Origin of our schools goes back to one letter
Edward Stanley’s letter to the Duke of Leinster was the foundation document for our national school system.
Predating similar provision in England and Scotland by about 40 years, the all-Ireland or national system was the Westminster government’s response to the intricate circumstances of its most ancient colony in the immediate aftermath of Catholic Emancipation, 30 years after the Act of Union.
Education in Ireland was a highly contentious dimension in a society that had many deep-seated religious, political, economic, cultural and social divisions.
The Whig-Liberal government of Earl Grey made its decisive move to take control of elementary education by appointing a state board of commissioners to oversee a new scheme of schools for the poor.
The Chief Secretary, Edward Stanley, announcing his intentions in the House of Commons on 9 September 1831, quickly followed up with a written plan conveyed in a letter in October to the Duke of Leinster, Dublin’s leading nobleman.
By December, the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland had commenced the national school system in a government office at 30 Upper Merrion Street in the heart of ascendancy Dublin.
Ireland’s burgeoning population of nearly eight million people was to have the first state system of elementary education in the English-speaking world.
Tailored to meet the specific requirements of Ireland, this gigantic state intervention in one of the poorest parts of the realm was an extraordinary development for its time.
Stanley’s letter committed the government to bear two-thirds of the costs out of public funds for a school system intended to be non-denominational or inter-denominational.
Stanley hoped to unite children of all religions and have joint applications from Catholics and Protestants to
provide common schools throughout the island.
A main feature of Stanley’s scheme was that children would be given combined secular instruction and separate religious instruction. A key aspect of Stanley’s plan for education was that inspectors would visit and report on schools to enable the Commissioners to control and superintend the system.
Inspection would also provide comprehensive knowledge about educational provision in all districts of Ireland and be publicly accounted in annual reports.
Stanley’s scheme proved to be highly controversial, especially among the various church bodies all of whom sought to vary the conditions on which grants were based.
The idea of a distinct separation between secular and religious instruction was challenged by churchmen of all denominations.
Over a period of about 30 years, Stanley’s plan for national schools was fundamentally altered and the system became largely denominational in practice.
However, paradoxically, the Commissioners preserved the original principles in their Rules and Regulations so that schools were open to pupils of all denominations and interference with the religious tenets of any pupils was prohibited.
The denominational tensions that bedevilled the national school system for decades were remote from the concerns of the ‘lower orders’ for whom the system was intended.
Gradually at first, but rapidly in the 1840s and later decades, the national school system expanded to be countrywide, increasingly supplanting or assimilating the indigenous schools of previous times. Within 20 years of its foundation, the system had almost 5,000 schools with over half a million pupils on school rolls.
At its peak in 1903, the national system numbered almost 9,000 operational schools with about three-quarters of a million pupils enrolled.
While the system had many shortcomings, it provided hundreds of thousands of pupils with literacy and numeracy skills that had transformative effects on the country.
For countless thousands of emigrants to North America and elsewhere, the national school system provided an
important and crucial measure of education, assisting many Irish men and women to build new lives in other lands.
Up to recent years, attendance at national school loomed largest as the educational experience of the vast majority of the children and young people of Ireland. A hugely successful aspect in the early years of the system was the development in Marlborough Street in Dublin of a series of lesson books that were much sought after, not alone in Ireland, but in Britain too.
These proved to be best-sellers throughout the colonies. Through the sale of books, and as a model for other territories such as those of Australia, Ireland’s national system had global reach from Canada to New Zealand for a period in the 19th century.
A leading and profound failure of the national school system was that it made no provision for the Irish language as a language of instruction or as a language for its own sake.
Irish language and culture were almost totally excluded from the system with significant effect for the contraction of the Irish language.
English, the preordained idiom of the national schools from the beginning, was the vernacular for almost all of Ireland by the close of the 19th century. With a resurgence of interest in Irish tradition and cultural revival around 1900, the Irish language was to be a
contributory motive force for national independence and identity with deep implications later for education in a self-governing Ireland.
Remarkably, Stanley’s letter was not overtaken by comprehensive legislation for education in Ireland.
Whereas Ireland led the way in providing for a national system, it failed to follow the example set in Britain from 1870 to devise updated arrangements for educational governance.
The critical failure to introduce some measure of rate aid and local control for education to the Irish system had long-term consequences both for funding and broadening interest in education.
Educational provision in the national school system was frugal and parsimonious, and underfunding remained a feature for decades. Concerted efforts to reform and restructure education prior to political independence in 1922 ended in failure so that Stanley’s letter maintained full currency in post-independence Ireland.
Modern systems for governing and administering education were not developed in Ireland, and integrated and co-ordinated structures for its oversight proved elusive. Not until 1998, three quarters of a century after independence, did an education act finally provide legislative arrangement for education in Ireland.
For several reasons, the role of churches in the national school system was predominant. This had many implications for the operation, control, resourcing and management of education over many decades with notable repercussions for post-primary educational development in Ireland.
Public provision of local funding, and civic interest and accountability in primary education, have not been features of the national school system.
This has had considerable effects for Irish society not least of which is the current impasse in making provision for diversity in an increasingly diverse population. While the State provides almost all the funding for primary education, it has significant restrictions in its capacity to ensure local responsiveness to changing requirements.
Stanley’s prescription for combined secular instruction and separate religious instruction in common schools, unsuccessful in the 19th century, may yet find greater acceptance in the 21st century in a changed and changing Ireland.
In the 1830s, an interested and observant female school manager remarked that the national school system was ‘a most admirable system’ as she described it as ‘the best present that was ever made to the country’.
For many reasons, despite its significant failings, there is much to celebrate in the contribution that the national schools and their teachers have made to progress and development.
Few, if any, British politicians of the 19th century could point to a legacy as important or valuable as all that derived from Edward Stanley’s letter of 1831.
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