In eighteenth and nineteenth-century Ireland, under British rule, formal education for Catholics was banned. In response, a quiet, improvised tradition took root: the hedge school. These were often held in barns, kitchens, or behind hedgerows, any shelter that could be found. Local teachers and travelling scholars taught what they could: reading, writing, English, Greek, Latin, history, storytelling. There were no uniforms, no buildings and little pay. But there was a hunger for learning and a need to remember.
Ever since I first saw Brian Friel’s Translations, I have been mesmerised by the idea of hedge schools, with ragged scholars reading Homer aloud in back fields and barns. It struck me then, and still does, as one of the most powerful images of education we have in Ireland.
When I walk the lanes around home and come across a collapsed gable or a few old stones being slowly taken back by brambles, I often find myself wondering: was this a hedge school? Was this one of the places where something was carried and kept alive, against the odds?
A power persists in the image of people gathering quietly on the margins to keep learning alive. It touches on something we may be losing in modern education: soul.
When I ask whether we are losing soul in education, I do not mean we are losing feeling. There is plenty of emotion in schools. I mean depth, a sense that learning should touch the deep places in us, not just what we measure but what we are beyond calculation. Do we make space for silence, for doubt, for nuance? Do we admit mystery? Do we value sitting with what we cannot immediately explain? Soul has to do with all this twilight stuff, with the slow and dimly lit work of becoming a person. And it has to do with place, the terrain of a life: the land, the weather, the neighbours, the stories. Hedge schools remind us of this. Have we pushed all that to the margins? Have we forgotten it was ever at the centre?
For over ten years I taught ethics to budding lawyers in London. The lecture that drew them in most deeply was one I gave each year on Heraclitus and his idea that our character is our fate. Something in that thought seemed to reach them. It slipped behind their ambition and unsettled something deep down. Many began to ask what they were really doing with their lives, what kind of people they were becoming. At the end of that lecture I would always say, “I hope this comes back to you throughout your life, and that it haunts you.” Every year, some of them would find me afterwards and say that it already had.
That is what I mean by soul in education.
A soulful education is not everything. Plato and Cicero do not plough fields or pick spuds. But there is dignity in studying them, in reaching into their work and searching for a prompt or a steer. Done well, this kind of learning does not pull us away from the world. It roots us more deeply in it. It sharpens our sense of where we are and what we are part of. It reminds us that thought is not weightless. It grows from the ground up.
There is a word in Irish, dúchas. It means something like native place, tradition, the knowledge you inherit from the land and the people around you. The hedge schools helped carry that, not only through what was taught but through how it was taught: side by side, among neighbours, under weather. The world was not something you stepped out of in order to learn; it was part of the learning itself.
That belief is perhaps the true legacy of the hedge school, and one worth revisiting now. In our own time, education faces a different kind of pressure: to perform, to quantify, to prove. Schools are asked to demonstrate outcomes, document progress, move ever faster. Yet the hedge school offers a counterpoint. It reminds us that education is not merely a system but a practice of paying attention, a communal act of keeping something alive.
For those who lead schools today, the hedge school tradition is a quiet challenge. It asks us to look beyond buildings and budgets, beyond compliance and metrics, to the deeper work of education: to keep curiosity burning, to cultivate belonging, to nurture that instinct for learning which persists even when conditions are harsh. The hedge school teacher knew that learning begins in relationship, in conversation, in the shared dignity of those who gather to think together.
There is another old Irish word worth remembering: tenalach. It refers to the hearth, the place of the fire. The hearth was once the centre of the home, the source of heat and food and light, and often of story and song. It was where people gathered to share what they had, to pass on memory and wisdom. In that sense, tenalach is not just a word for a physical fireplace, but for the warmth that keeps a community alive.
In recent months I have found myself facilitating something of a hedge school again, this time for adults who come away to think about deeper things and reflect. We sit by my fire. Instruction is replaced by dialogue. I do little to advertise the sessions, except for a quiet notice on my website, yet at the last one I ran out of chairs and two people had to sit on the floor. That image stays with me: the room full, the fire steady, people listening and speaking with care. Perhaps this too is tenalach, the old hearth still burning, not only in sticks and turf but in the warmth of shared thought.
Some school leaders will read this in overcrowded classrooms, dealing daily with scarce resources and the raw edge of social deprivation. Others, exhausted by policy demands and inspection cycles, may find talk of hedges and soul remote, even irrelevant. I understand that. But the spirit of the hedge school was never about comfort. It was about creating space for learning when everything seemed set against it. And that, perhaps, is what connects us most deeply to it now.
A few years ago, I was invited by UCAS in the United Kingdom to speak at their annual conference. I shared these same ideas. A few days later, one of the organisers sent me the feedback. She said she had never seen a more polarised response: half the audience thought it was wonderful, the other half thought it was pointless. I have thought about that ever since, because both halves have a point, and we must find a way for them to speak to each other.
If we lose that conversation, we risk building an education system that produces citizens who know everything about power and dominance but little about compassion, reflection or restraint. We risk forming people who can navigate the machinery of the modern world yet have no sense of how to question it, or how to imagine something better.
The hedge school reminds us that education is not just about equipping minds. It is about shaping souls, about the quiet work of forming people who can see the world clearly, love it deeply, and have the courage to live in it wisely.
Consilium 
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