Secondary School Education in Ireland

History, Memories and Life Stories, 1922 - 1967

Tom O'Donoghue, Judith Harford

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137560803
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Adopting a life story approach, this book explores the memories of those who attended Irish secondary schools prior to 1967. It serves to initiate and enhance the practice of remembering secondary school education amongst those who attended secondary schools not just in Ireland, but around the world.

1

Introduction to Secondary School Education in Ireland: History, Memories and Life Stories, 1922–1962

The year 1967 is very significant in the history of education in Ireland, marking the introduction of what became known as ‘the free education scheme’¹ that led to a great increase in attendance at post-primary schools across the country. Up until then, only a small number of those who left primary school continued their schooling. For the vast majority of this minority, what this meant was attendance at one of two types of schools, namely, vocational schools and secondary schools. The smaller proportion of the group attended vocational schools, which were run by local vocational education committees and offered a two-year course which was essentially practical and oriented towards the world of work. The larger proportion, albeit still very small in number relative to those who left primary school, attended secondary schools.

The general pattern of post-primary school attendance in the early 1960s had been established in the days of the British administration of the country and was maintained during the first four decades following Independence in 1922. In 1924, the number of students in secondary schools was a mere 5 per cent of those enrolled in primary schools in the State, and by 1960, the figure had increased only to 16 per cent.² The majority of those in secondary schools attended Catholic schools; there was a small number of Protestant schools, and a Jewish school was established in the 1950s. In contrast to the situation in many other countries,³ there were no State-established secondary schools in Ireland until 1966, when the first of a very small number of comprehensive schools was opened.

Secondary school education prior to 1967 was, then, very much for a minority. While the reasons for this are considered in the next chapter, there are also many related areas of research deserving of attention. In particular, there is a great lack of exposition on the experience of schooling by those in attendance at secondary schools in the decades immediately prior to the introduction of free secondary schooling. This book, focusing on memories of that experience over 50 years later, is offered as one attempt to address the deficit. It is recognized that there is also a great need for a similar book on those who attended vocational schools. Hopefully the present work will stimulate others to engage in a project to that end.

In conducting the associated research and in writing this book, we were motivated by our view that it was essential to commence the documentation of memories of students’ experiences lest, after a few more decades, these might be forgotten. On this, we were, in turn, influenced also by the small number of accounts available on the period between the early 1920s and the mid-1960s, which indicate that the experience of secondary schooling by students,⁴ as well as by teachers and parents, was far from homogeneous. This, of course, should hardly surprise us, since a range of categories of secondary schools existed in the country at the time, albeit with much in common in terms of management structures, the curriculum offered and the pedagogical practices employed. Also, while it is true that in the secondary schools the children of professionals, managers and employers heavily outnumbered the children of those from lower status occupations,⁵ many of their families were far from wealthy. Furthermore, even though the children of semi-skilled or unskilled manual workers were in the group to benefit least from secondary school education, not all were deprived of the experience. In some cases, this was due to Catholic religious orders of nuns, brothers and priests providing tuition free of charge. In other cases, it was due to parents making great financial sacrifices to pay the necessary fees. In other cases, yet again, it was thanks to scholarships provided by county and urban councils for a tiny cohort of students across the country.

A realization of all of the foregoing brought home to us the need to try to capture the range of experiences across the overall secondary school student cohort. On this, we could have commenced with an exploration of the field by seeking out such sources as students’ diaries, accounts in school magazines, and letters to parents and friends. However, we concluded that the most immediate task should be to capture the memories of a cohort of those who commenced Irish secondary schooling at various times during the two decades prior to 1967. As a result, we undertook a series of interviews with a wide range of people for whom this was the case. The remainder of this chapter locates the resulting accounts within the broader corpus of work on the history of education in Ireland and provides an overview on the nature of the research approach adopted.

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The history of education in Ireland is a well-researched field. Much of it relates to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but previous centuries have also received a reasonable amount of attention. The greatest emphasis in the existing corpus of work is on what might be termed ‘the high politics’ of schooling, dealing with such matters as who provided education during different time periods, for whom and to what ends.⁶ Central to this corpus of work are analyses of Church– State relations before and after Irish Independence in 1922, the churches in question being the Roman Catholic (RC) Church and the Protestant Churches, especially the (Anglican) Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church.⁷ Attention has also been given to analysing the nature of school attendance patterns over the years and the administrative structures in the various categories of schools established. Furthermore, a small but important body of work has been generated on the history of access to education,⁸ on the prescribed curriculum⁹ and on official positions on pedagogy at all levels of the educational system, as well as on teacher preparation,¹⁰ on school inspectors¹¹ and on the State-run national examinations, namely the Intermediate Certificate examination and the Leaving Certificate examination. We know much less, however, about some of the individuals and groups central to the system, including school managers, parents, teachers¹² and students.

The latter point is especially striking when considered in relation to former students’ memories of schooling. This is not to say that no works whatsoever exist. There are, for example, a number of autobiographical accounts which portray memories of primary schooling in rather romantic terms.¹³ At the other extreme, and also especially in relation to primary schooling, is a host of works which recall experiences of abuse, both physical and sexual, particularly in orphanages and industrial schools,¹⁴ as well as in more regular school settings. Some of this work is autobiographical,¹⁵ some is in the form of academic expositions¹⁶ and some yet again is in the form of testimony given to government commissions. Little, however, is available in relation to the large territory that lies between the romantic accounts and those of horrendous abuse, particularly in relation to secondary schooling. Furthermore, what does exist is usually not in the form of lengthy solicited narratives. Rather, it consists of various sections in works of reminiscences that, in most cases, span the broad range of human life experience.¹⁷ As already indicated, this book constitutes a first attempt to begin to address the deficit by outlining accounts of individuals who attended Irish secondary schools in the decades prior to 1967, the year in which free secondary school education was introduced.

