When I describe the schools that barefoot rural children once attended, in the USA of 1900 or the Ireland of the 1950s, everyone assumes their education would be pathetic — the “three Rs,” so named because we assume that backwoods hillbillies would have spelled the subjects “reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmatic.” We assume that the poorer you are, the worse your education, and these days that’s often true in my native USA, where two-thirds of all adults cannot read at a proficient level, and a third cannot handle a basic level. We assume knowledge only becomes vaster and more refined over time, and the further back you go, the dumber everyone was.
This belief, held by almost every man, woman and child today, crumbles the instant one reads descriptions of schools from a century ago, or actual school-papers of children then, or newspapers and magazines of the time, or reading the books normal children once read. Children used to read sophisticated literature that few college students – or professors – attempt anymore. So did mechanics and farm-hands, house-wives and fishermen.
They did not read them to boast that they had done so, as a few intellectuals might today, but out of a passion for learning. They discussed these works at the lodge and the shop and the pub. They wrote about them in their diaries. All this, you’ll recall, in addition to their practical skills, their knowledge of local lore, of the natural world and the people around them – all of which are also rare today.
Ann Gardinier remembered learning John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Dante’s Inferno, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as Latin, poetry and Shakespeare, all at the age of 11. [1] Alice Taylor remembered translating Virgil from Latin to English and back again. [2] Sean Cleary described performing Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in school, translating them into the native Irish language.
Nor was their schooling limited to literature; Liam Bradley remembered having to prove geometry theorems in grade school. “Mental arithmetic was a daily feature in our school life. My old school companions would be horrified at the hesitancy of modern schoolchildren in mental computations … there was really no need for pocket calculators.” [3]
Country schoolhouses might have been only one room with children of many ages, but that was a great advantage to which modern students have been denied, Bradley said. “Students of many ages had to be taught together, and younger children, instead of being isolated, overheard some of the things that their older peers were learning.”
Teachers – especially the Christian Brothers – gained a reputation for strict rules and corporal punishment. At the same time, Christy – who was taught by the Brothers, and became a teacher himself –said they had a dedication that few teachers show today. “They gave 24/7 in their teaching,” he said. “They were there after school, and they were there in the morning. The principal would have done the secretary work, the accountancy, the timetable, everything” without much of a salary. In contrast to movie monks, real ones grew up on farms, were “men with ruddy, weather-beaten faces who might have been …. uncles or neighbouring farmers, men who could turn from teaching honours maths to fixing the tractor,” according to one old student. [4]
In the countryside where there were no monasteries or convents, Taylor remembered that teachers rented their own schoolhouses and rode bicycles for miles every morning to school. “Those young educational entrepreneurs could have found jobs in well-established convents or colleges, or emigrated to exciting new places, but chose instead to face an uncertain future and invest their time and money in renting premises to set up these small schools,” she said. “These teachers are the unsung educators and enlighteners of many young minds around Ireland. We owe them a debt of gratitude.” [5] [6]
For many children, book-learning was not limited to school, but was a part of daily life, in-between farm chores. In the countryside of the early 1900s, Mary Fogarty estimated she read five hundred books a year, waking with her mother and sisters at 5 am to read for two hours, and then again before bed. “We read Lorna Doone – I was in love with John Ridd for weeks – The Vicar of Wakefield, more Dickens, Thackeray, Kingsley, and the Brontes, returning now and then, for little Annie’s benefit, to the loved books of our first days – Little Women, Masterman Ready, Scottish Chiefs, Gulliver’s Travels, and Mayne Reid,” she wrote in her memoir. “Mother enjoyed Maria Edgeworth more than we did, also Jane Austen; we much preferred George Eliot.” [7]
Ann Gardinier remembered reading Robinson Crusoe and Charles Dickens around the fire with his family. [8] Alice Taylor devoured Dickens as well before moving on to the Brontes. [9] Crosbie began reading with crime novels, as well as Treasure Island and Kidnapped, but soon was reading any kind of book. [10] “Reading had always been our great escape. We devoured anything we could get our hands on, suitable or not, though my mother kept a close eye.” [11]
Of course, everyone was poor by our standards, and schooling varied wildly from one person to another; a survey around the time of Irish independence in the 1920s found that 14 percent of the population were illiterate – but that is lower than the portion of Americans that are functionally illiterate today. Even the unschooled, though, valued the written word; some elders remembered people who were illiterate, and who dropped in at a neighbour’s house to listen to the newspaper read to them.
