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An overview of the thinking that led us to write our most recent book, Piety and Privilege. Catholic Secondary Schooling in Ireland and the Theocratic State, 1922-67, constitutes the substance of this paper. Our central argument is that during the period 1922-1967, the Church, unhindered by the State, promoted within secondary 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. This situation proved attractive to successive governments, partly because the great majority of the nation’s politicians and public servants were themselves loyal middle-class Catholics. In addition, the teaching religious played a crucial role in the State’s project of harnessing schools as part of its Gaelic nation-building project. This paper considers what we deem to be three distinctive aspects of our work. First, we detail how it is a contribution not just to the history of education in Ireland but also to the broader field of the history of Catholic Church and State relations in education in the English-speaking world for the period examined. Secondly, we deliberate on the research approach we adopted in generating our exposition. Thirdly, we outline our consideration of three aspects of the process of education in Catholic schools that have been neglected in many accounts to date, namely, the manner in which privilege, piety, and sex education were approached., Cet article offre un aperçu de la réflexion qui nous a conduit à écrire notre dernier livre, Piety and Privilege. Catholic Secondary Schooling in Ireland and the Theocratic State, 1922–67. Notre argument central est que durant la période 1922–67, l’Église, sans entrave de l’État, a promu au sein des lycées des pratiques visant le « salut des âmes » et à la reproduction d’une bourgeoisie et de clercs fidèles. L’État a soutenu cet arrangement avec l’Église agissant également en son nom en visant à former une population alphabétisée et sachant compter, en poursuivant la construction de la nation et en assurant la préparation d’un nombre de diplômés du secondaire suffisant pour répondre aux besoins de la fonction publique et les métiers. Cette situation s’est avérée attrayante pour les gouvernements successifs, en partie parce que la grande majorité des politiciens et des fonctionnaires du pays étaient eux-mêmes de fidèles catholiques de classe moyenne. En outre, l’enseignant religieux a joué un rôle décisif dans le projet de l’État, à savoir l’intégration des écoles dans le cadre de la construction de la nation gaélique. Cet article étudie ce que nous jugeons être trois aspects distinctifs de notre travail. Premièrement, nous détaillons comment il s’agit d’une contribution non seulement à l’histoire de l’éducation en Irlande, mais aussi au domaine plus large de l’histoire des relations entre l’Église catholique et l’État vis-à-vis l’éducation dans le monde anglophone durant la période en question. Deuxièmement, nous délibérons sur la démarche de recherche que nous avons adoptée pour développer notre travail. Troisièmement, nous élaborons sur trois aspects du processus d’éducation dans les écoles catholiques qui ont été négligés à date dans de nombreux comptes rendus, à savoir la manière dont le privilège, la piété et l’éducation sexuelle ont été abordés., El contenido de este artículo constituye visión general de las ideas que nos llevaron a escribir nuestro libro más reciente, Piety and Privilege. Catholic Secondary Schooling in Ireland and the Theocratic State, 1922-67. Nuestro argumento central es que durante el período 1922-1967, la Iglesia, sin trabas del Estado, promovió en las escuelas secundarias prácticas dirigidas a “la salvación de las almas” y a la reproducción de una clase media y clérigos leales. El Estado apoyó ese acuerdo con la Iglesia con el objetivo de producir una ciudadanía alfabetizada y aritmética, buscando la construcción de la nación y asegurando la preparación de un número adecuado de graduados de la escuela secundaria para abordar las necesidades del servicio público y Las profesiones. Esta situación resultó atractiva para los sucesivos gobiernos, en parte porque la gran mayoría de los políticos y servidores públicos de la nación eran fieles católicos de clase media. Además, la enseñanza religiosa desempeñó un papel crucial en el proyecto del Estado al aprovechar las escuelas como parte de su proyecto de construcción de la nación gaélica. Es posible destacar tres aspectos distintivos de nuestro trabajo. Primero, detallamos cómo fueno solo a la historia de la educación en Irlanda, sino también al campo más amplio de la historia de la Iglesia Católica y las relaciones del Estado en la educación en el mundo de habla inglesa en el período examinado. En segundo lugar, deliberamos sobre el enfoque de investigación que adoptamos al generar nuestra exposición. En tercer lugar, esbozamos nuestra consideración de tres aspectos del proceso de educación en las escuelas católicas que han sido descuidados en muchos relatos hasta la fecha, a saber, la manera en que se abordaron el privilegio, la piedad y la educación sexual.

