Time was, from around the end of the 17th c right up to the introduction of National Schooling in the mid 19th c, that Catholic children living in Ireland were not allowed to attend any form of school...
After all educated people are dangerous people and the British already had quite enough to contend with the Irish peasantry endlessly rebelling, albeit unsuccessfully.
But the common peasant wanted his children to be exposed to learning...they wanted them to learn to read and to understand maths and to be taught to play the Irish harp and the fiddle. So the Hedge-Schools were born out of a basic thirst for education.
They were run by young men mostly, who had been fortunate enough to acquire their own education before the implementation of the harsh Penal Laws...not only could they speak both Irish and English...they were also able to converse in Latin and many spoke and read Greek. They'd composed poetry...studied astronomy, learned complicated mathematical problems, and knew the stories of Homer.
But their teaching was illegal, so they taught the children outside in good weather with a pupil stationed as a look-out for the landlords men or the soldiers...the children wrote on bits of slate with chalk they found in the fields...on flat stones if there was no slate available...they learned to read and write and compose stories...practiced Greek and spoke Latin...learned about the stars and could recite Homer's Odyssey.
It was said by a French man visiting Ireland in the mid 1700's, that the poorly dressed, barefoot children of the common peasant had received a standard of education far superior to that of the ruling classes.
The teachers were paid in pennies carefully scrimped and saved, they were fed by the cottagers and frequently housed in the winter-time in an isolated cabin well away from the reaches of the
militia...books, paper and pens were carefully guarded...if there were any to begin with...any book was tattered and much used and carefully hidden away when not in use...
It wasn't just learning to read and write fluently or to be able to name the planets and the stars or speak and understand Latin...dancing was outlawed by the ruling British as was traditional music...so this was where the travelling musicians and the dance masters came in to the schooling. It was they who taught the jigs and reels ,who brought a battered fiddle and played the haunting airs or the fast dance steps...always with one child on look-out. They had penny whistles in the pocket of a baggy, much mended and probably verminous coat...the children taking turns to play out the old tunes...
Eventually...by the mid 1800's... the Hedge Schools and their Masters were beginning to disappear upon the relaxation of the restrictive Penal Laws...the National schools were built and compulsory education began for all children. Attendance was poor...the teachers were untrained and many couldn't speak English...it picked up over time and more schools were built and more teachers employed who had some knowledge to impart to their pupils. But those schools were owned and run by the Catholic Church and the teaching too often reinforced by beatings...
Little wonder then that many children left before they could write out their own name...let alone converse in Latin or name the planet's or recite ancient poems in their own language.
I've often wondered how many of our own children would have had the tremendous thirst for knowledge that those who attended the Hedge Schools had...how many of us would have sat outside, carefully writing out a poem on a bit of flat stone with a lump of chalk found in a field or welcomed a travelling dance master...taken our turn at acting as look-out for the militia men, with one ear trying to listen to the teenage Master telling how to solve a complicated equation...
