A Usenet persona calling itself BCITORGB wrote:

weiser says:
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Ireland wouldn't have had ANY schools if it weren't for the Catholic
church.
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do you mean to suggest that without the catholic church, the
gowvernment of ireland would not have provided some level of universal
education? that's hard to believe!

You'd better believe it. When Ireland was under the rule of the British (for
many hundreds of years) the British forbade Irish education. Moreover,
Britain brutally suppressed Catholicism for a long, long time and executed
priests who either engaged in religious duties or educated the Irish, which
priests did, in secret, for hundreds of years and at the cost of many lives.

There was a specific intent on the part of the British to keep the Irish
ignorant in order to keep them in subjugation. Remember that up until 1916,
there was no actual Irish government, it was ruled by the British using
pawns as a part of a sham assembly. Only after the Partition did most of
Ireland gain independence and a democratically elected government. Northern
Ireland remains in thrall to the British even today, and Catholics are still
persecuted, to this day, in Northern Ireland.


what isn't hard to believe is that catholic propaganda convinced the
irish that the church was best able to handle the job of educating the
masses. the catholic church knew well the dictum of the jesuits: "give
me the boy..."

Indeed. However, your argument fails when you assume that because the
Jesuits taught religion as a part of a young man's education that they did
not also teach science, mathematics or language.

--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

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© 2005 Scott Weiser