Why Gaelic Shouldn't Be Compulsary In Schools In Ireland | ||||||||
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The school children amount to 79% of the people who claim to speak Gaelic at least once a day in the country as a whole. 3% of adults claim to speak Gaelic at least once a day and 5% at least once a week (that's according to the Census returns -- but there are gounds for believing the response to this question on the Census overstates the true usage situation). Mountainous valuable knowledge and skills in other subjects are not being taught in the schools. Irish employers in practically all economic sectors report no need for Gaelic language skills. General education and skills standards in the Republic of Ireland are not good by international standards (see a review of the data). A significant portion of the Republic's population does not identify with or value the language under any circumstances (see the 1987 opinion poll at the TCD Irish Opinion Poll Archive (type 'Irish language' in the box). The teaching of Gaelic has failed. Children get nearly an hour's compulsory instruction in it, plus homework, every school day for eleven years of school. At the primary school level, more compulsory time is devoted to Gaelic than to basic numeracy and mathematics, or any other subject except English. The result is that most 18 year-olds can't maintain a rudimentary conversation in it. Here are some of the reasons. Less than half the parents say they'd like to see Gaelic used more widely and less than a quarter say they'd wish it to be the main spoken language (see the opinion polls cited above). Obviously then, most children are coming from a poor home environment for the subject. It's clear to the older children that Gaelic has little or no value in the real world in general. It's very difficult for the teachers to make the language come alive. Only 71,000 adults say they speak Gaelic at least once a day. Of these, roughly a third are the school teachers, a third are in the Gaeltachts, and the remaining third are government translators and miscellaneous other. Given the tiny numbers, most teachers can't communicate a living language. There are some good teachers who "live the language" and have their notion of self strongly invested in it. But for most teachers it takes a gigantic amount of will to be like that. If you look at the mortals who do most of the teaching, they live the English language and culture of their neighbours, friends, relatives, students and fellow-teachers. They rarely or never speak, read or write in Gaelic outside of their classroom duties, and they don't convey a living language. A recent initiative to teach the language by an "informal, conversational approach" is as doomed as every other. Continuing to cram it down children's throats can only have a demoralising effect on the overall educational experience of all those children who don't value it and can't connect with it. Plus there are reports that it's demoralising some of the teachers as well. Without any compulsion the nucleus of people who truly speak it can prosper and so can the larger nucleus who like it. The Gaelscoils show that. The vitality of Gaelic comes from those who truly value it. Without any compulsion, all the families and children who can contribute to the life of the language would still opt to study it. And the classroom environment for the subject might very well improve once the children with the poor motivation were permitted to study something else instead. But regardless of whether the classroom environment might improve or not, it is very clear that many children today would be far better off studying something else instead. I've heard it argued that the smattering of Gaelic words and cliches which people retain as adults is "a valuable part of Irish identity and heritage". In my view the smattering is utterly worthless. Tell me how can you defend eleven years of compulsory studies in the name of a smattering of cliches? And citizens deserve to be free to build their own identities. The Irish-identity totalitarians should not be permitted to foist the language on the unwilling. It's an oppression that parents who regard Gaelic as indisputably worthless should have to see their children forced to study it. The most important thing in the world today is in deciding which information to acquire out of the practical infinity of possibilities. That decision should not be compelled to include the concerns of Gaelic. The country lives in the big world. Today and tomorrow, many parents and children would rather study a Continental language or more science or computer skills, or in any case something more practical that the children will actually learn. Recently, I made enquiries in various places, asking why is it compulsory. The most common response was silence, no response. One of the responses I did get was: "As for the 'compulsory' element, this has mostly to do with the practicalities of school management." I can't believe that. Based on what other responses I got, I believe it is compulsory because too many people are not regarding the best interests of the children as paramount. They care more about what's good for the language than what's good for the children. Many children and teachers in the primary schools are suffering from the blindness and intransigence of these people. The old language is on an artificial life-support system never to come back to real life. Nothing would be lost as far as I'm concerned if the plug were pulled on it completely. I share the view of Daniel O'Connell when he said "I can witness without a sigh, the decline of the Irish language". However, clearly it remains valuable to some other people. All I'm asking is that the children of those who don't value it be excused from attendance at its bedside. Anyone telling me that's too much to ask for is a blind totalitarian who would keep the country in the backwaters for the sake of a romantic illusion. Relevant in this regard is a principle expressed in Article 42 of the Irish Constitution: "The State acknowledges that the primary and natural educator of the child is the Family and guarantees to