ABSTRACT
Education was to play a crucial role in the pacification of Ireland and in combating Irish disaffection in the nineteenth century. Central to the rational education was the new science of political economy, the dominant mode of English political discourse. Political economy claimed ideological neutrality and the universal validity of its laws; modestly descriptive, it saw itself as superseding previous prescriptive moral and religious discursive modes. Blake’s description of national teachers as a ‘moral Police’ force is obviously the source of the term ‘Educational Police’ in the United Irishman. In the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Primary Education in Ireland in 1870 some commissioners, especially William Brooke, found excessive emphasis on the wickedness of the English, not only in Ireland but also in North America and India, in the textbooks of the Christian Brothers.
