The Student in the Classroom and Beyond
This chapter provides an exposition of former students’ memories of secondary schooling in Ireland for the period 1922–1967, supplemented by similar material uncovered in the historical record. No claim is made that it portrays what were the common experiences of all. Rather, it is the product of a desire to cast the net as widely as possible, in order to canvass a maximum variety of perspectives. Further, most although not all of the testimony upon which we have based it is mainly of the ‘topical life story’ type. In other words, it is testimony based on memory. At the same time, we are not denying the possibility that it has the potential to provide understandings to add to the corpus of historical work already undertaken on the history of Irish secondary school education presented in previous chapters.