Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 26 April 2012

Technical Memories (Part 14)

The Making of National Syllabuses

The eleventh annual congress of the Irish Technical Instruction Association opened at 10 o’clock yesterday morning in the Crawford Municipal Technical Instruction, Sharman Crawford Street. There was a large attendance of delegates from all parts of Ireland…the Right Hon., the Lord Mayor of Cork, Alderman O’Brien, attended in state and extending a welcome to the members said, my Lords and gentlemen-I esteem it a great honour and no ordinary pleasure to offer you on behalf of the municipality of Cork a cordial welcome to this most important gathering of the representatives and Technical Instruction in Ireland (Cork Examiner, 1912, 5 June 1912).

To mark the opening of the Crawford Technical Institute on Sharman Crawford Street four months later in June 1912, the annual congress of the Irish Technical Instruction Association held their meeting in the Institute. All of the speeches, questions and debates on education are published in their annual journals, some of which survive in the Cork Archives. The minutes of the 1912 Cork event are described in the Cork Examiner on the 5 and 6 June 1912. Interestingly amidst these issues are also minutes of the official inquiry of the sinking of the Titanic in London.

The Cork congress was opened by the President of the Association Bertram Windle who outlined the agenda. Dealing first with the deficit in Westminster funding, he noted; “In fact if the money be not forthcoming, instead of going forward we will go back, for in matters educational there is no such thing as standing still”. In particular he introduced two topics to be discussed. The first was on new examination schemes by Mr. Fletcher, the permanent secretary of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. The second paper was a paper on continuation schools by Mr. William Starkie, the Resident Commissioner of National Education, who was also the Chairman of the Intermediate Board. I dwell on these papers because of the ambition they exerted for the Irish educational system and debates, which still echo strongly in today’s system.

Mr. Fletcher explained the new examination of the Department of Technical and Agricultural Instruction. He said that it was about six years previously at a Congress meeting in Waterford that it was decided to revise the scheme for the administration of the science and arts grants. He felt that little action had happened since that time.  There was a grant scheme introduced in the early part of the 1911 season, which greatly benefited small technical instruction centres who wished to receive grant money for promoting single subjects.

The establishment of an Irish system of examinations had also been urged upon the Department since its initiation. Up to 1912, the Irish Department made use of the English Board of Education of the Society of Arts and other examining bodies. They deemed this important for students entering the jobs market in Ireland and Britain. At least the examinations were common to the Britain and Ireland. Moreover the examination schemes were largely paid for out of funds other than their own technical system. According to Fletcher, this system was to be reviewed. The English Board of Education had completely revised and reshaped its programme and it was time that the Department in Ireland arranged their own examination systems. Fletcher went on his paper to add that the Department had never used examinations as a means of accessing grants for educational purposes. Hence, to him one of the greatest dangers connected with examinations had been avoided. That according to Fletcher “there was the rut into which examinations had come to be regarded as an end in themselves, having no reference to what was to come afterwards”.

Presenting a number of further options, Fletcher noted that the examination system could be purely voluntary. If the school or individual didn’t want to take up the examination there would be nothing to push them to do so. However, he further argued that Ireland did need examinations just as every other country.  There were necessary as the basis for judging the progress of schools and to judge the “efficiency of the individual”. Fletcher debated that examinations should not control or dominate in any way the educational system. It was, according to Fletcher, “extremely difficult to frame a system of examinations that would not stereotype educational matters”. The first aim of the Department’s new scheme was to frame a scheme, which would allow the widest latitude of choice of subjects within reason. Many good schemes too had been ruined by endeavouring to do too much. It was not proposed in the contemporary scheme to meet the needs of every individual. They were proposing to break away from examinations in individual subjects. Fletcher believed that the Department was not called upon to give a diploma for every kind of work. The scheme would provide distinct courses of instruction – mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, applied chemistry, building trades, art, commerce and domestic economy.

In drawing up the schemes of syllabuses, the Department received aid from the principals of technical schools, and afterwards the members of the staff who were specialists in the various branches in the different technical schools. The examinations would be spread over a course of four years, and they proposed to restrict the examinations to two in each year. In the third and fourth years there were options or parallel courses. Thus in the case of mechanical engineering there were two courses, either of which could be followed after the first year. For example there was a course in office work- ‘machine origin’ and one in ‘workshop practice’. It was impossible to draft a course suitable to all types of electrical engineers. Hence they chose to draft three courses, (1) power production and lighting, (2) telegraphy and (3) telephony.

