Introduction

Abstract

This collection of essays adds to the growing body of work concerning the history of education published in Ireland and internationally. In doing so, it rests upon a long tradition of such research that not only remains integral to the study of education generally but also forms an increasingly important subset within the broader parent discipline of historical studies. History, as a discipline, has always commanded respect in Ireland, despite occasional political moves to weaken its standing in schools. Historians have done much to help Ireland understand not only its distant but also its more recent troubled past, and the history of education is closely linked to events from the mundane to the dramatic; for example, the provision of schooling following the Tudor regime, the rise of the hedge schools during the Penal Period, the relationship between schools and nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and between curricula and revivalist Irish language policy after independence or the reimagining (or unimagining) of schools by successive post-independence administrations. Indeed, it might be argued that we have dug as deep as we can in some of these pits and yet new artefacts continue to emerge.