:Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America

Abstract

In this slim, engaging volume, Janet Nolan examines the role of education and teaching in the lives of Irish Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She points out that public school teaching offered many daughters of Irish immigrants well-paying, respected jobs and contends that it was “at the center” of the Irish American experience (p. 138). She notes that it proved to be the lifeblood for her own family: her father, her mother, and two of her aunts taught in the public school system. For the Nolan family and for thousands of other Irish Americans, teaching jobs offered access into America's middle class. Nolan begins her account in Ireland in the late nineteenth century. By this time, the British government's National School system was well established. Even in the most remote rural areas, Irish boys and girls were learning to read and write and compute sums. In addition, girls were being taught to cook, sew, and launder clothes. In the higher grades, children could study French or German but not Irish, and they became familiar with English history and culture. While the National Schools were providing Irish children with a good—albeit Anglo-centered—education, Ireland's economy was still reeling from the aftershocks of the Great Famine of 1845–1850. With no industry on most of the island and few jobs available for farm workers, thousands of young men and women left for America in the 1880s and 1890s just as previous generations had done.