“The Murder Machine”: what Pádraig Pearse can teach us about education.

Pádraig Pearse’s blistering essay "The Murder Machine" accused the British-controlled education system of turning Irish children into "slaves" and "eunuchs" stripped of national feeling. This piece traces how that system worked, outlines Pearse’s bilingual and child-centred remedies from St Enda’s to curriculum reform, and asks what his warnings mean for language, schooling, and diversity in Ireland today.

Let’s talk about "The Murder Machine". This is the name of a pamphlet, published by Irish revolutionary Pádraig Pearse in 1912. In it, Pearse decries the British-controlled Irish school system, which has the “ruthlessness of a potent engine”. In his view, Irish children were raised to become good British subjects, or submissive Irish ones. As Pearse pithily writes, “it has made of some Irishmen not slaves merely, but very eunuchs, with the indifference and cruelty of eunuchs”.

In this essay, I describe how Irish schoolchildren were turned into “slaves” and “eunuchs” by a non-native government. I will discuss Pearse’s solutions to counter British ruthlessness, such as bilingual education in schools and a child-centred approach to education. Finally, I will look at the legacy of "The Murder Machine" and what it can teach us today.

In "The Murder Machine", Pearse condemned “the prostitution” of Irish education, where “the divorce of education from the soil has extended from the tiniest National School on a Kerry mountainside up to the high academic places of the land”.

He remarked that “the system of slave education” in Ireland sent children to “private colleges such as Clongowes to be ‘finished’ … specialists ‘grind’ them for the English Civil Service and the so-called liberal professions”.

Rather than “grinding” students and making them submissive to authority, Pearse argued, children needed to be given “a viewpoint at once healthily national and broadly human”.

Pearse stressed the importance of bilingualism, the teaching of two languages side by side. He observed this on trips to Wales and Belgium, both of which had adopted bilingualism. Pearse proposed that Irish and English be taught “side-by-side”, giving children contact with a “two-fold culture” and a “double intellectual stimulus”.

As an Irish nationalist, Pearse was an unapologetic advocate for the Irish language. In a 1905 essay, he wrote that “Were the Irish language to disappear, then the people which we should have in Ireland, whatever else they might be, would not be the Irish nation”. The widespread adoption of the Irish language, believed Pearse, would lead to a revival in Ireland’s “own distinctive culture … Irish art, Irish dancing, Irish games and customs, Irish industries”.

In 1908, Pearse opened St. Enda’s School, a bilingual school for boys, in Ranelagh in Dublin, before moving it to Rathfarnham two years later. He was a proponent of educational thinkers such as Maria Montessori and John Dewey, both of whom were writing at the time. Both promoted a child-centred approach to education, free from "The Murder Machine" of exams. Pearse suggested that all educational bodies be brought under the control of a single Department of Education, with oversight by the Irish public.

St. Enda’s offered classes in European languages, botany, zoology, and geology. Students performed plays by playwrights such as Douglas Hyde. Indeed, five teachers at the school, including Joseph Plunkett and Tomás McDonagh, would be among those executed after the 1916 Easter Rising. Pearse also set up an all-girls school, Scoil íde. Though the school is now closed, the site is home to the Pearse Museum today.

How are Pearse’s words relevant today? Today, Irish people cannot speak our native tongue. Botany and zoology are not taught in Irish schools, at least in my experience. Almost one-in-five people living in Ireland today were born outside the country, including some of you here this evening. Nearly 100,000 Ukrainian refugees have arrived in Ireland since February of last year. Surely languages such as Polish, Ukrainian, Arabic, and Mandarin must be options for Irish students.

To conclude, let us sum up what we have learned. We have discussed how Irish students were turned into “slaves” and “eunuchs” by the ruthlessness of a British Murder Machine. We have discussed Pádraig Pearse’s educational proposals, such as bilingualism and a child-centred approach to education. We have also looked at some modern-day solutions. Let’s talk about "The Murder Machine" and fight it in our own world.

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