- The Celtic Languages Today -
bilingual cheque-books' (ibid.), adding, not without irony, that 'these show that the
symbolic use of Breton has extended beyond war-memorials'.
In the field of education, Welsh is now well provided for, at least at primary and
secondary levels. Welsh has long been taught as a subject in Welsh-speaking parts of
Wales and already before the Second World War was used to some extent as a
medium of instruction in primary schools. The first specifically Welsh-medium
primary school within the state system was opened in 1947 and the first bilingual
secondary school (Welsh being both the administrative language and the medium of
instruction for most subjects) in 1956. There are now nearly seventy such schools in
the primary sector and sixteen in the secondary sector. A more recent - and very
important - development has been the growth in the last twenty years of Welsh-
language nursery schools, which could prove an effective factor in slowing down
the decline in the use of the language. At the other end of the scale, some provision
is made for teaching through the medium of Welsh in some departments in the
University of Wales but, although there are demands for further expansion in this
direction and even for the establishment of an entirely Welsh-medium college within
the university, there seems little likelihood that this will prove to be feasible.
As in other fields, the provision for Gaelic within the educational system is greatly
inferior to that of Welsh. Gaelic is, however, widely taught as a subject in the Gaelic-
speaking areas and the sympathetic attitude towards it taken by the Western Isles
Islands Council is likely to lead to a substantial improvement.
The attitude of the French authorities towards Breton, as towards all minority
languages under their jurisdiction, has long been one of considerable hostility. In
1951, strictly limited provision for the teaching of Breton (and of Basque, Catalan
and Occitan) in state secondary schools was granted by act of parliament but this was
hedged around by highly discouraging constraints as to the circumstances in which
the languages in question could be taught. Some progress has been made since, at
both secondary and tertiary levels, but the most significant development has been the
rise, since 1977 and outside the state system, of a number of nursery and primary
schools in which Breton is not only taught but, to some extent, used as a medium of
instruction. However, 'in 1984, only a little over 5 per cent of all pupils [i.e. in schools
in the Breton-speaking part of the country] had any instruction in Breton'
(Humphreys 1991: 101), and the situation is unlikely to have improved markedly
SInce.
The picture in the Republic of Ireland is a very different one. There, in the two
decades following the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, an extensive
policy of gaelicization of the educational system was pushed through, with much
stress not only on the teaching of Irish but on teaching through the medium of Irish.
Views differ both as to the success of this policy measured by its influence on the
'restoration' of Irish and as to its possible harmful effects on the general educational
development of the children. However that may be, the policy has been largely
abandoned: an Irish Language Board report dated 1986 comments that the number
of Irish-medium primary schools, outside the designated Gaeltacht areas, declined
from 232 to 43 between 1957-8 and 1969-70, and to only 20 by the mid-1980s
(though there was later a small increase). In the same period, the number of Irish-
medium post-primary schools outside the Gaeltacht fell from 81 to 15 (Bord na
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