History of education in Scotland

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Carving of a 17th-century classroom with a dominie and his ten scholars from George Heriot's School, Edinburgh

The history of education in Scotland in its modern sense of organised and institutional learning, began in the Middle Ages, when Church choir schools and

grammar schools began educating boys. By the end of the 15th century schools were also being organised for girls and universities were founded at St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen. Education was encouraged by the Education Act 1496
, which made it compulsory for the sons of barons and freeholders of substance to attend the grammar schools, which in turn helped increase literacy among the upper classes.

The Scottish Reformation resulted in major changes to the organisation and nature of education, with the loss of choir schools and the expansion of parish schools, along with the reform and expansion of the Universities. In the seventeenth century, legislation enforced the creation and funding of schools in every parish, often overseen by presbyteries of the local kirk. The existence of this network of schools later led to the growth of the "democratic myth" that poor boys had been able to use this system of education to rise to the top of Scottish society. However, Scotland's University system did help to make it one of the major contributors to the Enlightenment in the 18th century, producing major figures such as David Hume and Adam Smith.

Religious divisions and the impact of industrialisation, migration and immigration disrupted the existing educational system and in the late nineteenth century it was reorganised and expanded to produce a state-funded national system of free basic education and common examinations. The reform of Scottish universities made them major centres of learning and pioneers in the admission of women from 1892. In the 20th century Scottish secondary education expanded, particularly for girls, but the universities began to fall behind those in England and Europe in investment and expansion of numbers. The government of the education system became increasingly centred on Scotland, with the final move of the ministry of education to Edinburgh in 1939. After devolution in 1999 the

Enterprise, Transport and Lifelong Learning Department and there was significant divergence from practice in England, including the abolition of student tuition fees
at Scottish universities.

Middle Ages

Main article: Education in Medieval Scotland
Tower of St Salvator's College, St Andrews, one of the three universities founded in the fifteenth century

In the Early Middle Ages, Scotland was overwhelmingly an oral society and education was verbal rather than literary. Fuller sources for Ireland of the same period suggest that there may have been

filidh, who acted as poets, musicians and historians, often attached to the court of a lord or king, and passed on their knowledge in Gaelic to the next generation.[1][2] After the "de-gallicisation" of the Scottish court from the twelfth century, a less highly regarded order of bards took over these functions and they would continue to act in a similar role in the Highlands and Islands into the eighteenth century. They often trained in bardic schools, of which a few, like the one run by the MacMhuirich dynasty, who were bards to the Lord of the Isles,[3] existed in Scotland and a larger number in Ireland, until they were suppressed from the seventeenth century.[2] Much of their work was never written down and what survives was only recorded from the sixteenth century.[1]

The establishment of Christianity brought Latin to Scotland as a scholarly and written language. Monasteries served as major repositories of knowledge and education, often running schools and providing a small educated elite, who were essential to create and read documents in a largely illiterate society.

song and grammar schools. These were usually attached to cathedrals or a collegiate church and were most common in the developing burghs. By the end of the Middle Ages grammar schools could be found in all the main burghs and some small towns. Early examples including the High School of Glasgow in 1124 and the High School of Dundee in 1239.[5] There were also petty schools, more common in rural areas and providing an elementary education.[6] Some monasteries, like the Cistercian abbey at Kinloss, opened their doors to a wider range of students.[6] The number and size of these schools seems to have expanded rapidly from the 1380s. They were almost exclusively aimed at boys, but by the end of the fifteenth century, Edinburgh also had schools for girls, sometimes described as "sewing schools", and probably taught by lay women or nuns.[5][6] There was also the development of private tuition in the families of lords and wealthy burghers.[5] The growing emphasis on education cumulated with the passing of the Education Act 1496, which decreed that all sons of barons and freeholders of substance should attend grammar schools to learn "perfyct Latyne". All this resulted in an increase in literacy, but which was largely concentrated among a male and wealthy elite,[5] with perhaps 60 per cent of the nobility being literate by the end of the period.[7]

A woodcut showing John Mair, one of the most successful products of the Scottish educational system in the late fifteenth century

Until the fifteenth century, those who wished to attend university had to travel to England or the continent, and just over a 1,000 have been identified as doing so between the twelfth century and 1410.