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Historically, patriarchy has been as dominant in education in Ireland as elsewhere. In the Irish context, it was promoted through the male-dominated Catholic Church, which controlled either directl...

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This article examines the perspectives of 14 primary school teachers subjected to a marriage ban in Ireland between 1932 and 1958. This oral history study provides a unique platform to examine the construction and articulation of these women’s historical memories. Interrogating their perspectives on the marriage ban provides an important window into the social and cultural world in which they lived, the norms and dominant values they encountered, and the ways in which they negotiated their own individual consciousness within a specific cultural framework. Specifically, the analysis of these women’s testimony generates significant insights into the gendering of teaching as a suitable profession for women in early twentieth-century Ireland; how gender shaped social and cultural roles; Church control over women’s training and employment; and the use of policy to deepen women’s social and economic subordination.

For the period 1922–1967 the Catholic Church opposed any notion of joint responsibility between laity and clergy for primary and secondary schooling. It did so in order to be able to pursue unhindered its major interest in schooling, which was ‘the salvation of souls’ and the production of priests, brothers, nuns, and a loyal middle class. Further, the State cooperated with the Church because in doing so it was able to pursue its own aim of producing a literate and numerate citizenry, pursuing nation building, and preparing an adequate number of secondary school graduates to address the requirements of the public service and the professions without having to provide schools. The Church legitimated the involvement of the teaching religious in associated practices with parents, school inspectors, and lay teachers. Relatedly, it worked to try to ensure that the voices of educationists who were not religious received little hearing in relation to education policy-making. A small number of secondary schools run largely by lay Catholics were able to operate. The individuals in question, in establishing these schools, quietly contested the hegemony of the Catholic clergy and religious in the provision of education, and indicated what might be possible in the future.

The concern in this chapter is with how the Church constructed the religious as teachers and as school principals, with memories of how they concurrently constructed themselves. An informing assumption is that one needs to consider these matters to arrive at an appreciation of how the religious were able to operate to pursue the Church’s interests in the classroom. Notwithstanding the nature of their religious formation and the rules that governed their lives, members of the teaching religious were not automatons in their approach to their teaching. If they had been so, then Catholic schooling could possibly have collapsed since the teaching religious would have been unable to respond to challenges, to change, and to demands of them by their superiors. While ‘religious formation’ was very much designed to produce very rigid and largely unbending individuals, the teaching religious were able to execute a certain amount of agency and be leaders even if contained within the structures of the life they lived.

This chapter provides an overview on the central argument of the book, namely, that the Catholic Church in Ireland, and especially from the time of national independence in 1922 until 1967, resisted questioning by non-clerics of its overall approach to education. As a result, it opposed involving lay people, including parents, in the exercise of what it claimed was its right and responsibility to provide secondary schooling. The State acquiesced willingly, thus allowing priests who were teachers, religious teaching brothers, and female teaching religious to promote unhindered sets of pedagogical, administrative and leadership practices aimed at the salvation of souls and the reproduction of fellow clerics and a loyal middle class. That situation, in turn, led to the promotion of piety and the upholding of class privilege as core characteristics of secondary schooling. Successive governments were pleased with the circumstances, partly because the great majority of the nation’s politicians and public servants were themselves loyal middle-class Catholics. Equally pleasing to them was the fact that the Church, for a fraction of the cost that would need to be paid by the State, was willing to fund secondary school education, and in so doing was prepared to meet the needs of the mercantile class, the public service, and the professions, for educated individuals in their late teenage years.

During the period 1922–1967 the Catholic Church in Ireland opposed any notion of joint responsibility between laity and clergy for secondary school education. The State also permitted the Church to pursue its major interest in education in secondary schools. Unhindered, the Church thus was able to promote within the schools sets of practices aimed at ‘the salvation of souls’ and at the reproduction of a loyal middle class along with priests, brothers, and nuns to maintain and expand the institution. The State for its part supported that arrangement as the Church also acted 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.

