This year's Blasket Island Commemoration will deal with education and learning on the Great Blasket, concentrating on the rich history attached to the island's national school, which was established in 1864.
When it closed in 1941, only three children were attending classes at the school. Just 12 years later, the island was evacuated, never again to be inhabited on a permanent basis.
At one stage, as many as 60 children attended the school on an irregular basis, and according to Mr Micheal de Mordha, director of the Great Blasket Centre in Dun Chaoin, around 1840, "during a period of zealous proselytising on the Dingle Peninsula", a Protestant school also opened there but lasted only a few years.
Educating children on the Great Blasket was, of course, for one purpose only - to equip them for emigration, usually to America.
The commemoration will run from April 6th to 8th and will include an exhibition of material connected with the school, including several references
which are contained in the National Archives, some of the original roll books and correspondence concerning the school.
On October 29th, 1883, Father William Egan, parish priest of Ballyferriter, wrote to a Mr John E. Sheridan of the National Education Office in Dublin, as follows: "The low proficiency of the school at the last results examination was doubtless in a great measure due to the fact that for almost the entire of the three months before the examination, the school was closed by order of the sanitary medical officer as fever was at the time raging on the island.
"Moreover, the Blasketters and their children know no other language but Irish. English is really a foreign language to them.
"Teaching such children English books is of course as difficult as teaching them Chinese. The same observations hold true generally of all that proportion of this promontory lying west of Dingle."
The last child on the island was Gearoid O Cathain, once famously described in the Irish Press as "the loneliest child in the world".
That wasn't how Gearoid saw himself, however.
In an interview with Southern Report some years ago, he described how being the only remaining youngster on the Great Blasket didn't bother him at all, as he became everyone's pet. He enjoyed spending his time "ag spaisteoireacht" - wandering about to his heart's content.
Mr O Cathain now lives in Cork and will be present at the commemoration. So will relatives of the teachers whose colourful careers on the island will be described.
There will be lectures on the broader aspects of education and emigration, culture contact on the Great Blasket and on the folklore collected by the schoolchildren of the island.
It is now recognised, says Mr de Mordha, that closure of the school was one of the final straws for the islanders at a time when the hardships associated with island life were crowding in on them.
In her Letters from the Great Blasket, Eibhlis Ni Shuilleabha in described the closure like this: "A notice came to the teacher to close the school at once . . . she bid the islanders adieu after about seven easy years teaching and left the three poor scholars to run wild with the rabbits."
The official opening will be performed by Senator Joe O'Toole, general secretary of the Irish National Teachers' Organisation.