The Foundation of the Preparatory Colleges and their Ideological Mission in the Irish Free State

Abstract

The Department of Education of the newly independent Irish Free State asserted in 1928 that the official initiative for the creation of preparatory colleges was designed to offer ‘…a sound secondary education on Irish lines…with the advantages of a collective school life lived in an atmosphere of Gaelic tradition’ (Report of the Department of Education for the school years 1924-25-26 and the financial and administrative year 1926-27, pg.21). The pre-service training of primary teachers emerged as a crucial arena of government intervention in the newly independent Irish Free State, not least due to the emergence of Gaelicisation as a key policy imperative and the enduring influence of cultural nationalism on the ministers who led the new government and the senior officials who were prominent in its public administration. The activism of the new Free State government in primary teacher training conformed to a wider pattern of development in Western European states, where state intervention was more significant and more intrusive in non-university institutions with a vocational or professional training mission (Neave, 1982). The policy activism of the newly formed Department of Education was all the more notable as it contrasted with a cautious and minimalist approach by the Irish state to policy and structural reform in primary and post-primary education. The most ambitious and radical departure by the Free State government in teacher education was the initiative for the establishment of the preparatory colleges.