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The accounts presented in later chapters were deliberately solicited from individuals whose memories were not dominated by a view that the experience of secondary schooling was totally idyllic. Also, there was no deliberate seeking out of participants whose recall of being brutalized overshadows all else. Furthermore, the selection of individuals was undertaken to capture a wide range of categories of schools, including schools catering for both Catholics and Protestants, and schools that differed in terms of their cultural ethos.

As this was the first attempt we know of to engage in such a project, we also deliberately sought to have amongst our participants individuals we considered would be likely to have reflected on their schooling. Thus, quite a number of our accounts are based on the memories of former teachers and of academics in the field of education studies. These are complemented by accounts from individuals who responded to a number of advertisements which explained the nature of the project and which requested people to volunteer to be interviewed. This purposive sampling approach allowed us to spread the range of participants widely.

We tried our best to have a gender balance and to have the memories of those who were boarding school students recorded alongside the memories of those who were day students. Also, all of the accounts are based on interviews with those currently in the ‘middle classes’. It is difficult to see how this situation could have been otherwise since a main function of secondary school education was to provide the credentials necessary either to maintain the middle-class position into which one was born, or allow one to move into this position. In saying this, we recognize that we could, in a larger project, explore the memories of those who did not succeed in moving up the social ladder as a result of their attendance at a secondary school, those who dropped out after attending for a year or two and those who remained in school for five or six years, but ended up failing the Leaving Certificate examination.

Rather than being oral history, where the aim is to gain information about the past, the research which eventuated in the solicited accounts presented in this book can be seen as being in the life history tradition. A life history is ‘the history of an individual’s life given by the person living it and solicited by the researcher’.¹⁸ It makes extensive use of the in-depth interview in order to encourage participants to reveal, in their own words, their perspectives on their lives, experiences and situations. Accounts that emerge from the adoption of this approach are mediated by the researcher’s interaction with the person during the telling of the story. Thus, one overcomes, to some extent, the problem in the traditional autobiography that what we read is what the author wishes us to know.¹⁹

Life history research in relation to education has become very popular over the last four decades. A relatively recent overview on scholarly contributions in this tradition has been provided by Rolls et al.²⁰ Teachers’ careers constitute one area of focus, with early comprehensive studies having been conducted by Lortie,²¹ Sikes et al.,²² Huberman²³ and Fessler and Christinsen.²⁴ There is a related tradition of recording individuals’ memories of schooling which has a much longer history. An example recounted by O’Donoghue²⁵ concerns Count Giovanni of Porcia who, in the early 1720s, invited a number of Italian intellectuals to tell the story of their lives. They were asked to describe the methods by which they were taught grammar and other subjects at school and university. The project led to the writing of The Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself and was published in a Venetian journal in 1728.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, Abbs²⁶ also demonstrated the potential of another related approach in his work Autobiography in Education. He focused on the manner in which education affected individuals by asking the fundamental question: where is it that education takes place? Education, he argued, cannot take place without reference to the individual; it is essentially an enterprise concerned with interior states and conditions. He then went on to use exemplary autobiographies from such notable figures in history as Augustine, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Gorky, for the purpose of studying the processes of childhood, education and growth.

Other significant studies making use of autobiography as a method in educational research were carried out by Goertzel and Goertzel,²⁷ who utilized published autobiographies of various eminent twentieth-century personalities to identify psycho-social factors influencing childhood formation. Similar work was carried out by Benjamin Bloom at the University of Chicago and was published under the title Developing Talent in Young People.²⁸ Here Bloom relates the results of his attempt to examine the processes by which highly talented individuals in the arts, business, sport, mathematics and science reached the highest levels of accomplishment in their chosen fields. In his studies, he placed great emphasis on investigating participants’ recollections of their educational experiences, with tape-recorded data forming the main source material for the research.

In the last two decades, accounts of research on other groups have also been written. These include those of adult dyslexics recalli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction to Secondary School Education in Ireland: History, Memories and Life Stories, 1922–1962
• 2. The Broad Background to Secondary School Education in Ireland, 1922–1962
• 3. Secondary School Education in Diocesan Colleges in Ireland, 1922–1962
• 4. Secondary School Education in Schools of the Irish Christian Brothers in Ireland, 1922–1962
• 5. Secondary School Education in Other Catholic Boys’ Secondary Schools in Ireland, 1922–1962
• 6. Secondary School Education in Girls’ Catholic Secondary Schools Run by the Sisters of Mercy and the Presentation Sisters in Ireland, 1922–1962
• 7. Secondary School Education in Girls’ Catholic Secondary Schools Run by Other Orders of Nuns in Ireland, 1922–1962
• 8. Secondary School Education in Protestant Secondary Schools in Ireland, 1922–1962
• 9. Secondary School Education in Various Other Secondary Schools in Ireland, 1922–1962
• 10. History, Memories and Life Stories of Secondary School Education in Ireland, 1922–1962: An Overview
• Notes
• References
• Index