Every early society, even the most primitive, historians tell us, paid some heed to the proper training and instruction of youth. But the record, despite the obliterating forces of time, is fairly clear: this heed was never cultivated to the point where it could mature into a body of knowledge about what education should do or how it should proceed. The elements of education were not codified in a systematic fashion. It was enough for views and values to be grafted to and remain alive in a general social tradition.

The march of time, however, made these pleasant educational informalities obsolete. When the clock of evolution reached the Greek Classical Age (450 - 350 BC), competing loyalties and conflicting social forces issued a vigorous challenge to old-fashioned educational habits: should persons be tutored to serve the State's interests first and in any time left over tend to their own? Or should the private, personal motives of citizens have priority, and in their realisation the legitimate interests of the state, of the body politic, could take care of themselves? These were fundamental concerns of the Greeks at this time.

By adopting the thesis that men and women have a primary obligation to serve the state, schools were commissioned to superintend civic training. And for civic training or citizenship the best and most dependable guidelines were certain to be found in political theory. When personal formation was accorded pride of place, however, lurking in the background was the premonition of individual appetite becoming so ravenous that civic and social virtue would be put in jeopardy. The cultivation of personal talent could be justified, but character needed a safeguard that, it was stipulated, moral philosophy (ethics) would have to supply.

With civic and personal objectives competing for education's attention, moral and political philosophers took their first hesitant steps toward educational theory and, their scholarly incentive in making educational policy complement either politics or ethics carried all the way to the invention of an infant, immature, and dependent philosophy of education.

There are essentially five strands, or phases, or wells, in the history of Western education. The first of these begins with the ancient Greeks with their emphasis on holistic education. Humanistic underpinnings pervade thinking under Greek influence. The next spring comes from Christian influence throughout the Middle Ages. Education during this rather lengthy period, was dominated by various forms of theological quests. When we come to the sixteenth century Renaissance we witness a reawakening of the spirit of ancient Greek learning. Humanism reasserts itself during this period. This is our third spring.

The fourth phase in the history of education tradition is the nineteenth century with its emphasis on industrialisation and urbanisation. Its philosophical foundation here was leaning towards utilitarianism. Population increases throughout Europe gave vent to a new desire on the part of those in power - the need for mass education. When we come to the final spring, in the twentieth century, educational principles are very much governed by research in psychology.

In the introduction to Ancient Education and Today, E.B. Castle wrote that " in the spring of 1958 the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions declared their revolt against a limited culture dominated by the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome reflecting little of the achievement, the ideas and philosophy of modern science". They wished instead to see evolved a curriculum which nurtures all that is good in our human and national heritage and which therefore, also reflects the importance of science in the mid twentieth century. The irony here, and Castle points it out very clearly, is that this is a Greek stricture i.e., the Greeks were a people who responded well to the demands of the times they lived in.

They too were able to conceive and construct an education system relevant to the needs of their age. The same might not be quite true of the Romans for they had to learn Greek, partly because their education was Greek education and partly because Greek was the lingua franca of the Roman world.

Should the classical response to the needs of technology be deemed irrelevant to the spiritual, intellectual and technical needs of the twenty first century? The Greeks began European education. They asked the profoundest questions and they gave the profoundest answers to these questions. They distinguished between culture and instruction, between value and fact. They gave answers to our questions today because they examined the nature of human beings; they were courageous, insightful. Their failures and perversities can teach us much; their successes and wisdom we neglect at our peril.

The Greeks resisted the dangerous doctrine that education was instruction in the making of things rather than the rearing of children so that they become good men. The insistent theme in the Greek idea, that education is what makes a person, still defines our modern problem. It reminds us that if we reject the means by which we are taught to control the machines we make, we are not responding to the needs of our own time. Do we accept what is transitory in our lives as having a profound value - there is something paradoxical in that. Do we accept a technical device as an end in itself; are we happy with immediacy? Is it enough to produce teachers who are technicians, who are skilled technicians, in a technicist education system? Are we happy in the knowledge that our schools may be populated by teachers who do not have a philosophy of education, who do not engage with tradition, who do not have an historical perspective? What then, we must ask ourselves is the future's legacy? What do we bequeath? These are some of the questions the Greeks asked. These are the basic considerations in any education system, for any age. The Greeks were the first in the Western world to ask what education is and how young people and adults should be educated.

