Mary Kenny
Considering how important a subject education is, it’s interesting to observe that relatively little national attention was paid to The Sunday Times list of top 100 Irish schools, just published.
Could this be because it is glaringly evident that Catholic schools continually emerge as the gold standard in educational attainment? Take the Salerno Jesus and Mary Secondary School in Salthill, Galway – top of the list, with 87.1% of its pupils going on to third level education (and it’s not a fee-paying school either).
The Salerno school, we are told in the report, “is typical of Irish schools in that it has a strong religious ethos”. It was founded in 1818 by St Claudine Thevenet, who, like St Angela de Merici before her, believed that education meant drawing out the best in the child.
Ethos
Another school with “a strong religious ethos” is the highly successful (and non-fee-paying) Presentation Secondary School in Mitchelstown, Co. Cork.
Just glance at the names adorning the first 50 schools, many of them so evocative of a long tradition of Catholic education: Laurel Hill in Limerick, Scoil Mhuire, the CBS in Cork, many Loreto schools for girls, Gonzaga, Mount Anville, Holy Ghost Blackrock, the Holy Child, the Jesuit schools in Galway and Limerick, the Teresian School, Colaiste Iosagain, Castleknock, Glenstal, Clongowes Wood, Belvedere, Cistercian College Roscrea, the CUS, Our Lady’s Bower, St Michael’s, Newbridge, and of course the Gaelscoileanna which have blazed such a brilliant trail.
Alexandra College – founded under the patronage of Queen Alexandra, wife to Edward VII to advance the education of girls as an Anglican institution – though nowadays less specifically religious – continues to show a fine academic performance. But Catholic names and ethos still overwhelmingly dominate.
Nothing is perfect, and it’s evident that there are inequalities of class and location pertaining to school admissions, and achievements. But it’s worth celebrating the fact that this academic list is a tribute to the continuing high standards of Catholic education – surely the best defence against the opponents who seek to dismember it.
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Nietzsche and Christian values
My son Patrick West has written a short book about Nietzsche which I think is most enlightening (not just the Mammy talking!). He’s called it Get Over Yourself – Nietzsche for Our Times, because he says that Nietzsche would greatly dislike the narcissism and the “identity politics” – such as transgenderism – that’s such a feature of social media today.
I vehemently disagree with Nietzsche’s take on Christianity. I believe he misunderstood Christianity, and conflated it with the repressive and conformist Prussian morality that he saw in 19th Century German culture.
And yet, there’s so much in Nietzsche’s thinking that echoes Christian values – the way in which he underlines that life is not about an entitlement to “happiness”: it’s about struggling with ourselves and even embracing adversity. “To live is to suffer.”
Experts
One of the renowned experts on Nietzsche, as well as on wider philosophy, was the Jesuit, Fr Frederick Coppleston, whose work Patrick also cites.
Nietzsche is in many ways a contemporary figure, and it’s fascinating to consider what he might make of our world today.
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The tooth, the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth
Back in the day, it used to be the fashion to have all your teeth extracted for your 25th birthday – the idea being that you would be free from toothache and other dental misery for the rest of your life. This seems a very mistaken idea to us, now that dentistry has progressed so remarkably.
Yet, with the passing of the years, one tends to spend more time – and money! – in the dentist’s chair, as they attend to such elaborations as canal root work, wobbly dental bridges, canine cracks, molar ‘crumbling’, gum shrinkage, and even after a tooth has had lavish attention paid to it, is declared doomed and sentenced to extraction.
Modern dentistry is terrifically impressive, but it still involves ordeals, and as I repose in that dental chair waiting for some new ghastly application, I swing between telling myself to “offer it up”, and “il faut souffrir pour etre belle”, as French women say when subjected to painful cosmetic measures. Occasionally, I do see the point of having the whole set yanked out at the age of 25.