The Beginnings of Democratic Control of Local Education in Scotland

Abstract

At a time when forms of increased democratic representation in local government have become the subject of contemporary concern, it is interesting to consider the historical beginnings in the nineteenth century of wider local representation. The then desire for such representation found its most effective expression in the elections that began in 1873 for local school boards, which surpassed all other existing forms of election to local government in their criteria for both the electors and the candidates, and above all in the method of voting. The situation that gave rise to the introduction of these local boards was the need, in response to various economic, social, and party political pressures in the mid-nineteenth century, to replace the socially narrow control of schools and their teachers that had been exercised for 300 years by local landowners and local ministers of the Church of Scotland. With changing views about the part that should be played in public affairs by those who were being governed, there was pressure to extend the system of control of schools, especially by increasing representation of the numerous and diverse local groups who had come to take an interest in the schooling of their children, and were no longer satisfied to leave such education to the patriarchal control of traditional interests. That traditional control was understandable enough – and had been legitimate enough – in the social circumstances of the centuries that followed the Protestant Reformation. Since the seventeenth century, Parliament had made the local landowners (heritors) legally and financially responsible for the provision in each parish not only of a church but also of a school building, for the choice of a qualified schoolmaster, and for supplying an adequate salary to maintain him. It had also encouraged, and provided for, the supervisory interest of one religious denomination in the acceptability of the faith, morals, learning and conduct of the teachers. In Reformation thinking, the local church and the local school were to exercise complementary functions in seeking to