The Pay Schools of Ireland and their Interface with the National System of Education

Figures

Figure 1: Richard Whately, Anglican Archbishop of Dublin: he was … ‘nothing less than the head schoolmaster of the Irish people’. Image, courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Figure 2: Hedge School, 1790s. Image, courtesy of Ms Sadhbh Lyons.

Figure 3: Reconstructed Hedge School at Newtown, Ballybrown, Co. Limerick. Author’s photograph.

Figure 4: The Spa National School, Tralee, County Kerry. Author’s photograph.

Figure 5: Kildare Place Society and Model School: ‘a society for the education of the poor’. Image, courtesy of Ms Sadhbh Lyons.

Figure 6: Thomas Wyse, MP for Waterford. Made great strides for legislation to underpin the National School System. His bill never got to the second reading stage. Image, courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Figure 7: Coolard National School, County Kerry, 1846–present. It is unusual to have a school still operating as a school 176 years following its foundation. Image, courtesy of Mr Maurice O’ Mahony, former school principal.

Figure 8: Model School, Newcastle West, County Limerick. Author’s photograph.

Figure 9: Reenturk National School, Tarbert/Ballylongford, County Kerry. The school opened on the lower road four miles outside Tarbert in 1868. It had views over the Shannon and Carrigafoyle Castle. It was a ‘double’ school in which boys and girls had separate classrooms and separate playgrounds. It was amalgamated in 1967 with Tarbert Boys’ and Girls’ Schools to form a new school in Tarbert. Reenturk NS building is now in private ownership and is used to house greyhounds. Author’s photograph.

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my appreciation to Prof. Tom O’Donoghue, Graduate School of Education, the University of Western Australia. His encouragement is cherished very dearly.

My thanks to the Library staff of Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, for their unstinting level of service, in particular Ms Elizabeth Brosnahan.

Gratitude is also extended to the wonderful staff of the National Library of Ireland, Kildare St, Dublin.

An especial thanks goes to my wife Sadhbh, for her support and patience.

Introduction

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

– Margaret Mead

The Western world, collectively, has a number of well-springs from which it has received its education philosophies, understandings and practices. Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome have given us much to deliberate on, much to dispute, much to contradict, much to absorb, and much to refine and re-imagine.

Likewise, with the Enlightenment period during which rationality held pride of place, and organized thinking groups such as the French philosophes became adversaries of traditionalism, dogmatism, religion, superstition, ignorance and oppression. Each epoch in history has evolved a type of education which suits contemporary requirements: each epoch also reflects on what has passed before, and may extract certain aspects of former ideas and give them a rejuvenated breath.

Down through the centuries education discourse has been concerned with elite members of society; it has been concerned with the artisan (to select one facet of society); it has been concerned with the male members of society; more recently, it has been concerned with women and children.

John Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) may be the first book on education that deals with the child. A whole plethora of publications on children has emerged since Locke’s time.

Education ideas have been and are forever in a state of flux. At one point systems of education did not exist: classrooms did not exist; schools did not exist, but is that true? No. Teachers have existed since time immemorial and so have pupils and students. They simply did not realize they were pupils, students or teachers.

Then, at some point, society began to order teaching and learning. For many centuries, there was one teacher to one student – a one-to-one ←1 | 2→correspondence in which education was perceived to be the preparation for one purpose in life. In Greek and Roman civilizations societies emerged with new ideas about teaching and learning. Schools emerged. However, it became very difficult to order society and its schools in such a way that could overcome diverse opinions. All-inclusive policies are now at the top of the agenda when it comes to education policy; it is now commonly accepted in the Western world that diverse opinions need to be reflected in policies that have a bearing on groups within different societies. This has been, and still is, a difficult task as human society is fissile.1 A pluralistic outlook may go some way in accommodating diverse opinions, and education can play a key role in that process.

