Education and Enmity (Routledge Revivals)

The Control of Schooling in Northern Ireland 1920-50

Donald Akenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136333958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Geschichte der Pädagogik

First published in 1973 Professor Akenson's book traces the series of religious and political controversies which have battered the state schools of Northern Ireland. After the government's admirably intentioned, but muddled, attempt to create a non-sectarian school system in the early 1920s, the educational system was progressively manipulated by sectarianism. The way in which the author describes how children are schooled reveals a great deal about the attitudes and values of the parental generation and also helps to explain the actions of later generations.

1

Introduction

This is not a book about Northern Ireland’s recent street battles. It is about an extremely complex, fascinating, and bewildering culture, one which has a historical richness and an integrity that long antedate the flood of ‘analytic’ periodical articles and instant-history books about the region’s troubles. Unhappily, almost no serious attention has been devoted to Northern Ireland by historians, although there have been significant works by social scientists and members of the bar.

The way in which people school their children is culturally diagnostic and one can learn a great deal about Northern Ireland’s social and political configurations by studying the history of the region’s educational system. Furthermore, the way in which children are schooled not only reveals a great deal about the attitudes and values of the parental generation, but helps to explain the later actions of the children’s generation. Although this study deals primarily with the provision and manipulation of Northern Ireland’s educational system by successive groups of adults, the last chapter speculates, tentatively, about the effects of the system upon successive waves of school children. I am aware only too acutely that this book will have to be rewritten—by another author—in thirty to fifty years when the government of Northern Ireland finally allows access to its education files for the first half of this century. It is, then, only a beginning.

I have drawn a line at the year 1950 for the sections of this book which treat education in Northern Ireland from a historical viewpoint. The date is a convenient one and seems to me to mark approximately the point where one crosses the line from matters of past history to questions of present policy. In the last chapter I have ventured to discuss live policy issues. I hope this will not be taken as arrogance but as an honest concern with educational problems which are difficult, but not insoluble. Probably, however, I shall be double-damned, by some of my fellow historians for dealing with the present and by some Ulstermen for meddling in their affairs.

The reader may be surprised to find that scant attention is paid to educational events in the south of Ireland after 1920, but interesting as those events may be in their own right, they had almost no impact on northern developments. The relevant comparisons are with events in England, for these comparisons are causal; the Ulster Unionist government has consistently modelled its social policy on English precedents.

Also, in explaining the reason why Northern Ireland’s school system assumed its singular outlines, I have given considerably more attention to the actions of Protestants than to those of Roman Catholics. The reason for this is simple: the Protestants have been the dominant group in Northern Ireland and therefore have had a much greater influence on governmental procedures.

The vocabulary used in this study should not be taken as indicative of any particular religious or political viewpoint. ‘Catholic’ and ‘Roman Catholic’ are used as synonyms, without intending to derogate the Protestant Churches’ claim to be part of the universal Catholic Church. Also, the Protestant Churches are often referred to as if they were a single group; this is for the sake of convenience and not a denial of the significance of the theological differences which distinguish the various Protestant groups. Further, the words ‘church’, ‘denomination’, and ‘faith’ are not used in their precise sociological sense but as synonyms. In referring to clergy I have shortened their ecclesiastical titles; no disrespect is intended.

When referring to events after 1920, ‘Ulster’ and ‘Northern Ireland’ mean the same thing; I am fully aware that the historical province of Ulster is not coterminous with the region presently under the control of the government of Northern Ireland. No judgement is implied in these pages on whether or not the government of Northern Ireland has a moral right to exist. The empirical fact that it has existed and continues to exist is all that matters for the purposes of this book. I have used ‘the south’ and ‘Southern Ireland’ as identical in meaning to the official titles which the twenty-six-county government has assumed since 1922.

The librarians and staffs of the following institutions were especially helpful: Armagh Public Library; Belfast City Library; Belfast Town Clerk’s Office; Douglas Library, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario; Durham County Record Office; Linen Hall Library, Belfast; National Library of Ireland; Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland; Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; the library of the Queen’s University of Belfast; Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; the library of Trinity College, Dublin.

Special appreciation is due to Lady Mairi Bury for granting access to the Londonderry papers in her possession at Mount Stewart, Newtownards.

I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Professors J. C. Beckett, E. Estyn Evans, E. R. R. Green, J. V. Kelleher, and J. V. Rice; of Drs H. G. Calwell, George I. Dent, R. J. Lawrence, David W. Miller, and T. O’Raifeartaigh; and of Messrs J. J. Campbell, Alistair Cooke, A. A. Dickson, John Gamble, T. J. McElligott, Sean McMenamin, Nicholas Wheeler Robinson, and James Scott. For clerical and editorial help I thank Mary E. R. Akenson.

