Читать книгу Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 740, March 2, 1878 онлайн

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With such a concurrence of evidence, and with the knowledge that there is a School Act of six years’ standing, why, it will be asked, are children in the Highlands and Islands still left to remain untaught in the elements of education? That is a question that could perhaps best be answered by the Education Board for Scotland. We can only conjecture that the educational deficiency in various quarters is due to the difficulty, for pecuniary reasons, in establishing and maintaining schools on a proper footing consistently with the obligations of the statute. Mr Laurie mentions that the school-rates press with a severity which in some places is perfectly paralysing. ‘In Shetland, for example, the School Boards were brought to a stand-still. They could not face a rate of four shillings a pound; the same proprietors having to pay not less than four shillings a pound for poor-rate and other burdens besides.’ This agrees with what we have privately heard of Shetland, where the rates of one kind or other very nearly swallow up the whole rental drawn by proprietors. Mr Laurie states emphatically as to this difficulty of school-rates, that ‘unless the government paid what was necessary above fifteen-pence per pound, the Highlands and Islands would not have the full benefit of the Act of 1872.’