Scottish schools: We must scotch our golden age myth

But when? When exactly did Scotland have the best performing schools on the planet? And how on earth would you measure this?

Don’t worry, this is not another newspaper polemic about Pisa, the complicated, contested and controversial international comparative study on pupils’ performance.

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By now most readers will know Scottish kids sampled last year scored less well than a cohort back in 2018 in reading, maths and science.

Moreover, in comparison with peers in other developed nations, our youngsters were distinctly average.

Scotland’s education system is definitely not a global best now, not, at least, on the relatively narrow benchmarking of Pisa. But was it ever? Well, certainly not in the era of modern rankings.

Opposition leaders absolutely should be haranguing SNP ministers on schools. That is their job. But what struck me is that so many of them chose to compare today’s Scottish schools with those of some undefined golden age.

Lib Dems and Tories both said Scotland had once had “one of the world’s best education systems”. Labour mixed the rhetoric up a bit, saying our schools were “once world-leading”.

I suppose we should be used to groundless superlatives and hyperbolic patter from our politicians and this applies to those in government as much as to those in opposition.

But there was something about these surreally overblown exchanges that tickled me. And that is that a small-n nationalist article of faith - our widely believed but rarely evidenced educational prowess - was being weaponised against a big-n nationalist government.

Isn’t it fascinating how so many of us mythologise our education and its history?

We have politicians demanding that out kids live up to standards which are more legendary than real.

Scots - well, some of us - really do love to think of ourselves as peculiarly well-schooled. When reality challenges this foolish conceit - as Pisa does - we tell ourselves another national story.

And that is one of great native ingenuity and a history of outstanding scholarship.

I think these narratives stray in to dummy-grade and potentially rather problematic exceptionalism.

But our little lies and exaggerations are also pretty mundane: Scotland is hardly the only country to mythologise its past or its education system.

How did schooling become quite so totemic in the small-n nationalist story of Scotland? Pass. There are lots of theories to choose from. And many sources for the myth.

If you want shameless boosteristic hoopla about our country a good place to look is the government-backed website of our national brand.

The not entirely credible scotland.org site tends not to waste time on caveats and context.

"Scotland has led the world in a commitment to excellence in education for centuries,” it declares. “We were the first country in the world to provide universal education open to both boys and girls, as early as the 17th century.”

Hmmm, yeah, maybe, kinda, dunno. It is definitely true that we were among the northern European countries to try to push literacy after the Reformation.

Does this protestant ethos still inform our self-image? It obviously mattered for the original unionists. They insisted the Scottish education system remain distinctive after 1707. For three centuries since some of us have felt the need to justify being different by claiming to be better.

When we finally did get legally mandated universal public education - in 1873, not the 17th century - there were those who saw the new system as an unwelcome English import.

Yet pride in Scottish education, in its distinct institutions and culture, is embedded in both traditional nationalist unionism and in the modern independence movement.

It is shared by progressives and conservatives, by Catholics as well as Protestants.

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Our belief system about education includes a specific democratic myth, the idea that our universal, and later comprehensive, schooling created a meritocracy.

We don’t talk much about lads an lasses o pairts any more. For good reason, the ongoing attainment gap tells us that schools don’t have a magic wand for fixing deep social disadvantage.

Yet the view that our system is or was best, or among the best, remains so deeply held that it is often not even questioned.

This assertion has as much evidentiary basis as my old mug saying I am the “world’s best dad”.

Let me add something that might trigger some nationalists, of both the British and Scottish variety. I think we should be reflecting on the role that arrogance about our education played in imperialism.

We certainly exported a lot of skilled people - doctors, engineers, teachers - to the colonies. And this surely helped create the image of the educated Scot.

But we also used our assumed superior learning as a justification for empire. It was part of how we rationalised our exploitation of others as a “civilising” mission. Sometimes it was an excuse for crime.

So that universal pride in our historic schooling? It ain’t always healthy, folks.

There is also the danger, in a hyper-partisan media and political culture, of replacing the old myth of superiority with a new one of inferiority. Our schools are not terrible.

We are still letting our old arrogance colour our politics. The Scottish Tory leader, Douglas Ross, this week indulged some spectacularly chauvinistic nitwittery. He told Holyrood that Scotland was “slipping below countries such as Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia”.

Maybe Mr Ross was counting on Scots being so badly educated that they shared his ignorant prejudices about the Baltic states, which have long had pretty good schools.

We might not be the best, but we can do better, at least on our rhetoric.