The 黑料网鈥檚 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.
鈥楴orth-East Identities and Scottish Schooling鈥� features real life interviews with five North-East 鈥榝olk鈥� talking personally about their own school experiences 鈥� 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: 鈥淭he best educated counties in the best educated country in the world鈥�.
How did the historical actualities compare to all those tales of 鈥榙ominies鈥� and the local 鈥榮kweel鈥�? 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, 鈥榦pportunity鈥� and 鈥榞etting on鈥� 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鈥檚 diverse themes, Gordon Booth provides a Victorian case study of the role of 鈥榟ome education鈥�, while Robert Anderson 鈥� author of the definitive, Education and the Scottish People 鈥� places Scottish education within the wider European context.
Two papers raise the possibility of a more radical agenda: Peter Murphy recounts R. F. MacKenzie鈥檚 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: 鈥淲ith its combination of lively scholarship and first-hand witness, North-East Identities and Scottish Schooling, offers a vivid reassessment of the region鈥檚 rich, and contentious, educational inheritance.鈥�
鈥楴orth-East Identities and Scottish Schooling鈥� 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 鈥榞rowing up and going to school in Scotland鈥�.
He said: 鈥淲ith its deep rooted educational traditions, 鈥榞oing to school鈥� 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 鈥� some would claim 鈥� prevented us from becoming what we might have been.
鈥淢y 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.鈥