John Devitt was a "bloody marvellous" teacher, according to the poet and publisher Peter Fallon, who was also a former pupil of his in Glenstal.
In The Irish Reader, an eclectic and absorbing book of essays published last week in honour of John, Seamus Heaney repeats the phrase in his dedication of a previously unpublished poem to him. John Devitt was a teacher for 44 years, first at second level, and then for nearly three decades as head of English in Mater Dei Institute of Education. And what a teacher he was.
At the launch of The Irish Reader, John, now retired, asked his audience to take his remarks as his last thoughts on teaching.
It was indescribably moving to hear him say that his deepest conviction about teaching is a moral one; a teacher is first and foremost a witness to the truth and beauty of what he professes to teach. Why bother with texts that are not beautiful? Odd how courageous it seemed to be to speak of truth, beauty and education in the same breath.
What has happened, he asked, that you are more likely to hear a cricket or hurling commentator use the word "beautiful" than an educator? He also spoke of the beauty of what goes on in a tutorial, the discovery pro-cess and heightened awareness that emerges when 10 or 12 students attend to a text.
I used to be one of those students. He was a man who fizzed with energy.
In a lecture or tutorial his arms would flail, he would march up and down, and in the very first lecture I ever attended with him, he did a rather convincing impression of what Jesus must have experienced while being crucified, accompanied by the alarming vision of the big man hanging out of the mobile chalkboard to illustrate his point.
I could feel the tears threatening last Monday, seeing him struggle with ill-health, and especially when he spoke of these being his last thoughts on teaching. Yet I was comforted by the realisation that he taught every class as if it were his last.
Hours of preparation preceded a passionate delivery designed to communicate love; love of a text, love of learning, love of beauty, and love of that uncharted territory which is a student's mind, where he always antici- pated the surprise of a marvellous discovery found and shared. Occasionally his anticipation was rewarded. More often, I suspect it was not, but John Devitt is a testament to the sustaining power of hope.
Mater Dei at the time was becoming a National University of Ireland college, and was loading its students with punishing levels of work. When John innocently handed us an assignment one day, I exploded. "It's all very well for you," I ranted. "All you have to do is sit around and read books all day."
He was hurt, deeply hurt. The moment the words were out of my mouth, I knew I had attacked the wrong target, but it is only now, having taught for years myself, that I appreciate the hours (decades?) of work that went into making every lecture seem effortless.
Perhaps what I have just revealed confirms the truism that education is wasted on the young. Yet nothing would persuade me to exchange the experience of being taught by John Devitt while still young enough to be filled with the inchoate longings for meaning and truth that we become too hardened to admit even to ourselves as we grow older.
I went to Mater Dei, a teacher training college for religious education teachers, expecting to find the most meaning in the theology lectures. Despite the presence of gifted theologians, the light shone brightest in the English lectures and tutorials given by John.
Some of the characters he introduced me to will live with me always, like Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, faced with the hollowness of her own marriage but also with an opportunity to help others. "What should I do - how should I act now, this very day if I could clutch my own pain, and compel it to silence, and think of those three!"
At the launch of The Irish Reader Prof Declan Kiberd declared John to be the most dialogic of teachers. I think what he meant was that you were never safe from a mind-opening conversation with John. More importantly, he meant that for John, the sheer love of teaching and communicating took precedence over the kind of intellectual territorial claims that plague academia.
Perhaps it is just as well that John Devitt has retired, because the educational system has become obsessed with quantifying everything in a way that is inimical to the patient, tentative, exploratory style of his teaching.
I never heard him express contempt for a human being, but last week he expressed contempt for the direction which education is taking. The tendency to use terms like "estimated learning time" appals him.
Faced with a form that asked him to estimate the learning time required for his current text, which happened to be Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, his beloved wife Irene told me that he suggested to her that 40 years might be appropriate. Worse still for him is the habit of describing courses in literature in thematic terms - King Lear in a course on male authoritarian figures, for instance. He almost spat that students will dutifully learn to produce whatever political or sociological drivel is required.
A third-level system dominated by a market-driven model of education horrifies him. In an interview with Andy O'Mahoney in The Irish Reader, he declares the hallmarks of a good education to be a certain good manners in disagreement, the willingness to firmly argue a case, but also to hear the other side, a flexibility of mind and mobility of intelligence.
In an era where teachers often feel battered and a bit war weary, he is an inspiration. Waves of affection for him flowed from everyone, from internationally recognised scholars to his most recent students, evidence that the technocratic approach to education will never succeed in eliminating the profound need for the "bloody marvellous" teacher.
bobrien@irish-times.ie