CHAPTER VI

THE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM

“When I consider how munificently the Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are endowed ... when I remember from whom all this splendour and plenty is derived; when I remember what was the faith of Edward the Third, and of Henry the Sixth, of Margaret of Anjou, and Margaret of Richmond, of William of Wykeham, and of William of Waynefleet, of Archbishop Chicheley, and Cardinal Wolsey; when I remember what we have taken from the Roman Catholics, King’s College, New College, Christ Church, my own Trinity; and when I look at the miserable Dotheboys Hall which we have given them in exchange, I feel, I must own, less proud than I could wish of being a Protestant and a Cambridge man.”—­T.B.  MACAULAY, Speech on the Maynooth Grant, 1845.

“What the Irish are proposing is nothing so enormous or chimerical.  They propose merely to put an end to one very cruel result of the Protestant ascendancy, the result that they—­the immense majority of the Irish people—­have no University, while the Protestants in Ireland, the small minority, have one.  For this plain hardship they propose a plain remedy, and to their proposal they want a plain, straightforward answer.”—­MATTHEW ARNOLD, Mixed Essays, 1880.

The fact that the recurrent educational problem in England is that of the Elementary Schools, while as to Ireland the only question which is ever to any extent ventilated is that of University Education, has led to the totally wrong impression that everything in this sphere in Ireland, with the exception of Higher Education, is in a satisfactory condition.  Nothing, in point of fact, could be further from the truth, and perhaps the strongest indictment against the present Executive system in the country is to be found in the chaos which exists in educational matters.

The National system of Education in Ireland was started by Lord Stanley in 1833.  Up to that date there had been no organised education in the country, and in fact there were still many living who could recall the time when for a Catholic to receive education from his co-religionists was a penal offence, involving legal and equitable disabilities.

The main vehicles of elementary education up to this date were the Charter Schools and the Kildare Street Schools.  The former, which were founded about 1730 by Primate Boulter, and lasted a hundred years, were frankly proselytising agencies—­the address for the charter to the Crown specifically setting out that it was a society for teaching the Protestant religion to Papist children.  John Howard, the philanthropist, condemned them as a disgrace to Protestantism and a disgrace to all society, but for all that, in the course of their career, they cost the public nearly two millions of money.  The Kildare Street Schools, which were founded in 1811, and which secured a Government grant for the first time in 1814, professed to be non-sectarian, and so long as they kept to their professions were successful, but their subsequent association with proselytising agencies, such as the Hibernian Society, was their ruin, and in 1831 the public grant was withdrawn from them by the Chief Secretary, who two years later introduced the National System.