Highland Schools and the SSPCK

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The SSPCK's rules, school numbers and publications are documented in its own records. How to judge it is genuinely contested. Older accounts praised it as a bringer of education; others, like John Lorne Campbell, saw "education" in its schools as Calvinist indoctrination; and recent research, such as Nathan Gray's 2011 thesis, places it in the wider effort to complete the Reformation. Sources differ on whether Gaelic was allowed alongside English or made the language of instruction from 1766–1767. The historical geographer Charles Withers, who worked through the Society's minutes for his Gaelic in Scotland 1698–1981 (1984), concludes that from 1766 pupils were taught to read Gaelic as well as English, as a way into English, while speaking Gaelic among scholars and using it as the medium of teaching remained forbidden. Withers dates the playground ban to 1751; other accounts give 1753.

A society for the Highlands

established The SSPCK was founded in 1709 to promote "the principles of the reformed Christian religion", chiefly through the established Church of Scotland. Its work included evangelising the Highlands, sending ministers to Scottish emigrant communities and sending missionaries to native peoples abroad. Its schools were intended to reduce support for Jacobitism and to resist Roman Catholic missions in the Highlands.

Why charity schools?

established Scotland already had parish schools, but in the Highlands they struggled with the terrain, the climate and the scattered settlements. The historian Nathan Gray argues that the SSPCK's charity schools were set up to supplement them. The Society was funded by donations from nobles, professionals, labourers and tenants through parish collections, ran on transparent financial lines, and expected its teachers to model piety to persuade children to attend.

Growth

established The first school opened on St Kilda in 1711, and by the end of that year there were five. The network grew to 25 schools by 1715, 176 by 1758 and 189 by 1808, when about 13,000 children were attending.

Banning Gaelic

established For its first half-century the Society worked against Gaelic. In 1716 it recorded that nothing could be more effectual for making the Highlands "usefull to the Commonwealth" than teaching the people their duty "and rooting out their Irish language". A rule of 1720 allowed schools to teach reading and numbers "but not any Latin or Irish", Irish being the usual term for Scottish Gaelic.

established The policy produced children who could read English without understanding it. In 1721 a group of Highland ministers and schoolmasters complained that pupils went home "able indeed to read the Bible but understand not even the plainest historical part of what they read". The Society's answer, adopted in 1723, was to let pupils translate their English lessons into Gaelic, but otherwise to forbid them to speak Gaelic to one another, with "private or Clandestine Censors" appointed to report anyone who did. In 1751 the ban was extended to children "playing about the Doors" of the schoolhouse. A Gaelic and English vocabulary, compiled by Alasdair MacDonald and printed in 1741, was intended "to Introduce the use of the English Language more Universally".

The Gaelic Bible

established In 1766 Samuel Johnson accused the Society of standing in the way of a Gaelic Bible. The Society changed course. In 1766 it allowed Gaelic to be used alongside English in its Highland schools, and in 1767 it published a Gaelic New Testament, with Gaelic and English on facing pages, translated under James Stuart, minister of Killin, with the poet Dugald Buchanan improving the Gaelic. The Old Testament followed in parts between 1783 and 1801, much of it the work of Stuart's son John Stuart of Luss.

shared Sources differ on whether Gaelic was simply permitted alongside English from 1766, or made the main language of instruction in SSPCK schools from 1767. The Society's own resolution of 5 June 1766 told schoolmasters in Gaelic areas to teach pupils "to read both Earse and English" as "the most effectual method to make them read, speak and understand the English language". Parish schools continued to teach in English.

Decline and legacy

established By the early 19th century the Society's school work was declining, and Gaelic school societies in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness took on teaching people to read in Gaelic. As late as 1879 the Society boasted that "barbarity and the Irish language" were "almost rooted out". In the 1880s it faced a Royal Commission inquiry into alleged financial mismanagement.

shared Its legacy is divided. It brought schools and literacy to places that had little of either, and its Gaelic Bible became a foundation of Gaelic literacy. But for decades it treated Gaelic as something to be eliminated, and it contributed to the language's decline.

