Las "Hedge Schools" irlandesasnaturaleza, etapas y representación

Abstract

The Hedge Schools were independent illegal schools born in 1695 when the Penal Laws deprived the Irish Catholic, among other rights, from the right to education. We consider their history can be structured in three stages, analysing the keys for their development, golden age and decline in the second half of the nineteenth century. After the Catholic Relief Acts of the 1780s, these schools flourished, although supported mainly by poor peasants. They competed then with proselytising Bible Societies -financed by the government- and, after 1831, with the National System of Education, created in order to offer free primary education to the lower classes. Finally we collect an anthology of diverse documents featuring the hedge-school master and we contrast these stereotyped images with the reality of these schools