Hedge school

Did You Know?

• Brian Friel's play Translations is set in a hedge school in 1833.
• William Makepeace Thackeray's Irish Sketch Books contain references to hedge schools.
• William Carleton, who received his early education in hedge schools, wrote comedic accounts including The Hedge School.

History

After the dispossession, emigration, and outlawry of Irish clan chiefs in the 16th and 17th centuries, teachers and students from bardic poetry schools adapted by becoming instructors at secret Catholic schools, which also served as minor seminaries for the underground Catholic Church. Although the name "hedge school" suggests classes by a hedgerow, when the Penal Laws were relaxed, lessons usually took place in a house or barn. Teachers were paid per subject, and bright pupils sometimes competed locally with their teachers or were smuggled to Mainland Europe for Catholic higher education at Irish Colleges.

Subjects included reading, writing, and grammar in both Irish and English, along with mathematics. Some schools taught Irish bardic poetry, local history, and home economics; in Munster, Greek and Latin were also offered. A parliamentarian in Westminster complained about children in Ireland being educated like those in Munster, where young peasants in rags carried Cicero or Virgil. Reading was often taught using chapbooks sold at village fairs, which contained stories of rapparees, many of whom were outlawed Gaelic nobles.

From 1723 to 1782, all Catholic education was forbidden under penal laws, yet no hedge teachers are known to have been prosecuted. The laws specifically targeted Catholic schools run by religious orders, whose property was confiscated, aiming to force Irish Catholics to convert to the Protestant Church of Ireland for education. Historians agree that hedge schools educated up to 400,000 students by the mid-1820s. J. R. R. Adams noted they testified to the strong desire of ordinary Irish people for their children's education, and Antonia McManus argued that Irish parents made enormous sacrifices to secure hedge school education for their children.