The Prejudices of EducationEducational Aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment

Resumen

Scottish enlightened culture originated in an awareness of various educational prejudices, including religious, patriotic, and linguistic ones. Overcoming them placed Scottish writers ahead of European philosophy in the central decades of the eighteenth century. Through their involvement in the contemporary debate on sensibility, the Scots set about recovering the fragments left of the Scottish past. However, this interest eventually involved a dissociation of the national past from the idea of progress, which in the nineteenth century led to a separation of the country’s history and literature from notions of scientific and academic success. Therefore, Scotland’s historical culture, which formerly had been an essential ingredient of the Enlightenment, was regarded as legendary, gendered as “feminine,” and relegated to the sphere of fancy. Religion regained control of Scottish universities and Scotland became a land of romance, rather than a model of cultural progress as in the age of Voltaire and Hume.