Between 1295 and 1800 Ireland possessed its own separate Parliament. In 1798, at the height of the rebellion of that year, the British cabinet decided that this Parliament (Grattan’s parliament) should be extinguished, and that Ireland should send representatives to a United Parliament at Westminster. In fact, the idea of a union was far older than this, and had briefly surfaced and been implemented by Cromwell.²

With the dissolution of the monasteries in the middle of the sixteenth century came the confinement of education in Ireland to the remnants of the Bardic Schools and to private individuals, or to those few monasteries that for a time escaped the despoiling acts of Henry VIII. These were few and far between: to remedy the defect of there being an absence of educational institutions to cater adequately for the native citizens of Ireland, an Act of Parliament was passed in 1537, to encourage ‘the English order habit and language’.³ This Act pertained to the changes proposed in the dress, manners and customs of the Irish, in consequence of their now becoming subjects of the Crown. As regards the English language, the Act stipulated that every archbishop, bishop, suffragen and every other having authority ←2 | 3→… ‘shall keepe, or cause to be kept, within the place, territory or parish, where he shall have benefice or promotion, a schole for to learn English…’4 Cultural difference, to which linguistic difference was considered central, created political division, and was thus an important hindrance to Henry’s plan to incorporate all the inhabitants of Ireland as subjects of the crown.⁵ King Henry VIII addressed the citizens of Galway in 1536, instructing them to use the English language and to send their children to school to learn the language. His most notable intrusion through legislation occurred the following year. There was an implication in Henry VIII’s Act that language and national identity were related, and ‘conforming to cultural Englishness was to be the proper test of political and religious loyalty for “true and faithful subjects”; the use of Irish was to be taken as a sign of treachery’.⁶

Thus, it can be seen that the onus of establishing a system of parish schools was placed on the Anglican bishops, and various penalties were stipulated for non-compliance, while on the other hand, no extra funding was made available for this initiative. The intention was that funds from the dissolution of the monasteries would be set aside for the purpose of financing the Crown’s plan for an education system in Ireland.

Despite the good intentions of the Act, the measure became a dead letter, and was not taken seriously by Government officials, bishops or other clergymen. One of the reasons for this was that in 1537 the King’s writ went no further than the Pale. Another reason was the failure of the Protestant Reformation in Ireland. Thus, the Crown’s plan came to nought, as there was an absence of the required infrastructure, namely, schools to support it. However, in an exceptional manner, it seems that a significant number of these Parish schools existed in the diocese of Kildare and Leighlin in 1824, most of them being supported by grants from the Education Societies.⁷

Following the social and political upheavals in seventeenth-century Ireland the great hereditary families of poets, scholars and teachers, after they had suffered the loss of patronage, had either fled the country or had been gradually absorbed into the peasantry. By the eighteenth century, according to one commentator, the national literary tradition had become the heritage of the tiller of the soil.8

From the late middle ages to early modern times many types of schools were instituted. Aside from the parish schools of Henry VIII, which failed abysmally, another attempt was made by his daughter Queen Elizabeth 1: in 1570 she endeavoured, through legislation, to establish Diocesan Schools. These were similar to the later grammar schools. Along with the Royal Schools of James I and the schools of the Erasmus Smith Foundation, all attempts at educational initiative were geared towards Protestant purposes only. The Charter Schools, whose expressed object was to take the children of the poor and bring them up as Protestants, came into being in the fourth decade of the eighteenth century.

None of the initiatives had any great deal of success – all attempts had the education of Protestants in mind plus those Catholics who might wish to convert to Protestantism.⁹

It must be recognized that the Charter Schools along with the Kildare Place Schools had some level of success in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Though some of the schools (the Royal Schools in particular) were non-exclusive, Catholics and Presbyterians were unable, because of their religious beliefs and practices, to benefit from them. To this end, both the dissenting Presbyterians and Catholics carried on their own type of private education. For about 200 years, from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, the main source of education for the rural poor was the hedge school (pay school).

