Irish Education 1

Irish Education: the Road to Educate Together

Jason C Courtoy

Middle Tennessee State University

 Irish Education 2

The recovery of the ancient Greek and Roman literature commonly is attributed to the

Moors. However, a group often overlooked not just for its role in the recovery of antiquities

literature, but also seen as having no influence on Europe is Ireland. The Danish once were the

capital of the world’s mercenary forces and banking system, and Portugal once dominated the

sea trade. Where does Ireland fit into this category of the world’s great powers? Ireland was

once the capital of the known literary world during Medieval Europe. When Europe was

burning and throwing out their books, Ireland was gathering, copying, and writing every book

they could get their hands on and teaching them too. The Irish were not always what the

Roman’s and Europeans’ would call “civilized” people. The Irish Celts develop from nomadic

tribes into devoted Catholics through the work of Saint Patrick. This shift both gave the Irish

their love for literature and education, but also stalled their educational system as they missed

the benefits of Luther’s Reformation. This missed benefit halted Irish education giving way for

the development of the National School system and the Educate Together Schools.

The Irish were not completely illiterate. In fact they had their own prehistoric alphabet

called Ogrham and their own epic called the Tain. The Ogrham, nevertheless, was similar to

that of the Nordic runes and the Tain was rather an oral history of bardic tales. It was not until

after Saint Patrick converted the Irish to Catholicism that the Tain was even written down. The

Irish after their conversion began to take to literacy (in the other languages of the world, i.e.

Latin, Greek, and Hebrew) “as something to play with.” (Cahill 1995, 164) They saw language,

much in the same way as Jacques Derrida, Fredrick Nietzsche, or many other modernist

thinkers of pre/post World War II, where they looked at language not simple as a means to

communicate, but also fundamentally at why language is structured the way it is. Cahill states
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that they would ask, “Why… did a B look the way it did...Was there an essential B-ness?” (165)

Cahill also explains that the Irish monks “saw no need for self-imposed censorship.” (159) It is

this desire, curiosity, and lack of censorship that made Irish monks different from their

mainland brethren. It is also these differences that pushed the Irish not to burn books, but

rather to record all the books they could. This vast library of books in Latin, Greek, and their

limited amount of Hebrew texts lead Ireland to be the perfect place to re-educated Europe.

Monks from mainland Europe would travel for miles to monastic fortresses like Kevin’s in order

to be educated by the Irish monks.

Once Europe had recovered and England began pressing its protestant influences on

their surrounding neighbors, Ireland having been untouched by Luther’s Reformation saw the

increasing pressure by the English as a threat. The increasing pressure by the English crown,

but also Cromwell’s Penal Laws against Catholics, forced Ireland to ever increasingly indentify

“Catholicism with freedom from foreign interference and this in turn prompted the

development of a version of national consciousness which saw a fusing of religious, political and

cultural elements.” (Williams 1999, 318) As Williams further explains that this identification

with religion as national identity became ever more apparent with the fractioning of Ulster or

Northern Ireland and later the Republic of Ireland into political rivals with Ulster wanting to join

the United Kingdom as Protestants and the Republic wanting to stay free as Catholics. The

Republic, when deciding to establish its education system, attached itself to this sense of

cultural nationalism by reviving the Gaelic language and aligning with the Catholic churches.

However, the government soon realized that “social disharmony deriving from the conflation of

religious with cultural identity” (Williams 1999, 318) as the driving force to create multi-
 Irish Education 4

denominational schools. These schools would cater not to the national religion of Ireland, but

rather to each patron churches religion. This quickly upset many churches, and they “quickly

moved to ensure exclusive control of individual schools.” (Rowe 2004, 2) Even though the

churches secured control, the National school system was established.