respect the inalienable right and duty of parents to provide, according to their means, for the religious and moral, intellectual, physical and social education of their children." More relevant still is a principle expressed in the 1998 Education Act: "An Act... to ensure that the education system... respects the diversity of values, beliefs, languages and traditions in Irish society.... Every person concerned in the implementation of this Act shall... promote the language and cultural needs of students having regard to the choices of their parents." (The full text of the 1998 Education Act can be found at http://www.irlgov.ie/educ/pdfs/a5198.pdf (a 400kb file)). Those words are mere empty words in the case of Gaelic. The reasons for keeping it compulsory, if any exist, must argue against freedom and tolerance, and against parental judgement, and against effective education, and against prosperity as well. I think it's safe to say that the economy would be stronger with young people who have studied Continental languages and computer languages rather than Gaelic and I've no doubt that most of the young people themselves would be the stronger for it too. The curriculum doesn't reflect the real world. Again, less than half the adult population would like to see Gaelic used more often and less than a quarter would like to see it as the first language. Only 5% say they speak it at least once a week. The education system can't teach it en masse and there's circumstantial evidence that it's having an adverse effect on overall primary education. Meanwhile closer contact with Europe demands more proficiency in Continental languages, and employment and enterprise demands more proficiency in English, science and maths. No new public vision is called for beyond respect for diversity as expressed in the 1998 Education Act. At present the Department of Education already has more than one primary-level curriculum as it relates to Gaelic -- but only for the benefit of those who want more Gaelic than the standard curriculum provides. Adding a couple of curriculums with less Gaelic and no Gaelic, and leaving the decision about which curriculum to use to the schools and teachers, would go a good bit of the way towards implementing the spirit of the 1998 Act. Thereby, people in rural areas with only one primary school would be subject to the values of the school principal (who would in most cases be responsive to local opinion) and to the individual teacher. A teacher with good fluency might teach more of it than the typical teacher would. As important, a growing proportion of the population lives in non-rural areas where more than one primary school or classroom is available for a given child and parents can have choices. Primary schools should be free to not offer Gaelic at all. Given the diversity of values about it, it shouldn't be a compulsory subject. English and maths are compulsory subjects -- why not let schools and parents and children freely drop these too? English is indisputably more valuable in the world after school for virtually all children. Being able to read and write well in English is essential in the world of work, whereas most children will never use Gaelic. Likewise numeracy and quantitative reasoning taught through maths are essential in adult life. It is an oppression that parents who regard Gaelic as irrelevant must see their young children forced to study it, as I said. It is a further oppression that half of the recent crop of school leavers are down at levels 1 or 2 in functional literacy in English, their native language, when their problems could largely be cured by the schools spending more time on developing skills in their native language, instead of spending time on a Gaelic programme that has failed for them and will keep on failing for them. And it is a further oppression that the State ties the hands of the schools and education professionals and compels them to teach Gaelic regardless of its merits and demerits. In Scotland in the Census of 1891, 7% of the population were recorded as Gaelic speaking. In Ireland the same year (32 counties), the figure was twice that, 14% -- though it should be noted that only 3.5% of children aged 10 and under were so recorded. A hundred years later, in Scotland today, the figure is 1.5%. In Ireland today (26 counties), the figure is twice that, 3% -- though it should be noted that well over half of these aren't using Gaelic as their primary vernacular; the school teachers for instance. Thus, universal compulsory Gaelic in Irish schools for the last three generations -- about an hour's instruction plus homework every school day, every year of school, for every child over the age of six -- has not slowed the decline in Ireland any more than in Scotland, where it hasn't been compulsory and in fact hasn't generally been taught. I'd like to add some notes about Gaelic in Irish history. I begin with the following bit of myth which is currently at the government's website at http://www.irlgov.ie/iveagh/information/facts/factsaboutireland/landandpeople.htm: "In the early sixteenth century, the number of monoglot English-speakers who were of Irish birth must have been extremely small. One obvious consequence of this fact is the absence of any long-established Irish dialects of English. Indeed, some phonological features of Irish English show clearly that it began first to be adopted as the vernacular in the later eighteenth century." Dublin was the second or third largest city in the English-speaking world in the middle of the eighteenth century. Cork and Limerick in 1750 were predominantly English-speaking and were among the larger towns of the English-speaking world (the big manufacturing towns of Britain and America having not yet grown up). In fact, today, the majority of the people in the Republic live in localities where English has been the vernacular language of the common people for eight hundred years without interruption. Specifically the counties Dublin, Meath, Louth, north-eastern Kildare, south Wexford, good parts of the Barrow-Nore-Suir valley (taking in Waterford borough, up through the Golden Vale in Tipperary, and some parts