David Limond’s research while affiliated with Trinity College Dublin and other places

Even if we consider only the culture or civilisation we habitually call western European—that which emerged from the collision of Athens and Jerusalem symbolically taking place in first century CE Rome—it is obvious that corporal punishment has deep historical roots. It has had domestic, scholastic, judicial and military expressions (Scott, 1968; Gibson, 1979; Parker-Jenkins, 1999; Geltner, 2014). It is often referred to as spanking at home, caning or belting in schools, birching in judicial contexts and flogging if associated with the armed forces. It was decreasingly commonly permitted in families/homes in Europe by 2020 and its use in civilian or military law was unknown there by then (though it remained extant elsewhere; Human Rights Watch, 2020a, 2020b). In its scholastic form it was also anathema in western Europe by 2020 but it had been practised in European schools for centuries. Although it was practised in pre-Christian, pagan or classical western European life, including the Greco-Roman and Celtic milieus, it clearly has a longstanding and close association with the Judeo-Christian culture that has influenced western Europe since late antiquity (Scott, 1968; Gibson, 1979; Ristuccia, 2010; Geltner, 2014; Parsons, 2015).

The author discusses the operation of the Catholic Workers’ College (CWC) in Dublin between 1951 and 1966. Founded by the Society of Jesus to offer education to working-class adults, the CWC came to occupy a significant place in Irish religious, educational, and social life, garnering high esteem for its work. Modeled on Plater College in Oxford, England, the CWC was shaped profoundly by its first prefect of studies, Edward Joseph Coyne (1896–1958), and his deputy and eventual successor, Edmond Kent (1915–99).

Whether for good or ill, the rapid decline of the standing of the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries is a well enough known story. Though a crude measure of anything, it is a striking fact that, in 1932, a Eucharistic Congress, culminating in an open-air ceremony in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, could attract an estimated 1 million people, but an equivalent event in 2012 saw unsold tickets left over for a gathering in a rather more modestly sized stadium. In addition to the more general processes of secularisation that have been at work in Europe and elsewhere for decades, if not centuries, and which have had obvious implications for Ireland, a series of scandals related to clerical abuse of children/adolescents have been documented in official and popular publications, some of the latter harrowingly autobiographical. Rightly or wrongly, concern at the undoubtedly repressive conditions in such residential institutions as orphanages, children’s homes and so-called Magdalene laundries now often spills over in such a way as to contribute to the construction of a place of fearful repute: ‘the Catholic school’. In this way, Catholic education in Ireland has come to be thought of as a site of widespread abuse of power. These matters are probably only now beginning to receive systematic academic attention, but some Catholic educational institutions continue to be remembered (or so it seems to me, though this is, admittedly, anecdotal and impressionistic on my part) with affection and respect. One such institution was the Catholic Workers’ College(CWC), though it is perhaps better remembered by its later title, the National College of Industrial Relations (NCIR).

This paper concerns The Little Red Schoolbook, an English translation of the Danish book Den lille røde bog fur skoleelever. After the book's publication in the UK, opponents were successful in pressing for its publisher's prosecution. The ensuing trial led to its withdrawal and its bowdlerisation. It is argued that the work played some part in changing social and sexual mores and sex education practice in the UK, being, in effect, the Urtext of the ‘harm reduction approach’.

This piece concerns the relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom over the course of some 170–180 years from the early/mid‐1800s to the present. It is argued that, despite the expectations of nationalists such as Timothy Corcoran, writing in the immediate aftermath of independence, to whom it seemed both desirable and inevitable that Ireland ‘historic [educational] culture’ would be ‘rapidly, universally, and thoroughly restored’, the tendency for educational homogenisation present prior to independence has been continued, and even exacerbated, since. It is suggested that a ‘post‐colonial overhang’ affects Irish policy‐makers and bureaucrats in their educational policies and practices.

This paper concerns the response to the sex education film Growing Up, made in 1971 by Dr Martin Cole, which used a combination of animation and live action to offer a frank and uncompromising account of sexual reproduction. As part of this, both male and female masturbation and an unsimulated act of male–female coitus featured in the film. Cole was widely denounced both by religious conservatives including the members of the Nationwide Festival of Light and by others involved in sex education. The former objected to what they took to be his promotion of precocious and promiscuous sex, and the latter charged him with setting back the cause of ‘responsible’ sex education by years or decades. However, evidence from various schools in which Growing Up was seen suggests that it was apparently well received by pupils. But an ad hoc alliance of religious conservatives and ‘responsible’ sex educators ensured that Growing Up was not widely distributed, and a tactic agreement of sorts has arisen that such explicit sexual imagery will not be featured in school sex education materials in the United Kingdom. Sources include selected media reports/discussions, parliamentary debates, letters sent to Cole, teachers' comments and an interview conducted in 2007.

This piece concerns the controversy engendered by Martin Cole’s 1971 film Growing Up, an attempt to start a revolution in school sex education practices by showing explicit scenes of unsimulated sexual acts. Although Cole’s film was never widely shown it marked a turning point in English school sex education by defining the limits of the ‘tasteful’ and the acceptable.

This piece concerns a largely forgotten ethnographic experiment conducted under the auspices of the United National Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and its Tensions Affecting International Understanding Project. In the early 1950s, with UNESCO's backing, two young African teachers spent a short time living and working in a small English town. What follows is an attempt to locate them. That is to say, it sets out variously to establish who Miss V and Miss W might have been and to examine the situation in which they found themselves. The hope was that children from a monocultural background in rural England brought into contact with African teachers would have many of their prejudices dispelled. To some extent, in its own terms, the project was successful but the resulting book rendered the women anonymous and voiceless and exoticzed them in the process. Thus the piece attempts, largely using the means of textual inference, to reconstruct what can be known of their experiences, and speculates on the effect(s) that participation in the experiment might have had on them. It thus gives again both voice and identity to Miss V and Miss W, so that, like Sojourner Truth, they can come up again.

In 1964-65 a teacher at London's Kidbrooke School gave a speech that appeared critical of the Labour government's nascent comprehensivization policy. A Times editorial based on her comments influenced the tone and content of the crucial parliamentary debate of January 1965, which continues to have implications for the organization of schools in Britain.