Heroes of the Republic of Ireland

An Open Letter to Uachtarán na hÉireann Michael D. Higgins:

President Higgins:

In May of this year I was privileged to be invited to Ireland to speak to, and work with, the fabulous educators of your nation. At the ICT in Education Conference|Comhdháil ICT san Oideachas
at the Limerick Institute of Technology campus in Thurles, County Tipperary, and in schools from the center of Dublin to the shore at St. Finan's Bay in Baile an Sceilg, we met, conversed with, and worked with many transformational educators who are seeking to create a future full of possibility for their students, for their nation, for their Europe, and for their world.

But what we also saw was a national government, if not a society in general, forgetting that most basic axiom of Irish history... when times are tough we worry first about our children and our future.

And we saw these wondrous educators, among the finest on this planet, struggling to understand how that could axiom could be forgotten.

Children play outside at the An Scoil ag an Ghleanna|Glen National School at St. Finan's Bay

On the edge of the world in County Kerry we found one tiny Gaelscoil leading a small group of rural students both into the future and deep into the collective past. The words were in Irish, the storytelling as ancient as the rocks on which the Atlantic crashed outside the windows, but the children were connected to the world through both technology and their committed, devoted teachers.

At a Shehy Mountains pass in County Cork we found an even tinier school, Cuppabue National School, which has won, in the past year, national awards for everything from maths and sciences to film-making, but whose teachers, students, and parents fear Ruairi Quinn's policies ("Very few young children now would walk to school. Many of the schools in rural Ireland were located because of the fact that people walked to school. The arrival of traffic… makes it virtually impossible, certainly not safe, for people to walk to school. The face of Ireland has changed, not just urban or rural Ireland. We have to reflect that change.") will shutter a school which has educated students brilliantly since the Catholic Emancipation.

St. Mocholomog National School/Cuppabue National School has been a place of learning
for as far back as the stories recall. That students "could go elsewhere" according to the
Minister of Education and Skills should not shutter a fabulous school.
(below) the (pre-K-grade 6) students' award-winning film on the fiscal crisis

In Dublin we found Bridge 21 Learning offering secondary students with few traditional paths to opportunity coming to a "school" on their off-hours just to participate in collaborative community learning, yet euros are short, and the program can only reach a small percentage of the adolescents who desperately need this support.

In Thurles the Presentation Secondary School, a beautiful place filled with higher level thinking, arts, and music struggles with furnishings so old, and classroom spaces so tight, that students are wedged into desks with, yes, inkwells.

St. Martin de Porres N.S. multiage choir says it all.

(below) students at St. Martin de Porres know how to leverage technology to
overcome learning issues.

And in Tallaght we found the remarkably diverse and exciting St. Martin de Porres National School with an incredible technology program powering every learner which needs newer equipment and greater bandwidth if they are going to continue their children's growth.

Before I began the visit I wrote...

"Ireland is wasting time and energy worrying about “efficiency,” “saving money,” “teacher pay,” and battles over the Junior and Leaving Certs, instead of investing in imagining, and moving towards, a lifespan educational structure which will carry Ireland into the future. In this, this nation is hardly alone, but perhaps the stakes are much higher for a small island nation which knows the ability of education to transform a society, which saw the changes of the 1970s and 1980s, in all levels of schooling, lead a societal and socio-economic revolution... we will not focus on “rigour” – the making of things difficult for the sake of difficulty, nor on “efficiency,” an odd concept to embrace as we discuss the raising of our children, nor on “standards,” which involve statistical tests originally designed to ensure the consistency of barrels of Guinness. Instead we will begin with the idea of creating “learning space,” real, virtual, even imagined, where every student, at every age, has the opportunity to not just succeed, but to thrive."

And just last week, Ireland's Secondary Teacher of the Year answered in an impassioned address, which included this:

"Obviously I have a personal agenda here - I want to save my job. But I don't have a political agenda.

