Hedge schools to national schools

Under the Education Act 1695, only schools run by members of the established Anglican church could legally operate, until the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1782 repealed it. Catholics and Presbyterians kept small, unlicensed pay schools instead, and these were the hedge schools. Parents usually paid the master by the subject.

The name is more romantic than the reality. Wikipedia's article, citing de Breffny's Ireland: A Cultural Encyclopedia, says that once the Penal Laws eased, classes were normally held in a house or a barn, not behind a hedge. Daniel Corkery (1926) and later writers stressed the Latin and Greek taught in some schools; the same article notes those subjects were taught where there was local demand, not in every school. The scenes of boys reading Virgil in rags come from that tradition, and they describe some schools, not most.

How many were there? A History Ireland article by Tony Lyons gives an estimated 9,000 such schools attended by 400,000 scholars by the end of the "long eighteenth century". It also says that in Irish-speaking districts teaching was through Irish, and that by 1800 English was steadily replacing it as the language of instruction, because parents saw its value at "fair and market".

Wikipedia's article says no hedge teacher is known to have been prosecuted, but gives no source for that line, so treat it with care. A study by Yolanda Fernández-Suárez, cited there, found hedge schools still running into the 1890s.

The Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry asked the Protestant and Catholic clergy of every parish to return the schools in it in 1824. The Second Report (1826) printed the result. According to Who Do You Think You Are? magazine, its appendix lists more than 11,000 schools, hedge schools among them, and over 12,000 teachers.

Gap: the report's own national totals were not read for this page. Exact figures quoted elsewhere online (such as 11,823 schools) could not be checked against the report and are left out. Garret FitzGerald's book Irish Primary Education in the Early Nineteenth Century (RIA, 2013) analyses the returns in full.

In 1831 the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Edward Stanley (later the 14th Earl of Derby), wrote to the Duke of Leinster setting out a state-funded primary system run by a Board of Commissioners. The Stanley letter is still the legal basis of the national schools. Its idea was that children of every denomination would be taught together, with separate religious instruction.

That isn't how it worked out. As the national school article sets out, the churches soon applied separately for their own schools, and by the end of the century most national schools in practice served one denomination. A 1953 report found more than 90% were attended by only one. The Catholic bishops largely backed the new schools; Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin wrote in 1831 that trained, certified teachers would help in "suppressing hedge schools" (quoted here).

Wikipedia's Stanley letter article says enrolment passed 100,000 and reached almost a million within 40 years, citing Drudy (2009). Its wording ("by 1831") is muddled, so no start date for the 100,000 is given here.

The national system taught through English. Máire McCafferty, in a 2022 peer-reviewed article in COMHARTaighde, writes that Irish was "completely omitted" from the system for over half a century after 1831. The National Board made some concessions in 1878 after campaigning by the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language. Real change came in 1904, when the Board accepted the Gaelic League's Bilingual Programme for Irish-speaking and bilingual districts.

After 1922 the position flipped. A History Ireland review calls it one of the great ironies of Irish education history: the schools that had promoted English and ignored Irish in the nineteenth century became, after 1922, the main tool for promoting Irish. See Irish speakers at every census since 1851 for what happened to the number of speakers.

In the popular version, a child wore a stick on a cord and got a notch for every word of Irish, then a beating for the notches. In 1936 the Irish Folklore Commission sent out a questionnaire on bataí scóir, and the replies from Cavan, Kerry, Cork, Laois, Wexford, Limerick, Mayo, Waterford and Tipperary are in the National Folklore Collection, volume CBÉ 0495. They don't all tell the same story:

• Croom, Co. Limerick: a woman described the stick her mother used at school in Ballinard, Co. Tipperary. It was kept by the master, checked monthly, and the master punished the child, "sometimes the father of the pupil took a hand". She did not know whether the master or her grandfather supplied it. A second man in Croom said he never knew it to be used at school.
• Abbeystrowry, Co. Cork (1939, in Irish): old people spoke of a piece of wood (a "saghnum") hung on boys who spoke Irish, with the father cutting the score. It wasn't put on girls. No one there had seen one.
• Corkaguiny, Co. Kerry (in Irish): no one knew of the sticks, but people said Irish was banned in and out of school, with pupils set to watch each other and a slip of paper passed to whoever spoke it.
• Durrow, Co. Laois: the oldest storyteller the teacher could find, a man over 80, had never heard of it.

What is contested: how widespread the stick was, how long it lasted, and who was behind it. Some of these accounts put parents, not only teachers, in charge of it. No National Board rule ordering it was found for this page. The popular version treats it as Board policy; that is not shown here, so the stick is labelled folk memory, gathered in the 1930s about schooldays decades earlier.

Only the 1936–39 replies linked above were used. Later retellings online were not used as evidence. The Irish-language replies are summarised here, not quoted.

• 16 August 1878: the Intermediate Education (Ireland) Act set up a seven-member Intermediate Education Board. It was to promote secondary education through public exams, prizes and exhibitions, and payments to schools based on exam results. It was paid for out of Church of Ireland funds after disestablishment (up to £1 million). The Act says no exam was to be held in religion, and that the benefits were to reach girls' education "as far as conveniently may be".
• 10 September 1966: the Minister for Education, Donogh O'Malley, announced free post-primary education up to the Intermediate Certificate, in a speech to the National Union of Journalists. He said schools charging higher fees might choose not to join the scheme (source).
• September 1967: free secondary education began (source).

1841 (aged 5+): 28% could read and write, 19% could read only, and 53% could do neither (History Ireland, on the 1841 Census report).

1911 (aged 9+): 331,317 of 3,600,915 could not read, a literacy rate of 90.8% (CSO).

These two are not comparable. In 1911 the census raised the age from 5 to 9, because, as the CSO's background notes put it, it was unreasonable to call a child illiterate before they had had the chance to learn. The CSO's 1911 rate also counts "read only" as literate. National figures for 1851–1901 were not read for this page.

The first three columns are the CSO's Table 2.1, from Table XXXIII of the 1911 Census: people aged 9 and over, the number who could not read, and the literacy rate. The last three come from each county's own 1911 report. Each report says what share of people aged 5 and over were "unable to read or write" in 1891, 1901 and 1911, so these are illiteracy rates on the old age-5 basis: lower is better.

"—": Carlow's report prints the 1911 age-9 table but not the 1891–1911 comparison sentence. The Donegal scan on the CSO page has no introductory report. Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Londonderry figures in the last three columns are "for the County and City". Belfast City and Dublin City are separate areas; Belfast links to Antrim.

• No county literacy figures for 1841–1881 are given. They are in the printed census reports (and the Queen's University Belfast Database of Irish Historical Statistics: Literacy, 1841–1911), but they were not read for this page.
• The 1891–1911 figures were taken from scans: from their text layer, and from the page image where the text was garbled (Cavan, Mayo, Kildare, Londonderry). Kildare's 1911 figure (9.3) has a smudge on the scan.
• The 1824 survey totals and the hedge-school estimate are secondary figures, not read from the 1826 report.
• The census asked whether people could read and write; it did not test them.

Sources: CSO, Stories from Census 1911: Literacy ↗ · Census of Ireland 1911 county reports (CSO scans) ↗ · Irish speakers since 1851 · Population since 1841