The authors of this work on Irish secondary education have a clear agenda as indicated in the subtitle of the work. They do not, however, offer much evidence for the claim that Ireland was a theocratic state. A central theme throughout the book is the idea that the Church deliberately facilitated inequality in Irish society by concentrating its efforts on the middle classes who could afford to pay for the secondary education of their children. By 1967 the Irish government had instituted free secondary education for all. The legacy of inequality has continued to endure. Poverty was certainly a deterrent to further education. While it is true that official Catholicism could have done more with regard to the educational needs of the poor, it might be going beyond the evidence adduced here to say that the Church had little concern for the rural poor. There are some very good sections on the role of the Irish language in the school curriculum, and the fact that the education system was too exam-oriented, which not only made subjects seem dull but which contributed to the overall failure to respond to the needs of pupils. The authors might have mentioned in this regard that Patrick Pearse, the leader of the 1916 Rising, was as an educationalist deeply committed to ‘child-centred’ education, and hence his denunciation of the British system of education in Ireland as ‘the murder machine’. The authors are critical of the centrality of religion in Irish secondary schools, up until recent times, but this is hardly surprising in schools which were quintessentially Catholic. Some chapters are over-reliant on the otherwise interesting testimony of pupils who went through the system. The claim by one former pupil, that oppression in school was enhanced by the fact of pictures of Christ and the Blessed Virgin in classrooms which gave the impression that students were under constant surveillance, stretches credulity. The fact that the schools run by priests and religious were used as recruiting grounds is regarded by the authors as a sinister manipulation of the school system. The Church's dominance of education in the period under discussion was, as the authors admit, partly in function of the fact that the state could simply not afford to provide comprehensive education to all, and it suited both Church and State to be unequal partners in the education of Ireland's children. In general, the historical sections of the book must be read with caution as there are a number of errors and too many sweeping generalisations. Towards the end there is a splendid account of the restructuring of educational administration from the 1960s onwards with useful comparisons with what was happening in Britain. The work is based on a wide use of sources, and is well written, and an easy read.
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