nominalists at Paris in the early sixteenth century, of which John Mair was probably the most important figure. He had probably studied at a Scottish grammar school, then Cambridge, before moving to Paris, where he matriculated in 1493. By 1497 the humanist and historian Hector Boece, born in Dundee and who had studied at Paris, returned to become the first principal at the new university of Aberdeen.[8] These international contacts helped integrate Scotland into a wider European scholarly world and would be one of the most important ways in which the new ideas of humanism were brought into Scottish intellectual life.[7]

Impact of the Reformation

Main article: Education in early modern Scotland
Andrew Melville, credited with major reforms in Scottish Universities in the sixteenth century

The humanist concern with widening education was shared by the Protestant reformers, with a desire for a godly people replacing the aim of having educated citizens. In 1560, the

Classical literature and sports.[12]

In 1616 an

Restoration brought a reversion to the 1633 position, in 1696 new legislation restored the provisions of 1646 together with means of enforcement "more suitable to the age". Underlining the aim of having a school in every parish. In rural communities these obliged local landowners (heritors) to provide a schoolhouse and pay a schoolmaster, while ministers and local presbyteries oversaw the quality of the education. In many Scottish towns, burgh schools were operated by local councils.[13] By the late seventeenth century there was a largely complete network of parish schools in the lowlands, but in the Highlands basic education was still lacking in many areas.[14]

The widespread belief in the limited intellectual and moral capacity of women, vied with a desire, intensified after the Reformation, for women to take personal moral responsibility, particularly as wives and mothers. In Protestantism this necessitated an ability to learn and understand the catechism and even to be able to independently read the Bible, but most commentators, even those that tended to encourage the education of girls, thought they should not receive the same academic education as boys. In the lower ranks of society, they benefited from the expansion of the parish schools system that took place after the Reformation, but were usually outnumbered by boys, often taught separately, for a shorter time and to a lower level. They were frequently taught reading, sewing and knitting, but not writing. Female illiteracy rates based on signatures among female servants were around 90 percent, from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries and perhaps 85 percent for women of all ranks by 1750, compared with 35 per cent for men.[15] Among the nobility there were many educated and cultured women, of which Mary, Queen of Scots is the most obvious example.[16]

The High Street college of the University of Glasgow, completed under the Commonwealth

After the Reformation, Scotland's universities underwent a series of reforms associated with

Protestors, who were generally favoured by the regime because of their greater antipathy to royalism, with Patrick Gillespie being made Principal at Glasgow.[20] After the Restoration there was a purge of the universities, but much of the intellectual advances of the preceding period was preserved.[21] The five Scottish universities recovered with a lecture-based curriculum that was able to embrace economics and science, offering a high quality liberal education to the sons of the nobility and gentry. It helped the universities to become major centres of medical education and would put Scotland at the forefront of Enlightenment thinking.[14]

Eighteenth century

Main article: Scottish education in the eighteenth century
The old school at Kingsford, East Ayrshire

One of the effects of this extensive network of schools was the growth of the "democratic myth" in the 19th century, which created the widespread belief that many a "lad of pairts" had been able to rise up through the system to take high office and that literacy was much more widespread in Scotland than in neighbouring states, particularly England.

consequentialist thinking. Some modern attitudes towards the relationship between science and religion were developed by his proteges David Hume and Adam Smith.[25]

By the eighteenth century many poorer girls were being taught in

dame schools, informally set up by a widow or spinster to teach reading, sewing and cooking.[26] Among members of the aristocracy by the early eighteenth century a girl's education was expected to include basic literacy and numeracy, needlework and cookery and household management, while polite accomplishments and piety were also emphasised.[27]

Belles Lettres
at the University of Edinburgh

In the Scottish Highlands as well as problems of distance and physical isolation, most people spoke Gaelic which few teachers and ministers could understand. Here the Kirk's parish schools were supplemented by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, established in 1709. Their aim was to teach English language and end Roman Catholicism associated with rebellious Jacobitism. Though the Gaelic Society schools taught the Bible in Gaelic, the overall effect contributed to the erosion of Highland culture.[28]

Throughout the last part of the century schools and universities also benefitted from the robust educational publishing industry that existed across the Lowlands and which printed primers, dabbity sheets, textbooks, lecture heads and other kinds of effective learning tools that helped students remember information.[29]