of Kilkenny and Carlow), and the towns Cork, Limerick, Galway, Youghal and their hinterlands, plus some smaller walled towns. In these districts most of the ordinary natives have been speaking English (together with a bit of Anglo-Norman French among the lords in earliest times) continuously for the last 750 and 800 years. These districts hold over half the Republic's population today, a share which is increasing as some other parts slowly continue to lose population. I can recommend "Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447-1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule" by Steven Ellis (ref) for the period when the Anglo-Norman English-speakers reached their lowest ebb. For a history of Galway City and its hinterlands on the Internet, showing that people have been English-speaking in Galway and in the area between Galway and Athenry for the last 800 years, see Hardiman's history of Galway. Why no dialect? In the 14th and 15th centuries the English spoken in Yorkshire was in some ways almost a foreign language to what was spoken in London, which in turn was significantly different from what was spoken in Kent. In the course of history the people of Ireland adopted "the King's English" just as the people of Yorkshire and Kent did. Consider: "When that Aprille with his shoures sote / The droghte of March hath perced to the rote / And bathed every veyne in swich licour / Of which vertue engendred is the flour". That's Chaucer. He lived in London and his English pretty much turned into the King's English so it's relatively comprehensible to us. Now consider the following English from Ayenbite of Inwyt written just down the road in Kent in about the year Chaucer was born: "And uorlet ous oure yeldinges / Ase and we uorleteth oure yelderes / And ne ous led nat in-to uondinge / Ac vri ous uram queade. / Zuo by hit." Here's a clue as to what it's saying: we nowadays say "Amen" for "zuo by hit". Today the people of Kent speak the same King's English as the people of Ireland (with some trivial differences whose origins lie in more recent times). We should shed no tears that the English dialects all went defunct. I think it would be awful if the people of Colraine spoke a different English from the people of Cork, who spoke a different English from the people of Leeds, who were not understood by the people of Dover, etc. It would only have been an empty provincialism. And likewise we should shed no tears that Gaelic and Cornish (Kernewek) went defunct. Sadly, however, Gaelic is still not quite defunct and we live in an age when artificial life-support systems are possible. Let's pull the plug on it! It's for the antiquarians! But actually there's no chance that removing it from the compulsory curriculum would mean the end of the language -- look at Gaeilge ar an Ghréasán or Eolas ar an Líon Gaelach for instance. There are tens of thousands of adults today who truly love the language and speak it reasonably fluently. Because they love it, we should expect they will continue to use it despite the fact the language has no critical mass, no competitive advantage, no practical utility, and slim claims to a distinct culture beyond distinct linguistics. Of all the centuries after the arrival of the Anglo-Normans, the sixteenth might be said to be the one where Gaelic speaking reached its maximum geographic extent in Ireland. Yet only about 100 manuscripts survive from Gaelic sources from the entire sixteenth century. This is in contrast to countless thousands or tens of thousands of documents written in Ireland in the sixteenth century that survive from English-speaking sources (sometimes writing in Latin). As an additional small item of note, among linguists who study the Gaelic of the sixteenth century the most-studied texts are probably the Gaelic New Testament and the Gaelic Book of Common Prayer. Yet these were produced not by Gaelic society itself, but by auspices of English Protestant Reformers who wanted to have religious books in the people's vernacular. The Gaelic world has been in decline ever since the sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865), who wrote in English, wrote more maths and physics than all that had been written in Gaelic in his lifetime on those subjects. Not only that, but his publications in maths and physics were more voluminous than all that had been published in Gaelic in his lifetime by all writers on all subjects combined, non-fiction and fiction. Not only that, but they were more voluminous than all that had been published in Gaelic by all writers on all subjects since the invention of the printing press, if you exclude the above-mentioned translations of religious books and the few books that were published in Scotland. And the Gaelic language has been in decline relative to English ever since. It's been estimated that at the beginning of the nineteenth century half of the Irish population had Gaelic as their mother tongue, although many and perhaps most of these could also speak English as a second language despite little or no formal instruction in it. From a usage point of view, Gaelic in the 19th century was pretty much the same as the dialects of English (or the dialects in Germany, France and Italy), in the respect that it was an almost exclusively oral medium in use among illiterate or only slightly educated local communities. 