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Hedge schools (Irish language names include scoil chois claí, scoil ghairid and scoil scairte) were small informal secret and illegal schools, particularly in 18th-century Ireland, teaching the rudiments of primary education to children of 'non-conforming' faiths (Catholic and Presbyterian). Prior to the 1792 repeal of the Education Act 1695, only schools run by subscribers to the Anglicanism were allowed to operate. Instead, Catholics and Presbyterians set up secret and illegal schools that met in private homes.
While the "hedge school" label suggests the classes took place next to a hedgerow, when the Penal Laws were relaxed, classes were normally held in a house or a barn. Payment was generally made to teachers per subject, and bright pupils would often compete locally with their teachers, or even be smuggled to Mainland Europe, for Catholic higher education at one of the .
Subjects included the reading, writing, and grammar of both the Irish language and , and mathematics (the fundamental "three Rs"). In some schools, the Irish bardic poetry, local history and home economics were also taught. In Munster especially, Koine and Latin were also taught. In Westminster a parliamentarian complained 'I do not wish to see children in educated like the inhabitants of , where the young peasants of County Kerry run about in rags with a Cicero or Virgil under their arms". Reading was often taught using chapbooks, sold at village fairs and typically filled with exciting stories of well-known , many of whom were outlawed members of the Gaelic nobility of Ireland who still held to the code of conduct of the traditional chiefs of the .
While all Catholic education was forbidden under the penal laws from 1723 to 1782, no hedge teachers are known to have been prosecuted. The penal laws particularly targeted run by , whose property was routinely confiscated. The laws were intended to force Irish Catholics of all classes to convert to the Protestant Church of Ireland if they wanted a decent education.
Historians agree that the hedge schools provided education, occasionally at a very high level, for up to 400,000 students by the mid-1820s. J. R. R. Adams says the hedge schools testified “to the strong desire of ordinary Irish people to see their children receive some sort of education”. Antonia McManus argues that there “can be little doubt that Irish parents set a high value on a hedge school education and made enormous sacrifices to secure it for their children....the one of their own”.Historians Adams and McManus are quoted in Michael C. Coleman, American Indians, the Irish, and Government Schooling: A Comparative Study (2005) p 35.
Formal schools for Catholics under trained teachers began to appear after 1800. Edmund Ignatius Rice (1762–1844) founded two religious institutes of religious brothers: the Congregation of Christian Brothers and the Presentation Brothers. Both opened numerous schools, which were visible, legal and standardized. Discipline was notably strict.Daire Keogh, "Forged in the Fire of Persecution: Edmund Rice (1762–1844) and the Counter-Reformationary Character of the Irish Christian Brothers." in Brendan Walsh, ed., Essays in the History of Irish Education (2016) pp. 83–103.
Hedge schools declined from the foundation of the national school system by the British government in the 1830s. Most of the Catholic bishops preferred the new system, as the new schools would be largely under the control of the Catholic Church and would allow formalized teaching of Catholic doctrine. James Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, wrote to his priests in 1831:
A study of hedge schools by Yolanda Fernández-Suárez of the University of Burgos found that hedge schools existed into the 1890s and suggested that the schools existed as much from rural poverty and a lack of resources as from religious oppression.
After 1900, historians such as Daniel Corkery tended to emphasise the hedge schools' classical studies (in Latin and Ancient Greek). Those studies were sometimes taught (based on a local demand) but not in every school.
Fernández-Suárez quoted a Board of Education inspector visiting a school in 1835:
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