Excerpt from The Catholic World, Vol. 46: November, 1887
Nine-tenths of an entire nation were thus compelled to accept illiteracy.
Fifty years ago, writes the ever-dear Alexander M. Sullivan in New Ireland, the schoolmaster was not abroad in Ireland. Indeed, in the pre vions century he had better not have been, if he wished to avoid convie tion for felony under the 8th of Anne, cap. Iii. Sec. 16. In most of the rural parishes of Ireland not half a century ago the man who could read a newspaper or write a letter was a distinguished individual, a useful and im portant functionary. He wrote the letters for all the parish, and he read the replies for the neighbors who received them. It was a calamity the evil effects of which will long outlive even the best efforts to retrieve them, that, at the period when in other countries, and especially in England and Scotland, popular education was being developed and extended into a pub lic system, in Ireland the legislature of the day was passing statute after statute to prohibit and punish any acceptable education whatsoever, uni versity, intermediate, or primary, for nine-tenths of the population. That is to say, the bulk of the population being Catholic, penal laws against Ca tholic schools - laws which made it felony for a Catholic to act as teacher, usher, or monitor, and civil death for a Catholic child to be taught by any such masters - were virtually a prohibition of education to the mass of the people.
Still crouching ’neath the sheltering hedge or stretched on mountain fern, The teacher and his pupils met, feloniously to learn.’ The spelling-book remained for nine-tenths of the Irish people an outlaw until little more than fifty years ago.
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