72% of the Irish could not read and write in the Census of 1841. Illiteracy was particularly high in the Gaelic-speaking areas. In Connacht in 1841 82% were illiterate and some good portion of the other 18% were native English speakers. See percent who could read and write in 1841 by County. Though it was true that most who were literate spoke English as their first language, it was also true that most who spoke English as their first language were illiterate. For example 73% in Meath were illiterate in 1841, 66% in Wexford, 60% in Antrim & Down. As you might expect, the native English-speaking illiterates of Ireland were not King's-English compliant. The things that induced them to adopt "proper" English instead of their local English were very similar to the things that induced the Gaelic speakers to adopt English instead of their local Gaelic. Mothers in both the English- and Gaelic-speaking areas encouraged their children to use proper English instead of the local English or the local Gaelic, and for pretty much the same reasons, and this was reinforced by rising literacy levels following the introduction in 1831 of nationwide free primary schooling conducted exclusively in proper English. In the Census of 1891 only 3.5% of children aged 10 and under were recorded as Gaelic speaking (while the figure for older age groups at the time was higher, as Gaelic-speaking mothers declared their children to be English speaking). After 1891 an attempt was made to revive Gaelic as part of an anti-British, isolationist romantic nationalism. It didn't succeed. As reflected in the 1996 Census, the language is brain dead for all practical purposes. Here's a statistic for you: In the 1996 Census there were more Travellers (aka "gypsies") in the Republic (24,000) than adults in the Gaeltachts who said they speak Gaelic at least once a day (21,000). See Cuisle for some details about how these 21,000 were spread out among the different Gaeltachts. Note that some good portion of these 21,000 daily speakers are not using it as their primary vernacular. Gaelic is no longer the primary vernacular in the Gaeltachts. The majority of Gaeltacht adults said they speak Gaelic less frequently than once a week or not at all. Meanwhile outside the Gaeltachts, the number who said they speak Gaelic at least once a day was only a few thousand greater than the number inside, when you don't count the school teachers. It is true that 38% of non-Gaeltacht adults answered YES to the 1996 Census question "Can the person speak Irish". But since -- not counting the school teachers -- just 3% said that they actually do speak it at least once a week, nobody should believe that anything close to 38% actually can speak it. Fully 66% of children aged 10 to 19 answered YES to the Census question "Can the person speak Irish". Based on Leaving Cert examination standards, however, Gaelic language professionals are in agreement that less than 10% of all school leavers can handle it with a good proficiency. I take the 38% and 66% YES answers to mean only that 38% and 66% identify with it, not that these people sincerely believe themselves able to speak it. And with regard to those who say they speak it at least once a week, we shouldn't believe all of them either. People who routinely use a few sayings from it are not speaking it, but some of them will state otherwise on the Census questionnaire. Best-selling books in Gaelic don't sell over 1,000 copies a year. If every adult Traveller were to buy two Travellers books a year, the market for Travellers books would be considerably larger than the market for Gaelic books, not counting school books of course. Best-selling television programming in Gaelic rarely captures over 1.5% share of available viewers and some good portion of that 1.5% are short-stay channel switchers who don't understand what they are hearing. Virtually everyone in the Republic is fully part of the greater English-speaking world. They read the books of the English speaking world, watch BBC & UTV, etc., etc. But a gigantic waste is occurring in Irish primary education in the name of a bogus "Gaelic nation". Here's a quote from a typical primary school curriculum: "That all our pupils should come to appreciate and love our national culture and heritage and the vital part the Irish language plays in this." This is bogus. Ireland's culture is squarely in the English-speaking world and Gaelic is a foreign language to 95% of the Irish. Meanwhile, on the whole, the Republic of Ireland has the weakest education standards of the OECD English-speaking countries and among the weakest in the European Union. This is true for both the younger generations and the older. See a review of the international education data. It has been suggested that trying to teach Gaelic in primary school is a contributing factor to this, not just in terms of all the time that is wasted on it. Gaelic may also diminish young pupils enthusiasm for education and their confidence in their ability to master a subject. You cannot successfully teach a practically brain dead language to young children whose families don't want it revived or couldn't care less about it. It can only be dulling for them. Yet the education system is trying to do just that, under the ridiculous premise that everyone should be adopting a "Gaelic identity" -- and the obnoxious premise that they should be compelled to. Removing the compulsory nature of Gaelic would let the education system be more flexible, responsive, and successful at preparing the children for living in the real world. Footnote: In light of the failure of the Gaelic language to thrive, some people have suggested replacing it in the primary curriculum with an "Irish Studies" taught mostly through English. Others have suggested that children would be better off with "Civilisation Studies" or "European studies with a Continental language". Others would prefer to see more English writing skills training plus a taste of another language, be it Gaelic or other. Still others want more maths, science and computer skills. And so on. Let me get to my point. Respect for parental judgment is a better thing than a national identity. There is nothing wrong with Irish Studies provided it's not compulsory. But compulsory Irish Studies would be national totalitarianism all over again. In the primary school curriculum just recently introduced, teachers are supposed to allocate a half an hour more per week to Gaelic than to basic numeracy and maths. That is madness. Or at least it is not fair on those who put a higher value on maths. And a straightforward replacement of compulsory Gaelic with a compulsory Irish Studies would be equally unjustified and unfair. The Reform Movement has been unable to locate the individual retaining copyright for the following publication. If anyone has any information regarding copyright for this publication, please contact the Website Administrator
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