key role in educating new generations of highly-educated young people, the architects of today's knowledge economy.
Minister for Education Mary Hanafin said recently at the Marino Institute of Education in Dublin, "it is no exaggeration to say that your Order was a foundation stone of the Irish education system and generations of our young people have come through your schools to contribute in the widest sense to all that is best in Irish society".
In recent years, the Christian Brothers pioneered the democratisation of schools' structure, introducing representative management boards long before these became mandatory.
Throughout the 1990s, they funded and developed programmes for school leadership, pastoral care, technology education, and new approaches to religious education. These contributed in no small measure to the mainstreaming of such programmes within the contemporary Irish education system.
New structures to establish the transition to lay trusteeship will provide more impetus for further development. Inspired by Edmund Rice's particular concern for access to education, the Christian Brothers have pioneered innovative Life Centres, now four in number and growing, that offer new educational opportunities to young people for whom mainstream schooling does not work.
With their lay colleagues, the Christian Brothers sponsor a network of 115 schools and education centres, catering for over 40,000 pupils.
This network continues to be a strong, vital and imaginative contribution to Irish education and society.
The modern Irish economy grew dramatically because of massive inward investment. Hidden from view, however, has been the equally massive investment of human capital from previous generations.
Among such investors were the Christian Brothers.
Today, we speak of social entrepreneurs. They bring about social transformation through the vision, determination and talent that they invest generously in the community they serve. The Christian Brothers, like Edmund Rice, have been the social entrepreneurs of our time.
The New Testament urges us to give testimony to the "hope that is in us". For many communities around the world the Christian Brothers continue to offer hope and life through the transforming work of education made freely available for all.
As Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said in a speech at the Marino Institute of Education on May 28th last "in each of the five continents, your work in education and with some of the poorest and most disadvantaged in our world, has given renewed hope to many".
It is this flame of hope that, with their lay collaborators, the Christian Brothers nurture and keep alive in an increasingly fragile world. This is the spiritual dimension of social entrepreneurship.
Br Michael Murray is province leader of St Helen's Province of the Christian Brothers in Ireland