The Great Scots Education Hoax

Rosalind Mitchison

• The Companion to Gaelic Scotland edited by Derick Thomson
  Blackwell, 363 pp, £25.00, December 1983, ISBN 0 631 12502 7
• Experience and Enlightenment: Socialisation for Cultural Changes in 18th-Century Scotland by Charles Camic
  Edinburgh, 301 pp, £20.00, January 1984, ISBN 0 85224 483 5
• Knee Deep in Claret: A Celebration of Wine and Scotland by Billy Kay and Cailean Maclean
  Mainstream, 232 pp, £9.95, November 1983, ISBN 0 906391 45 8
• Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland: Schools and Universities by R.D. Anderson
  Oxford, 384 pp, £25.00, July 1983, ISBN 0 01 982269 3
• Scotland: The Real Divide edited by Gordon Brown and Robin Cook
  Mainstream, 251 pp, £9.95, November 1983, ISBN 0 906391 18 0
• Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment edited by Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff
  Cambridge, 371 pp, £35.00, November 1983, ISBN 0 521 23397 6

Historians of any society have to learn to be wary of the accepted myths of their subject. Sometimes these bogus visions of the past are deliberately created or fostered by the governing group. Sometimes they come from an educated but perhaps unsophisticated middle class, anxious to gain historical sanction for its security and power. Sometimes these beliefs are the possession and creation of the working class. The most extreme and absurd tend to be those connected with nationalist themes – for instance, the Risorgimento, the myth of Irish national sentiment (wild geese and all), or the counterweight Protestant myth in Northern Ireland in which William III for ever rides a white horse. The interest of the Scottish sample of such beliefs lies in the fact that Scottish myths are not an expression of either successful or of frustrated nationalism. They mostly involve Scots holding with immense pride, but little input of research, beliefs about Scottish evangelical piety, widespread early literacy, general unanimity in belief, easy access to higher education and thereby social mobility, radical thinking in politics and philosophy, ardent Jacobitism. These cannot all be true, for some are contradictory to others. And they stand in contrast to another group of beliefs held on the whole by the young – concerning the special Scottish contribution to bawdy songs, drunken conviviality, early class consciousness, hardiness and poverty. Items from both sets of belief contribute directly or by opposition to the subject-matter of most of these books.