This time it was the Anglican Church, which imposed entry qualifications to Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Again this was attributable to the influence of the church. It is also fascinating to realise that, during the 18 th Century, Scottish universities were streets ahead of their English counterparts. He studied Robert Boyle’s lectures on chemistry, other volumes on history and geography, plus texts written by leading philosophers of the day. By the age of 16 years, Burns was an avid reader and had read extensively some of the more prominent writers of English literature. He studied Latin and French and excelled as a student. While the majority of people living in farming communities throughout Europe were largely illiterate, the working classes in Scotland, including Burns, had access to education. He was the son of a poor tenant farmer and grew up in rural Ayrshire. It was not until the late 1880s that England managed to achieve a similar level of literacy.Ĭonsider Robert Burns, born on 25 th January, 1759. By 1750 it was estimated that more than 75% of the Scottish population was literate, and there were lending libraries in every moderate sized town. Education for the general public was provided free of charge. As a direct consequence of the 1696 Act, it became a legal requirement for each Parish in Scotland to establish a school and to pay the salaries of teachers. The political force behind this act was the Kirk, where the aim was to bring the written scriptures to the population as a whole.

This came about when the Scottish Parliament introduced an “Act for Setting Schools” in 1696. Is it not surprising that Scotland, considered to be western Europe’s poorest country, and with such a small population, should have such a dramatic impact upon the rest of the world? To understand how that came about it is necessary to look back at Scottish history and to realise that Scotland was the first European country to achieve general literacy among its population. Other famous Scots include John Witherspoon, a presbyterian minister from Paisley who became the father of the American educational systems William Patterson of Dumfries who founded the Bank of England John Paul Jones of Kirkbean who founded the US Navy John MacDonald as the first Prime Minister of Canada John Muir the pioneer of modern conservation programmes ……and the list goes on! We could mention John Chalmers of Dundee who invented adhesive postage stamps. We could talk about John MacAdam from Ayr who discovered the ideal road surface materials or John Boyd Dunlop, of Dreghorn for his invention of motor car tyres.

How the scots invented the modern world