The University of Aberdeen’s Elphinstone Institute has joined forces with a group of esteemed Scottish authors to launch a new publication that explores the changes and enduring worth of the North-East schooling system over the past century.
‘North-East Identities and Scottish Schooling’ features real life interviews with five North-East ‘folk’ talking personally about their own school experiences – a group that includes James Michie and Norman Harper. The book examines the statement made just over a century ago by Sir Henry Craik, the founding Secretary of the Scottish Education Department: “The best educated counties in the best educated country in the world”.
How did the historical actualities compare to all those tales of ‘dominies’ and the local ‘skweel’? What was the fate of the Doric, under a regime that insisted on academic uniformity? Writers including Ian Campbell, Derrick McClure, David Northcroft, and Douglas Young explore these questions and look at the culture of the North-east in relation to the Edinburgh-run education system.
These writers also explore key aspects of Scottish schooling such as the classroom treatment of the Doric, the ways in which individual memory and received myth intermingle to tell the story of the local parish school, and the ways in which writers like Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Ian Macpherson, and Jessie Kesson have represented their own school experiences in their books.
For some, ‘opportunity’ and ‘getting on’ were benefits of the system, but for others the local school is remembered as an austere and over-disciplined place, where individual needs, and the culture and the tongue of their own communities, were systematically repressed.
On other subjects in the book’s diverse themes, Gordon Booth provides a Victorian case study of the role of ‘home education’, while Robert Anderson – author of the definitive, Education and the Scottish People – places Scottish education within the wider European context.
Two papers raise the possibility of a more radical agenda: Peter Murphy recounts R. F. MacKenzie’s doomed reforms at Summerhill Academy, while Robbie Robertson makes the case for a computer-age revolution.
Dr Ian Russell, Director of the Elphinstone Institute, said: “With its combination of lively scholarship and first-hand witness, North-East Identities and Scottish Schooling, offers a vivid reassessment of the region’s rich, and contentious, educational inheritance.”
‘North-East Identities and Scottish Schooling’ is edited and compiled by David Northcroft, Research Associate of the Elphinstone Institute, who spent many years at the Northern College of Education. He is currently carrying out research into the experience of ‘growing up and going to school in Scotland’.
He said: “With its deep rooted educational traditions, ‘going to school’ in the North-East of Scotland has shown itself to be one of the few really life-defining experiences that, along with the land, the sea, the weather and the language, have helped to make us what we are and – some would claim – prevented us from becoming what we might have been.
“My own investigations, both in preparing this book and in gathering in some 120 biographical interviews with a whole range of North-East folk, have richly demonstrated that every one of them has a compelling life-story to tell and that their own local school has made an essential contribution to it.”