The Revival of Scottish Gaelic Through Education By Michael McIn ...

Scotland send its oldest son to an approved school where he would be taught English so that gradually the Gaelic culture would be eradicated (MacLean, 1995). During the early 1800s, John Loch, a driving force in the clearing of Gaels from the Scottish Highlands, declared “that he would never be satisfied until the Gaelic language and the Gaelic people would be extirpated root and branch from…the highlands of Scotland” (MacKenzie, 1991/1883, p. 122).

The drive to eradicate Celtic languages took on a more refined aspect during the enlightened Victorian era. Gone were the edicts and the forced deportations, which is not to say that what O’Connor referred to “coercive Anglicization” abated at all (1997, p. 1). Its form changed, which is to say it became more sophisticated. Matthew Arnold, who is best known today as the great English poet who gave us such poetic classics as “Dover Beach,” but who was also at one time an Inspector of Schools (Phillipson, 2003), advocated the establishment of a Celtic Chair at the University of Oxford in “On the Study of Celtic Literature” (Arnold, 1867; O’Connor, 1997). However, at the same time that he was advocating the “disinterested study of Celtic literature [and]…knowing the Celt and his genius,” Arnold was also calling for the “speedy demise of Celtic languages and literatures as living cultures.” The study of Celtic cultures was only to take place after this “culture has been safely consigned to the past” (O’Connor, 1997, p. 2). In other words, we will honor and love this language after it is safely dead.

About the same time, James Cowles Prichard advocated categorizing races by language; “members of ‘less advanced’ societies [should demonstrate] a knowledge of the ‘more highly developed’ language to qualify for wider educational and job opportunities” (Roberts, 1998, p. 51). Similar to the rationale for the contemporary English-only advocates, Prichard and his fellow Victorians saw his motivations as benevolent and altruistic as they saw themselves bringing civilization, albeit rather forcefully, to those sunk in barbarism.

Nor did the English contain their antipathy for other languages to Scottish, or Irish Gaelic, or Welsh. They were quite ecumenical in their despising of the “other” and quite self-congratulatory regarding the