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

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Evidently, the School Boards, notwithstanding their comprehensive and compulsory powers, are unable to plant and sustain schools in all quarters where required. The difficulty, it is observed, is financial. Let us instance the island of St Kilda. Its inhabitants are said to be seventy-six in number, while the annual rent exigible by the proprietor is somewhere about a hundred pounds, payable in kind. How can the School Board of Harris, with which the island is connected parochially, be expected to build a school and sustain a schoolmaster for the benefit of so small a population, in which there are perhaps only a very few children of school age? To build a school of the ordinary authorised type would cost at least six hundred pounds. And the payment of a teacher with other expenses would amount to one hundred pounds a year. The organisation of a school on this footing would go far beyond what is desirable or what could be asked for from either the state or the ratepayers.

A consideration of the financial difficulty leads to the conviction that something very much less costly than the present school organisation must in many parts of the Highlands be attempted, if the children are to get any education at all. Mr Laurie very properly remarks that children ‘would not well learn English except through the Gaelic;’ meaning by this, we suppose, that the teacher would require through the agency of Gaelic to explain the meaning of English words. That surely would not be difficult to accomplish; nor would it be unreasonable to establish schools on a much more modest footing than those latterly sanctioned by School Boards. The Scotch were long accustomed to see a very humble class of schools in secluded rural districts. Often, these schools consisted of cottages of not more than two apartments, one of which constituted the dwelling of the teacher. These cottage schools were conducted at an exceedingly small expense, yet they answered their purpose. Neither dignified nor imposing, they were useful. They imparted to the few children in their respective neighbourhoods a knowledge of letters. We are inclined to think that a modification of this kind would solve some existing difficulties as concerns the establishing of schools among the sparse population of the Highlands and Islands. In short, it would be well to legalise a minor or sub-class of schools, to be conducted at a small cost, designed to effect a particular purpose, namely, that of communicating a knowledge of the English language to large numbers of poor children who are at present growing up in ignorance of any spoken tongue but their native Gaelic, and who, in many cases, as is seen, have no education whatever.