The heroes of Homer were endowed with areté, a word which cannot be translated in any proper sense. It can mean virtue or excellence, it can have overtones of moral goodness. The Greeks felt that areté makes a thing, a horse, a soldier, a hero, the best, the most effective of their kind. The meaning given to the word depended on what contemporary views of excellence might be.

Homer's areté was much associated with honour; not a christian, chivalrous honour; it was not philanthropic, but it was an honour associated with supremacy among peers. This honour had to be proven to all; to win glory. Virtues prized in later centuries, honesty, loyalty, charity, are not up for judgement. Achilles deserted his friend, Odysseus was a cheat, both had areté, both performed great deeds, both had to be imitated.

Of course areté was not confined soley to the field of valour. Achilles had been educated to be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds. Here we see an example of the Greek conviction that skill in speech is an expression of the sovereignty of mind. Thus, the conception of areté changed to higher and more complex views of human capacity. Centuries later we see areté in action again when Socrates preferred hemlock to silence when truth must be spoken.

Areté can be our greatest achievements, whether individual or collective. It can be poetic, aesthetic, physical, moral, social. It can be one or all of the appendages we affix to human endeavour. It does not have to be aristocratic or hierarchical; it can be organic and evolutionary. It needs to be evolutionary, it needs to respond to the moment, but it is our understanding that enables us to respond at a particular moment and it is through education that we acquire this understanding. To this end the Greeks were very much responding to their circumstances.

Types of Education

There were many types of Greek education, embracing many philosophies. The Spartan philosophy of education was one where all softness of life was held in contempt and the standards of living were those of a soldier on active service, for wherever he happened to be the Spartiate was aware of the precarious nature of his existence. Hence, he made a virtue out of the enforced austerities of his regime, and the depressed class that fed him in the attainment of his areté - obedience to the laws and valour in battle.

There was little or no time for aesthetic cultivation. Whatever cultural values existed were associated with military efficiency. Whatever literacy, poetry, or music were deemed worthwhile were measured in terms of military usefulness. The total energies of this ancient Herrenvolk became concentrated on the promotion of the state's interests.. In an intense and concrete way, the Spartan citizen made a willing surrender of all his loyalties and physical powers to this political expression of his own will.

The Spartan education system ensured that the citizens were reared in such a way that they neither would, nor could live by themselves; they were to make themselves one with the public good. This involved a long process of conditioning, beginning at birth where babies were deemed much less the children of their parents than the wards of the commonwealth. Each new born was exposed to the judges, a kind of state health committee. The' puny or ill-shaped' were condemned to suffer at the foot of a mountain. At the age of seven the state took complete charge of the child. State training, or agogé began, covering the next thirteen years. In effect this service was a life sentence. Individuality, idiosyncrasy, freedom of thought were simply knocked out of the Spartan. His chief role in life was to obey.

Did the Spartans achieve what they set out to do? Yes. Their objectives were definite and severely limited. Their practical training of children was entirely relevant to the solution of what they conceived their special problem to be. Sparta achieved a stable state, a united community whose institutions resisted corruption. It was envied by others. It was a tidy system of education, of class education. It was a system, which had an elemental appeal to courage and obedience and it proved its capacity to develop a type of character held in high esteem by the ruling classes of nineteenth century England and Ireland. Within a closed society it was possible to condition the young that they become just the sort of persons their elders wished them to be. Nazi rulers never had any doubt about the moulding power of education. This was schooling with propaganda and indoctrination as its cornerstones. It had nothing to do with educaré, a leading out.

