Page 96 - Gonzaga at 60
P. 96
96
GONZAGA AT SIXTY: A WORK IN PROGRESS
Staff celebration dinner at the closure of the Prep school. Seating by the window
is Máire O’Kelly … ‘the presiding genius of Prep 1’ for a quarter of a century
‘Give me a boy when he is seven years of age and I will show you the man.’
For 45 years a considerable proporion of Gonzaga’s graduates could look back on ten years of
Jesuit formaion. When the Prep School closed in 1995 ‘ater a long process of discernment’ and
for ‘reasons – or pressures: inancial, educaional, apostolic’, as Fr Keane put it in his valedictory
homily, many of these graduates (some of them now prospecive Gonzaga parents) considered it
unthinkable. To have been part of the school for ten years almost amounted to perpetual family
enitlement.
The bonds created by ten years of schooling in a single place have a way of engendering
ierce loyalty and a sense of belonging – and superiority, when it comes to having to share your
school in First Year with an intake of boys from other schools.
The alumni of the very early days write of close friendships forged over ten years; of an
educaion at the feet almost exclusively of Jesuits. They portray a strange world of ‘biings’
and magenta blazers, of quarter caps and conkers, of Rosary recited at the end of break and
Johnson, Mooney and O’Brien-wrapped sandwiches. David Fassbender evokes in his aricle the
early atmosphere of gowned clerics and ‘Corporaion Men’, back gate and bike shed, and apples
from the Rector. Charles Lysaght captures some subtler levels in his memoir of the ‘ities. A few
brief comments on the Prep School in its last twenty-ive years are necessary.
In his homily of 1995, Fr Keane recalled the arrival of lay teachers. With remarkable
generosity – or insight? – he commented that ‘in primary educaion, at least, this was very much
a case of the professionals taking over from the amateurs’. First among these he names Maire
O’Kelly, describing her as ‘the guide, philosopher and friend, the presiding genius of Prep 1’. Her
former pupils, many of them her life-long friends, will recognize how accurate this descripion
GONZAGA AT SIXTY: A WORK IN PROGRESS
Staff celebration dinner at the closure of the Prep school. Seating by the window
is Máire O’Kelly … ‘the presiding genius of Prep 1’ for a quarter of a century
‘Give me a boy when he is seven years of age and I will show you the man.’
For 45 years a considerable proporion of Gonzaga’s graduates could look back on ten years of
Jesuit formaion. When the Prep School closed in 1995 ‘ater a long process of discernment’ and
for ‘reasons – or pressures: inancial, educaional, apostolic’, as Fr Keane put it in his valedictory
homily, many of these graduates (some of them now prospecive Gonzaga parents) considered it
unthinkable. To have been part of the school for ten years almost amounted to perpetual family
enitlement.
The bonds created by ten years of schooling in a single place have a way of engendering
ierce loyalty and a sense of belonging – and superiority, when it comes to having to share your
school in First Year with an intake of boys from other schools.
The alumni of the very early days write of close friendships forged over ten years; of an
educaion at the feet almost exclusively of Jesuits. They portray a strange world of ‘biings’
and magenta blazers, of quarter caps and conkers, of Rosary recited at the end of break and
Johnson, Mooney and O’Brien-wrapped sandwiches. David Fassbender evokes in his aricle the
early atmosphere of gowned clerics and ‘Corporaion Men’, back gate and bike shed, and apples
from the Rector. Charles Lysaght captures some subtler levels in his memoir of the ‘ities. A few
brief comments on the Prep School in its last twenty-ive years are necessary.
In his homily of 1995, Fr Keane recalled the arrival of lay teachers. With remarkable
generosity – or insight? – he commented that ‘in primary educaion, at least, this was very much
a case of the professionals taking over from the amateurs’. First among these he names Maire
O’Kelly, describing her as ‘the guide, philosopher and friend, the presiding genius of Prep 1’. Her
former pupils, many of them her life-long friends, will recognize how accurate this descripion
