III.-HEAD INSPECTORS' REPORTS upon SCHOOLS In spected during the year 1851. APPENDIX B. III. Head on Schools No. 1.-GENERAL REPORT of WILLIAM MCCREEDY, Esq., Head Inspected. Inspector, on Schools inspected by him, in the year 1851. Mr. M'Creedy. January, 1852. GENTLEMEN, I beg to submit the following as my General Report on the ordinary National Schools inspected by me during the short time allowed me for that purpose in the past year, and upon which I have already forwarded, separately for each, the customary special Report called for by the office. Occupation of Time.-Before proceeding, however, to the proper subject of my present communication, and with the view of satisfying the Commissioners, that if the number of schools inspected by me is small, this is simply owing to my having been occupied in the discharge of other duties of no less importance, and to no other cause whatever, I take leave to lay before them a statement of the occupation of my time for the year 1851: Schools Inspected.-In the thirty-three days which remained available to me for the inspection of schools, I visited and reported upon forty-nine, of which three, however, were found closed. The greater number were visited by me in the months of June and July, before commencing the examination of Teachers, and with the exception of four, are all situated in III. Head APPENDIX B. the county of Donegal, many of them, too, being in its western division, which it is well known is much the poorer part of what is certainly not one of the most favoured of our northern counties. Inspectors' on Schools Inspected. Of the forty-six schools reported on found in operation, seven were attended by boys only, three by girls only, and Mr. M'Creedy. the remaining thirty-six, one or two under Mistresses, were what are called mixed schools—that is, attended by both boys and girls. State of Attendance on Schools visited.-The following is an accurate summary of the state of these schools, as regards the average attendance of pupils, the numbers present at the time of my inspection, &c. :— 33 Months. Average time spent by Children at School, From this it will be seen that the number of pupils I found present was one-fourth less than that returned as the average daily attendance for the year; and that this last again is but a little more than one-half the number entered on the school rolls that is, of the number nominally said to be at school. To give this last proportion with numerical exactness, according to the above returns, it would appear that about 57.6 per cent. only of the children entered on the rolls, are in general actual attendance. Yet even this, low as it is, I believe to be too high; for the comparison to be just should be, not with the number found at any one particular time on the rolls, but with the average number on the rolls throughout the year, taking one month with another. Now, compared with this last, I find from my notes that but 54 per cent. of the children of our schools attend regularly; or in other words, that for every 100 pupils enrolled on the books of our schools, we can really reckon on but 54 as at all The Creevery mixed School is omitted from these Returns, it hav ing been but recently opened. likely to attend with due regularity; and this, be it observed, APPEndix B. is found true, not only of the few schools now directly referred III. Head to in this Report, but of two hundred others whose Teachers Inspectors' I last year examined, and of whose state, as regards attend- Reports ance, &c., I had the fullest and most complete returns furnished on Schools Inspected. to me by the Teachers themselves. Mr. Butler,* I perceive, in his Reports for 1850, sets down Mr. M'Creedy. the average attendance on the schools inspected by him as 53 per cent. of the average on the books; and in the case of one hundred and four schools, male and female, whose Teachers came before him for examination and classification, he returns it so low as 46 per cent. This is certainly very lamentable, and discloses a frightful degree of uncertainty and irregularity in the children's attendance; such a state of things, in fact, as to make one almost despair of the efficacy of any educational measures, however good in themselves, which have not some decided bearing, direct or indirect, upon this, the monster evil of our present position. Irregularity of attendance illustrated by instances.-To illustrate the nature and extent of this fluctuation of attendance at our schools, I shall adduce here a few examples taken from my note-book. The first I take from school, No. 40, of the annexed returns; it is situated in a considerable market town, and is immediately under the eye of its patron, a Roman Catholic bishop, whose flock constitute the great bulk of the population-not unfavourably circumstanced, one would say, to command attendance-yet on looking over its class rolls, the "days absent" and "days present" seem pretty nearly equal, with not infrequently a decided balance in favour of the former. For instance, taking up the Third Class roll for the months of April, May, and June of last year, the attendance appeared thus throughout the fifty schooldays, for the 16 pupils in