This book offers the first full-length study of the education of children living within the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking communities in Ireland, from 1900 to the present day. While Irish was once the most common language spoken in Ireland, by 1900 the areas in which native speakers of Irish were located contracted to such an extent that they became clearly identifiable from the majority English-speaking parts. In the mid-1920s, the new Irish Free State outlined the broad parameters of the boundaries of these areas under the title of ‘the Gaeltacht’. This book is concerned with the schooling of children there. The Irish Free State, from its establishment in 1922, eulogized the people of the Gaeltacht, maintaining they were pious, heroic and holders of the characteristics of an invented ancient Irish race. Simultaneously, successive governments did very little to try to regenerate the Gaeltacht or to ensure Gaeltacht children would enjoy equality of education opportunity. Furthermore, children in the Gaeltacht had to follow the same primary school curriculum as was prescribed for the majority English speaking population. The central theme elaborated on throughout the book is that this schooling was one of a number of forces that served to maintain the people of the Gaeltacht in a marginalized position in Irish society.

This book examines school acts in the long nineteenth century, traditionally considered as milestones or landmarks in the process of achieving universal education. Guided by a strong interest in social, cultural, and economic history, the case studies featured in the book rethink the actual value, the impact, and the ostensible purpose of school acts. The thirteen national case studies focus on the manner in which school acts were embedded in their particular historical contexts, offering a comprehensive and multidisciplinary overview of school acts and the role they played in the rise of mass schooling. Drawing together research from countries across the West, the editors and contributors analyse why these acts were passed, as well as their content and impact. This seminal collection will appeal to students and scholars of school acts and the history of mass schooling. Chapter 9 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

Focusing on the history of education in Ireland and Europe from the seventeenth century to the present, and written by scholars from a number of disciplines, this collection pursues new areas of inquiry and offers new perspectives on familiar topics. These include an investigation of the emergence of educational print prior to the establishment of the national-school system; the national-school system and the Irish language; the educational formation of the revolutionary generation; the impact of the introduction in Ireland of 'free' second-level education in the 1960s; elite transnational education in the nineteenth century; school architecture; and the experiences of second-level education in the twentieth century as revealed through the life histories of pupils. This volume also includes an extended introduction that locates the historiography of the history of education in Ireland in its international context. These are the proceedings of the eighth Seamus Heaney lectures series, delivered at St Patrick's College, DCU, in 2015. Contents include: James Kelly and Susan Hegarty (DCU), Introduction: writing the history of Irish education; James Kelly (DCU), Educational print and the emergence of mass education in Ireland, c.1650- c.1830; Nicholas Wolf (NYU), The national-school system and the Irish language in the nineteenth century; Ciaran O'Neill (TCD), Education, cosmopolitan cultural capital and European elites in the nineteenth century; David Fitzpatrick (TCD), Knowledge, belief and the Irish revolution: the impact of schooling; Catherine Burke (Cambridge U), Poetry, materialities and montage: towards new histories of twentieth-century school architecture; Judith Harford (UCD) and Tom O'Donoghue (U of Western Australia), Exploring the experience of secondary-school education in Ireland prior to the introduction of 'free' second-level education in 1967; and Audrey Bryan (DCU), (In)equality of opportunity and educational reform in Ireland in the 1960s. [Subject: History of Education, Irish Studies, Pedagogy, Archives & Records]

For centuries, the Catholic Church around the world insisted it had a right to provide and organize its own schools. It decreed also that while nation states could lay down standards for secular curricula, pedagogy, and accommodation, Catholic parents should send their children to Catholic schools and be able to do so without suffering undue financial disadvantage. Thus, from the Pope down, the Church expressed deep opposition to increasing state intervention in schooling, especially during the nineteenth century. By the end of the 1920s however, it was satisfied with the school system in only a small number of countries. Ireland was one of those. There, the majority of primary and secondary schools were Catholic schools. The State left their management in the hands of clerics while simultaneously accepting financial responsibility for maintenance and teachers' salaries. During the period 1922-1967, the Church, unhindered by the State, promoted within the schools' practices aimed at 'the salvation of souls' and at the reproduction of a loyal middle class and clerics. The State supported that arrangement with the Church also acting on its behalf in aiming to produce a literate and numerate citizenry, in pursuing nation building, and in ensuring the preparation of an adequate number of secondary school graduates to address the needs of the public service and the professions. All of that took place at a financial cost much lower than the provision of a totally State-funded system of schooling would have entailed. Piety and Privilege seeks to understand the dynamic between Church and State through the lens of the twentieth century Irish education system.