Three remaining acts of legislation were needed to ensure the creation of Educate

Together in Ireland; the 1965 Rules for National Schools, 1971 New Curriculum, and the 1998

Education Act. The 1965 Rules for National Schools established that primary education’s

religious practices, called Religious Instruction, was too short within school hours; therefore

they placed the instruction of religion no longer on the teachers but rather on separate

Religious Instructors. The 1971 New Curriculum established the child-centered and integrated

nature of Irish schools today. “It made it effectively impossible for a parent to remove a child

from the inculcation of the religious beliefs of the school’s patron.” (Rowe 2004, 2) Lastly the

1998 Education Act made it the exclusive right of the patron of a school to establish its beliefs

and staff. These documents, along with Ireland’s cultural history, paved the way for the ethos

of the Dalkey School Project and the Educate Together Schools.

The Educate Together Schools have four main tenets to their ethos that their schools

abide by. The first of these and most important is their effort for a fully multi-denominational

school curriculum. In Ireland, the schools patrons (or sponsors) decide what the ethos or

religious background of the school should be. 1 Therefore, the patrons of Educate Together (the

schools board made up of parents, teachers, and community leaders) decided to recreate the

intended result of the National School systems multi-denominational approach as a means to

1
Since the establishment of the 1971 New Curriculum and the 1998 Education Act stated above their multi-
denominational view is able to be facilitated.
 Irish Education 5

end violence do to the polarization of religion. The way the schools go about this is during the

national allotted hour for religious instruction, they implemented their Ethics teaching. This

model allows for the equal teaching of all religions, including that of humanism, agnostics, and

atheists. It is composed of four main topics: “’Moral and Spiritual Development’, ‘Justice and

Equality’, ‘Belief Systems’, and ‘Ethics and the Environment’” (“What is an Educate Together

School?” n.d.) The purpose of these topics is to allow for not just the education of holidays

such as Christmas and Easter, which would traditionally be taught in other Irish schools, but

also the pagan holidays of the Celts around Christmas and various other religious holidays such

as Ramadan or Yom Kippur. They also leave the school rooms open for parents, after hours, for

doctrinal instruction or religious teachings of a specific type. These doctrinal instructions,

however, are extracurricular and not considered as obligatory leaving parents of agnostics or

atheists to not feel forced. The second tenet of Educate Together is co-educational. While not

entirely a large matter in Ireland today (as most schools in Ireland educate both sexes), this

tenet is implemented as a means to attack “counter gender stereotyping in all its forms.”

(“What is an educate Together School?” n.d.) A major issue with this tenet was not that it’s for

co-education, but rather as Paul Rowe points out the “increase in alienation of young people

especially young men from the education system.” (11) In the States, co-education usually

means an overemphasis on women’s education as a means to counter-balance male education

which tends to be left in the dust. It is promising however that the CEO or director of Educate

Together is aware of this increasing problem and is working to correct it.

Child-centered is the third tenet of the school’s ethos. This too like co-education is

nothing new to Ireland’s education system; the 1971 new Curriculum established this as a main
 Irish Education 6

goal of the National School system. This tenet is based around the idea that everything the

school, teachers, and board discuss should be decided on the basis of what is best for the

children not the school or teachers. However, this also plays into the way in which the teachers

present information to the children. One example from the texts we read expresses this

plainly, in dealing with a question of whether or not to buy a bus pass the teacher essentially

asked the kids “from whose perspective are we seeing the world in this material?” (Apple 2007,

17) The teacher was asking the students even though this material is biased one can still

understand more about multiple perspectives bringing not just the subject matter to life, but

also allowing kids to operate their minds in a more democratic manner. The last tenet is

democratically run, which has already been hit on a little bit above. The purpose is to provide

not just teachers and the board with a means to negotiate, but also to allow parents to feel like

they have a real stake in their school, community, and in the education of their children. The

way this is implemented is in the school’s board itself. The board is made up of teachers,

parents, and members of the community. The parents elect two members onto the board

(which each parent is rotated into these spots from the whole parent body), along with the

Principle, and two members of the teacher facility. In this manner, not only is the normal

school structure there (teachers and Principle), but also an equal number of parents. Each

decision made by the Principle or the school is discussed and voted on by the board leaving

even the color of the school’s walls up for a vote.

