Education and the 'universalist' idiom of empire: Irish National School Books in Ireland and Ontario

History of Education

Volumn 37, Issue 5, 2008, Pages 645-660

  Walsh, Patrick ^a  

^a QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Canada; Education; Imperialism; Ireland; Schoolbooks; Universalism

Indexed keywords

EID: 51849163809     PISSN: 0046760X     EISSN: 14645130     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00467600701504964     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. J. Cleary, 'Edward Said and the Cultural Intellectual at Century's End', The Irish Review 32, Autumn/Winter (2004): 7.
2. A current of recent, revisionist historiography questions the concept of 'colonialism' in discussing Ireland's relationship with Britain: see Stephen Howe Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
3. For more diverse analyses see Terence McDonough, ed., Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005).
4. J.M. Goldstrom, Education: Elementary Education 1780-1900 (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1972), 74.
5. Donald H. Akenson, The Irish Education Experiment: The National System of Education in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 229-30.
6. See J.M. Goldstrom, The Social Content of Education 1808-1870 (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972), Ch. 3 'The Secular Phase'.
7. In historical writing Ontario is often referred to as both Upper Canada and Canada West, two of the names by which it was officially known as the constitution evolved in the nineteenth century.
8. Egerton Ryerson, Report on a system of public elementary instruction for Upper Canada by the Reverend D.D. (Montreal: Lovell & Gibson, 1847).
9. D.H. Akenson, 'Mass Schooling in Ontario: the Irish and "English Canadian" Popular Culture', in Being Had: Historians, Evidence and the Irish in North America (Ontario: P. D. Meany Publishers, 1985), 146-47.
10. V.E. Parvin, Authorization of Textbooks for the Schools of Ontario 1846-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 36-37.
11. Akenson, 'Mass Schooling in Ontario', 148.
12. For a detailed account of the establishment of the Ontarian system of common schools see Bruce Curtis, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 1836-1871 (London: Falmer Press, 1988).
13. Parvin, Authorization of Textbooks, 21.
14. Ibid., 26.
15. Ibid., 29.
16. D.H. Akenson, The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1984), 16-28.
17. Cecil Houston and William J. Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), vii.
18. Ibid., 3.
19. Ibid., 154.
20. R. White, Ontario 1610-1985; A Political and Economic History (Toronto and London: Dundurn Press, 1985), 123.
21. For an analysis of the growth of 'separate schools' and the contribution to this of the Irish Catholic population in Ontario see Chapter 9 in Susan E. Houston and Alison Prentice, Schooling and Scholars in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).
22. Ibid., 122.
23. Akenson, 'Mass Schooling in Ontario', 174.
24. Ibid., 185.
25. Ibid., 168.
26. Akenson, Irish Education Experiment, 383-84.
27. For a contemporary newspaper account of conditions in Skibbereen in West Cork in 1846 see C. Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994), 123.
28. 'In the 1850s, the Census Commissioners recorded that in the ten years from 1841 to 1851 the population of Ireland had fallen from 8,175,000 persons to 6,552,385.' Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 295.
29. C.Ó Gráda, Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 85.
30. Akenson, Irish Education Experiment, 376-85.
31. See Ó Gráda, Black '47 and Beyond, 105.
32. M. Daly, The Famine in Ireland (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1986), 53-55.
33. Akenson has written about the proliferation of famine historiography and commemorations that accompanied the 150th anniversary of the Famine in 1995 as including many which indulge in 'faminepornography'. See D.H. Akenson, 'A Midrash on "Galut", "Exile" and "Diaspora" Rhetoric', in The Hungry Stream: Essays on Emigration and Famine, ed. E.M. Crawford (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University, Belfast, 1997), 5. The debate on 'revisionism' between Irish (and Irish-American) scholars has been 'lively'.
34. E. Ryerson, The Story of my Life (Toronto: William Briggs, 1883);
35. G.J. Hodgins, ed., Ryerson Memorial Volume (Toronto: Warwick & Sons, 1889);
36. G.J. Hodgins, ed., Documentary History of Education in Upper Canada 1791-1876 (28 volumes) (Toronto: King's Printer, 1894-1910);
37. C.B. Sissons, Egerton Ryerson: His Life and Times (Clarke, Irwin and Co, 1947);
38. N. McDonald and A. Chaiton, eds., Egerton Ryerson and his Times (Toronto: Macmillan, 1978).
39. For an extended biographical treatment and for a fuller bibliography see also R.D. Gidney, 'Entry for Egerton Ryerson', in Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www. biographi. ca/EN/index. html
40. R.D. Gidney, 'Entry for Egerton Ryerson', Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/EN/index. html (accessed 17 January 2006).
41. However, see Bruce Curtis, 'Schoolbooks and the Myth of Cultural Republicanism: the State and the Curriculum in Canada West, 1820-1850', Histoire Sociale - Social History XVII, no. 32 (1983): 305-29.
42. J.H. Love, 'Cultural Survival and Social Control: The Development of a Curriculum for Upper Canada's Common Schools in 1846', Histoire Sociale - Social History XV, no. 30 (November 1982): 359-60.
