Education
Six families in Belfast established a Gaeltacht area in Belfast in the late 1960s and opened Bunscoil Phobal Feirste in 1970 as the first Irish-medium school in Northern Ireland, and in 1984 was granted the status of a voluntary maintained primary school. The first Naíscoil (Irish-medium nursery school) opened in 1978.
Comhairle na Gaelscolaíochta (CnaG) is the representative body for Irish-medium Education. It was set up in 2000 by the Department of Education to promote, facilitate and encourage Irish-medium Education. One of CnaG’s central objectives is to seek to extend the availability of Irish-medium Education to parents who wish to avail of it for their children. Irish language pre-schools and primary schools are now thriving and there are Irish language secondary schools known as Méanscoileanna in Belfast, Donaghmore, Castlewellan and Armagh.
In the academic year 2011/12, 4691 children were enrolled in Irish-medium education:
- 45 nurseries (Naíscoileanna) with 1,047 pupils
- 36 primary schools (Bunscoileanna) with 2,892 pupils
- 4 post-primary schools and a post-primary streams with 752 pupils
The British Council administers a scheme to recruit Irish language assistants for English-medium schools in Northern Ireland.
Examinations in Irish are gaining in popularity among school-age and adult students. In 2004, there were 333 entries for A-Level examinations in Irish and 2,630 for GCSE.
Read more about this topic: Irish Language In Northern Ireland
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war?—not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)