The Wanganui Chronicle. TUESDAY, MAY 4, 1937. EARLY SCHOOLING IN SCOTLAND

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 104, 4 May 1937, Page 6

The Wanganui Chronicle. TUESDAY, MAY 4, 1937. EARLY SCHOOLING IN SCOTLAND

ZEALANDERS are accustomed to pride themselves ou the excellent facilities provided in the direction of educating the younger generation. Schools and schoolrooms claimed to be the last word in such amenities have been erected throughout the Dominion, but there still remain structures which suffer from comparison with the most modern ideas of school buildings. These, no doubt, will gradually disappear when a progressive policy makes its force felt, Uncomfortable as many of these buildings must be, and lacking in those extras which are considered so necessary in up-lo-date schools, they cannot be compared with some of the hovels which passed for schools a hundred years ago in Scotland. A piece of blunt autobiography by a gardener, William i homson, who was born one year before Waterloo and died in his eighty-first year in 1894, appears in the Countryman. It furnishes a remarkable picture of the wildness and poverty of Ihe rural parts of Scotland in the early years of last century. ’ lore, for example, is the old man’s account of his school days:— “My father, on the 21st of May, 1821, took me to school at a liamlet called Fanmore. Mrs. Clephane gave the schoolmaster C 25 a year and a small croft. The schoolhouse was very wretched. It was thatched with turf and had an earthen floor. When rain was heavy the water poured through the roof and Hooded the floor, and the master set the most ingenious boy to make gutters to conduct the water to the door. The fire was in the middle of the floor, and the roof was black as if pitched with tar. The black drops of water spoiled our books—we had to hold our bodies over our books to shield them from the drops, which fell on our backs instead of our books. I still have books with the black drops on them. We had no forms, only big stones carried in by the bigger boys and placed round against the walls.”

Teaching was conducted in English, though the scholars spoke Gaelic by nature, and were not, it seems, very proficient in English. Thomson wrote: “My knowing the English language gave me a great advantage over the Highlanders, and I soon picked up the Gaelic. Our master made it a flogging crime for any boy or girl to speak a word of Gaelic in school hours. If he had occasion to ask a child any question that required an answer in English they were allowed to come and tell it to me in Gaelic, and I gave them the English version, which they took to the master.”

Equipment, it is obvious, was almost nothing. Thomson says he never saw a map of any kind till he was out of his ’teens, and work was hard and continuous. Two days’ holiday in the year were all that were allowed. This press of work, combined with the dirt and lack of ventilation, was very hard on the scholars. “We often suffered with severe hea'daehes in a hot, unventilated school. In those days it was not even suspected that fresh air was of any advantage to human beings.” Conditions such as these would, of course, not be tolerated to-day in any civilised country, and in spite of the fact that many of the Scots educated under such primitive conditions became the statesmen and commerce kings of the 19th century, there is no doubt that the improvement in educational facilities has been all to the good.