In the long run Sparta failed. She paid the penalty of expediency. The most evident characteristic of Spartan education is the complete submergence of individuality in a system where the state possesses the child, body and soul. It was a type of regime not solely attributable to Sparta. We see instances of this type of education dotted throughout history. The experiences of the young are carefully selected and carefully regulated to protect the speculative mind from indulgence in dangerous thoughts. This philosophy can be applied to post-French Revolutionary thinking in many parts of Europe. Throughout the nineteenth century governments and institutions strove to find ways to control the thinking processes of the mind. Control became the key word in nineteenth century educational discourse. Spartan education was narrowly utilitarian; there was no place for the cultivation of the intellect in any sense comparable to the opportunities enjoyed in other city- states. The Spartan system produced a type, a type sufficient for the needs of the state as far as the Spartans could see what those needs were. The type suffered from serious limitations. Xenophon speaks with personal knowledge of fourth century Sparta and admits that the Spartans did at least know what they were doing. Plutarch too, saw many positive elements in Spartan education. We must turn to Plato and Aristotle to enable us to assess what E B Castle calls the "true value" of Spartan education, for as he says, " they were inclined to praise it for its virtues although forced to recognise its deficiences". Plato refers to Sparta's primary weakness; it is education not by persuasion but by force. Aristotle goes further in saying that the Spartans 'brutalize their children by laborious exercises which they think will make them courageous'. To educate for one virtue alone is not enough. We have many instances from history which provides evidence of the ultimate moral failure that comes of concentrating the energies of a people and the direction of its education, exclusively on drill in a technique. Young people whose upbringing provides no place for individual judgement, and no opportunity for social experience outside the domestic or narrowly national setting, are not likely to respond with much imagination to the demands of new situations. The Spartans narrowness of experience failed them when adaptation was called for.

`Excessive denial of normal human pleasures, embodied in a regime where temptations are not felt because the objects of desire are absent, is not the best form of character training. There is no point in teetotalism practised in jail. Plato fastened himself to this weakness in the Spartan regime: if our citizens grow up from their youth unpractised in the greatest pleasures the consequence must be that when they find themselves amongst pleasures without being trained in the duty of resisting them… because of the natural attraction of pleasures they will suffer the same fate as those who are worsted by fear… they will be enslaved by those who are able to hold out against pleasures". In some respects Spartan virtue was a cloistered virtue, and Spartan temperance at home no preparation for sober behaviour abroad.

The Spartan system disregarded human nature. For two centuries the system flourished. Then outraged nature had its revenge. This is the lesson for the educator who uses education to perpetuate a social system by creating a type to fit neatly into a static society. History has shown us how easy it is for totalitarianism to mould the youth of a nation into a pattern conformable to a particular ideology. This sterilises the thinker, the artist; it rejects freedom; it embraces moral bankruptcy; it arrests civilisation.

Athens

As Sparta decayed Athens opened up her mind to new ideas. She was an initiator, not an imitator. The Athenian learned how to rule and how to be ruled. When we think of Athenian education we must remember that beyond the school and gymnasium the youth had more potent teachers than the schoolmaster. There was drama, poetry, religion, art, dance. When we attempt to bring together these many and diverse influences, these eclectic influences, that poured in upon the citizens of ATHENS WE FIND THEM ALL FLOWING IN ONE DIRECTION, INTO A HARMONIZING UNITY IN which the two orders of the Athenian existed: his own private life and domestic possessions, which was the lesser part; and the life of the polis into which all his highest energies were poured. We can say that the Athenian lived in 'an educative society'. The citizen was identified with the state. There was no distinction between public and private virtue. The citizen's private conscience reposed in the city's laws, in which was embodied a code of behaviour sufficient for public and private activities. Hence, the legislator was esteemed with the poet, philosopher, and the orator as the highest type of citizen and as the leader who most fundamentally served the city community. Even the artist took a lower place in Greek estimation, for he worked in stone whereas the law-maker shaped the lives of men. Athenian education was much richer in content and more imaginative in conception than Sparta's. We see this portrayed nowhere more clearly than by Thucydides in Pericle's funeral oration ;

For our purpose the peculiar value of this speech is in its portrayal of the amazing comprehensiveness of the Greek view of what membership of a community means in terms of human activity. Athenian democracy asked how can its citizens acquire the individual and political excellences requisite for services in such a state. The eventual answer was not framed in terms of a curriculum, but rather in terms of the 'good life' which the state fostered. This goal was very different from that in Sparta. It involved the development of education, largely free from state interference, whose aim was to make the good life available to all. And the good life, it was assumed, depended on the development of the whole personality in a balanced relationship of its physical, intellectual, aesthetic and moral aspects. It was an ideal seldom attained and eventually corrupted in the course of Greek history, but it has left a deep impression on western civilisation.

