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

Chapter 1:  The Dying Gael
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The same holds true for children from a group which is not the dominant one:

[C]ultural immersion represents overt rather than covert attempts to resocialize youngsters…and to inculcate in them mainstream perceptions and behaviors…youngsters are encouraged to abandon their own cultural values and practices in favor of those of the majority culture. (Hollins, 1996, pp. 148–149)

Just so we are not under the illusion that this resocialization is an entirely gentle process, Dorian (1981b) wrote of other aspects of persuasion besides the lecture and instruction that are often employed:

[T]he tessera, or maide-chrochaidh, a piece of wood handed in succession to each child heard to speak Gaelic and at the end of the school day handed back from the last possessor to each previous possessor, severe floggings accompanying it in its backward progression to the day's original unfortunate. The tessera was known and feared in many Highland and Hebridean parish schools, the more so since many pupils had no language other than Gaelic in which they could express themselves. (p. 24)

Such has been the fate of Gaelic speakers in Scotland, and, as a matter of fact, of non-English speakers, in general. Matheson and Matheson (2000) wrote the following:

This of course is comparable to the Welsh not, a piece of rope ritually hung round the necks of children caught speaking their own Welsh language at school in order to humiliate them. The irony is that in both cases the teachers carrying out the punishment probably themselves spoke the language they were attacking. (p. 215)

Those who have not been killed or deported have been demoralized to such an extent that the culture and the language of the Gael in the British Isles lie languishing on its death bed. The point of this gloss on the historical circumstances surrounding the experiences of the Gaels and the Gaelic language is not to drum up past injustices, but