They proposed not to issue certificates except for the third and fourth courses, that in the third course being a full certificate. Out of all that they could make up the qualifications required for teachers, they were proposing to give an honours certificate. The teachers in their examination would be required to show some knowledge of the history, the aims, and the methods of examination. Similarly they suggested to allow similar options in art. There was also another way in which they hoped to avoid the danger of stereo typed teaching. By the advice of the examination body, they hoped to arrange a very wide choice of questions. At the same time it might be necessary to set one or more compulsory questions on matters of fundamental importance.

Caption:

638a. Discussion on a paper at the 1912 Technical Congress Cork (picture: Guy & Co.)

Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 19 April 2012

Technical Memories (Part 13)

Playing a Piano Badly

“I am glad to be here …to bear testimony to the admirable work carried on under somewhat disadvantageous circumstances in the past and which will, doubtless, in the new circumstances greatly advance both as regards quantity and quality.” (Thomas Wallace Russell, Cork Examiner, Wednesday 17^th January 1912)

In his wide ranging speech at the opening of the Crawford Technical Institute on Tuesday, 16 January 1912, Thomas Wallace Russell, Vice President of the Irish Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction took the opportunity to comment on the needs of industry of the day and gave his opinion on the role of women in the country.

Regarding the strengths of industrial education, Russell commented on all kinds of classes in the Cork institute. He shed light on the classes in mechanical engineering and physics – noting that Haulbowline and other places required students educated in those subjects; 

 “I have heard a good deal in the last year or two of different classes in Cork.  You have a tailoring class for example.  It has been difficult to satisfy the Department as to a teacher, but there is no lack of students. In that class men engaged in the tailoring industry receive valuable education, which tends to make them better tailors than they would be without it.  There are also classes in bootmaking and printing.  These may not be as successful as we could desire but they fulfil at least the primary function of technical education, and they have the strictest relationship to the industries of the district. It is not the function of technical education to make men tailors, bootmakers or printers.  It is its function to make a man a better tailor, a better bootmaker and a better printer than he would be otherwise.”

Russell also spoke about the domestic economy classes, which to him affected perhaps more closely the masses of the people than any other part of his department’s work.  Much he noted had been said and written on the question of higher education for women.  He gave his opinion that he did not have extensive sympathies with what he described as the “good deal of what is going on now in what is called the world of women”. To him the education of women as it was carried on opened up more than one “grave problem”. 

In the wider context of his speech, a year earlier in the United Kingdom had witnessed the first act of suffragette arson and two years later Emily Davison died at the Derby as she rushed out to bring down the King’s horse. In Parliament, pressure for change was led by some liberal MPs, who were the leading figures in a suffrage committee. Away from the reasoned debate of Westminster, prisons filled with women prepared to go to jail for the right to vote. The civil disobedience continued behind bars, with many women force-fed to prevent them hunger striking. Their families campaigned for the inmates to be given political status, including the right to wear their own clothes, study and prepare their own food.

            Noting his view of women in education in his Cork speech Russell argued:

“I am all for the higher education of women up to the point where that education can be of service to her.  If a young woman desires to become a teacher; if she desires to enter on a path of life where higher education is necessary; even if she can afford it – should she desire the wider outlook such an education will give her – I go fully with her aspirations.  But when I come to examine a country like Ireland where the great majority of the young women of the day, if they stay at home – and I am glad to know they are not leaving in such numbers – have a clear prospect before them of being the wives of farmers, shopkeepers and of labourers, the case to me is quite clear. 

In all such cases a diploma in domestic science will be of far more use than a degree in arts; and for the wife of a farmer, a shopkeeper or a workman, it will be inestimably better for her and better for Ireland, that she would know how to manage a family and to cook a potato well than to play a piano badly. And here comes in the importance of our domestic economy classes in these schools. They are not schools, as some people suppose, for the mere teaching of cooking.  They are schools for the making of good housewives.  They are schools where in addition to cooking, cleanliness and good order, hygiene, and sanitary science are taught and these are all vital interests of to-day.  It is in these directions that women can play a really great part in the present and in the future.”