(c) £10 for a schoolteacher.10

Mr and Mrs Hall believed that the Penal Laws fostered a servile, dependant mentality among the native Irish.¹¹

The surreptitious nature of hedge school education however changed as the Penal Laws relaxed in intensity and in some cases were not implemented at all. Most historians agree that, by the 1730s, penal legislation had become somewhat relaxed. In 1782 and 1783 legislation was enacted to discontinue the Penal Laws, though some commentators believe that the spirit of the Penal Laws continued unabated well after the letter of them had been partially effaced in the courts, magistracy, police, education, corporations and revenue.¹² It was not until 1829 with the passing of Catholic Emancipation legislation that the Laws were finally abandoned completely.

The term ‘hedge school’, which developed from the customary practice of holding classes near a hedge, is really a misnomer. The phrase ‘hedge ←5 | 6→school’ was used by P. J. Dowling in the title of his book, The Hedge Schools of Ireland (1935)13 and it joined the realms of classical treatment of the subject, and was republished many times. It offers a colourful, idiosyncratic, if a somewhat romantic account of the schools and the teachers. It is possibly closer to the truth to state that these schools were very rarely held beneath hedges. More often than not, they were held in quickly built cabins or huts, and the better-off teachers held their schools in stone-built houses, and sometimes in their own homes, or in neighbouring houses in the parish. A more correct name would be ‘pay school’, because the teachers were paid by the parents of the children they taught. Payment varied from school to school and usually amounted to only a shilling¹⁴ or two per quarter from each pupil. At times the master lived on the hospitality of the people; sometimes he was paid in kind: butter, milk, potatoes, eggs and bacon were available where money was not forthcoming. Some masters supplemented their income by drawing up leases, measuring land, making out wills, drafting memorials to the authorities, or even in manual labour on the farms in the summer time (see interpretation of the word ‘hedge’ in Chapter 2). After all, these teachers were the educated members of the local community.

Prior to the Relief Act of 1782 there were many pay schools in operation throughout the country. The work in these schools had to be undertaken furtively so as not to attract the attentions of the authorities. Therefore, in advertising their wares, discretion was the better part of valour.

One method of attracting ‘scholars’ to their schools was by word of mouth, but another that was used from time to time was by putting an advertisement in the newspaper. No indication was given as to which religious denomination the advertiser belonged, and Catholics would not have been bold enough to proclaim they were breaking the law. Based ←6 | 7→on these newspaper advertisements, it becomes clear that those schools catering for boys-only offered a wide range of subjects: several included Greek and Latin. The curriculum, in general terms, was very much of a utilitarian nature, geared to equip boys for a mercantile or commercial career, or the army and navy. One advertisement, in The Cork Chronicle, Or Universal Register, 31 July 1766, by John Fitzgerald, a teacher at the Blue Coat Hospital school in Cork, advertised the following:

Others were more succinct: Austin Atkins15 and George Dobson¹⁶ merely informed the public that they prepared pupils for ‘civil, commercial, naval and military employments of life’.

According to the newspaper advertisements girls were taught reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, needlework and drawing.

There was, of course, a community demand for education, particularly literacy. There were occasions during which this demand was impeded: during a general down-swing in the Irish economy, particularly in the 1820s and continued for twenty years or so in textile and tillage sectors, the demand for education did not decrease, as might be expected.¹⁷ It is likely that demand increased during these years, as education importance increased as economic opportunities narrowed, while the declining demand for child labour freed more children to attend school.¹⁸

Broadly speaking, neither the British government nor the Catholic hierarchy wanted education to propel dramatic change in Ireland. The Catholic Church primarily sought to thwart the so-called ‘Second Reformation’, a ←7 | 8→vigorous Protestant evangelical movement that peaked in the 1820s, and the British Government aimed to keep Ireland quiet.19

Education also played an important part in agrarian activity during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries. Secret agrarian societies often used the written word in the form of letters to threaten the recipient, usually the landlord or some member attached to the authorities. An example of the importance of letter-writing, though rudimentary, is: