Cultural Diversity and Education in Scotland

Abstract

Two fundamentally important facts, both with deep historical roots as well as contemporary implications, lie behind any study of multicultural education in Scotland [ 1 . Firstly, cultural diversity is not new; Scotland has been a multicultural and multilingual country since it came into existence, though of course the nature of that cultural mix has constantly been changing right up to the present. Secondly, the identity of the country itself is ambiguous. As an independent nation, it had to spend much of its energy over the centuries maintaining that independence in the face of a powerful southern neighbour; and since the Union with England in 1707 it has formed a minority within the United Kingdom. There is still manifestly a sense of national identity, but this is compromised by the awareness that the majority community within Scotland remains a minority in the larger political unit, and a vulnerable one at that. (England, by far the largest partner in the Union has no such problem.) For minorities within Scotland, therefore, whether regarded as 'indigenous' or descended from more recent immigrants, the problems of identity can be twofold in their relationships with the majority Scottish population and, for Scottish society as a whole, in their relationships with the British State itself multinational in its constitutional structure and multicultural in its population, but where English influence clearly predominates, to the extent that the word 'England' is commonly (but quite inaccurately) used for the United Kingdom as a whole. It is widely believed, even in Scotland, that an originally Gaelic-speaking nation has been gradually anglicised over the centuries, a transition from one monoglot culture to another. This is far too simple, however. There has been a general trend of this kind, but it has been neither consistent nor complete. The original Scots, Gaelic-speaking settlers from Ireland, settled in Argyll about the fifth century, and took half a millennium to establish control over the rest of the country at the expense of the Picts, the Welsh-speaking Britons, and the Angles of Lothian. But the Western Isles and much of the North-West remained Norse until the thirteenth century, by which time the penetration from the South had been under way for 200 years, mainly through the importation of Norman 'military advisers' and Anglian and Flemish merchants by Queen Margaret, wife of Malcolm Canmore, determined to 'civilise' her barbaric kingdom that is, to impose ways familiar to herself. (Her husband, doubtless relieved to have supplanted the much-maligned Macbeth, had been brought up in the English court himself, and seems to have made no objection.) Their descendants continued the process; slowly, French, Lowland Scots and English rolled Gaelic back into the North and West. By the eighteenth century, Scotland was roughly half Gaelic-speaking, half Lowland Scots, with English encroaching on both (French and Norse having long disappeared by this time). The erosion of Scots was a relatively subtle process, that of Gaelic much less so. The political structure of Gaeldom was broken at the Battle of Culloden in 1746