By 1918, the Peoples Act allowed women over 30 the right to vote. It would take a further 10 years to abolish the age qualification and put men and women on an equal footing. In 1918 Russell retired from politics and died in May 1920, aged 79.

To be continued…

Caption:

637a. Cookery Room, Crawford Municipal Technical Institute, Cork 1912 (source: Souvenir 1912 booklet)

Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 12 April 2012

Technical Memories (Part 12)

Commercial Education in the City

In a wide ranging speech at the opening of the Crawford Technical Institute on Tuesday, 16 January 1912, Thomas Wallace Russell, Vice President of the Irish Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction Technical Education took the opportunity to comment on the politics of the day and the needs of education in the country.

Russell had been head of the latter Department since 1907. A year earlier in 1906 he was re-elected as an “Independent Unionist”, Tyrone South in the Westminster Parliament one of several candidates referred to as “Russellite Unionist”. He rejoined the Liberal Party and stood as a Liberal candidate at the general election in January 1910, when he lost his seat. Russell does not appear to have contested the December 1910 general election, but in 1911 he won a by-election in Tyrone North, a seat he held until the constituency was abolished in 1918.

In outlining what the new Crawford Technical Institute was building upon, Russell commented on the Cork School of Commerce;

“You have in the first place a School of Commerce connected with this institute. Now if technical education is to be worked on right lines then education ought to have some relation to the industries connected with the place where it is given. I think that it is a great matter for the people of Cork that they have this School of Commerce. You are to a very considerable extent a commercial city, and the youth of Cork if they are to remain here, must to a certain extent receive a commercial education and be educated along commercial lines. On every occasion on which I have visited Cork I have nothing but praise of your School of Commerce. …the education afforded as a complement to that given in the primary and other schools of the city cannot fail to improve the chances in life of those who attend the School.”

Consequent to the opening of the Crawford Technical College and the promotion of scientific subjects, commercial subjects were promoted in the city. Records show that in 1905-6 a total of 88 classes were given in science and commerce under the auspices of the Technical Instruction Committee. In a great Chamber of Commerce publication entitled Cork: Its Trade and Commerce (published in 1919), commercial classes began in Cork in 1908 at the Cork School of Commerce on Jameson Row on the South Mall and these were given to 550 students. The business methods department was particularly well equipped containing the latest “filling systems, duplicating apparatus, specimens of various types of looses leaf ledgers, and other examples of modern saving appliances”.

The typewriting section was well set up with a large number of machines. A special geography room was fitted up, containing maps of various kinds, including special railway and steamship maps, relief maps as well as a selection of charts, globes and show cases illustrating the various processes in different manufactures. The lectures were illustrated by means of a lantern and slides. In the modern languages department extensive use was made of the phonograph and illustrated charts. A select library was attached to the school for the use of the students. Lectures were delivered in the higher courses at the school were recognised by the renamed University College Cork (1908), hence enabling students of the school to obtain a university certificate in commerce.

Courses could be studied for four or five years and comprised: commercial arithmetic, book-keeping, accountancy, auditing, commerce including commercial practice, commercial English, salesmanship, insurance, banking and finance, railways, home and foreign trade, economics, French, German, Irish, Russian, Spanish, commercial geography, commercial and industrial law, company law, shorthand, typewriting, and manifolding (or carbon copying). Introductory course subjects were English, Mathematics and Drawing. In addition to the course of study above, the School arranged each term for a number of public lectures for the citizens.

The Crawford Technical Institute was to add the role of the Cork School of Commerce in the city. Commenting in his opening speech, Russell commented:

“ It is of importance to a young man who has made up his mind to be a clerk in a business house that he should be taught business methods, that he should understand two things in addition to the ordinary work of the office. He will be worth much more to his employer and to himself if he can write shorthand and if he can do typewriting. Both of these accomplishments are absolutely necessary in the business life of to-day – necessary in our commercial offices, necessary in our Government departments. What I would do without a staff of shorthand-writers and typewriters in the Department I do not know. One thing is certain – people would require to wait a good while for answers to their letters; they have been known to say they had to wait a good while as it is…Here, at all events, is one branch of your work which has a bearing upon the needs of the city – on its commercial life and in this respect at least it fulfils the conditions rightly imposed upon all technical education”.

To be continued…

Caption:

636a. Cork School of Commerce as pictured in 1919 on Jameson Row, South Mall (source: Cork: Its Trade and Commerce)