Gaelscoil
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A gaelscoil (Plural: gaelscoileanna) is an Irish-speaking school often also co-educational usually found in Ireland, but outside the Irish speaking Gaeltacht areas. Irish is the working language for these schools. Most of the schools are under the patronage of Foras Pátrunachta na Scoileanna LánGhaeilge.
There are currently 31,000 pupils attending gaelscoileanna, with 158 gaelscoileanna at primary level and 36 schools at post-primary level (gaelcholáistí), the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Gaelscoileanna amount for 1% of the Northern Irish school system. The largest gaelscoil in Belfast is Coláiste Feirste. There is now at least one gaelscoil in all 32 traditional counties of Ireland and several in each of the bigger cities.
The idea of founding gaelscoileanna harks back to the turn of the century and the Gaelic Revival. Bilinguality from an early age is recommended by many linguists, as it helps children become more adept at picking up languages. Some studies have shown that bilingual children have advantages over monoglot children in other subjects.
Nowadays in Ireland, many people send their children to these schools, as they would not otherwise get to speak Irish. Ireland is mostly English-speaking, and although non-Gaelscoil schools also have Irish as a mandatory subject, many students leave with only a rudimentary knowledge of the language. There are both Irish-speaking primary and secondary schools, called bunscoileanna and meánscoileanna respectively, these are the lower two tiers of education in Ireland before college (coláiste) and university (ollscoil) - third level education.