In the eighteenth century Scotland's universities went from being small and parochial institutions, largely for the training of clergy and lawyers, to major intellectual centres at the forefront of Scottish identity and life, seen as fundamental to democratic principles and the opportunity for social advancement for the talented.[30] Chairs of medicine were founded at Marsichial College (1700), Glasgow (1713), St. Andrews (1722) and a chair of chemistry and medicine at Edinburgh (1713). It was Edinburgh's medical school, founded in 1732 that came to dominate. By the 1740s it had displaced Leiden as the major centre of medicine in Europe and was a leading centre in the Atlantic world.[31] The universities still had their difficulties. The economic downturn in the mid-century forced the closure of St Leonard's College in St Andrews, whose properties and staff were merged into St Salvator's College to form the United College of St Salvator and St Leonard.[32]

Old College, University of Edinburgh, built to plans drawn up by Robert Adam and completed in the nineteenth century

Access to Scottish universities was probably more open than in contemporary England, Germany or France. Attendance was less expensive and the student body more representative of society as a whole.

European Enlightenment.[23]

Many of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment were university professors, who developed their ideas in university lectures.

agronomist, Joseph Black, physicist and chemist, and James Hutton, the first modern geologist.[25][37]

Nineteenth century

Main article: Scottish education in the nineteenth century
The Mearns Street Public School built for the Greenock Burgh School Board still bears its name, carved on the stone pediment above the entrance.

Industrialisation, urbanisation and the

Baptists had more Sunday schools than churches and were teaching over 10,000 children. The number would double by 1914.[39] From 1830 the state began to fund buildings with grants, then from 1846 it was funding schools by direct sponsorship, and in 1872 Scotland moved to a system like that in England of state-sponsored largely free schools, run by local school boards.[22] Overall administration was in the hands of the Scotch (later Scottish) Education Department in London.[40] Education was now compulsory from five to thirteen and many new board schools were built. Larger urban school boards established "higher grade" (secondary) schools as a cheaper alternative to the burgh schools. The Scottish Education Department introduced a Leaving Certificate Examination in 1888 to set national standards for secondary education and in 1890 school fees were abolished, creating a state-funded national system of free basic education and common examinations.[14]

At the beginning of the 19th century Scottish universities had no entrance exam, students typically entered at ages of 15 or 16, attended for as little as two years, chose which lectures to attend and left without qualifications. After two commissions of enquiry in 1826 and 1876 and reforming acts of parliament in 1858 and 1889, the curriculum and system of graduation were reformed to meet the needs of the emerging middle classes and the professions. Entrance examinations equivalent to the School Leaving Certificate were introduced and average ages of entry had risen to 17 or 18. Standard patterns of graduation in the arts curriculum offered 3-year ordinary and 4-year honours degrees and separate science faculties were able to move away from the compulsory Latin, Greek and philosophy of the old MA curriculum.[41] The historic University of Glasgow became a leader in British higher education by providing the educational needs of youth from the urban and commercial classes, as well as the upper class. It prepared students for non-commercial careers in government, the law, medicine, education, and the ministry and a smaller group for careers in science and engineering.[42] St Andrews pioneered the admission of women to Scottish universities, creating the Lady Licentiate in Arts (LLA), which proved highly popular. From 1892 Scottish universities could admit and graduate women and the numbers of women at Scottish universities steadily increased until the early 20th century.[43]

Twentieth century

Main article: Education in Scotland in the twentieth century
Perth High School, opened in around 1972

The Scottish education system underwent radical change and expansion in the 20th century. In 1918

Higher Grade ('Higher') qualifications in 1962, which became the basic entry qualification for university study. The centre of the education system also became more focused on Scotland, with the ministry of education partly moving north in 1918 and then finally having its headquarters relocated to Edinburgh in 1939.[14]

The student library at Abertay University

The first half of the 20th century saw Scottish universities fall behind those in England and Europe in terms of participation and investment. The decline of traditional industries between the wars undermined recruitment. English universities increased the numbers of students registered between 1924 and 1927 by 19 per cent, but in Scotland the numbers fell, particularly among women. In the same period, while expenditure in English universities rose by 90 per cent, in Scotland the increase was less than a third of that figure.