The educational structure which Northern Ireland inherited from the United Kingdom can be simply described. First, and most important, the overwhelming majority of Irish schools were under denominational control even though they were financed chiefly by the state. The primary school system (the so-called ‘national school system’) was in theory non-denominational, but in practice control of all but a few schools was vested in the parish clergy. Among the academic secondary schools (usually termed ‘intermediate schools’) the Catholic institutions were entirely under clerical control, the Protestant foundations usually being governed by a mixed board of clergy and laymen. There was also a scattering of schools conducted by laymen for private profit. In neither the primary nor the academic secondary network was there provision for local civic support of the schools through the rates, or any statutory provision for the participation of the local citizenry in controlling the schools. Only the technical schools, institutions operating under an act of 1899, were under lay control and in receipt of regular financial support from local taxation as well as from the central exchequer.

Secondly, the government of Northern Ireland inherited an educational machine which had serious mechanical difficulties. In fact, it is possible to argue that Ulster did not succeed to a mechanism of education but to three separate, self-enclosed systems: national education, intermediate education, and technical education. Like a great, untracked locomotive, each of these educational engines went its own way with little effort at overall guidance and coordination being made by the central government.

Of the specific flaws in the national school mechanism— that is in the primary schools—a particular vexing one was the predominance of small schools. The leading professional educators were disturbed that early in the twentieth century more than sixty per cent of the primary schools were single-teacher schools having fewer than fifty pupils in average daily attendance.¹ The one-teacher schools were usually ill-equipped and the hard-pressed teacher had to deal with children of six or seven ages simultaneously. In 1904 the commissioners of national education, at the behest of their chief civil servant, William Starkie, began a campaign to amalgamate small schools, but here they ran foul of the Catholic bishops and clergy. Catholic canon law delegated the moral supervision of each child to his parish priest and this supervision, the church leaders believed, could be most efficiently conducted if the children of a given parish were educated in a primary school under the direct control of the priest of their parish. Hence, amalgamation of several parish schools was undesirable because it would blur the lines of pastoral responsibility. Further, pastoral considerations aside, control of the local parish school implied certain secular prerogatives and patronage rights and it was a rare parish priest who was willing to give up the unfettered exercise of those powers. In addition, some clerics opposed the amalgamation of boys’ and girls’ schools on the grounds that the mixing of young boys and girls in the same school was morally dangerous. In the test of wills between the educationists and the Catholic authorities, the religious forces prevailed.² Whereas in 1904, on the eve of the amalgamation campaign, the average number in daily attendance in each Irish national school was fifty-six, the corresponding figure for 1919 had risen only to sixty-one.³

A slightly more tractable problem was the low proportion of children who attended school regularly. In the decade before the new states were established the average attendance in Irish primary schools was approximately seventy per cent of the number of children on the rolls, instead of the eighty-five to ninety per cent which it was reasonable to expect. At the heart of the problem was the Irish compulsory attendance act of 1892 which applied only to urban areas—a fatal flaw in an agrarian country. Moreover, the most important municipal corporations (eg, Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford) refused to cooperate in enforcing the act, partly because the Catholic hierarchy was opposed to compulsory attendance as an infringement of parental rights, and partly because the government steadfastly refused to give financial aid to the Christian Brothers’ schools.⁴

The most difficult problem concerning chiefly (but not solely) the primary schools was the lack of local involvement by the citizenry in educational affairs. From its earliest years the national system had effectively excluded parents and the majority of the local citizens from a voice in the management of the schools. Further, the citizenry were not required to aid the schools through the local rates; indeed, they could not have done so legally even if they had so desired. This was an especially thorny problem as related to Ulster because the cross-perceptions of four groups were involved: the educational professionals, the English Liberals, the Ulster Protestants, and the Roman Catholic authorities. The educational professionals, by and large, were convinced that the existing arrangements (or lack thereof) deprived the child of parental involvement in his schooling which could have been educationally beneficial. The English Liberal Party, a group especially important in any Irish matter, saw the problem through a lens originally shaped to suit the English situation, namely the principle that public educational institutions should be controlled by local civic authorities and underwritten in considerable measure by local rates. The third group, the leaders of Ulster Protestantism, were deeply concerned about the lack of local involvement in the control and financing of primary education. Crucially for the future of Northern Ireland, the fourth group, the authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, failed to perceive that the problem was significant. They viewed the educational system as a moral rather than as a strictly educational responsibility, and believed that the system of clerical control over each primary school was a moral necessity. In 1907 and in 1919-20 the Catholic authorities were able to block four separate bills which would have introduced a strong element of lay control into education. Obviously the matter of control was an explosive one which would have to be dealt with immediately by the new Ulster government.⁵