Holistic Education

Essential to Greek education in general terms, was the idea of wholeness. Training in the gymnasium fostered endurance and courage; poetry and music provided an engagement with the aesthetic; the Athenian youth had intimate contact with the working institutions of the city. Education was an experience embracing balance; we see this in Plato's words in the Protagoras: the boy's teachers are to attend to his manners even more than to his reading and music; he studies great poets for their many admonitions; the harmonies and rhythms of music are expected to inspire the gentle and harmonious life; and when schooling is over young men learn the 'laws of the state'. So, according to Protagoras, in 400 BC young men were prepared for war, for political affairs. The Athenian saw no inconsistency between training for state service and developing vital original qualities of character. The Athenians sincerely believed that a supple mind was more effective in achieving this end than the inelastic product of Sparta.

Thinkers

It is well known throughout history that theorising about education is not very common among those who teach. The person in the classroom has so many other things to do. We must turn to the philosophers for theoretical insights. It is possible to say in this context that at no period in our history was there more profound thinking on education than in the hundred years preceding the death of Aristotle in 322 BC. During this period Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle turned their minds to the problem of how to make good men. When we think of education in philosophical terms we begin with them. Socrates wished Athenians to think philosophically. He wished his listeners to be aware of the dangers of high technical ability in oratory, for example. He wished his listeners to examine the exact meaning of virtue, justice, piety, courage. By asking the right questions, always the first step in the pursuit of truth, he exposed peoples' ignorance about ideas they thought they had thoroughly grasped. He convinced them, not by preaching, but by forcing them to see their own ignorance and to discover their own truth in their own minds. This was the Socratic Method, whose ultimate purpose was to convince people that the one thing needful was self-knowledge, the knowledge that first reveals us to ourselves as we are, a complex of prejudice and irrational impulse, and then requires us to accept reason as our guide. Knowledge of this kind is virtue; and conversely ignorance is vice. Without self-knowledge we have a tendency to work evil and our motives are fed by self-interest. Passion is a deciding factor. Reason will bring order into the life of the city. This is not only a rational but, a stern interpretation of duty and responsibility. It was Socrates' answer to the Sophists, for the majority of whom the one thing needful was the 'know how' of getting on. The Sophists offered a commercial education which satisfied the basic requirements of society.

Socrates was right in insisting that we must understand before we act. While Plato emphasised contemplation of final truths, Socrates gave priority to reflective action in teaching and learning. Socratic education seems to have provided for everybody in the polis, while Platonic strictures accommodated only the most intellectually gifted of the citizens. Plato's Republic was an elaboration of Socrates' theme i.e., the theme that those who rule must be persons who think philosophically, and therefore disinterestedly, and whose lives are trained and disciplined for the purpose of ruling justly. In Plato's scheme there was to be careful planning and selection. Education must be controlled by the state. Plato's scheme is founded on an aristocratic ideal - the rule of the best. It is an hierarchical system with the super-elite or Philosopher Kings at the apex. It is meritocratic. History suggests that no community has had enough good men to go round. Political rulers have been tainted by various forms of corruption.

Plato

Plato seeks harmony. Platonic education involves integration. It involves a slow growth. We are reminded by Jaeger that' despite its lofty intellectualism, Plato's idea of education was that it was like a slow vegetable growth- a notion almost wholly absent from the individualistic methods of the sophists.

