Looking Back: Too Many Are Left Behind

From  April 1965

-          says a minister

Recent issues of Life and Work have carried lively and stimulating articles on Scottish education at University level. These have provoked widespread interest and discussion throughout the country and everyone must be grateful to the Church for helping to bring and hold this vitally important issue in the forefront of public concern.

There is, however, another educational issue of still greater fundamental importance for Scotland and its future on which the Church’s voice has not yet been heard: the schooling of the children who will never qualify for any certificate course, far less reach university; and those make up about seventy percent of our school-age population.

If my own town is in any way typical of the national situation then more than half of Scotland’s future is having a raw deal.

We have two schools to serve a population of one thousand, nine hundred children at secondary stage.

THE CONTRAST

One school is modern, properly equipped, well-staffed and has excellent playing fields. The roll of this school stands at just over 600 so that neither its accommodation nor teaching power is being used to anything like capacity.

The other school is antiquated, unsightly and inadequate in teaching staff, accommodation, equipment, playing fields.

The roll of this school stands at 1,250 pupils, with about two hundred of these receiving their education as “modified children” in separate annexes, one for girls and one for boys.

The former Minister of Education, Sir Edward Boyle, in his foreword to the Newsome Report, writes: “The essential point is that all children should have an equal chance of acquiring intelligence.”

What chance have the majority of these children of acquiring anything but a fierce inferiority complex?

The spiritual damage to the children at the “top” of our educational ladder can be no less serious. Whatever counter-action headmasters and teachers may take – and their efforts in their schools have been quite magnificent – pupils in the schools catering for the top twenty percent cannot escape a feeling of their own innate superiority.

“In the unglamorous claims of very ordinary boys and girls lies a challenge of the first importance to Training Colleges, which have not yet paid enough regard to their intellectual and emotional needs”.

The Church should plead the cause of Scotland’s forgotten children in its own courts and through its people on Education Committees.

Each of us can put to his own conscience the question: “If this were the only secondary education available for my child, would I accept it so meekly?”

Whatever others may do, a Christian must demand for his neighbour’s child the same benefits and opportunities as he requires for his own.

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