‘Injurious to the best interests of education’? Teaching and learning under the intermediate education system, 1878-1922

Abstract

The personal histories of the teaching profession in Ireland have been largely unrecorded. We know very little of the daily lives of teachers and their pupils. School histories tend to be celebratory, and it is often difficult to gain any tangible sense of what day-to-day life was like in the past for teachers and pupils, apart from usually laudatory descriptions of school life in institutional publications. The school Annual-usually appearing at the end of the academic year-typically depicts idyllic, happy communities labouring in the cause of a shared ideal or ‘mission’. These official and sanctioned histories seldom reveal the daily, often grinding, routine of school life. The reports of the inspectorate provide statistical data and information pertaining to general standards, but the voices of those they describe are often lost to us. We know a little of the experiences of teachers in Ireland from accounts such as G.K. White’s The Last Word (1977), T.J. McElligott’s This Teaching Life (1986), Bryan MacMahon’s The Master (1992) and Maurice McMahon’s Mr Mac (2009), academic research or by anecdotes broadcast through public media. Hence, the “story” of teaching reaches the public in a sporadic, incomplete and often subjective manner.