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Strangers in their own land
By Alan MacGillivray
In Scotland today, in our schools and colleges, we are surrounded by strangers in a strange land. I am not referring to immigrants from abroad, legal or illegal. The strangers are the pupils and students who are being taught within the autonomous Scottish education system, plus many of the teachers themselves, who are administering this system; and the strange land, strange to them all, is Scotland itself. The reasons for this paradox are not hard to find.
To begin with, the strangeness of the land. Unlike virtually every other country in the world, Scotland has long been governed by people who have difficulty accepting the self-evident truth that all citizens have a right to know about the culture of their own land. Everywhere else in the world, including our great neighbour to the south, there is a requirement that the education system at all levels pays attention as a duty, an inescapable obligation, to the national cultural assets, including its literature and its language. Usually this requires an element of mandatory examination and assessment.
Scotland is different. None of its administrations and governments over many decades have paid more than a fluctuating lip-service to the validity of Scottish culture and literature. Encouraging words in abundance have been uttered, yet never has any Education Minister, whether Conservative, Labour or SNP, committed clearly and unambiguously to placing a mandatory Scottish element in the language and literature curriculum. Thus very many pupils and students of Scotland live in a land strange to them because they are not shown the cultural wealth that defines it most fully.
In this way, they, and very many of their teachers, are like immigrants to Scotland. They look around the visible surface of the society and are not admitted into a sharing of its rich secrets. Nobody is charged to tell them that they are the rightful inheritors of a 1,500-year-old tradition of languages and literature that has been an integral part of European civilisation and has influenced societies the world over. Of course, nobody has told most of their teachers that either, so how can the pupils be expected to know? English teachers are the product of the same inadequate curriculum as their pupils. For pupils, teachers, and indeed officials and politicians as well, Scottish culture is pawky and parochial, the language is common slang, and literature amounts to platitudes about Rabbie Burns.
Every one of these delusions is the product of laughable ignorance and pathetic prejudice. The growing number of scholars and enthusiasts who are aware of the true range, scope and depth of Scottish literary and cultural achievement are doing a great job in the face of governmental apathy, civil service hostility and the irrational prejudice of colleagues to spread at least some knowledge in the schools. However, the results are patchy and many schools are total desert areas where Scottish language and literature are concerned.
A necessary first step in redressing this is to review what may needed in the form of Scottish language and literature courses for English teachers at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels of tertiary education and training.
Striking a note of faint optimism, one can say that even in official quarters there is now a growing sense that this nonsensical state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue. The total lack of any arguments that can be mounted against the rational policy of making the teaching of Scottish literature and culture mandatory in Scottish schools, the realisation of the inescapable right of all future Scottish citizens to be informed about their own country, and the sense that officialdom is beginning to look merely ridiculous in its intransigence - these are bringing about some movement in the glasshouses of government. Yet the instinct is to move at a snail's pace, fighting a delaying action. The time for action is now. A Minister of Education must grasp the nettle very soon (safely protected by the gloves of officialspeak) and declare for a secure place within Scottish education for the national literature. It really is time to make Scotland less of an international educational oddity.
Alan MacGillivray has been a Principal Teacher of English, a Senior Lecturer in English at Jordanhill College of Education, and a lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Strathclyde. He is the author and editor of books and articles on the teaching of Scottish Literature, and is a Past President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Recently he has been writing and publishing collections of poetry.
Scottish Literature in the Modern classroom
Finding Our Own Voices (Teaching Scottish Literature in our Schools)
While recently rereading an article I wrote on the teaching of Scottish literature over thirty years ago, I was struck both by how much had changed and how much hadn't. The landmark report Scottish Literature in the Secondary School (1976) acknowledged that the future of the subject was in 'a delicate balance' but hoped that it would now be given 'a central place in the curriculum.' While it is no longer in such a delicate condition, the report's aspirations have yet to be realised in most schools.
When I first began teaching, Scottish literature was a closed book to most of my colleagues, educated under a system that disinherited us from our own culture (and bequeathed us an inferiority complex about our own language and identity POSS CUT.) Much has changed for the better, but many teachers still seem oblivious or indifferent to the fact that we possess an astonishing diversity of voices and perspectives, past and present and a wealth of great writing by anyone's standards.
Although we shouldn't choose texts simply because they are Scottish, we surely need to challenge the strange situation of texts from elsewhere being all pervasive when more relevant Scottish texts are usually available e.g. the predictable Shakespearean or American choices and ignoring Scottish drama altogether, (such as Bridie, Campbell, Lochhead or Glover) or selecting English First War poets in preference to powerful Scottish war poetry and song, e.g. by George Campbell Hay, Sorley MacLean or Hamish Henderson. While time is severely limited, surely we can at least try to develop some sense of the diversity of our tradition by ensuring that our pupils read far more than they need for the exam, with selections from our poetry in Gaelic, Scots and English.
Certainly we must ensure they meet the same criteria for each stage as any other text, but we also need to ensure we help our pupils to explore the particularly Scottish historical or literary features, e.g. how Scottish writers succeed in capturing a distinctively Scottish voice, such as Gibbon for Scots, Neil Munro and Neil Gunn for Gaelic or Leonard, Kelman and co for Glasgow. While there are few topics that cannot be explored via Scottish texts, there are also plenty of examples where Scottish writing can offer a particularly rich and relevant source, possibly because of the uniqueness of its language or setting or because, like all our best work, the theme has a particularly powerful Scottish resonance which is at the same time universal, such as Sunset Song, The Silver Darlings, The Cone Gatherers or Docherty.
Unlike when I started out, there are now plenty of Scottish texts and teaching resources, available, especially the wealth of material from the ASLS, while every school in Scotland should have copies of the Higher Still support material on Scottish literature. Other must-have resources are the three volumes on Scottish Literature and Language (EUP, 1997- 2002), The Kist, Scotsoun recordings, the SNDA's school resources and Itchycoo Publications.
Another reason to feel more positive is that although many teachers may not have studied the subject at University, in my experience most are not unsympathetic to using more Scottish texts throughout the curriculum and in fact some Scottish texts are now widely used, even if they are often from a depressingly narrow range. In my opinion most would probably now welcome a mandatory examination element, which might only ensure a minimal coverage in some schools, but it would be a move of great symbolic importance.
While we have had vaguely supportive policy statements before, teachers now have a clear public duty under Curriculum for Excellence to 'develop an appreciation of Scotland's vibrant literary and linguistic heritage and its indigenous languages and dialects,' a principle that 'suffuses the outcomes and experiences etc.' Therefore schools that fail to ensure that our own literary heritage has a central role in the curriculum are not only failing to implement national policy, but are failing to educate their children about the culture of the country in which they live. No other country would permit such a neglect of its own literature in its educational system.
John Hodgart was PT English in Garnock Academy and retired in 2009. He is the co author of the play Bessie Dunlop the Witch of Dalry and was recently awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.