The Catholic Church harnessed the secondary schools in Ireland in pursuit of its interest in recruiting new members for the diocesan priesthood and for the religious orders by utilizing two major sets of practices. First, the teaching members of the orders were themselves regularly reminded of the theological arguments that justified their state in life as being most elevated spiritually, thus reinforcing within them the conviction that the choice they had made was noble. This reinforcement also enthused them to respond constantly to requirements in their rules and constitutions that they encourage their students to consider seriously joining the ranks. Second, the superiors of a number of the orders dispatched ‘recruiting agents’ specially chosen for the task to visit Catholic schools with the explicit intention of ‘seeking out vocations’. These personnel supplemented their talks to potential recruits by distributing recruitment literature among them. That literature served not only to remind readers once again of the hierarchy of vocations in the Church but also to encourage them to become members of an order by appealing to various sentiments, including their sense of care, of heroism, and of adventure.

This chapter provides an exposition of former students’ memories of secondary schooling in Ireland for the period 1922–1967, supplemented by similar material uncovered in the historical record. No claim is made that it portrays what were the common experiences of all. Rather, it is the product of a desire to cast the net as widely as possible, in order to canvass a maximum variety of perspectives. Further, most although not all of the testimony upon which we have based it is mainly of the ‘topical life story’ type. In other words, it is testimony based on memory. At the same time, we are not denying the possibility that it has the potential to provide understandings to add to the corpus of historical work already undertaken on the history of Irish secondary school education presented in previous chapters.

In the latter half of the eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth century the priests’ leadership role in Ireland increased, aided by the relaxation of the Penal Laws and the eventual granting of Catholic Emancipation throughout the United Kingdom in 1829. Concurrently, a new generation of reforming bishops shook off the approach of caution of their predecessors towards government and became increasingly assertive about Catholic interests, including in education. That assertiveness is central in the considerations of this chapter. Developments in relation to the role of the Catholic Church (the Church) in Irish society from the decades prior to the Great Famine of 1845–48 are outlined. Relations between the Church and the State on education from the establishment of the Irish National School System in 1831 to the advent of national independence in 1922 are then examined. In the third section the activity of ‘the triumphalist Church in Ireland’ for the period from 1922 to the introduction of ‘free second-level education’ in 1967 is detailed.

A pluralist, outward-looking approach to Catholic education in Ireland now characterizes some of the latest changes at the level of governance and curriculum. Regarding piety, the first of the two main themes addressed throughout this book, change is also evident. In particular, the manner in which it is promoted and practised in the Catholic secondary schools now is more benignant, personal, ecumenical, and inclusive of those of other faiths than it was in the past. Regarding the second theme considered throughout, namely, the role of the Church historically in favouring at secondary school level those privileged in Irish society socially and economically, the situation is that while expansion of education provision has raised national standards of education, it has not led to the kind of reduction in relative social class inequalities that many believed it could or would. Thus, while so much has changed in relation to second-level schooling in the country from the end of the period 1922–1967 and the move away from the theocratic State, the Church in Ireland still continues to be enmeshed in social reproduction through the position it continues to hold within the nation’s secondary school sector.

The Catholic Church ensured its teachers operated the secondary schools in such a manner that the sexes were segregated. That it did partly because of its view that if there were not appropriate safeguards, young people would readily engage in sexual relations before marriage, a practice considered gravely sinful. Thus, it promoted single-sex education to minimize threats in this regard. Equally, it promoted it to perpetuate the domestication of women and to encourage students, both male and female, to join the religious life, a matter dealt with in detail in the next chapter. For the same reasons, the Catholic bishops and the schools’ authorities also frowned on the provision of sex education. The Church also operated the secondary schools to construct as it desired those Irish Catholic males and females it recognized were not going to enter religious life.