Plato's curriculum includes drama, music, poetry, literature, stories of Gods, as part of the young child's experiences- all curtailed, monitored, censured - the young child's mind and character determined and moulded by Platonic stricture. It was a custodial education. Plato's Republic was nothing short of a totalitarian state where individual choice plays second fiddle to proscription.

Nevertheless, in the whole history of education there has been no nobler conception of education as a process depending on the inflowing power of beauty and goodness over the growing mind. Plato, however, is so concerned with keeping youth on the straight and narrow, so unwilling to allow them to experiment with their own responses to moral challenge, that he strips their lives of all adventure, allowing them only the sometimes infertile experience of doing as they are told. He has too little respect for a child's capacity to choose well or to learn by his mistakes, too little regard for the dangers that beset the teacher who believes he is always right, and he seems to be unaware that unremitting as distinct from occasional, compulsion may create a resentment that, in Bertrand Russell's phrase, results in 'good behaviour with wrong emotions'

We may ask ourselves some questions: Should we challenge the appropriateness of of Plato's recommendations for current schooling? Were Plato's prescriptions sound for his own time or for any time? Were his strictures simply an answer to the needs of the military state?

Ancient Greece treated education as part of politics. The training of the young has its end in the welfare of the state. Both Plato and Aristotle were similar in this regard. Their differences lie in emphasis rather than in principle: Aristotle raises the individual higher in the scheme of things, even to the extent of conceding that in the last resort the state exists for making possible the noblest life for man. According to Aristotle education should be for everyone. Children should be trained to be good persons as well as good citizens. Children acquire good qualities by forming good habits. They do this through the rational principle i.e., they are able to disentangle themselves from bad habits, to acquire good ones, and to control their irrational impulses. 'It is by doing just acts that we become just, by doing temperate acts that we become temperate, and by doing brave deeds that we become brave …'

To be of good moral character we are to abide by the Doctrine of the Mean i.e., we display moderation. We are to aim at the mean, the point of balance between the two extremes of excess and deficit. For example, the mean between the two extremes of fear and rashness is courage. To attain the mean is difficult, because it involves both feeling and action. That is why it so difficult to be good. And that is why we must be trained in habits of temperance from childhood, even before the reasoning powers are fully developed, for then are laid the foundations of character.' We must use the instrument of habit before we use that of reason, and we must deal with the body before we deal with the mind'. Aristotle's regime is rigorous, almost Spartan in nature- 'for human nature should early be habituated to endure all which by habit it can be made to endure'. Like Plato, Aristotle is the advocate of a strictly guarded education.

Aristotle expresses mixed feelings about what should be taught. His basic curriculum is a liberal one. An important principle in the Aristotelian curriculum is that of leisure- it is summed up in the assertion that 'the first principle of action is leisure'. What should we do with our leisure? 'Clearly we ought not to be amusing ourselves, for that would make the base admission that amusement is the end of life. Leisure is activity in the cultivation of the mind; it is study for its own sake; it is neither relaxation nor the acquisition of knowledge, which will help us to be successful in our next business venture. It has nothing to do with utility. We should seek education 'not as being useful or necessary, but because it is liberal and noble.

Aristotle's contribution to the education of the young is remarkable as the first scientific argument based on the observation of human nature. This brings him closer to an understanding of children than Plato achieved with all his spiritual insight. Aristotle's view that character has its roots in instincts and desires is a sound beginning for thinking about education and is well supported by modern views on character formation; his recognition that the wayward passions of the young are susceptible by their nature to the appeal of the rational principle within us again places the educator in his debt; his insistence that leisure is activity in the cultivation of the mind, and not mere amusement, warns us against the pursuit of the shoddy and the second-hand; and his principle of pursuing happiness through the mean conjures up an entrancing picture of the teacher leading youth by the hand along the narrow path between reason and appetite, as they strive in partnership for the good life.