James Kirkwood's lost argument

established The idea of charity schools for the Highlands came from James Kirkwood, a minister who had once been a chaplain in Breadalbane and who organised the distribution of Gaelic Bibles in the 1690s. Sir Francis Grant, one of the founders, wrote to him in 1707: "You Sir, did give the birth, some time ago, to this designe." But Kirkwood wanted the schools to teach children to read the Bible in Gaelic, arguing that teaching them only English was "lost labour" for most of the population. He was the only voice of dissent among those shaping Highland education, and he died before the Society first met.

Where the schools were

established Mapping the Society's schools in 1719, 1731, 1755, 1774 and 1792, Withers found them clustered along the edges of the Highlands and in Argyll, with very few in the north-west. He argues that their location helps explain why Gaelic retreated first from the border parishes and survived longer in the north and west. Boys far outnumbered girls: by five to one at Croy and Dalcross in 1774, and eight to one at Moy and Dalarossie. In 1766 the naturalist John Walker reported that children who arrived knowing no English could read and speak it "perfectly" within three or four years.

A prejudice learned

The longer view

established Robert Anderson, in his chapter of Scottish Education (5th edn, 2018), sets the SSPCK in a wider frame. By the end of the 17th century the parish school network was largely complete in the Lowlands, but not in the Highlands, where poverty, distance, the slow spread of the church's parish organisation and an oral Gaelic culture all worked against schooling. After the risings of 1715 and 1745, he writes, church and state combined to enforce loyalty and orthodoxy, and it was taken as axiomatic that this must be done through English. The SSPCK's schools supplemented the parish schools on those terms, and its refusal to teach in Gaelic, except as an aid to learning English, put a cultural barrier between home and school.

established Anderson's verdict on results is more positive than the Society's methods might suggest. By the early 19th century, he finds, the more prosperous parts of the Highlands and Islands were not so different from the Lowlands, though with scantier resources, and illiteracy had been pushed back into its last strongholds in the Western Isles. When the Argyll Commission reported in 1867–8 it still found poor provision in the Western Isles, Skye and some mainland districts, but Anderson treats these as untypical of the Highlands by then, and says the problems were overcome within a generation of the 1872 Act.

shared Anderson also cautions against blaming the 1872 Act alone for the retreat of Gaelic: Highland schooling had always insisted on the primacy of English, and serious efforts to promote bilingualism came only after 1945. Boyd Robertson, writing on Gaelic education in the same volume, dates the first official sanction of Gaelic as a medium of instruction in state schools to the Western Isles bilingual project of 1975, followed by the first Gaelic-medium units in Inverness and Glasgow in 1985.

shared Withers argues that the Society's most lasting effect was on attitudes. Touring its schools in 1824, Patrick Butter found "a very general prejudice against using the Gaelic as a school language", even among older people who could speak no other language. When the Society began teaching Gaelic reading first in 1825, it did so partly to win parents round with the promise that English would follow. By then, Withers notes, the Society was more in favour of Gaelic in schools than many Highlanders were.

• The SSPCK's first school was on St Kilda.
• By 1808 about 13,000 children attended its schools.
• Its 1720 rule banned teaching "Irish", meaning Gaelic.
• From the 1750s children could be punished for speaking Gaelic even outside the schoolhouse.
• Samuel Johnson criticised the Society for blocking a Gaelic Bible.
• The Gaelic New Testament of 1767 had Gaelic and English on facing pages.
• The poet Dugald Buchanan helped polish its Gaelic.
• In 1879 the Society boasted that Gaelic was "almost rooted out".
• The idea of the SSPCK's schools came from James Kirkwood, who wanted them to teach reading in Gaelic.
• From 1723 secret "censors" reported pupils who spoke Gaelic to each other.
• Boys outnumbered girls in some SSPCK schools by eight to one.

• Disputed: the SSPCK as simply a benefactor or simply a destroyer of Gaelic. Both views are partial.
• Disputed: when Gaelic became the language of instruction. Sources differ; there is no single date.
• Myth: SSPCK charity schools and parish schools were the same. Parish schools continued to teach in English.
• Myth: the SSPCK made Gaelic the language of teaching in 1766. It allowed Gaelic reading as a route to English.