The general patterns established during the period 1922–67 regarding the political and administrative arrangements relating to the Irish education system began to break down after following the introduction of free second-level education in 1967 and a subsequent great increase in attendance at second-level schools. In 1965, The OECD-sponsored Investment in Education report contributed greatly to portraying the economic, social, and geographic inequalities of opportunity in Ireland at the time. In particular, it drew attention to the fact that one-third of all children left full-time education upon completion of primary schooling and only 59 per cent of all 15-year-old children were in school. What was less clear in the public mind at the time was that levels of provision had been even bleaker on the establishment of the State and had not changed substantially over the succeeding four decades. That reality constitutes the background to considerations in this chapter. It opens by elaborating on the various types of primary, second-level, and continuation schools that existed across the nation. The overall patterns of access to and attendance at secondary school are then detailed. A very general exposition of the economic and social conditions in the country that influenced the existence of these patterns follows.

The Catholic Church and the State supported each other in their pursuit of their respective interests in schooling in Ireland. That was particularly so in relation to the secondary school curriculum. The interest of the Church was in maintaining an all-pervasive religious atmosphere justified by reference to its overt aim of using the schools as an instrument for enhancing ‘the salvation of souls’. Concurrently, it supported successive governments in the pronounced emphasis they placed on promoting the Irish language and Gaelic culture, including through the secondary schools. Further, on occasions when it perceived State initiatives in that domain over-zealous failure to have them implemented was due primarily to the Church having the upper hand in the partnership. At the same time, tension never spilled over into displays of public acrimony. A desire on the part of both institutions not to jeopardize the promotion of the intellectual and emotional development of students only in a very narrow sense served to maintain harmony, as it facilitated the deeper interest of both institutions in maintaining their power among the majority of the population.

Teachers are widely recognised as the most powerful determinants of pupil achievement. Those countries considered to have high-performing education systems, such as Finland and Singapore, have prio...

Examining the historiography of women’s education, the issue which dominates is understandably that of access. Access, or lack thereof, is a transnational construct which forms an over-arching framework through which the issue of historical gender equality in higher education can be interpreted and interrogated. Each of the seminal texts which examines the historiography of women’s higher education uses access as a lens. While it is important to examine access in the historiography of women’s education, a focus on access can obscure an interrogation of agency and particularly the role of social and intellectual networks in advancing key strategic objectives such as access. Against the backdrop of the higher education movements in both Ireland and the United States, this article examines the role of the Central Association of Irish Schoolmistresses (CAISM) in securing access for women to Trinity College Dublin and the concomitant role of the Woman’s Education Association, Boston (WEA) in securing Harvard degrees for women. Chronicling the activities of the associations, both compensatory and innovative, it interrogates how the women at the centre of the associations straddled a conservative/progressive agenda in order to incrementally open up the privileges of a patriarchal space to women

The political and social rationale for the establishment of a national system of education in nineteenth-century Ireland has been the focus of considerable attention by scholars. Less attention has, however, been paid to teacher quality and school effectiveness within that system. Various efforts were made over the course of the century to address the issues of teacher quality and school effectiveness. The paid monitor was introduced in the early 1840s to convent and ordinary national schools, with paid pupil–teacher programmes recognised in the larger convent and national schools during the same period. A more strategic effort was made to address the issue of teacher quality with the introduction of an in-service type intervention from the mid-1850s to provide a school-based programme for teachers and managers in effective school organisation. Examining this intervention is the purpose of this paper: what was its rationale and purpose, how was it planned and implemented; what was its impact and what is i...

In 1831, the British Government decided to become directly involved in the provision of elementary education in Ireland, a country over which it then had jurisdiction. By European standards of the time this was a highly unusual step. A number of scholars have interrogated the factors that led to this outcome as well as the role played by various individuals. Daniel O’Connell’s activities, at this time, have been described as relatively limited, which appears incongruous given that he is considered the most powerful Irish politician of this era and was then at the height of his powers. It is the central contention of this article that O’Connell was, in fact, intimately involved in bringing about a national system of elementary education. Of more lasting significance is the manner in which he defined the role of the politician vis-a-vis the Church authorities in educational policy-making. In this regard he established a pattern that remained unchanged for over a century and indeed, it could be argued, large...