The Greek Contribution to Education

What was the Greek contribution to education? They believed that the greatest work of art was the human form. They were the first to regard education as a means of moulding human character in accordance with an ideal. They approached their problem in a scientific way, by examining the principles governing human life, asking what a man was, body, mind and spirit, and prescribing a form of education which, they hoped, would lead to the desired end. We must recognise the greatness in this conception while at the same time realising the dangers of the 'moulding' view of education as we see in Plato's theory, and in Spartan practice. The main theme is that the Greeks emphasised that education is the making of men, not training men to make things'. Throughout history we have returned to this principle time and again when we have become anxious about some malaise in society- juvenile delinquency in the twentieth century, the problems associated with drugs, and so on. Today we tend not to ask, how we shall make a child into a complete person, but what technique we shall teach him/her so that he/she will become a neat and uncomplaining cog in a world whose main concern is to produce material wealth. To Plato and Aristotle, and their followers, this is technicism--useful, no doubt necessary, but not education.

Teaching someone the skills of using a computer or a mobile phone is not education because it is not a true culture of the whole person. The Greek conception of educating for 'wholeness' is summed up in the word paideia which Plato defines as ' the education in areté from youth onwards, which makes men passionately desire to become perfect citizens, knowing both how to rule and how to be ruled on a basis of justice'.

The danger of technicism, as Plato saw, is that a particular technique or narrow scientific study tends to become an end in itself, cramping the mind of the student and limiting his/her vision to a point where he/she remains unaware that his technology and the machines which he makes, have become the master, not the servant. That is why Plato insists that his Guardians should spend five years studying philosophy, learning to see 'the connexions of things.'

Old Wine in New Bottles

In today's world, is 'communication' replacing 'education'? Is independent thought now in danger of being absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination? There is a feeling that much of the debate within the reforming structures of Irish education emphasises the need for Irish society to be well equipped in the technical, commercial, and entrepreneurial spheres. No one can deny that Irish society needs a sound business-like approach to industrial advancement. True, in today's international commercial field, marketing, specialist technical skills, the spirit of enterprise, are all necessary consequences of our involvement in a highly sophisticated European and World configuration. Where does this leave education?

Is there now, in our country, a shift in focus from an emphasis on educating the whole person to an emphasis on schooling the person as producer and consumer? The philosophy of liberal education, which has been at the heart of Western civilisation for two and a half thousand years, argues that education must go beyond the mere communication of technical skills and concern itself with the powers of understanding through a rich variety of experiences. This in turn enables the individual to draw on his/her own particular resources, be they technical, scientific or aesthetic. In this manner, the individual is not merely trained in a utilitarian sense, but he/she is educated to a point where choice is possible and where alternatives are made more accessible. This form of democratic education commits a society to teaching virtue, or freedom, or both. In the words of Amy Gutman, the more benign characteristics of democratic education are veracity, self-discipline, non-violence, toleration, mutual respect for reasonable differences of opinion, the ability to deliberate, to think critically about one's life and one's society, and therefore to participate in conscious social reproduction, not replication.

The Greeks asked questions when planning education. Plato and Aristotle prescribed an education far more protective and directive, both in home and school, than we give to our children today. Is there not scope, E B Castle asks, for the modern equivalent of Aristotle's 'legislator' to inquire into the total moral impact of the cinema, press, television, and if Castle were around in the twenty first century, the internet, on the modern child? Are educational administrators clear what they are planning for and building schools for? Are the scientists and technologists sure what science and technology are for? The Greeks would have asked all these questions. And governing all their inquiry would have been the final question - in what way do these wonderful inventions help to make a person?

We fail to ask these questions. Our education system responds to the needs of immediacy. We tinker with the curriculum, we make slight insignificant changes to the way teachers are prepared for the job of teaching.

The Greeks sought balance and harmony in their educational principles. They desired children to be so educated that each part of their learning nourished the other parts in a harmonious relationship. This is a fertile conception of education that requires us to replace the scrappiness of learning with the relatedness of all learning, to build bridges between parts of knowledge rather than subject-tight compartments that lead to its fragmentation. A sense of the unity of knowledge must be built up in the child's mind. For this to happen such a sense of unity must exist first in the mind of the teacher, who must be capable of seeing the relevance of his own specialist interest to those of colleagues.

