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Intelligence, or cognitive ability, is a key variable in reproducing social ineguality. On the one hand, it is associated with the social class in which a child grows up. On the other, it is a predictor of educational attainment, labor-market experiences, social mobility, health and well-being, and length of life. Therefore measured intelligence is important to our understanding of how ineguality operates and is reproduced. The present analysis uses social surveys of children aged 10 to 11 years in Britain between 1947 and 2012 to assess whether the social-class distribution of intelligence has changed. The main conclusions are that, although children's intelligence relative to their peers remains associated with social class, the association may have weakened recently, mainly because the average intelligence in the highest-status classes may have moved closer to the mean.

The relationship between the breadth of the curriculum which university students followed at secondary school and their degree attainment or their entry to employment is studied using a series of surveys of graduates from Scottish universities between 1960 and 2002. The relationship of the school curriculum to the later experience of students who entered university has not been extensively studied. Scotland is a useful case study for this purpose because breadth of study at school was a core feature of school-leaving assessment from the origins of modern secondary schooling in the early twentieth century until the end of the century. Breadth of learning was also a principle of the dominant university tradition in Scotland from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The conclusion of the analysis is that breadth was associated with propensity to enter professions rather than managerial occupations, and to avoiding low-status occupations. But also, for students with relatively moderate or low attainment from school, breadth was associated with a lower chance of gaining the highest attainment at university.

Leading historians discuss the distinctive and internationally significant history of Scottish education The excellence of Scottish education is, as it is commonly understood, 'held to be absolute'. One of the key national 'myths' has emphasised the quality, distinctiveness and accessibility of educational institutions north of the Border. The 'democratic intellect', the 'lad o'pairts' and other aspects of the Scottish educational tradition have been identified as key elements of national identity. In this book, a range of authors consider the truth behind the 'myth', and between them tell the story of the development of Scottish education over a period lasting almost a millenium. From the medieval origins of the Scottish universities, to the development of parish schooling after the Reformation, to the reforms of the nineteenth century, to the radical extension of educational participation throughout the twentieth century, this book traces the emergence of the complex educational structure of today's Scotland out of all these legacies. Key FeaturesThe first multi-authored history of education in Scotland that covers the whole of its medieval and modern historyAn unrivalled group of historians and social scientists with extensive expertise in Scottish historySets new agendas for the future of historical research in Scotland

Liberal education used to command wide political support. Radicals disagreed with conservatives on whether the best culture could be appreciated by everyone, and they disagreed, too, on whether the barriers to understanding it were mainly social and economic, but there was no dispute that any worthwhile education ought to hand on the best that has been thought and said. That consensus has vanished since the 1960s. The book examines why social radicals supported liberal education, why they have moved away from it, and what the implications are for the future of an intellectually stimulating and culturally literate education.

This practical introduction for first time researchers provides a bridge between how to conduct research and the philosophy of social science, allowing students to relate what they are doing to why. It does not provide a set of rigid recipes for social scientists as many methodology books do, rather it stimulates students to think about the issues involved when deciding upon their research design. By discussing standard approaches to research design and method in various social science disciplines, the authors illustrate why particular designs have traditionally predominated in certain areas of study. But whilst they acknowledge the strengths of these standard approaches, their emphasis is on helping researchers find the most effective solution to their problem by encouraging them, through this familiarity with the principles of various approaches, to innovate where appropriate. This text will prove indispensable for social science students of all levels embarking upon a research project, and for experienced researchers looking for a fresh perspective on their object of study.

Three of the great social ambitions of educational reform since the late nineteenth century are now seriously problematical. Although education does offer individuals a way of bettering themselves, we now know that it does little to change the terms of the competition among people who start from different social classes: it probably does not, by itself, affect relative social mobility. Education in advanced economies has little effect on overall rates of growth: it is now clear that the analogy between individual and economic development is untenable. And the main other option to these instrumental goals—that education should pass on the best that has been thought and said—is now deeply unfashionable with policy-makers, radical activists and most shades of academic opinion. Scotland is a telling case of these shifts. In the past century, it has held quite firmly to all three older views, and has tried quite thoroughly to implement educational reforms in pursuit of them. Its experience is as good a demonstration as any that the first two ambitions—of social mobility and of economic development—cannot be realised by educational change alone. The country is also moving deliberately away from the third ambition, its old humanism of knowledge. The implications of this experience and these developments are discussed.

It is widely agreed that formal learning can influence people's social attitudes and can encourage them to take part in civic activities. Less investigated, however, has been the question of whether these effects flow from any kind of education, or whether particular subjects of study are more relevant to civic values than others. The 1958 and 1970 British birth cohort studies are used to investigate this question. Longitudinal data are essential here in three respects. They allow the accumulation of information about many episodes of learning, and so allow attention to be given to learning in adulthood, vocational courses, and informal learning as well as to courses that are part of formal initial education. They allow numerous confounding factors to be controlled for. And, with such controls, they allow the question of whether there might be long-term influences of learning. The conclusion is that courses in the social sciences and humanities are more strongly associated with socially liberal values and with participation than other courses, but that (by comparing cohorts) this distinction might be declining over time.

Scottish secondary education was radically extended in size and social reach in the first four decades of the twentieth century, bringing significant new opportunities in secondary schooling to girls, to children of the lower-middle and upper-working classes, and to Catholics. Most of the new secondary schools were based on those parish schools that had in the nineteenth century sent a few boys directly to university, and so this new secondary sector was a modernising of the mythological tradition of the lad o' pairts. The main reason it succeeded was that it sought to extend to new social groups the benefits of the version of liberal education that had come to be regarded as the foundation of professional careers. Thus the reforms also had the effect of transferring to the senior years of the secondary schools the old undergraduate curriculum that had been replaced by more specialist university courses in the late-nineteenth century. The paper offers an evidence-based critique not only of that strand of pessimism which has claimed that Scottish education was stagnant between the wars, but also of George Davie's influential view that the tradition of a broad general education was lost.

A pressing question about the expansion of higher education is whether it tends to be inclusive, in the sense of bringing in larger proportions of persons from disadvantaged backgrounds, or diversifying, in that higher education tends to differentiate as it expands, or both, by bringing more persons into an increasingly stratified system of higher education. This paper addresses the question with evidence on higher education expansion in Scotland. Data are drawn from six waves of the Scottish School Leavers Survey from the late 1980s to the start of the new millennium. Binary and multinomial logit models are estimated to examine changes in inequality during this period, which was characterised by substantial expansion in both secondary qualifications and postsecondary enrolment. The results show that, in contrast to the general pattern of stable inequality observed in most nations, overall social inequalities in Scottish higher education enrolment declined over time. However, this decline did not occur in all sectors but was limited to the lowest-status institutions. These findings illustrate how expansion can serve both inclusive and diversifying ends.

It is half a century since the publication of the book that has done more to shape debate about Scottish education than any other (except ultimately theFirst Book of Discipline). When George Davie’sThe Democratic Intellectappeared in 1961, its meaning would probably have been more widely evident than it has been since.¹ The essential problem of interpretation may be summed up tritely as one of where to put the stress. Is Scottish education characterised by democracy, to which the intellect contributes, or is it shaped by the intellect, enjoining it to behave in democratic ways? Walter Elliot, from