As ASTI delegates gather at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Galway this week for their annual convention, a new history of their association has been published.
That book, Unlikely Radicals: Irish post-primary teachers and the ASTI, and published by Cork University Press, is written by Galwegian and NUI, Galway historian Dr John Cunningham.
Unlikely Radicals traces the history of post-primary education over the past century. When the ASTI was founded in 1909, fewer than one in 10 Irish teenagers went on to secondary school, and very few completed the post-primary programme.
Almost all schools were run by religious orders, and most teachers were also priests or nuns. For the minority of so-called ‘lay teachers,’ pay was very low, working conditions poor, and job security non-existent.
Dr Cunningham’s book shows how the men and women of the ASTI gradually improved the conditions of lay teachers, and how they also helped to shape today’s system of post-primary education.
“This book shows the ASTI has had a noble and an occasionally turbulent history, leavened with some victories, the occasional setback, and robust engagement both internally and externally,” said ASTI general secretary John White. “It establishes that the ASTI’s history is interwoven with the struggle for the improvement in conditions of employment, the contestation between church and State for control of education, and in the development of Ireland as a modern European state.”
