THE issue of the control of primary schools has taken on a new urgency in recent weeks, with moves afoot to provide for greater diversity in school patronage in Ireland.
It’s a far cry from the day in September 1831 when the House of Commons voted a sum of £30,000 “to enable the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to assist in the education of the people.” Westminster had long studied the question of providing for the education of the poor in Ireland.
Ultimately, it fell to Edward Stanley as chief secretary for Ireland to propose the details of a new scheme for elementary education to meet the circumstances of the island of Ireland. The scheme adapted recommendations made by a select committee and also the proposals of Thomas Wyse, MP for Co Tipperary. Daniel O’Connell welcomed the government’s initiative that followed relatively soon after the passing of Catholic Emancipation two years before.
Stanley’s legacy was the provision for setting up schools throughout Ireland. Of profound significance for ordinary people, the national school system owed its origins to the so-called Stanley Letter. Dated October 1831 in London, the handwritten letter was addressed to the Duke of Leinster, the leading Irish nobleman of the time, a Protestant who was well regarded by Catholics. The letter directed that an unpaid board of commissioners would be appointed under his presidency to oversee a system of national education for the poorer classes in Ireland.
The board would have absolute control over funds voted by parliament to grant aid for the erection of schools, to pay gratuities to teachers, to pay inspectors to visit and report on schools, to train teachers, to produce suitable textbooks and to make regulations to effect the government’s intentions. The system was to unite children of different creeds so that children of different persuasions would receive combined moral and literary instruction but separate religious instruction. The Stanley Letter bore many signs of a pragmatic and tentative approach to the intricacies of the religious and political circumstances of Ireland.
Intended as national in the sense that it would encompass the whole of Ireland, the national school system commenced operations at the end of 1831. In spite of many difficulties, it was soon apparent that the system was successful. Acquiring headquarters in Dublin at Marlborough Street by 1835, steps were taken to build model schools and training colleges for men and women soon after. In the following decades, the national school system went from strength to strength, though it became in practice largely denominational. Its remarkable growth may be understood from the fact that when Stanley died in 1869, there were over 6,500 national schools established throughout Ireland, with close to one million pupils on rolls.
An important detail was that the system made no overt reference any longer to the poorer classes as the national schools gradually came to embrace virtually all the children of the country.
As the national school system developed, it spawned a great variety of institutions and positions. There were ordinary schools, model schools, agricultural schools, industrial schools, monastery and convent schools, workhouse and prison schools, evening schools and even navigation and maritime schools or departments. There were teachers, principals, assistants, workmistresses, monitors, pupil teachers, as well as handicraft, cookery and dairy instructors.
Within the administration in Dublin, there were housekeepers, gatekeepers, watchmen, messengers, apprentice clerks and boys, copyists, abstractors, pay clerks, higher clerks, storekeepers, packers, book-keepers, financial secretaries, secretaries, and resident commissioners.
In the field so to speak, there were inspectors, sub-inspectors, assistant inspectors, head inspectors and chiefs of inspection as well as a directress of needlework, an examiner of music, school organisers, and professors in charge of teacher training colleges for males and females.
For the pupils who attended the schools, a range of new experience opened up with the appearance of lessons, school books, timetables, class divisions, roll books and registers, copybooks, maps, slates, nibs, inkwells, school clocks and a myriad other items of interest and fascination. A whole new chapter of Irish history had commenced.
Stanley succeeded to become the fourteenth earl of Derby and was prime minister on three occasions. Regarded as somewhat aloof and perhaps too given to shooting and horse racing, he was not the most popular or distinguished of statesmen. However, his association with the foundation of the national school system ensures for him a place of note in the history of Ireland, considering that the national schools provided schooling for successive generations of Irish men and women and, in the process, eradicated illiteracy within a few generations of its inception.
Few institutions have so deeply imbued and coloured Irish life. Surprisingly, the Stanley Letter endured as a key charter for the primary school system of Ireland for an extraordinarily long time – until comprehensive modernising legislation was belatedly passed in 1998.