Why are we cutting the study of scotland?

This week’s In Common asks what happens when a country becomes better at celebrating its culture than understanding it.

It is becoming hard not to ask why Scotland seems so willing to lose the capacity to study itself.

The University of Edinburgh's plans to close around 90 degree programmes are being presented as part of a response to a major financial crisis. There are difficult decisions to be made when a university faces a £140 million budget gap. But the sheer range of subjects affected makes it difficult to see these simply as individual courses that happen not to attract enough students.

Among those facing closure are Scottish Literature, Celtic, Scottish Ethnology and a range of joint degrees involving Scottish history, literature, archaeology and languages.

There is an obvious response to this. Perhaps these are niche subjects. Perhaps not enough students want to study them. Universities cannot preserve every course indefinitely simply because it is interesting or culturally valuable.

But this raises a more fundamental question: why would we expect people to want to study something they have not been given much opportunity to learn about?

Scotland does not have a particularly strong tradition of teaching its own history as a coherent whole. Scottish history is taught in schools, but what pupils encounter can vary considerably according to the choices made by schools and teachers.

At National 5 and Higher, pupils study one Scottish, one British and one international historical context. The Scottish component, therefore, exists. But it does not mean every child receives a comprehensive grounding in the history of Scotland.

One pupil might study the Wars of Independence. Another might learn about migration and empire. Another might encounter the Jacobites or the Highland Clearances. At earlier stages, there is considerable flexibility over what is taught.

That flexibility has benefits. Teachers should have the freedom to teach subjects that engage their pupils. But it also means that a young person can leave Scottish education knowing a handful of famous episodes without ever having been given a proper understanding of how Scotland itself developed.

There is something strange about this. We are a country with its own legal system, education system, institutions, languages, literature and history. Scotland was an independent kingdom before the Union of 1707. The Union fundamentally changed the political relationship between Scotland and England, but it did not make their histories interchangeable.

Yet we can be remarkably comfortable treating knowledge of Scotland as an optional extra.

“if we stop studying it, eventually we may find that we have lost the capacity to understand ourselves.”

Scottish culture is everywhere. We are perfectly happy to celebrate tartan, kilts, Burns, haggis, whisky and Irn-Bru. But cultural symbolism is not the same thing as cultural knowledge. We can turn Scottishness into a successful brand while becoming less able to explain where that culture came from.

That matters because universities do not exist in isolation from schools.

If fewer young people encounter Scottish literature, Scottish history, Celtic studies or Scottish ethnology at school, fewer are likely to discover that they want to study them at university. If fewer students choose those subjects, universities have less incentive to maintain courses. If courses disappear, there are fewer academics to teach and research those subjects. And if that expertise disappears, the next generation has even fewer opportunities to encounter it.

The cycle reinforces itself. Demand is not simply discovered. It is also cultivated.

This is why the loss of university courses is about more than the students who might have enrolled next year. It is about the intellectual capacity that Scotland may not be able to rebuild easily once it has gone.

A university department contains accumulated knowledge, researchers, archives, teaching expertise and connections between generations of scholars. Remove enough of those things, and it becomes considerably harder to recreate them later. This should concern us regardless of our views on the Constitution.

It would be simplistic to claim that every reduction in Scottish studies is part of a deliberate attempt to erase Scottish identity.  National cultures are maintained partly through what institutions choose to remember, teach and research. A larger political state can develop a larger shared story, while the histories of the nations within it become something more specialist and peripheral. 

That can happen without anybody deciding that it should happen. And so we should ask whether Scotland is comfortable with becoming a country that celebrates its cultural symbols while steadily reducing its capacity to understand them.

The issue is not whether every small degree programme must be protected forever. Universities have to make choices. The issue is whether anyone is considering the collective consequence of those choices.

Universities are generational institutions. Their responsibility cannot simply be to balance this year's books. They also hold knowledge on behalf of generations that have not yet arrived. The students who cannot study something today cannot become the teachers, researchers and writers who pass that knowledge on tomorrow.

So perhaps the question is not simply why so few people want to study Scotland. Perhaps we should ask what we have done to make sure they ever had the chance.

If we stop teaching Scotland, we should not be surprised when people stop studying it. And if we stop studying it, eventually we may find that we have lost the capacity to understand ourselves.