Scotland in The Early Modern Era - Culture - Education

Education

Protestant reformers shared the humanist concern with widening education, with a desire for a godly people replacing the aim of having educated citizens. In 1560 the First Book of Discipline set out a plan for a school in every parish, but this proved financially impossible. In the burghs the old schools were maintained, with the song schools and a number of new foundations becoming reformed grammar schools or ordinary parish schools. Schools were supported by a combination of kirk funds, contributions from local heritors or burgh councils and parents that could pay. They were inspected by kirk sessions, who checked for the quality of teaching and doctrinal purity. There were also large number of unregulated "adventure schools", which sometimes fulfilled local needs and sometimes took pupils away from the official schools. Outside of the established burgh schools masters often combined their position with other employment, particularly minor posts within the kirk, such as clerk. At their best, the curriculum included catechism, Latin, French, Classical literature and sports.

In 1616 an act in Privy council commanded every parish to establish a school "where convenient means may be had", and when the Parliament of Scotland ratified this with the Education Act of 1633, a tax on local landowners was introduced to provide the necessary endowments. A loophole that allowed evasion of this tax was closed in the Education Act of 1646, which established a solid institutional foundation for schools on Covenanter principles. Although the 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". It took until the late seventeenth century to produce a largely complete network of parish schools in the Lowlands, and in the Highlands basic education was still lacking in many areas by the passing of the Education Act 1696, which would be the basis of administration of the system until 1873. In rural communities this act obliged local 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. In the 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 for Promoting Christian Knowledge, established in 1709. Its aim was to teach the English language and to end the Roman Catholicism associated with rebellious Jacobitism. Although the Gaelic Society schools eventually taught the Bible in Gaelic, the overall effect was a contribution to the erosion of Highland culture.

After the Reformation, Scotland's universities underwent a series of reforms associated with Andrew Melville, who returned from Geneva to become principal of the University of Glasgow in 1574. A distinguished linguist, philosopher and poet, he had trained in Paris and studied law at Poitiers, before moving to Geneva and developing an interest in Protestant theology. Influenced by the anti-Aristotelian Pierre Ramus, he placed an emphasis on simplified logic and elevated languages and sciences to the same status as philosophy, allowing accepted ideas in all areas to be challenged. He introduced new specialist teaching staff, replacing the system of "regenting", where one tutor took the students through the entire arts curriculum. Metaphysics were abandoned and Greek became compulsory in the first year followed by Aramaic, Syriac and Hebrew, launching a new fashion for ancient and biblical languages. Glasgow had probably been declining as a university before his arrival, but students now began to arrive in large numbers. He assisted in the reconstruction of Marischal College, Aberdeen, and in order to do for St Andrews what he had done for Glasgow, he was appointed Principal of St Mary's College, St Andrews, in 1580. The results were a revitalisation of all Scottish universities, which were now producing a quality of education the equal of that offered anywhere in Europe.

After the religious and political upheavals of the seventeenth century, the universities recovered with a lecture-based curriculum that embraced economics and science, offering a high quality liberal education to the sons of the nobility and gentry. It helped them to become major centres of medical education and to put Scotland at the forefront of Enlightenment thinking. Key figures in the Scottish Enlightenment who had made their mark before the mid-eighteenth century included Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), who was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow. He was an important link between the ideas of Shaftesbury and the later school of Scottish Common Sense Realism. Colin Maclaurin (1698–1746) was chair of mathematics by the age of 19 at Marischal College, University of Aberdeen and the leading British mathematician of his era. Perhaps the most significant intellectual figure of this era in Scotland was David Hume (1711–76) whose Treatise on Human Nature (1738) and Essays, Moral and Political (1741) helped outline the parameters of philosophical empiricism and scepticism. and he would be a major influence of later Enlightenment figures including Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham.