Campaign launches for St Andrews day to get Scotland to promote its culture in schools and to give children an equal chance to learn Scottish heritage.

A campaign launches this week to get Scottish children to study the culture and languages of their own country. This is to prevent Scottish culture from being sidelined by recent changes in the curriculum which have made the study of other cultures mandatory and Scottish culture has almost disappeared from the classroom altogether. Following a recent BBC article, "Gaelic roots need to be uncovered"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4396660.stm, it is clear that there is widespread neglect of Scottish culture in school today.

30 November is Scotland's national day - St Andrews Day. Yet even on this day, you will probably find the flags and languages of other countries appear more often than Scotland's in Scottish schools. On the other 364 days of the year the difference is even more dramatic. Whilst French is made a mandatory subject for many, the idea of teaching even an introduction to Scottish culture or the Scottish languages of Scots and Gaelic is not only optional, the issue is rarely even raised. Scottish children can be exposed to French every day at school but if they want to be Scottish, they're lucky if there's anything outside St Andrews day. The recent advances in Gaelic medium education have left the English medium sector behind when it comes to teaching Scottish culture and the campaign calls for this gap to be addressed.

The author's daughter came home aged 4 saying "happy new year" in Chinese when this was studied in school. When she was 5, she was counting up to 10 in French. She attends a state school typical of many where foreign modern languages have been made a core part of the school curriculum and other cultures are introduced as part of a broad cultural understanding. When the author went to High school in Perthshire in the 1980s, French was mandatory for at least two years. Gaelic was refused, despite many local placenames being unpronouncable without a basic knowledge of the language.

This is not about banning Chinese or French in school however. Far from it. Such opportunities to expose young children to other cultures, broaden their horizons, promote greater understanding of other peoples and as is often the case with language, the earlier learning starts the better.
The great question is that if it is OK to make French mandatory, why is it not OK to make Scottish studies mandatory. Indeed, why is it not even a subject on offer? We are calling for equality for Scottish culture and languages so that they can be included in the broad spectrum of languages and cultures that children are introduced to as part of their core learning.

Whilst Gaelic medium education is continuing to grow (8% by number in the previous year), the real issue is that children being educated through the medium of English receive cultural content from France and little from Scotland. Moreover the other Scottish language of Scots which gave us the world's most cited poet Robert Burns, rarely gets a look in either. Certainly in the author's experience it was a double helping of Shakespeare at school and no mention of Scotland's national bard at all.

The general lack of knowledge in Scottish place names and language denies children from all ethnic backgrounds the opportunity to understand their surroundings. As such, they grow up effectively foreigners in their own country. The symbol of Gleneagles is now associated with a bird of prey which is nothing to do with the origins of the name. Falkirk looks like it is from "fallen Kirk" but is from the Scots word 'Fa' meaning speckled and has an identical meaning in its Gaelic name of "Eaglais Breac". Places such as Tomintoul are mispronounced as Tom-an-tool (meaning hill of the eye) rather than correctly as Tom-an-towel (meaning hill of the barn). We teach incorrectly that Loch means Lake, however Loch Fyne and Loch Linnhe aren't lakes and have more in common with a Norwegian Fjord. The Norwegians when translating Fjord to English don't use the word "lake", so why do we?

A broad, multicultural view of the world taking in Gaelic, Scots as well as French and other languages not only would give children a better sense of their own identity but would help them understand the links with other countries, many of which are not necessarily obvious to the English-only speaker. Greater problems arise, especially with un-anglicised Gaelic names. The nearest hill to where the author grew up in Dunblane is called "uamh bheag" and a nearby Munro, visible from as far as West Lothian, "Stuc a' chroin" both present considerable problems to the non-Gaelic speaker and render the average Scot unable to pronounce them. Despite this, in the 1980s the author was denied an opportunity to learn Gaelic at school despite us having a native speaker of Glencoe Gaelic at the school. Shamefully for the Scottish educational system, he ended up teaching the author Gaelic in Essex instead. Moreover the school cited "lack of demand" as the reason, yet saw fit to run a Latin class for four people, a Russian class for four people and made French compulsory (and it still is). Why is the study of another country's culture compulsory in Scottish schools yet the study of our own country is not? Do we take it too much for granted?

For such a supposedly highly educated country, such a gap in understanding place names but actually being able to pronounce them is not only surprising but highlights an opportunity to address this via education. Indeed some adults now turn to "Gaelic for hill walkers" classes to close the gap left by their education in school.

The campaign is not against the teaching of multiculturalism and children learning French, German, the customs of other countries and so on. The problem is the absence of Scotland in all of this and it seeks equality of status for longer standing Scottish customs and language alongside those that have arrived more recently. For instance, at the time of writing this, the Executive has published an excellent guide to multiculturalism in Scotland under the welcome "One Scotland" initiative. However, whilst this is fantastic at helping to combat racism, excellent at promoting cultural understanding of recent immigrants and a great step forward to a broad and diverse society, we see no mention of the Celtic festivals of Beltane or Hallowe'en in their list of cultural festivals in Scotland and in the list of major immigrations to Scotland, there is no mention at all of Celts that settled here from the 6th century bringing us a language that is still spoken to this day.

Not only is it important for existing Scots to understand about recent immigrants, but so it is also important for those recent immigrants to learn about longer standing traditions - why should we all be excluded from learning about Beltane, now celebrated in Edinburgh by 15,000 people?. Perhaps as many people in Scotland speak Scots as those in Wales who speak Welsh. Yet Welsh is confident and growing, with the number of speakers rising by 2% in the last ten years, enjoys legal status, and virtually every child in Wales has the opportunity to learn Welsh. Scots should be in no less a position based on speakers, and Gaelic should be in no less a position based on the influence it has had on Scotland as a whole. A simple introduction to these and Scottish culture more generally through the medium of English would go a long way to close the cultural gap between what Wales has achieved and what Scotland could achieve in terms of cultural confidence.

Related links:

Stand up for Scottish culture
http://www.siliconglen.com/culture/scotland.html

BBC Article by the author
"Gaelic roots need to be uncovered"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4396660.stm

http://www.siliconglen.com/
By the author, the first online guide to Scotland



About Craig Cockburn
Craig Cockburn has been promoting Scottish culture online since the 1980s and in 1994 wrote the first online guide to Scotland. He manages the Scottish culture site http://www.siliconglen.com