My grandfather was a proud Fine Gaeler and I have many friends in the Labour party. I want to believe that Fine Gael and Labour can find a way to be better than the idiots who got us into this mess in the first place.

Some positive things are happening in education: our minister Ruairi Quinn is determined to bring about changes in our in-many-ways antiquated educational system - and for this I admire him.

The proposals for the new Junior Cert have the potential to bring about real and meaningful change (but the department need to listen to the teachers) and this is a change I want to be a part of.

But we need to make sure we're making things better not worse. Destroying the morale of the teachers who will be implementing this change is not the way forward.

Minister Quinn will no doubt throw his hands in the air and say there is no money.

Well I say to Ruairi Quinn and the Department of Education, if this is the limit of your creativity, imagination and passion to protect our children's education - shame on you."

Secondary Teacher of the Year Evelyn O'Connor

President Higgins, much of what I, and Dr. Pamela Moran of Virginia, saw on our visit demonstrated that Irish education - especially Irish primary education - could be the envy of the world. We saw a wondrous commitment to natural child development unhindered by the panic over "grade-level standards" which have threatened to destroy education in the United States and United Kingdom.

We saw a level of humanity, a commitment to arts and the whole child, which should be "the standard" everywhere. We saw local control and local opportunity which allowed teachers to build classrooms around the needs and passions of their children. We saw teachers that anyone, in any nation, would want supporting our next generation of leaders.

We saw a commitment to the concept of "the public space" you so beautifully express in your book . Renewing the Republic. A belief in an unselfish dedication to a shared future that should be the pride of any nation.


Of course we saw problems. We saw secondary education far too bound by test preparation, and tests which, though in some ways excellent, are graded on the wrong parameters, are taken with the wrong (19th century) technologies, and which hold far too great a sway over both individual and national futures. We saw a lack of investment in learning spaces, a lack of investment in this century's communications technology, and a lack of support for a fabulous teaching community.

Grades 2 through 6 at Dualla National School

One afternoon in Dualla in County Tipperary we visited the Dualla National School. There we met brilliant educators working with another small cohort of children, and making the best of limited, old, technology. It was wondrous what Principal Teacher John Manley accomplished with a few old laptops and an old iPhone with a shattered screen, and how that combined with a fully inclusive multiage environment (and a heavy dose of hurling) to offer a broad path to success for every child. But their energy should be poured into their students, not concerns about how to update antiquated communications systems.

On another day we met Hellie Bullock of Limerick, a brilliant young educator who should be working every day with children - and being paid a respectable wage for that. On other days we met some of the world's leading university experts in the future of education, who should be going about their work without panicking about the ability to care for their families.

President Higgins, we must, as you know, measure nations and societies by their commitment to their children, and their commitment to a better future. Ireland, like many nations, has deep problems and little in the way of available funds. But Ireland also has a grand tradition of putting education and children first. From the ancient monasteries to the hedge schools of the worst occupation days, from the re-birth of the education system after entering the European Economic Community to, hopefully, today, Ireland has sought whatever creative solutions were necessary to protect its communal future.

Seeking creative solutions to ensure our future: CoderDojo Thurles

The educators we met, President Higgins, are the heroes of today's Republic of Ireland. They are fighting, working, and struggling every day to ensure the future of this nation, and to protect its children from the ravages caused by the greed of another generation, and they, whether Hellie, or Evelyn O'Connor, or Stephen Howell at the Institute of Technology Tallaght (who has given our children Scratch to Kinect) deserve the support of their nation, in their work and in the security of their positions and ability to live.

So I ask you to join us President Higgins in our conversations, to join us in our search for creative solutions, to join us in our drive for universally designed learning spaces which can carry all of our children into successful futures, in our attempts to bring the Labour and Fine Gael leaders into true conversation about what our children need.

I write this not as a meddlesome outsider, but because I have been welcomed into this conversation warmly by the education community of the Irish nation. I know this community views you as a hero, as a man who has stood for what is right for half a century, and so I ask you to, please, become a part of this essential discussion.

