"The children are used wretchedly": pupil responses to the Irish charter schools in the early nineteenth century.

Abstract

`Su ce it to say’ , wrote Irish charter school pupil Thomas Moyle in 1824, t̀hat the children are used wretchedly . . . while the masters live in the most splendid manner’ . So courageously and acutely did the 18-year-old teacher trainee recount his educational experiences, that the Commissioners of Irish Education Enquiry published his letter in their First Report of 1825. Members of this royal commission also questioned him and a small number of other charter school pupils of both sexes during their investigations, publishing the apparently verbatim interviews in appendices to the report. The present paper will utilize these ® rst-person accounts to analyse the responses of the pupilsÐ I will also refer to them as boys and girls, although many were in their late teens by the time of interviewÐ to a school system which by 1825 was receiving increasing criticism in both Ireland and England. The paper will suggest the importance of children, so often ignored, in the history of educational developments; little, for example, has been written on Irish educational history from pupil perspectives. The charter school witnesses were more than merely passive victims, they acted, and their evidence mattered, as Parliament considered educational alternatives for Ireland, recently united with Britain in the 1801 Act of Union. While not systematically comparative, the paper will nevertheless suggest relevant comparisons with the experiences of pupils confronting similar educational regimes. My study also has a methodological point to make. Although di cult to obtain, pupil perspectives, especially when contemporaneous with the events described, are especially important to historians of education. We cannot interview children from distant eras, and are thus often forced to rely on later adult reminiscences of schooling. Often, as I suggest below, such long-term reminiscences are problematic as evidence, even when we can secure an adequate number for analysis. So, although the charter schools were a tiny minority of all educational establishments in early nineteenth-century Ireland, the evidence given by their pupils to the Commissioners allows us glimpses of the complex and sometimes remarkable ways in which supposedly passive children perceived, responded to, and even resisted a harsh school regime. By presenting and examining their recorded words here, I hope to stimulate