The Primary School Curriculum celebrates the uniqueness of the child. One of its stated aims is to nurture the child in all dimensions of his/her life - spiritual, moral, cognitive, emotional, imaginative, aesthetic, social and physical. This is laudable by any standards. But, does the curriculum have a stated philosophy of education? NO.

It is concerned chiefly with cognition, aims and objectives, curriculum areas, curriculum implementation, process, development and assessment. Is this absence of a fundamental expression of a philosophy deliberate or is it part of the way education is governed by certain powerful elements in society?

The process of education in recent times appears to engage in the "engineering of learning" and does not appear to consider education in a metaphysical sense. It is the reason for doing something that gives it its metaphysical meaning. Without a reason, one does not become a different person because of something one has learned.. Change in mindset must involve the appropriation of a concept, an insight, or a vision. Reason and motivation are not the same thing. Within the context of schooling, motivation refers to a temporary psychic event in which curiosity is aroused and attention is focused. Reason asks why be in the classroom, why sit for examinations, why listen to the teacher, why go to school even if a person is not motivated? For education to work, the existence of this reason is essential. To invoke Nietzsche's famous amorphism- 'he who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.' This applies as much to learning as it does to living. Students in modern times are motivated to learn, in the immediate sense, but they appear to lack the reason for learning.

Education is now in the midst of what Neil Postman calls " the great narrative of technology" This god of technology has been spawned from the science-god. This god of technology offers us a vision of paradise, a clarity unheard of before. It offers convenience, efficiency, and prosperity, here and now. It does not allow all other gods to enter the fray. This means that those who follow its path must shape their needs and aspirations to the possibilities of technology. This god has taken up a sovereign position. Its genius lies in the replication of its component parts- its machines. This means that technological ingenuity and human progress are one and the same.

Among those who have taken the name of the technology -god in vain was Max Frisch, who remarked, 'Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.' Much of educational discourse today is bounded by an almost fanatical reverence for technology.

Education, in the most basic sense, ought to embrace culture: it ought to establish an identity; it ought to become individual; it ought to nourish; it ought to liberate. Education, in Ireland today, has become the property of political and commercial interest groups. It is difficult for the pupil to emerge liberated with his/her own identity. Instead he/she is cast, at a young age, in an inflexible mould and much of what is most promising and special among each pupil's potentials is obscured and smothered. As Pádraig Hogan puts it in his book, The Custody and Courtship of Experience, a mentality which places a primary emphasis on proprietorial rights, albeit for the most sincere reasons, promotes an ethos of partiality and power-seeking, overlooks the venturesome play of educational experience, and undermines the coherence of teaching and learning as a jointly undertaken quest which builds enduring solidarities.

Allied to this notion is the trend in recent times to overvaluate the functional, the professional, and the corporate forms of knowledge. The gradual growth of skill-based education in the West grew out of an increase in the perceived need for technological advancement and the industrial power-holders need for skilled workers, especially those in engineering and related technical backgrounds. The twentieth century has seen the scrutinising of educational disciplines for their "use" value.

This is true in Ireland as it is elsewhere. To ensure a successful future for Irish education it is essential that curriculum reformers bear in mind the necessity for flexibility and for idiosyncrasy. They must make efforts to avoid constricting the pupil and the teacher. The tradition of Irish education has, down through the centuries, invoked a healthy and mutually enriching relationship between teacher and pupil. This is the most valuable educational heritage we have. We therefore, need to be circumspect in our current reforming zeal, lest we replace entirely what is distinctive, individual, and very often local, with something cold, cursory, impersonal, and spiritless. Irish education must make a choice. In the promotion of an educational ethos, which embraces transience, we may lose sight of our particular areté, our particular striving for excellence, which has, as far as Irish education is concerned, espoused reflection, imagination, spontaneity, diversification, and self-awareness. An education system whose philosophy embraces these qualities emerges into the limelight having its participants exposed to a fruitful experience. The alternative is a barren landscape of mediocrity, which fails to address the idiosyncratic nature of human interchange.

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