43. Parvin, Authorization of Textbooks, 33. Quoted from Egerton Ryerson, Special Report on the Separate Schools Provisions of the School Law of Upper Canada, and the Measures which have been Adopted to Supply the School Sections with School Text-books, Apparatus and Libraries (Toronto: John Lovell, 1856), 22.
44. See M. Barber, 'The Ontario Bilingual Schools Issue: Sources of Conflict'; M. Prang 'Clerics, Politicians and the Bilingual Schools Issue in Ontario', in Minorities, Schools and Politics, ed. R.C. Brown (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969).
45. For the most comprehensive account of the Catholic separate schools in Ontario see the works of F.A. Walker, Catholic Education and Politics in Upper Canada (Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons [Canada], 1955);
46. idem. Catholic Education and Politics in Ontario. (Toronto: Thomas Nelson & Sons [Canada], 1964);
47. idem. Catholic Education and Politics in Ontario: From the Hope Commission to the Promise of Completion (1945-1985) (Toronto: Catholic Education Foundation of Ontario, 1986).
48. The following example quoted in the Prologue of Chad Gaffield's study could be multiplied, but it serves well as a representative flavour of an influential sector of Anglophone opinion: 'The Prescott and Russell schools [counties in Eastern Ontario where the French speaking population had rapidly increased] are the nurseries not merely of an alien tongue but of alien customs, of alien sentiments, and we say it without offence, of a wholly alien people.... The system in vogue in the schools renders it quite impossible for the young generation to rise above the intellectual level of the average Lower Canadian habitant; and if it be allowed to continue, the Eastern part of Ontario, into which the French are steadily marching, is doomed before many years to be as dark a spot on the map of intelligence, as any portion of Quebec' (Toronto Mail, 24 November 1886).
49. Quoted in C. Gaffield, Language, Schooling and Cultural Conflict: The Origins of the French-Language Controversy in Ontario (Kingston-Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987), Prologue. The Orange Order was active in this controversy.
50. See Houston and Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore, 152-54.
51. In 1881 the Francophone component of Ontario's population was 102,443, about 5% of the population. It had grown to 158,671, about 10%, by 1901, which is approximately what it is in present-day Ontario. See Gaffield, Language, Schooling and Cultural Conflict, 32.
52. See Gaffield, ibid., for a full account of the controversy.
53. For a detailed account of this process see Bruce Curtis,'Curricular Change and the "Red Readers": History and Theory', in Re-Interpreting Curriculum Research: Images and Arguments, ed. G. Milburn, I.F. Goodson and R.J. Clark (London: Falmer Press, 1989).
54. For a full listing of this series, written under the supervision of the Commissioners of the Irish National Schools and published between 1831 and the late 1860s, see Akenson, Irish Education Experiment, 231.
55. As well as being used extensively in Britain they had a big influence on subsequent school books series published there: 'The popularity of the books invited imitation. In 1840 the British and Foreign Schools Society published its first school books with secular material. They were closely modelled on the Irish books....' J.M. Goldstrom, 'Richard Whately and Political Economy in School Books 1833-80', Irish Historical Studies XV, no. 58 (September 1966): 137.
56. Commissioners of National Education, Ireland. The Third Book of Lessons for the Use of Schools, (Dublin: Alex Thom & Sons, 1858), 141-42. This is in the school book collection in the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Belfast, EL/05/30.
57. Ibid., 147.
58. Ibid., 150-51.
59. Commissioners of National Education, Ireland, The Fourth Book of Lessons for the Use of Schools (Dublin: Alex Thom & Sons, 1859). This is in the school book collection in the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Belfast, EL/05/10.
60. Lorcan Walsh, 'The Social, Political and Economic Content of Nineteenth-Century Schoolbooks', Oideas, Fómhar, 1988: 45-49.
61. Parliamentary Papers, 1870 (C. 6-III), XXVIII, iv, 1226.
62. Cited in Walsh, 'Social, political and economic content', 46.
63. Ibid., 49. After revision of the readers in the 1870s more material on Ireland appeared but this was usually mawkish and sentimental poetry on themes such as emigration or 'nation songs' of the school of Thomas Moore - see The Second Reading Book for the Use of Schools, formerly published by direction of the Commissioners of National Education, Ireland (Dublin: Browne & Nolan, Limited, 1885?). (This is how the date appears in the museum catalogue of the Belfast Folk and Transport Museum), El/01/1. Later, in the early part of the twentieth century, the successors to these books such as The Sterling Readers continued the tradition of uncontroversial Irish material.
64. See The Sterling Readers: Intermediate Reader (Dublin: Browne & Nolan Limited, 1910?). (As it is hesitantly dated in the museum catalogue), EL/01/44.
65. Padraic Pearse, The Murder Machine and Other Essays (Dublin-Cork: Mercier Press, 1976), 10-11.
66. Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2004).
67. For a discussion of this see C.Ó Gráda, 'The Great Famine and Today's Famines', in The Great Irish Famine, ed. C. Póirtéir (Cork: Mercier Press, 1995), 250.