- Ira Socol

Please don't stop us now... the future can be wondrous

A Memorial Day Lesson in Citizenship

I am fairly sure that it was 1970. A lifetime ago. Two generations ago. Somewhat like today, America was an insanely divided culture, with very different understandings of "reality" embraced by two sides of a political divide. The Vietnam War, Civil Rights, the rights of women, even the ways to become intoxicated, had split the society down the middle - even if that middle was far to the left of today's divide. (The "right" then - represented by President Richard Nixon - believed in price controls, environmental protection, even a path toward universal healthcare. It was more akin to European "Christian Democrats" than the lunatic fringe the US Republican Party has become today.)

New Rochelle's "The Mall" was still the new hangout in 1970, with blacklight posters
and "paraphernalia" available at "World Imports" on the lower level.

I was a young adolescent. My father was not yet 50. New Rochelle, New York was 282. Memorial Day, begun as "Decoration Day," a name my Da continued to use, was 105, more or less. The war veteran's association, the American Legion, was 51. And a collision was about to occur.

My father was not a politician, but he was what I would describe as "a citizen." He did not just always vote, he didn't just always bring his children into the voting booth in the back of the old Church Street fire headquarters, he didn't just work for candidates - knocking on doors, dragging us kids into passing out campaign literature - but he actively engaged in the debates of the day throughout the year.

Eamon deValera's "war of choice" - the Irish Civil War
disgusted my father as much as Vietnam

He was also deeply opposed to what might be called "state violence." He hated war, police violence, the death penalty. Even wars he "supported" - World War II in which he served, The Anglo-Irish War, Israel's fight for independence from Britain, Algeria's from France, he found morally horrific. "Wars of choice," whether begun to Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam or Eamon deValera in Ireland, were, in his mind, the ultimate sin.

"I've been in a war that had to be fought," he'd say, "and even that did more damage to the world than anyone could imagine." He'd been with Patton, at the Normandy breakout, at Metz, in the rush to relieve Bastogne, crossing the Rhine, liberating Dachau, and pushing all the way to Plsn in (then) Czechoslovakia.  He had lifetime leg problems are being hurt, he had nightmares until he died.

But more. He was the son of a World War I veteran, a combat engineer who struggled with what we'd now call PTSD and the scarred lungs of a gas attack victim until he died - at his own hand.

So, unlike the stereotype of the WWII "GI" being "pro-war" in the 1960s, my Da was the opposite - intensely, vocally, politically against US involvement in Vietnam. And he was particularly dismissive of the crowd which hung out at the American Legion Hall across from our home, who, in his words, "had sat back in the safety of the States or in England during their war and now wanted to send kids to die."

Whether that was either true or fair or neither, I really don't know. He knew many of them, so, it might have been true, though, being luckier in assignment than my father had been is really no vice.

Either way, they waved American flags while we went to hear Bobby Kennedy, Gene McCarthy, and Eldridge Cleaver. New Rochelle, like most of America, was split.

Not a lot has changed in this view, looking north on North Avenue, except
for the Trump Tower in the distance, and the fact that the big supermarket
across from the Legion Hall has been replaced by a Latter Day Saints Church.

Which brings me back to Memorial Day, and the Memorial Day Parade which traditionally began outside my bedroom window, at the Legion Hall. Two controversies erupted in the days before the parade: First, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War asked to march. Second, the high school band decided to wear black armbands in the parade. In my house, these were easy issues to decide - free speech and opposition to the war, but elsewhere it seemed far more complicated.

The American Legion, like many right-wing organizations "devoted to America," was not particularly inclined to accept the constitutional right to political expression in public places. They said that the parade was something they organized, and thus they could decide who would be in it. The City of New Rochelle took a different view, noting that this was a public event, on public streets, involving the work of many public employees, and as a "public space," was open to all.

