ABSTRACT
By the early nineteenth century, the English government focused on an Ireland where the lower classes were becoming more assertive and were expressing their rights through the medium of the Catholic Association founded by Daniel O’Connell in 1823. By 1824, it was “enrolled in what was arguably the first mass movement of organized democracy in Europe” (McCartney 1987, 112). The campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union (1801), the end of the Irish tithe system, universal suffrage and a secret ballot for parliamentary elections was nonviolent, but agitation and the threat of violence were constant. The passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) only fueled the imperial drive to “subdue the Irish,” to “make the poor contented with their lot” (McCartney 1987, 119). As the imperialist administration saw it, the solution to the Irish problem lay in cultivating the greatest resource the country had, its children, through bodies of knowledge and the disciplinary practice of schooling: “It is to the child we must address ourselves,” wrote Thomas Wyse in his treatise, Educational Reform. He continued: “an infant is capable of belonging to any country,” and given the “flexibility of his nature,” he may “with equal facility be moulded … into an Englishman.” Childhood education was metaphorically viewed as “a second creation” that would ensure a “useful, obedient, respectful and happy race” (Wyse 1836, 5, 278).
