The Production and Dissemination of Knowledge in Scotland

Education and learning have traditionally been areas in which the national
specificity has been promoted and asserted in Scotland and apparently with
good reason since for several centuries the Scottish population could claim to
be the most thoroughly educated in the world. This achievement was the
consequence of the nation’s love affair with the transmission of basic
knowledge through schooling and intellectual inquiry which started with the
Reformation and culminated in the Scottish Enlightenment. As a whole, this
collection aims to show some small part of the breadth of knowledge created in
Scotland and disseminated in and outwith the country. This broad field of
interest echoes the wider range of subjects traditionally taught in Scottish
schools. It attempts to highlight what is distinctive about the Scottish
approach to knowledge acquisition in general while also presenting the areas
in which this endeavour overlaps with similar concerns in the rest of the
world. The overall impression created is that of a country consistently
confident in its ability to create useful knowledge; capable of applying that
knowledge at home and of sharing it with others.