And so Memorial Day came. My mother advocated for watching from the windows. My father would have none of this, and led us out into the fray. He was going to march with the Veterans Against the War, and he wanted us by his side. "Citizenship means nothing without expression or risk," a Jesuit priest once told me, and my father was going to do both.

The Legion had placed the two groups they didn't want at the end of the parade, and as the parade began, they unfurled a huge banner reading "End of Parade" right in front of the New Rochelle High School Band - an amusing precursor to "Mission Accomplished" in my mind. But they also had bigger plans. As the band began to move, Legioneers drove cars from both their parking lot and the Daitch Shopwell supermarket lot into the band to block them. Meanwhile a crowd of overweight middle age guys wearing funny hats came out on the Legion Hall steps to curse at the band and Vietnam vets.

Which all led my family into action. One of my sisters climbed onto the hood of one of the cars, stomping the paint, denting it, which led the band to simply walk over the vehicles. My father led a bunch of vets 25 years younger than himself in a charge up the steps of the Legion Hall, demanding to know what battles those guys had served in. I tried to pull him away, to prevent the inevitable fight, and might have been just slightly successful. A few punches thrown. None landed.

much quieter now, Memorial Day 2012,
the parade route has reversed...

A few cars messed up - deservedly I'd say - but the parade, the whole parade, went on. Even if it was the last Memorial Day Parade in town for about 15 years. The war would drag on for another five years. My father would keep hating wars - from Ronald Reagan's bizarre attack on a Medical School in Grenada to George H.W. Bush's first Gulf War.

So, what was the lesson? We need to be engaged. We need to be active. We cannot let others silence us. There are things worth fighting for, including Justice and Peace. But most things are not worth fighting about. There are better ways. And we teach our children to be engaged/active citizens, we teach them about rights and responsibilities, or we do something else. It is a choice. A choice with huge consequences.

Public service, in all its forms, is a gift we give to ourselves. It is humanity at its best, while working at a place like Bain Capital is humanity at its worst. One builds the public sphere, honors our human society. The other privatizes what should be shared, and shatters our social bonds.

Mary and Catherine Cronin's father
rescues a fellow firefighter
in the photo above.

My family's public service, from the military service of my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father, to my police work or work in other public services, is one kind. The kind of service which Mary Cronin wrote about in a story about her father which helped inspire this.

But there are other ways of building our public spaces... through commitment, and passion, and yes... risk. And sometimes even by willing to act a bit crazy in the defense of our society, and what it could, and should be.

That day in 1970 my Da showed his passion, his beliefs, his commitment, and he carried his children with him into action. The things I have done for our shared world since, owe a great deal to that Memorial Day.

Now, as I read Michael D. Higgins brilliant bookon our "public spaces," I recall those who have taught us the right things to do, on the most intimate levels.

And I say thanks.

- Ira Socol

The Multiage Magic

Conor Galvin sent me a link to poem I had almost forgotten, and it started thoughts spinning... (Dr. Galvin on Twitter)

St. Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
and Lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in Love's deep river,
'To labour and not to seek reward,' he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name.

- Seamus Heaney

"And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow, Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?" Part of the magic of imagination in the education of ourselves as young people lies in our seeing - and in our constantly changing understanding - of the older people around us. We see, we assume, we imagine, we project, we play at, we practice... and then we cycle through all of that again and again. 

This is the natural rhythm of human learning. It includes steady doses of myth, of vocabulary we do not understand, of subject matter we cannot yet fully comprehend. We guess wrong a great deal, and then we test those guesses, find them wanting, and guess again...

"Belfast was impossibly far away. Only Aedan had been there and he talked about how big it was and how the giant cranes towered over the shipyards. "They built the Titanic there," he told us, "I saw where. It was the biggest ship ever but it hit an iceberg and sank and everyone died." This was an amazing story. We argued about when it might have happened. "Long back." "Very long?" "Before the war." "In the war the Germans sank a lot of boats with torpedoes ." We knew this. There were uncles and grandfathers lost on those Royal Merchant Ships, and even American ones. But before? "Maybe 1938 or like that," Aedan said. This seemed possible. An iceberg! Eventually someone would have to ask an adult."

