Belvedere College

Encyclopedia : B : BE : BEL : Belvedere College

Belvedere College SJ is a Jesuit-run secondary school located in Great Denmark Street, Dublin, Ireland. Its sports grounds are located on the Distillery Road in Drumcondra and on the Navan Road in Cabra. Belvedere is an all-boys school and most of the current teaching staff are lay-persons, though a number of priests and brothers take part in the school's administration. It was founded in [1832], celebrating its sesquicentenary (150th anniversary) in 1982. The College serves approximately 850 pupils. Belvedere is one of a number of Jesuit schools in Ireland.

Facilities at the school include a 25-metre swimming pool, a gymnasium, a state-of-the-art science block and a theatre with an astro-turf roof. Belvedere is a fee-paying school, costing nearly €4000 per year per student, although a scholarship scheme is available with the aim to be socially just.

The Jesuit ethos of social justice remains strong to this day. Students can help out on the Dublin Pilgrimage to Lourdes, take part in an exchange to Calcutta, where they work in homes for orphans and street-children and the St. Vincent de Paul Society is one of the largest in a school in Ireland, with activities such as old-folks parties and flat decoration taking place through-out the year. It is run by the students for the community of which Belvedere is a part. The pupils complete a charity walk from Dublin to Galway every summer to raise funds for the blind and The Temple Street Children's Hospital which is nearby the school. They also sleep out in the streets of Dublin before Christmas in order to raise funds for the homeless.

The school has a strong rugby tradition. In 2005, for the first time in the College's history, they won both the Leinster Junior Cup and Leinster Senior Cup. It was the first time in over thirty years that the Senior cup was won by a Northside school. Cricket is also, traditionally, a strong sport as the College has won both the Leinster Senior and Junior Cups more times than any other school. They have won the Leinster and All-Ireland schools debating competition (2005), winners of the Alliance Française debating championship and won the last ever series of Blackboard Jungle, a popular television programme on RTÉ. Their Lifesaving club is also very successful, and have many All-Ireland Titles to their credit and students have represented Ireland at International Lifesaving Competions.

Culture of Belvedere

The school motto is Per Vias Rectas translating as "By straight paths" or "By straight ways" and the College aspires to produce "Men for Others". Traditionally students wrote the motto of the Society of Jesus, Ad maiorem Dei gloriam, on the top left of pages in their copybooks. This translates as "For the greater glory of God".

The unofficial school anthem, often heard at rugby matches, is "Only In God", based on Psalm 62 in the Bible.

The school is known by the shortened name "Belvo" to most of its pupils.

The school yearbook is known as "The Belvederian". The term Belvederian is also sometimes used to refer to attending students and Old Belvederian (OB) for alumni. Old Belvederians normally refer to their graduation by using the name of the final year in the college followed by the year as, for example, "OB Rhetoric '84".

Belvedere College is the backdrop for much of James Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is a semi-autobiographical piece of work, and the teacher was based on Joyce's own English teacher, George Dempsey.

The school is separated into six years:

Rhetoric (6th year)
Poetry (5th year)
1st Syntax (4th year)
2nd Syntax (3rd year)
3rd Syntax (2nd year)
1st Grammar (1st year)

Philosophy was a seventh year [now discontinued] available to students who had sat their Leaving Certificate but were yet to attend University.

The old primary school also had these titles

2nd Grammar (6th class)
3rd Grammar (5th class)
Rudiments (4th class)
Elements (3rd class)

Alumni

External links

[Belvedere College Web site]

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.