When T. K. Whitaker published Economic Development in 1958, there was one remarkable gap in his thinking about how Ireland could become part of the modern world: education. It was not discussed at all. And yet one of the most obvious ways in which Ireland was backward was that it had failed to keep up with the great expansion of schooling in post-war democracies, and in particular the extension of free tuition to second level. When I started school in 1962, the church-dominated school system had left the Irish among the worst-educated people in the western world.
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