Most said that everyone they knew read whenever they weren’t working. Sometimes they did both at the same time; one elder described ploughmen holding books in front of them – usually something we would consider a classic – as they ploughed, or craftsmen employing a boy to read to them from such a book as they made barrels or shaped leather. Taylor said that her father loved poetry and recited it for his children. “His favourite poet was Goldsmith and The Deserted Village rolled off his tongue with such relish that you knew he approved of all the poet’s sentiments.” [12]
Farmer Stephen Rynne, who chronicled his life in the early 1900s, described passing the winter nights reading Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Cobbett’s Rural Rides and Advice to Young Men, Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and Joseph Joubert’s Thoughts; without them, he said, “the long winter nights would be too long by streets.” [13] Nor were any of these people wealthy; Rynne remembered one of his farm-hands spending his leisure hours reading the Confessions of St. Augustine, [14] and the local greasy mechanic in Rafferty’s village had read Gibbons’ Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Dickens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, WB Yeats, and Paine’s Rights of Man. [15]
“That generation …. seemed on average to have greater facility with words – better handwriting, even – than we do and to use language more precisely,” Gene Kerrigan said. [16] If you want first-had evidence of this, read from Rynne’s journal from almost a century ago. Read it aloud to yourself, slowly, letting the words roll around like music:
“One pauses to look at the bronze and golden trees: every beech a Titian, every lime a Norse goddess, elms like sunsets, and oaks like Vandyke’s old men. Boastfully a Spanish chestnut holds up her unlocked seed-vessels. The berry clusters of the hollies bite out like rubies from the rich velvet of foliage. The brownish-green masses of the sycamores seem like tapestry in which one could imagine pictures: horses and huntsmen, or medieval battles. In the wood, this year’s leaves lie with the skeletons of their ancestors.
… Yet give me gleaming autumn with its fast hours, its replete grandeur, its pacific beauty languishing on earth and bending from the sky. Just now the world is like a Dutch kitchen: all bronzes, lustre and pewter. There are calm, gold days making up weeks together, each day as rich as the woven costume of a mandarin. Leave me autumn with its threat of winter, and let romantic-minded urban dwellers enjoy the summer to their hearts’ content.” [17]
When I describe this to people today, they are sceptical: these must have been the few rich farmers, people tell me, the oppressors rather than the oppressed. Or they must lie to justify how miserable their life was. They didn’t know any better, people tell me – they were too stupid to realise how miserable they were. And if we use simpler language, they tell me, it must be an improvement – back then, people were too ignorant to use small words. And why, they ask, would anyone want to read works from long ago, before anyone knew anything?
They never ask the more obvious question: If even the poorest people spoke and wrote beautifully less than a century ago, if people knew and loved magnificent works for thousands of years until recently, if everyone had a book in front of them until yesterday, what happened to us?
Photo: My daughter helps with the firewood while she catches up with her reading.
[1] The House Remembers, 136
[2] Quench the Lamp, 104
[3] No Shoes in Summer, 68
[4] Ballyfin – A Boarding School Memory, RTE documentary
[5] Books in the Attic, 15
[6] No Shoes in Summer, 14
[7] The Farm by Lough Gur, 172
[8] The House Remembers, 129
[9] Quench the Lamp, 127
[10] Your Dinner’s Poured Out, 131
[11] The House Remembers, 10
[12] To School Through the Fields, 61
[13] Green Fields, 69
[14] Green Fields, 76
[15] And the Band Played On, 85
[16] Another Country, 67
[17] Green Fields, 19
