• Introduction: writing the history of Irish education / James Kelly
• Educational print and the emergence of mass education in Ireland, c.1650-c.1830
• The national-school system and the Irish language in the nineteenth century / Nicholas M. Wolf
• Education, cosmopolitan cultural capital and European elites in the nineteenth century / Ciaran O'Neill
• Knowledge, belief and the Irish revolution: the impact of schooling / David Fitzpatrick
• Poetry, materialities and montage: towards new histories of twentieth-century school architecture / Catherine Burke
• Exploring the experience of secondary-school education in Ireland prior to the introduction of 'free' second-level education in
• 1967: the potential of the life-story narrative approach / Judith Harford & Tom O'Donoghue
• (In)equality of opportunity and educational reform in Ireland in the 1960s / Audrey Bryan.

Focusing on the history of education in Ireland and Europe from the seventeenth century to the present, and written by scholars from a number of disciplines, this collection pursues new areas of inquiry and offers new perspectives on familiar topics. These include an investigation of the emergence of educational print prior to the establishment of the national-school system; the national-school system and the Irish language; the educational formation of the revolutionary generation; the impact of the introduction in Ireland of 'free' second-level education in the 1960s; elite transnational education in the nineteenth century; school architecture; and the experiences of second-level education in the twentieth century as revealed through the life histories of pupils. This volume also includes an extended introduction that locates the historiography of the history of education in Ireland in its international context.