SMITHY OF THE SOUL: COLONIALISM, EDUCATION, AND IRISH RESISTANCE

Refusing to be silenced across these centuries in Irish history, from the thirteenth century through the late twentieth century, across all of Ireland’s four provinces and thirty-two counties, Irish nationalists offered resistance, rebellion, and finally revolution against England’s presence. Much like the early centuries of conquest, resistance came intermittently, and was suppressed first by England’s and then the British Empire’s social and political efforts to deny and destroy Irish culture-- efforts that are intrinsic to colonisation and synonymous with the sweep of “Empire”. Accordingly, resistance was not confined to the political arena and the barricades: a line of political figures linked to cultural movements strove to revive the culture-- ethnic and social--and the Irish language. Ultimately, many of these figures took up the fight for freedom, independence, and democracy. A closer look at Irish life reveals that education was consistently used as a means of resistance, revolt, and cultural survival; the ways and means of this resistance began with the hedge schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was re-ignited by the work of Padraig Pearse in the early twentieth century. This resistance-via-education culminated in his efforts as an educator at St. Enda’s school for boys, and as an education activist-writer until his execution in 1916. Indeed, a survey of these two historical movements suggests that they are, despite being separated by time, space, and ideologies, viable avenues of political resistance and cultural survival consistent with the work of key critical pedagogists from the last half of the twentieth century