"The charter schools, founded in the early eighteenth century, were envisaged by their supporters as the positive side to government policy towards the Roman Catholics of Ireland. The various penal laws sought to restrict power to those with an interest in maintaining the Protestant (Anglican) state, while the charter schools were to open the scriptures to the children of the poor, educating them in the Protestant habits of loyalty to the Hanoverian crown, of industry and of good husbandry." "In 1733-4 the Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Working Schools in Ireland was granted its charter. In the course of a century, over a million pounds in government funding was provided for the establishment and running of these schools. But the results fell far short of expectations." "Chapters on the origins of the schools, on their administration, their everyday routine and their curriculum, will reveal many reasons for their failure. Yet the charter schools were never intended to be the places of horror, the prototypes of Dotheboys Hall, that they so frequently became. How did it happen that, established with such high hopes for advancing the cause of the Reformation in Ireland, they ended by seriously discrediting it?" "This study draws largely on manuscript sources, official and otherwise, in repositories in the England and Ireland. The picture that emerges is of an organisation insufficiently aware of the existence within its own system of those very phenomena central to its purpose: the frailty of human nature and the prevalence of Original Sin!"--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This book provides a complete overview of the development of education in Ireland including the complex issue of how religion can coexist with education and how a national identity can be aided through Irish language teaching. It also offers a comprehensive exploration of the development, issues, challenges and future of education in Ireland within the context of historical studies.

David Hayton examines the political culture of the Anglo-Irish ruling class, which had settled in Ireland in different ways over a long period and had differing degrees of attachment to England, and shows how its multi-faceted identity evolved.

What was life like for Irish Protestants between the mid-17th and the late-18th centuries? Toby Barnard scrutinizes social attitudes and structures in every segment of Protestant society during this formative period.

A comprehensive cultural history of childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland, which explores how the notion of childhood fluctuated depending on class, gender, and religious identity, and presents invaluable new insights into Irish boarding schools, the material culture of childhood, and the experience of boys and girls in education.

Nigel Yates provides a major reassessment of the religious state of Ireland between 1770 and 1850. He argues that this was both a period of intense reform across all the major religious groups in Ireland and also one in which the seeds of religious tension, which were to dominate Irish politics and society for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were sown. He examines in detail, from a wide range of primary sources, the mechanics of this reform programme and the growing tensions between religious groups in this period, showing how political and religious issues became inextricably mixed and how various measures that might have been taken to improve the situation were not politically or religiously possible.

The abolition of the Scottish and Irish Parliaments in 1707 and 1800 created a United Kingdom centred upon the Westminster legislature. This text discusses what this meant for the four nations involved, and how conceptions of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh identities were affected.