Turning to the intermediate educational system—that is, to the academic secondary schools—one finds that they too were often too small for efficiency: in 1904 no less than 110 of the 275 intermediate schools in operation had fewer than fifty pupils.⁶ The overwhelming majority of the schools were conducted under religious auspices and the fractionalism of the Irish religious situation made merging schools difficult. A much more serious aberration in the intermediate education mechanism was the method through which the government distributed grants to each school according to the performance of that school’s pupils on annual written examinations. From an administrative viewpoint this mercenary mechanism was simple enough, but it had the great disadvantage of turning many schools into mere cramming establishments. Departures from the set syllabus were discouraged because such intellectual excursions cost the school managers money, through diminished examination scores, even though the departures may have been educationally beneficial to the children. During the first two decades of the twentieth century the commissioners of intermediate education softened some of the harsh edges of the examination system by introducing bonus and incremental grants which were paid according to school inspections. Nevertheless, the system taken over by the Northern Ireland government was rigid and examination-bound.⁷

The curricular rigidity of the intermediate schools was compounded by serious staffing difficulties. Although male clerical teachers and nuns (who comprised about one fifth of the teaching force) were usually well educated and competent, the lay staff were not. Less than twelve per cent of the male Catholic lay teachers and eight per cent of the Catholic lay women were university graduates. Parallel figures for Protestants were better—fifty-six per cent and thirty per cent respectively—but hardly impressive, especially in view of the propensity of Protestant graduates to use school teaching as an interim occupation before moving on to some more desirable profession.⁸ The reasons why the intermediate schools were unable to attract suitable lay personnel were the low pay, the insecure tenure and, among Catholic schools, the near impossibility of anyone not in holy orders becoming principal of a school. Intermediate school teachers were little better than educational serfs and persons of ability and background generally avoided such posts.⁹

Of course, most of the creaking and grinding in the intermediate education apparatus could have been smoothed into silence if enough financial lubricant had been applied. Curricular rigidity, the proliferation of small schools and the unsatisfactory position of the teacher all could have been reduced if the commissioners of national education had possessed adequate resources. Unfortunately, a combination of rapid inflation and growing intermediate school enrolment during the first two decades of the twentieth century meant that the real income of the intermediate education commissioners was decreasing, not increasing. In their report for the year 1920 the commissioners reported that ‘the whole edifice of secondary education in Ireland is toppling to destruction’, and that if something is not done immediately to place Irish secondary education in the position of financial equality with that of Great Britain, it is impossible to see how the complete disruption of the system can be avoided’.¹⁰

In sharp contrast to the state of the intermediate schools the technical school system was in good order. The system, founded in 1899, differed from all Irish precedents in being controlled by laymen and in being non-denominational. The state authorities in charge of technical education encouraged local civic agencies in the planning and management of each technical school and in almost every case the school received some aid from local taxation. Not surprisingly the clerical authorities were suspicious of these secular institutions, but they could do little to impede their development: the department of agriculture and technical instruction had been created with strong Nationalist support and local civic leaders had heartily embraced the system. In any case, the technical schools were not a serious rival to either the national schools (because the technical schools took pupils after they had received their primary education) or to the intermediate schools (because the vocationally-oriented technical schools catered to a different clientele than did the academic intermediate schools).¹¹

Whereas the intermediate schools were tied to a nation-wide examination system, the technical schools received grants on a capitation basis with each school’s programme being framed to fit local needs. Whether or not the technical school system was a model to be copied or an embarrassingly successful experiment to be ignored was something the new Ulster government would have to decide.

Although several ad hoc attempts were made at coordinating the systems of national, intermediate and technical education, in most matters each organisation went its own way without reference to the other. Thus, there was a gap between the attainments of those who left the national schools at fourteen, the normal leaving age, and the standards demanded for those entering the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Life in a Northern Climate
• 3. The Londonderry Reforms, 1921-3
• 4. The Protestant Clergy Attack, 1923-5
• 5. Progress and Controversy, 1925-30
• 6. The Stranmillis Affray, 1930-2
• 7. Depression and Revitalisation, 1931-44
• 8. Not Peace, but the Sword, 1945-50
• 9. What Other Hope?
• Statistical Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index