Timothy Corcoran, SJ

Tullabeg and Clongowes 1885-1890 I Timothy Corcoran, SJ

Timothy Corcoran, SJ (1872-1943), educationist, was a native of Dunkerrin, County Tipperary, who attended Tullabeg and Clongowes in 1885-90, winning first place and the gold medal in the intermediate grade as the best scholar of his age in Ireland. Having taught at Clongowes, he studied philosophy and education at Milltown Park and Louvain. He was ordained in 1912. In 1909 he became professor of education at UCD, a post he held until 1942. He was an active and an extremely influential figure – ‘the masterbuilder in education’ of the new Irish state – who was close to Éamon de Valera and a mentor of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid as well as generations of secondary teachers. His conservative views were strongly held and expressed with a forthrightness that even his apologists considered unfortunate. He believed in education by inculcation – whereby students benefited in knowledge from memorisation and the teacher’s authority. He dismissed child-centred methods as ‘soft pedagogy’, championed competitive examinations and advocated ‘the rod of correction’ to drive away the ‘folly bound up in the heart of a child’. He was contemptuous of theorists, such as Dewey, Froebel and Montessori. His position was at the extreme end of Catholic nationalism: rejection of foreign – especially non-Catholic – influence; primary education through Irish (which he didn’t speak himself); distrust of science; disinterest in foreign languages apart from the classics; rejection of Newman’s idea of a university; hostility towards protestants; denigration of Anglo-Irish literature. He was the original, if short-lived, editor of Studies. He penned numerous articles especially in the Catholic Bulletin, edited school texts and published several books on education history. His Clongowes Record (1932) is a major resource for the history of the college.