Early Influences on the Work of Joyce That Contributed to His Development as an Educationist of Renown

In his book, English as We Speak It in Ireland, published when he was 83 years of age, P. W. Joyce recalled his schooling, which took place at a time when the hedge schools that operated around the country were slowly giving way to those schools established under the National Board. On that, while he had spent 48 years promoting the very formal and disciplined National School system of education, he remembered with affection his own early experiences as a pupil. Also, while he never shifted in his commitment to promoting the need for an efficient and orderly approach to schooling, the nature of how he tempered that over the years by emphasising the need for teachers to promote hands-on activities and be attentive to students’ needs and interests may have been due not just to becoming informed widely on international developments in education but also to a growing memory of happy schooldays in his youth.