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Arthur Sullivan, New Ireland, 1882 (1st edition was 1877), chap. II ""The Schoolmaster Abroad"", from pp.9-12
It was a calamity, the evil effects of which will long outlive even the best efforts to retrieve them, that at the period when in other countries, and especially in England and Scotland, popular education was being developed and extended into a public system, in Ireland the legislature of the day was passing statute after statute to prohibit and punish any acceptable education whatsoever--university, intermediate, or primary--for nine-tenths of the population. That is to say, the bulk of the population being Catholic, penal laws against Catholic schools--laws which made it felony for a Catholic to act as teacher, usher, or monitor, and civil death for a Catholic child to be taught by any such master--were virtually a prohibition of education to the mass of the people. [.....]
As early as 1783 the legislature commenced repealing the severest of these enactments against Catholic teaching in Ireland; by 1830 they had nearly all been swept away; and in the year following the late Lord Derby, Irish Chief Secretary, proposed and established the present State-school system. [.....]
Time had not been wanting efforts enough previously to supply Ireland with public schools; but they were seminaries which the Catholic Irish could not be induced to enter. There were the Royal Free Schools in 1608, Erasmus Smith's Schools in 1733; the London Hibernian Schools in 1811, besides quite a number of others. They all aimed more or less energetically at "weaning the Irish youth from Popery;" and the Irish youth, still more energetically refusing to be so weaned, stopped away en masse. [.....] The Irish valued education much, but they valued religion more.
Over the Irish national-school system established by Mr. Stanley in 1831 a fierce controversy has raged for some years. [.....] although that scheme rather painfully baulked the Irish of that which after such severe suffering and sacrifice they had some reason to expect--namely, a system of public education as much in accordance with their religious conviction as the Scotish and English systems were with those of the Scottish and English peoples-- they nevertheless "attorned" to it; and for the first time in Anglo-Irish annals, Irish children in thousands flocked into the Government schools.
Mr. Stanley stands in history as the author of the scheme; but as a matter of fact, Lord Cloncurry it was who devised and suggested it, the Irish Secretary coming slowly to espouse the project. [.....] On the one hand, all previous experiments aimed more or less directly at converting the Irish from Catholicism; on the other hand, the Irish demanded a public-school system at least as denominational as the English or Scottish system. His proposal was to forbid proselytism, but to exclude all denominationalism [.....] Secular schools were utterly repugnant to the "denominational" principles of the Catholics. Still the system was so great a boon, compared with any previous plan or proposal, that the Catholic prelates, with but few exceptions,* decided that to reject it would be wrong [....]
* The Most Rev. Dr. MacHale, Archbishop of Tuam, from the outset resolutely refused to approve or accept the new system.
page last updated 17 Oct 2005
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