Teaching history and making rebels
25 June 1916 - The fallout from the Easter Rising has continued in the wake of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry which placed partial blame at the feet of schoolteachers.
The charge of 'treasonable teaching' was dismissed as ‘libellous and insulting’ by G. Ramsey of the Irish Protestant National Teachers Union.
He denounced criticism of national school teachers as being disloyal and a meeting of the Union passed a motion condemning the rebellion.
Meanwhile, at the Irish Methodist Conference in Belfast, Rev D. Evans, a Commissioner of Education in Ireland, said that he did not see how history could be written to meet the requirements of everybody in Ireland, and he would rather have no history at all if that was the objective.
Nonetheless, the Conference passed a motion that every possible safeguard should be taken ‘to secure that matters of controversy, or suggestive of sedition or disloyalty, be eliminated from the text books, which include the undisputed facts of history.’
[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]