The major differences between my schooling and how our education system works

compared to Ireland’s and the Educate Together Schools are summed up in the opposite of

their four tenets. The first difference I saw is that the American system has to keep church and
 Irish Education 7

state separate under the Constitution, though they can educate in a non-biased manner, this is

quite hard to develop a fully multi-denominational system. Another problem is parent support,

Educate Together is created and run by parents that want their children in such an

environment, where as parents in American schools are forced due to zoning or exceptions

because of where they live and based on their financial abilities. An additional reason is that

schools though they can teach about religion decide not to and tend to leave this sort of

instruction to the parents (unless it is a Catholic or Christian private school). Instances where in

Educate Together Schools a child celebrating Hanukah or the Hindu Festival of Lights are asked

to bring their parents and have them talk about this holiday (what it means, etc), where in

America we tell them to stay at home or only to celebrate it at home leading many children to

teasing them about why they had to stay home.

Another large difference is that where Educate Together is child centered American

schools are school or score centered. American schools are not worried so much about the

child’s education as they are the child’s test scores. This is not to say that all schools, school

districts, and teachers don’t care about their actual education. Many of the intentions of

bringing up scores is meant as a sign of increased education, however the side-effect is not

always so. Often increased scores for a school means increased dollars, and low scores means a

school might be shut down. Another side-effect of this policy is that children are singled out.

The testing of each individual student accumulates into a competition not just for money, but

also between students. Children that get low test scores are called stupid or unintelligent by

their peers, and those with high test scores are mocked for being geeks or for making everyone

else look bad. I remember in high school the class would get mad at the one student that made
 Irish Education 8

a ninety-nine on a test because it meant that everyone’s curve was only going to be for one

point. The Educate Together schools, however, turn most projects into group oriented

activities. One classroom we walked into was exploring being creative, where student broke off

into groups to create a movie, website, or sculpture. No child was singled out. Art projects in

my elementary were individually based, where every student made a single sculpture. In other

words, choice was left only to the teacher not the students as to the projects. The last and

most important difference in their systems is that American schools are board run. They are

boards of elected members, and many of them often are not teachers themselves. The

decisions are often made for what is best for the county’s schools (i.e. money) rather than the

children.

The Irish’s love for free education in the Medieval Age foreshadowed that of the desire

of some Irish parents for Educate Together schools. The social tension between the Catholic

and the Protestant Irish (or North and South) gave the original creators of the Dalkey School

Project criteria to fulfill in creating a purely democratic and multi-denominational school

system. The final piece to the creation of Educate Together was the securing of not a patron

church (as it had previously been under the National School system), but rather under a patron

by the 1965 Rules for National Schools. The separation of religious instruction as the teachers’

job allowed for teachers of multiple faiths to come together under Educate Together. The

child-centered and parent involvement that Educate Together fosters is something I feel that

the American system can learn from. It might even fix the evolving authority dilemma that

Hannah Arendt describes about education today.

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REFERENCES

Apple, M. W., & Beane, J. A. (2007). Democratic Schools: Lessons in Powerful Education.

Portsmouth: Heinemann.

Cahill, T. (1995). How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from

the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. New York: Anchor Books.

Rowe, P. (2004, April 16). The Origin, Development and Potential of the Educate Together Ethos.

Retrieved July 1, 2010, from Educate Together: http://www.simonlewis.ie/et/?p=219

What is an Educate Together School? (n.d.). Retrieved July 1, 2010, from Educate Together:

http://www.educatetogether.ie/?page_id=26

Williams, K. (Dec., 1999). Faith and the Nation: Education and Religious Identity in the Rupublic

of Ireland. British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 47, No. 4 , 317-331.