Culture and education in Ireland 1920 - 1960

Abstract

This study investigates the interrelationship between those cultural influences which the author identifies as key determinants of educational development in both parts of Ireland in the period 1920-1960 and, as a consequence, the manner in which educational policies were pursued over those years.

Beginning with an examination of the state of education at elementary and secondary levels on the eve of Ireland being partitioned and of the cultural influences which had shaped these sectors of Irish education over the preceding century, the study focuses in detail on its evolution in the following four decades. Religious and political ideologies are identified as the source of the major cultural influences, with the sharp contrast and antagonisms which they contain in their Irish contexts providing the basis for the rapid divergence between the systems in both parts of the country. Contrast and antagonisms were not, however, merely confined to relationships on a North-South basis. Within both parts of Ireland, but most particularly within the North, a further set of contrasts and antagonisms existed, which created their own divisions. Religious and political influences are identified as the primary determinants of these divisions. The South, too, experienced tensions which, if they did not lead to the sharp internal divisions evident in the North, did, nonetheless, mark the evolution of education in very distinct ways.

The framework for the investigation is set by a discussion which suggests that national education in Ireland, no less than education in other contexts, is inevitably subject to dominant cultural influences. The particularities of the Irish context are provided by the very power of two sets of influences which managed, in the period under discussion to achieve, each for itself, a degree of hegemony unrivalled in preceding periods. This was achieved as a result of the coalescence of religious and political interests which established a degree of mutual interdependence with considerable implications for education.

Reference is made to F.S.L. Lyons major work of cultural analysis 'Culture and Anarchy in Ireland' which provides a second framework for the investigation. Using this framework links and parallels are traced, some direct, others oblique, between developments in both parts of the country. Despite the extent to which the systems formally diverged, one is left, as a result, with a strong sense of having witnessed quite similar cultural influences at work.

Date of Award	1989
Original language	English
Supervisor	Roger Austin (Supervisor)