We have long grown used to our national education in Scotland and taken it for granted, as if it has always been there. One day I took to the streets to ask British students at the University of Edinburgh from where they thought our education system had come. Not one of them knew, so I decided to try Scottish people in Musselburgh, thinking that they would be able to tell me. This time I focused on the more elderly population. I met with embarrassment, as if the locals should know the answer, but did not. Various suggestions were made, such as the Labour Party. Eventually a lady in her eighties gave the right answer: “The church,” she said quietly and confidently.
Christians like Kentigern in the sixth century were seeking to educate people in Scotland. By the Middle Ages schools were springing up, with the nation’s oldest being the High School of Glasgow (c.1124) and the Royal High in Edinburgh (1128), both being founded by the church. When the Reformation came there was a dramatic acceleration of education in Scotland, as shown in the extraordinary document called the First Book of Discipline (1560). It is here that we find the blueprint for a national education in the following remarkable words:
“Of necessity therefore we judge it, that every several church have a schoolmaster appointed… And further, we think it expedient that in every notable town, and especially in the town of the superintendent, [there] be erected a college, in which the arts, at least logic and rhetoric, together with the tongues, be read by sufficient masters, for whom honest stipends must be appointed; as also provision for those that are poor, and are not able by themselves, nor by their friends, to be sustained at letters, especially such as come from landward… Last, the great schools, called universities, shall be replenished with those that are apt to learning; for this must be carefully provided, that no father, of what estate or condition that ever he be, use his children at his own fantasy, especially in their youth; but all must be compelled to bring up their children in learning and virtue.”
The Church of Scotland worked hard to achieve the vision of “a school in every parish”. By 1660, Bishop Burnet was astounded to see widespread literacy in much of Scotland, even among the poor cottagers who could reason on points of the Bible and expressed opinions concerning government. Besides this, the Church of Scotland pioneered Sabbath schools long before Robert Raikes’ English Sunday School Movement. Dr John Brown stated that “Mr Raikes was the founder of the English schools, and that he had no acquaintance with the prior existence of these schools in Scotland… we had Sabbath Schools of a superior order long before the days of that eminent philanthropist.” Brown then cites examples of Sabbath schools in Norham in 1757 and in Simprin in 1707.
By 1819 there were 452 Sunday schools in Scotland, most of which were run by Independent or interdenominational church groups, although the Sabbath School Union for Scotland claimed that there were also 567 schools affiliated with them, with 39,000 pupils.By 1842 Glasgow alone was educating 25,000 pupils with its Sunday school growth outstripping the population growth by four times; this was largely due to the evangelical movement. By 1891, 46% of children between the ages of five and fourteen were in Sunday schools there: this amounts to 108,205 pupils, being taught by an army of over 10,000 teachers. Illiteracy in that city had also fallen through this work between 1850 and 1870, from 18.3% to 5.8%.
In the Sunday school records we can see a pattern emerging across Scotland: there was huge growth from the 1830s to the 1890s, and then the numbers begin to tail off. At its height in 1890, the Church of Scotland had 217,207 pupils; the Free Church had 166,166; and the United Presbyterian Church had 103,010 – or a total of 486,383 children in Sunday/Sabbath Schools, and this did not include the Independent and other churches, missions and societies.
The politician, Sir Thomas Chambers, after the national school boards had been established with the 1872 Education Act, asked, “Who are they that have brought about this marvellous improvement in the amount of Education given, and in the Educational machinery involved? Who but the members of all the Evangelical Churches throughout the country? Who have filled the Sunday Schools, and the Ragged Schools, and the British and Foreign Schools, and to a great extent, the National schools, with teachers? Who but the men [and women] who have acted from religious motives, and whose conduct has been influenced by the teaching of the Gospel?”
“He [Solomon] spoke three thousand proverbs, and his songs were one thousand and five. Also he spoke of trees, from the cedar tree of Lebanon even to the hyssop that springs out of the wall; he spoke also of animals, of birds, of creeping things, and of fish. And men of all nations, from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom, came to hear the wisdom of Solomon” (1 Kings 4:32-33, NKJV).
Image: Castle Hill School (1888), the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. Photo by Paul James-Griffiths