Paisley and Robert Gordon.[45] In 2001 the University of the Highlands and Islands was created by a federation of 13 colleges and research institutions in the Highlands and Islands.[46]

After devolution, in 1999 the new

Enterprise, Transport and Lifelong Learning Department, which together took over its functions.[47] One of the major diversions from practice in England, possible because of devolution, was the abolition of student tuition fees in 1999, instead retaining a system of means-tested student grants.[48]

The current education system

For a description of the current education system in Scotland, see Education in Scotland

See also

Notes

  1. ^
    ISBN 0-19-538623-X
    .
  2. ^
    ISBN 0-521-89088-8
    , p. 76.
  3. ISBN 0-7486-1299-8
    , p. 220.
  4. ISBN 0-7509-2977-4
    , p. 128.
  5. ^
    ISBN 1-84384-096-0
    , pp. 29-30.
  6. ^
    ISBN 1-4464-7563-8
    , pp. 104-7.
  7. ^
    ISBN 0-7486-0276-3
    , pp. 68-72.
  8. ^
    ISBN 0-333-56761-7
    , pp. 124-5.
  9. ISBN 0-333-56761-7
    , pp. 119.
  10. ISBN 0-521-89088-8
    , p. 5.
  11. ISBN 0-300-09234-2
    , pp. 59-62.
  12. ISBN 0-7486-0276-3
    , pp. 183-3.
  13. ^ "School education prior to 1873", Scottish Archive Network, 2010, archived from the original on 28 September 2011.
  14. ^
    ISBN 0-7486-1625-X
    , pp. 219-28.
  15. ISBN 0521890888
    , pp. 63-8.
  16. ISBN 0748612998
    , p. 187.
  17. ^
    ISBN 0-7486-0276-3
    , pp. 183-4.
  18. ISBN 90-04-10097-0
    , p. 280.
  19. ISBN 0-19-162433-0
    , pp. 196-7.
  20. ISBN 0140136495
    , pp. 227-8.
  21. ISBN 1-4464-7563-8
    , p. 262.
  22. ^
    ISBN 0-14-100234-4
    , pp. 91-100.
  23. ^
    ISBN 0-609-80999-7
    .
  24. ^ José Manuel Barroso (28 November 2006), "The Scottish enlightenment and the challenges for Europe in the 21st century; climate change and energy", EUROPA: Enlightenment Lecture Series, Edinburgh University, archived from the original on 22 September 2007, retrieved 22 March 2012
  25. ^ a b c "The Scottish enlightenment and the challenges for Europe in the 21st century; climate change and energy", The New Yorker, 11 October 2004, archived from the original on 6 June 2011
  26. ISBN 0-7486-1625-X
    , p. 1022.
  27. ISBN 1843836815
    , p. 26.
  28. ISBN 0521624037
    , p. 138.
  29. ^ Eddy, Matthew Daniel (2012). "Natural History, Natural Philosophy and Readership". History of the Book in Scotland. 2: 297–309.
  30. ^
    ISBN 0-19-211696-7
    , pp. 612-14.
  31. ISBN 0521003237
    , p. 100.
  32. ^ "Medieval university" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 22 July 2013. Retrieved 3 January 2013.
  33. ISBN 0-521-89088-8
    , p. 245.
  34. ^ M. Magnusson (10 November 2003), "Review of James Buchan, Capital of the Mind: how Edinburgh Changed the World", New Statesman, archived from the original on 6 June 2011.
  35. ISBN 0-415-06164-4
    .
  36. ISBN 0807861138
    , p. 282.
  37. ISBN 0-7382-0692-X
    , pp. 117–43.
  38. ISBN 1-4464-7563-8
    , p. 397.
  39. ISBN 0712698930
    , p. 403.
  40. ^ "Education records", National Archive of Scotland, 2006, archived from the original on 31 August 2011.
  41. ISBN 0-7486-1625-X
    , p. 224.
  42. ^ Paul L. Robertson, "The Development of an Urban University: Glasgow, 1860-1914", History of Education Quarterly, Winter 1990, vol. 30 (1), pp. 47-78.
  43. ISBN 1-86094-986-X
    , p. 264.
  44. ^
    ISBN 0-7486-0999-7
    , p. 78.
  45. ISBN 0-7486-1625-X
    , pp. 664-5.
  46. ^ "UHI is awarded taught degree awarding powers, news release 26 June 2008, Highland Council website, accessed 20 March 2009". Highland.gov.uk. 26 June 2008. Archived from the original on 28 July 2011. Retrieved 2 February 2011.
  47. ISBN 0-7486-1625-X
    , pp. 132-40.
  48. ISBN 0-7486-1625-X
    , pp. 62-73.

Further reading
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