Madam, - My colleague (and dare I still say, friend?) Dr Brendan Walsh (October 3rd) repeats many of the points he made in his response to an article of mine published in the Australian Journal History of Education Review some time ago. Unfortunately, he is no more correct about Pearse, or my reading of Pearse, now than he was then.
In particular he is at fault when he suggests that I am party to the "tired excesses of commentators. . . [of] the 1970s". The error of the revisionist historians who tackled the subject of Pearse in that period was to take the educational writings at face value (as Dr Walsh himself does), without any deeper reading of their proto-fascist implications and intentions. In effect, the revisionist said: Love him or loathe him, you can't ignore that he was progressive in education.
The facts say otherwise and this is the error I have avoided by assessing Pearse against generally accepted standards of educational progressivism. There can be do doubt that Pearse was personally charismatic and innovative in some ways, but not all: innovation involves progress, change for the better. Another former pupil, Denis Gwynn, said of Pearse that he had "provide[d] himself [at St Enda's] with the nucleus of a young band of politicians who would follow him to the scaffold".
Gwynn also later wrote an account of the life and politics of the sometime clerical fascist Charles Maurras and I think he may have recognised many similarities between Pearse and Maurras. - Yours, etc,
DAVID LIMOND, School of Education, Trinity College, Dublin 2.