the class, viz. :— * Doctor Patten, I observe, makes returns very much the same as Mr. Butler,--for of seventy schools reported on by him in last year, he sets down 54, 46, and 47 per cent., as the proportion of the daily average attendance to the average number on the rolls for, respectively, 21 boys', 22 girls', and 27 mixed schools. APPENDIX B. III. Head Inspected. Mr. M'Creedy. The next I draw from school, No. 10 (see annexed sheet)—a school very fairly managed by an able and well qualified Teacher, and its interests most carefully watched over by an enlightened and liberal patron, who is also the landlord of the surrounding country, and a man of great and deserved local influence. Here the class-rolls for its four classes for the quarter beginning the 6th of January and ending the 5th of April, 1851, exhibit the following: Days. Days. First Class, 15 pupils, present collectedly, 675. Absent collectedly, 495 Second 32 Third 27 1,447 1,361 253 3,736 1,049 745 527 2,816 This, however, was much too favourable a specimen; for, on looking over the Register, I ascertained that of 432 pupils entered since the opening of the school, the annual average of actual attendance for each, taking one year with another, and excluding vacations from the reckoning altogether, was twenty-one weeks and two days. In another school, placed in a very good locality, better peopled, and with an air of more comfort than most I have visited, the class-rolls yielded the following results :— Days. Days. To take another case, that of No. 26: here I found that in the quarter ending June, 1851, of 103 pupils enrolled as at school, 55 were absent throughout the entire time-65 schooldays-while the remaining 48 attended collectedly, 1,642 days, and were absent collectedly, 1,478 days. The rolls for the previous quarter, for the months of January, February, and March, present similar unfavourable results. Again, to conclude these illustrations of a very painful matter, the Registers of many of the schools inspected show that the time of the mere nominal attendance-that is to say, the time of mere enrolment in our books-is, for large numbers of pupils, not more annually, one year with another, than four or five months; nay, sometimes not more than three months. When, therefore, we make allowances, in the way of reduction, APPENDix B. on these short periods for occasional absences, the time spent III. Head under actual instruction, by hundreds and thousands of our Inspectors' poorer children, nominally reported as at school, must appear Reports short indeed! on Schools Inspected. Causes of Irregular Attendance.-The causes of this deplorable state of things are very various, and to be adequately dis- Mr. M'Creedy. cussed would require much more space than I, even were I fully competent to the task, can afford to grant; but I cannot pass on without giving a brief notice of some, at least, of what I consider the chief of them. I. And first among them is the extreme poverty* of great masses of our people, which makes them dead to every thing but the most urgent calls of their physical nature. In their case, as always happens with an indigent population, the "flesh" wages a deadly warfare against the "spirit," and soon triumphs over it, quelling and stifling, if it do not extinguish, all the nobler desires of their nature. Hence, they think instruction, education, the arts of reading and writing, &c., are not for them or their children, but for those only who are rising, or likely to rise, in the world. For their poor, helpless little ones, doomed, like themselves, they fear, to a life of hopeless misery, better avails a bit of bread, sought from the hands of a charitable neighbour, or a stray gift of a halfpenny from the passing traveller, than all the treasures knowledge can afford. And how blame them for this? Are they not to be pitied rather? It is their "poverty and not their will consents" to this woful intellectual destitution of their children, as dear to them, no doubt, as to others better cir cumstanced are their more highly favoured offspring. Often, in driving in a morning to a school, where, perhaps, I was destined to meet but some 10 or 14 pupils, have I passed scores of children of the most tender years sitting by the side, covered with old sacks, sheets, or quilts, or perhaps with nothing but their own scanty rags, and so the long day through, herding sheep and cattle, and sometimes geese, instead of being where they ought to have been, and where, most probably, if their parents' poverty had not interfered, they would have been,-under the eye of the neighbouring way "Education is not compatible with extreme poverty. It is impossible effectually to teach an indigent population."-John S. Mill. "The apostle," says Hooker, "in exhorting men to contentment, although they have in this world no more than very bare food and raiment, giveth us thereby to understand, that those are even the lowest of things necessary; that if we should be stripped of all those things, without which we might possibly be, yet these must be left; that destitution in these is such an impediment, as, till it be removed, suffereth not the mind of man to admit any other care." |