Principal of Belfast's Holy Cross Boys School Kevin McArevey joined Ryan to talk about teaching philosophy to kids to promote problem-solving and mental health and Young Plato, a new film about his work.
When he was three years old, Kevin McArevey watched his father being taken away by soldiers who burst into their home with dogs and guns. His mother's face was split open by a soldier's rifle butt and she needed seven stitches.
Kevin remembers this day vividly, as he told Ryan Tubridy. What helped him choose the path of peace as an adult, Ryan wanted to know? "Education", says Kevin.
Now a school principal, McArevey teaches philosophy to young boys in his school. He does it to promote mental health in the classroom, but he's also teaching the boys to process past events in their own community.
Kevin and the boys of Holy Cross School are appearing in a new documentary Young Plato, which will be screened this weekend as part of the Dublin International Film Festival and opens in cinemas across the country in March.
Holy Cross Girls School (sister school to Kevin's school) in Belfast’s Ardoyne made international headlines in the early 2000's for all the wrong reasons. The world watched as the girls were escorted to school by riot police, while screaming adults threw hot tea and balloons filled with urine in their direction.
The wider context was eclipsed by the screams of small children. 20 years on, Kevin McArevey is teaching boys whose parents were among the Holy Cross children who lived through the troubles and the children are steeped in their parent’s history, even if they don’t fully understand it. Kevin says that there has to be some way of processing this:
"You have to look at the idea of trans-generational trauma, which is a legacy of The Troubles. What that brings is addictive natures such as alcohol, drugs, domestic abuse, gambling. And this is everywhere. As teachers and educators, we have to deal with the outworkings of that, and the outworkings of that are the children. So they’re coming with the baggage and we want to give them opportunities to say: There’s a way out of this: education is a way out of this."
As a principal, Kevin made the decision to show his boys the news footage of what happened in 2001. He says the children were genuinely shocked and horrified as they had never seen it before. What’s more, it was happening to their own parents as small children:
"You have to talk about it. You have to have a conversation about it. What’s going on in the house now? How are parents now with the trauma? How are we coping? It’s very real. It’s very real for the parents. I need the kids to be able to think there’s nothing you can’t talk about, that there’s nothing you can’t have a conversation about; because that’s what philosophy is."
Kevin is totally convinced that teaching Seneca, Plato and Aristotle to primary school kids will help them navigate their lives in multiple ways, and he’s putting his ideas to the test every day at school:
"Promoting mental health and well-being through philosophy. That’s what we’re doing."
The trick is, though, to understand that philosophy is not about reading boring old books and memorizing theories. Kevin says it’s a thing you do, a conversation with yourself and others about things that are important to you:
"Philosophy is an activity. It’s not a theory."
Kevin has clearly had some success in building the confidence of the kids at Holy Cross, as they ran rings around politicians who visited the school. The topic was morality and the law and local representatives exchanged ideas with the children about what kind of laws they would all bring in if they had the choice. Then Lord Mayor of Belfast, John Finucane suggested reducing the voting age, but one of the boys had bigger ideas, Kevin says:
"He was called Ché and he says 'Do you know what, if I was to enact my own law, it would be to make sure the rich pay a lot more taxes and to help the poor. Because there’s an awful lot of poor, not just in our communities, but in other countries in the world.’"
As the kids and the politicians reflected on Ché’s ideas on the re-distribution of the world's resources, Ryan, another boy in the class went one better:
"So, Ryan says, 'I wouldn’t reduce the voting age to 16,’ and John’s going uh-oh, where’s this going? And he says, ‘I would bring it down to 10 and I would vote for you Ché!’ So Ché jumps up, punches the air and says ‘Yes! A vote for Ché, I’ll make the rich pay!’ Well, the whole place went into raptures laughing."
Kevin McArevey knows how the boys in his class feel. He shares some of the same political baggage as they do, the same community history. He's keen to make a difference in their lives by giving them the tools to deal with things that could overwhelm them. The person who made the biggest difference in his life in this respect was his Mum, and Kevin says she set him on the right course:
"I’ll tell you what happened to me. My mum. My mum has a massive influence on my life. She being the matriarch just pushed education, education. That’s the way forward. That’s your way out, son.
As a principal, Kevin deals with representatives of all communities in Belfast, but his ambitions stretch beyond Ardoyne: he wants every child to have the chance to learn about how philosophy can help them think:
"If you’ve a desire and belief, you will make the impossible possible. And that’s what I wanted to do. I want to get this story out to every school. Every child should be doing philosophy. It is something that we naturally do."
If you’d like to hear more about Kevin’s school philosophy programme, the documentary Young Plato, and Ryan and Kevin’s shared Elvis obsession, it’s all in the full interview above.
Young Plato will be shown in Cineworld in Dublin on Saturday the 26th of February and nationwide from the 11th of March.
