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Lay Schools and Schools of Philosophy
sionate attachment of the Irish people to their language,
their literature, their laws, the preservation of their his-
tories and genealogies, the development of their art and
the historic elements of their distinctive civilization, found
full expression. To read, write and speak in its fulness
and precision the Irish language, to learn Irish grammar
and the rules of poetical composition, to master geography
and history, especially the geography and history of
Ireland, and to acquire a knowledge of Irish poetry and of
the Irish epic tales such was the curriculum of these lay
schools in so far as they aimed at a liberal or professional
education in the field of Irish studies. There were schools
of the brehons, the bards, and the seanchaidhe or his-
torians, there were schools of medicine, and schools of the
military art, these last not dissimilar to the gymnasia of
Athens where Plato and Aristotle first taught. These
schools of the seanchaidhe, the poets and the bards had
a curriculum founded on the teaching transmitted from
the Druids, and that teaching was largely confined to the
Irish studies enumerated above. To these studies the
professional schools added the study of law, of medicine,
or of the military art as the case might be.
The ideal of secular schools, presided over by lay pro-
fessors, and attended by lay students, devoted to purely
lay and professional studies, is an ideal so foreign to the
spirit of the Middle Ages, and particularly to the spirit
of the governors of the Christian church in the early
part of those ages, that considerable skepticism appears
quite natural in respect to their existence in Ireland. But
the truth is that the proofs bearing on the activity of
these schools are as copious and convincing as in the case
of those larger Irish establishments the intellectual leaders
of which were honored throughout Christendom and in
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