The Relationship of the Scottish Educational System to the Culture of the North-East of Scotland. Edited by David Northcroft.
Detailed Description
‘The best educated counties in the best educated country in the world ’.This is the claim which is examined in the papers and the real life interviews of North-East Identities and Scottish Schooling . How did the historical actualities compare to all those tales of ‘lads o ’pairts ’,of ‘dominies ’, and the local ‘skweel ’?What was the fate of the Doric, under a regime that insisted on academic uniformity, often at the end of the tawse? How did writers, like Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Jessie Kesson, represent their experiences at its hands? Ian Campbell, Derrick McClure, David Northcroft, and Douglas Young explore the intrusion of an Edinburgh-run system into the culture of the North-East. Elsewhere, Gordon Booth provides a Victorian case study of the role of ‘home education ’, while Robert Anderson 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. The collection is completed by generous excerpts from interviews with five ‘North-East folk ’freely talking about their own school experiences –a group which includes James Michie and Norman Harper.
ISBN: 0-9545682-2-2
Whatever the final judgement, there is no doubt that ‘Scottish schooling ’has made a profound impact upon those who have grown up in the North-East. 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.