Multiage Titanic 100th Project
Scoil ag An Ghleanna, Baile an Sceilg, County Kerry

At St. Finan's Bay in County Kerry, the Atlantic and hundreds of sheep outside the school windows, young children could offer clues to why the RMS Titanic sank, "it wasn't blessed," "it said "no pope" in one of the mirrors," mythic answers in a place hardy unfamiliar with either shipwrecks or the mythic. Are these answers wrong? They lack the technical certainty of a St. Mocholomog's School (in County Cork, near Bantry) eight-year-old's description of the length of the tear in the hull and the number of compartments flooded, but... who knows what brought that ship and that iceberg together that night 100 years ago? There is nothing wrong with children looking out at their fog-shrouded sea and hearing the old tales and imagining, before they begin to test and evaluate.

We lose so much when we divide students by age... We lose peer mentoring, we lose the aspirations to be "like the big kids," we lose the ability of younger kids to become leaders, and we lose the ability to let kids grow at their own rate. We also lose the shared public space which lies at the heart of community, culture, and democracy.

"Culture, beyond all the definitional difficulties, is based on what we share," Uachtarán na hÉireann Michael D. Higgins writes in his book Renewing the Republic. "It is a process, one that is continually reworked. In addition, because culture is shared, it constitutes the bedrock of the public world  - a public world that is under threat from the demands of a destabilizing, privatizing world, predicated on consumption, and the protection of a life-world often based on a fear of others.  Thus, the shared trust of citizens in the public space is replaced by the insecurity of protecting private possessions."

Multiage Hurling at a Multiage Primary
Dualla NS, Dualla, County Tipperary

In our not too distant past, we grew up in families with many children, in communities with many children, with the older supervising, teaching, supporting, the younger. In the neighborhood of my childhood perhaps 50 kids, in a 12-year-or-so age spread, played together. When I lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, I would look down from my third floor window on South Oxford Street, and see the youngest kids playing on the sidewalks, protected from traffic by the parked cars, and watched by the young teenagers - who played in the street, and the older teens who watched from their gathering spots on the stoops of the block.

But now, if I suggest that younger children should learn from and with older children, many parents - especially American parents - re-coil in fear. They expect, well, they expect all kinds of corruption, which is part of our belief in adolescents, and even "almost adolescents," as dangerous aliens.

In schools across Ireland over the past two weeks, from Dublin on south and west, in suburbs and cities, in formal schools, at a CoderDojo, at Bridge21Learning, I saw the values of multiage education at work. 

National Film Award Winner created by multiage
St. Mocholomog National School (Cuppabue NS), County Cork

Students built their knowledge in skills at a personalised pace which seemed to differ by subject area. Students mentored each other. Students relied on each other. Students cared for each other. James Gee has long written and spoken of the value of video game multiage groupings in building the expert vocabulary of students and their interests in a wider world - and how those informal groupings triumph over our age-segregated schools.

All ages share together at the CoderDojo in Thurles,
County Tipperary (Limerick Institute of Technology)

When I watched the children I saw over the past two weeks, the great lies of "industrial processing education" were exposed. America's "Common Core" with its age-based parameters. Our "grade-appropriate curricula," our "age-limited content," our notions of "must accomplish "x" in "x" grade." All of these, whether in American, British, Australian, Canadian, Secondary Irish, or any other form, are destructive to children and to learning.

Children are children. Individual human children. Learners are learners, and all are different. They grow best in a diverse ecosystem which allows the greatest level of cross-pollination, not in artificially limited, engineered monocultures created by testing and mandated curricula.

"And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow, Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?" Let "Kevin" imagine. Let us imagine Kevin. Let Kevin find "himself linked into the network of eternal life," of the world, of our world.

- Ira Socol