Towards a Better Future

Towards a Better Future: A Review of the Irish School System
PURPOSES IN TEACHING AND LEARNING:
CONTROVERSY AND COHERENCE
In Ireland as elsewhere, when teachers are asked about their purposes, about what has brought them
into teaching, they rarely if ever reply in such utilitarian terms as those cited above from the
Predictability report. More characteristically, they report that they want to make a difference for the
better in the lives of their students; that they wish to help students to reach their potential as human
beings; that their work as educators will help to strengthen community, cultural and civic life (Lawlor,
2014, Ch.5). A critic or sceptic might claim that such motivations assume too sanguine a view of
teachers’ scope for agency; that such optimism fails to recognise the social and historical constraints
in which teaching is embedded; that the institutionalised interests, which invariably secure a decisive
say in the control of schooling, are being disregarded. Moreover, clearly there is abundant evidence
on which such criticism can draw, both in historical and in empirical research studies. Rather than
defeat the purposes of improvement, however, such evidence needs to be explored with discernment,
incisiveness and a keen sense of the practicable. Only thus can the attractions and dangers of a fool’s
paradise be kept at bay.
Before proceeding further, the issue of tensions between teachers’ scope for agency on the one hand
and the weight of inherited traditions and institutionalised powers on the other needs some
preliminary investigation or clarification. On such clarification depends much of the coherence of
teaching itself as a social good and a defensible practice.
The idea that the guiding purposes of formal education are to be decided chiefly by those who
have secured a position of institutional power became deeply lodged in Western civilisation.
Educational historians have traced the beginnings of the long ascendency of this idea to the early
9th century (Boyd & King 1999; Bowen, 2003). Early versions of the idea were championed by the
institutional churches; more recent ones have become manifest in an international educational
discourse about the needs of economy and society. For all its apparent naturalness, however, this idea
is a distortion and an impediment. It defines formal education as an essentially paternalistic
undertaking. In its preoccupation with controlling the right contents for curricula, it cloaks some
of the most important consequences of teaching, even from teachers themselves. It deprives teaching
of the coherence and integrity that should properly belong to anything called a practice, and to the
practitioners of that practice. In short, it tends to make formal education a vehicle for one or other
dominant ‘ism’. For instance, the guiding purposes of education can be seen to be placed in very
powerful hands – and cast very differently – if we take the following illustrative examples from the
history of Western education: European countries in Medieval Christendom; European countries
after the Reformation; England in the mid-19th century; Ireland in the later 19th century; Eastern
European countries after the Second World War; Ireland in the early period of independence;
England after the Education Reform Act of 1988. In each of these examples, one can identify a
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