Historical Perspectives

Robert Anderson

Scottish education has been characterised by a peculiar awareness of its own history. Since 1707 its distinctness has been a mark of national identity to be defended against assimilation with England, and its supposed superiority has been a point of national pride. Two achievements were especially notable: the early arrival of universal or near-universal literacy, and a precociously developed university system; on these was founded the 'democratic' myth of Scottish education, often traced back to John Knox, and expressed in the literary and popular image of the 'lad o' pairts', the boy of modest social origins from a rural or smalltown background climbing the educational ladder to the ministry or school teaching. Like other national myths, this idealises reality, but has a core of truth, though most historians would agree that it represented an individualist form of meritocracy, rather than reflecting a classless society. For all the virtues of the rural parish school, the chief features of modern Scottish education were created in the few decades following the Education (Scotland) Act 1872, and as a pioneering urban and industrial country, Scotland was deeply marked by the class divisions of the nineteenth century. The 1872 Act was a political and administrative landmark, but (as we shall see) the basic task of schooling the new working class had already been largely overcome, and the increased intervention of the state was not so much a reaction against the previous dominance of religion and the churches, as a modernised and secular form of an ideal of 'national' and public education, aimed at imposing cultural uniformity.

THE PARISH SCHOOL AND LITERACY

The leaders of the Scottish Reformation had an unusually clear vision of the role of education in creating a godly society. The First Book of Discipline of 1560 sketched out an articulated educational structure, from parish school to university, and sought to provide basic religious instruction and literacy in each parish.

Achieving this was the work of several generations, but it is today generally agreed that, by the end of the seventeenth cen-tury, the network of parish schools was largely complete in the lowlands, though not in the highlands. The Act of 1696 passed by the Scottish Parliament, which was strengthened in 1803 and remained the legal basis of the parish schools until 1872, consolidated this structure. The landowners (heritors) were obliged to build a schoolhouse and to pay a salary to a schoolmaster, which was supplemented by the fees paid by parents; ministers and presbyteries were responsible for the quality of education and the testing of schoolmasters. This was a statutory system, but one run by the church and the local notables rather than the state.

Schooling did not become compulsory until 1872, and attendance in the early modern period depended partly on the perceived advantages of education (which were greater for boys than girls), and partly on the pressure of landowners, ministers and community opinion. Attendance was clearly not universal, and recent studies of literacy have challenged the traditional optimistic picture. Houston (1985, pp. 56-62) estimates male literacy (defined as the ability to write a signature rather than making a mark) at 65 per cent in the lowlands in the mid-eighteenth century, and female at no more than 25-30 per cent. This put the Scottish lowlands among the more literate areas of Europe, but was not a unique achievement. As elsewhere, literacy varied regionally (the borders and east central Scotland being the most advanced), was higher in towns than in the countryside, and was correlated with occupation and prosperity, reaching artisans, small merchants or farmers before labourers, miners, factory workers or crofters.

It is very likely that the early stages of the Industrial Revo-lution, with the accompanying phenomena of urbanisation and migration from the highlands and Ireland, worsened overall rates of literacy. But exact figures are lacking until the official registration of marriages was introduced in 1855. At that time, 89 per cent of men and 77 per cent of women could sign the registers - compared with 70 per cent and 59 per cent, respect-ively, in England. But signature evidence may underestimate the basic ability to read, for writing was taught as a separate skill, with higher fees, and many children, especially girls, did not advance beyond reading. Taken as a whole, the evidence on literacy suggests that by 1800 Scottish lowland communities had made the fundamental transition to written culture. Illiteracy survived, but was stigmatised and deplored by the church and the secular authorities, and the ability to read was broad enough to support the beginnings of a tradition of working-class selfed-ucation and self-improvement.

None of this applied to the highlands, where attempts to create schools suffered from adverse economic and geographical conditions, the slow penetration of the church's basic parochial organisation and the resistance of an oral Gaelic culture. After the Jacobite risings of 1715, and even more after 1745, church and state combined to enforce loyalty and orthodoxy, and it was axiomatic that this must be through the medium of English.

Parish schools were supplemented by those of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, founded in 1709, but the refusal to teach in Gaelic (except initially as an aid to learning English) created a formidable cultural barrier between family and school. Nevertheless, by the early nineteenth century conditions in the more prosperous parts of the highlands and islands were not so different from the lowlands, though usually with scantier resources, and illiteracy was being driven into its last redoubts in the Western Isles.

A notable feature of the parish school was its connection with the universities. Schoolmasters were expected to have some university experience, and taught enough Latin to allow boys to pass directly into university classes. This system had evolved to encourage the recruitment of ministers, and there were bursaries to give promising pupils financial support. This was the origin of the tradition of the 'lad o' pairts', and though in practice most such boys came from the middle ranks - the sons of ministers, farmers and artisans - rather than the really poor, the educational opportunities offered in the countryside made Scotland unusual.

BURGH SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES

The parish school legislation did not apply in burghs. It was normal for royal burghs to maintain burgh schools, whose existence can be traced back into the Middle Ages. Originally these were grammar schools, teaching Latin with an eye to the uni-versities, but town councils began to appoint additional teachers for modern and commercial subjects, and by the late eighteenth century there was a move to consolidate the various schools in an 'academy', usually housed in impressive new buildings. The expanding middle class of the towns was thus well catered for, and outside the big cities the burgh schools and academies were open to both sexes, an unusual feature at the time. But town councils had no statutory duty to provide education for the mass of the population, and most basic education in the towns was given by private teachers. Although Scotland has a strong tradition of public education, private schools once had a vital role, in rural areas as well as in the towns, being squeezed out only in the nineteenth century by competition, from churches and charitable bodies as well as the state. These schools have been underestimated as they left few traces in historical records. They ranged from the 'dame school' where a woman taught reading to young children in her own home, through the 'private adventure' school which at its best could give the same sort of education as a parish school, to expensive boarding and day schools in the cities, training boys for the university or a commercial career, or 'young ladies' in the accomplishments expected of a middle-class bride.

The vigorous state of urban education by 1800 reflected the prosperity of the age of improvement, as did the striking success of the universities, of which Scotland had five. Three were founded in the fifteenth century (St Andrews, Glasgow and King's College Aberdeen), and two after the Reformation (Ed-inburgh and Marischal College Aberdeen), but the Reformation did not change their fundamental character, as inward-looking institutions teaching arts and theology, whose core task was the training of the clergy. The political and religious upheavals of the seventeenth century were damaging, but after 1700 the universities embarked on a notable revival culminating in the age of the Enlightenment, when Scotland was for a time in the van of European thought. The lecture-based curriculum had a broadly philosophical approach, embracing modern subjects like science and economics, and directly expressed enlightened ideals of politeness, improvement and virtue. The universities could thus offer a liberal education to the social elite, while simultaneously developing professional training, most fully at Edinburgh, in law and medicine. Medical education was especially important in securing the universities' reputation and attracting students, as was to remain the case in the nineteenth century. Socially, the fact that all the universities except St Andrews were situated in large towns kept them in touch with contemporary demands and made them accessible to the new commercial and professional classes; the sons of the aristocracy and gentry, no longer sent abroad to universities like Leyden, rubbed shoulders with a more modest and traditional contingent aiming at the ministry or school teaching.