Education and Society in Modern Scotland: A Comparative Perspective

Abstract

THE EDUCATIONAL TRADITIONS of Scotland have always been distinct from those of England, and reputedly more democratic. Mass literacy was achieved at an early stage, the general character of the system was meritocratic, and the four universities were noted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for their vigor and their popular base. Yet the country has attracted little attention from the growing band of scholars studying the comparative social history of education. One exception is Hartmut Kaelble, who has used Scottish evidence in his studies of education and social mobility; but Scotland does not figure either in the recent collection of essays on higher education edited by Konrad Jarausch or in the most substantial work in this field, Fritz Ringer's Education and Society in Modern Europe. Ringer's book includes brief treatments of England and the United States, but it is essentially about higher and secondary education in France and Germany, and is notable for the mass of statistical data that it assembles and analyzes.' Ringer uses the terms inclusive and progressive for the two main measurable dimensions of educational democracy.2 Inclusiveness can be assessed by relating school and university enrollments to the total population or, preferably, to the relevant age groups. A system is "progressive" if it "draws a large proportion of its advanced students from the lower middle and lower classes." Measuring progressivity depends on the availability of information about students' parents.3 For Scotland such information is limited, and I have used it elsewhere to discuss educational opportunity and the ways in which it changed during the nineteenth century.4 The present paper has two aims: to establish basic enrollment data for Scotland between the 1860s and 1939 and to discuss the structure and development of the Scottish system in the light of some of the general theories put forward by Ringer and other scholars. Most European countries in the nineteenth century had state systems of education, usually organized on "dualist" lines, with separate sectors