‘An Instructed and Intelligent People’: Adult and Continuing Education in Scotland

What is it about?

A survey of the development of Adult and Continuing Education in Scotland, from the eighteenth century schemes to teach adults to read, such as the Scottish Society for Propagating the Gospel, active in the Scottish Highlands from 1709, whose main aim was to teach illiterate, often Gaelic-speaking , Highlanders to read the Gospel. In the nineteenth century, the earliest Mechanics’ Institutes in Britain were in Scotland, starting with the Edinburgh Society of Arts, (later Heriot Watt University) , founded in 1821. Their origins lay in lectures for working men given by George Birkbeck, a Yorkshire Quaker, at Anderson’s Institution, Glasgow, (later Strathclyde University) in 1799. Mechanics Institutes spread all over Britain, focusing on the teaching of popular science. In first half of the twentieth century, the rise of the labour movement produced a demand for education for citizenship, by organisations such as the Workers Educational Association, which favoured partnerships with universities, or the National Council of Labour Colleges, which was suspicious of collaboration with established educational institutions, which it saw as complicit with the existing economic and political system. The NCLC was stronger in Scotland than the WEA and used correspondence education as a method of reaching trade unionists in the workplace. In the second half of the century, the Open University, which had strong Scottish connections, was the brain child of the Labour government of Harold Wilson, launched in 1971. The Fife-born Jenny Lee MP was the Minister of Arts, who promoted the OU, and its first Vice Chancellor was Walter Perry, a Dundee-born medical academic. The OU degree curriculum was heavily influenced by the Scottish degree system of a generalist first year. The later years of the century saw the emergence of a system of mass higher education. During the 1990s, the number of part-time and full-time students in Scottish higher education almost doubled from around 140,000 to 263,000. This was a European trend that saw the participation rate in Scotland reach around 50% of school leavers.

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Why is it important?

It is important to record the significant changes taking place in Scottish adult and continuing education over the centuries, to see what degree of continuity can be traced. The learner experience is a crucial part of this, and there is a rich heritage of Scottish working class autobiographies to cast light on the desire for self improvement, often in difficult circumstances. More research needs to be carried out in this field.

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