Studies covers Irish education down the years
Dermot Roantree (from autumn 2026 Studies) :: In the very first issue of Studies, in 1912, education was announced as one of the subject areas (bundled together with philosophy and sociology) that would be ‘specially provided for’ in the new journal. It was to be expected that it would feature prominently, if only because co-founder and first editor of Studies Timothy Corcoran SJ was also the first professor of education at University College Dublin. Though Corcoran only remained editor for eight issues, he was a frequent contributor to Studies over the following decades, writing thirty-eight essays, mostly on educational topics, between 1912 and 1941.
Corcoran’s stance was clear and uncompromising. He shared in the cultural isolationism that marked many areas of Irish life in the post-independence decades. What the country needed, he believed, was an educational system with ‘national purpose’. It should prepare students for citizenship in a Catholic Irish nation, one that looked to its own Gaelic and medieval Christian past for its sense of itself. ‘The international culture of Latin’ was essential to this task, as was the promotion of the Irish language so that it would become in time the main vernacular of the land. For Corcoran, the authority of the teacher was paramount. He rejected outright the whole-child and child-centred pedagogy of Enlightenment figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi as well as that of the later Montessori method. They displayed, he believed, a fanciful trust in the ‘auto-education’ of the child and emptied out the very meaning of the word ‘teacher’. In sum, Corcoran believed in the cultural distinctiveness of the Irish state, was wary of foreign influences and of novelty, and saw education as a process of authority-led formation, not self-development. The impact of his pedagogy was evident long after his death in 1943.
Yet even in the 1930s, signs of a departure from Corcoran’s worldview began to appear in Studies. With the essays of Henry Gill SJ, Lambert McKenna SJ, and to a lesser extent Alfred O’Rahilly, there was a detectable shift from cultural-nationalist education toward a more modern appreciation of science and technology and of economics, as well as greater attention to pedagogical developments abroad and the importance of education meeting the needs of a changing society.
The most important and long-lasting shifts, however, came later. In the late 1950s and 1960s, as the Keynesian spirit began to change social and economic thinking in Ireland, Studies contributors such as Patrick Lynch and Garret Fitzgerald stressed the need to view education as an investment in human capital. Education came to be seen as not only an end desirable in itself but also as both a cause and a consequence of economic growth, especially as Ireland began to orient itself more towards the international community. And alongside but distinct from this sea-change, Ireland began to catch up with progressive pedagogical thinking: children are more than mere recipients of instruction and formation; they are, rather, agents that possess capacities and interests that education ought to cultivate. Joseph Veale SJ was an early exponent of this development in Studies – ‘The whole education of the adolescent must take account of all that we know about his natural growing need to question, assess and criticize’.
The new thinking of the 1960s led to a time of considerable change in the Irish educational landscape: the child-centred New Curriculum of 1971; the emergence of a more empirical and interdisciplinary academic study of education; the development of initial and continuing teacher education; the recognition of education as an instrument of social equality and mobility; and, later, the adaptation of educational structures to the declining role of the Catholic Church and to greater cultural pluralism. Many of these themes have been addressed in Studies over the past fifty years, in essays by Pádraig Hogan, Áine Hyland, Sheelagh Drudy, and David Limond, for example.
The autumn 2026 issue of Studies » has the title, ‘Shaping the Future of Education in Ireland: A Contribution to the Conversation’. It continues the journal’s practice of contributing to the national conversation on education at critical junctures. It is not the first time that an issue of Studies has been given over entirely to the question of the future of Irish education. The autumn 1968 issue was largely composed of responses to the opening essay on ‘Post-Primary Education: Now and in the Future’, by Seán O’Connor, Assistant Secretary at the Department of Education; and in 2012, the summer issue was built around responses to the opening contribution of Ruairi Quinn, Minister of Education and Skills, on ‘The Future Development of Education in Ireland’. The prompt for the current issue is the National Convention on Education, a government-approved initiative designed to inform the long-term education strategy of the country in and for a new era.
