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CURRICULUM STUDIES WORLDWIDE

CURRICULUM IN
INTERNATIONAL CONTEXTS
Understanding Colonial, Ideological,
and Neoliberal Influences

Ashwani Kumar
 Curriculum Studies Worldwide

Series Editors
William F. Pinar
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada

Janet L. Miller
Teachers College
New York, NY, USA
This series supports the internationalization of curriculum studies
worldwide. At this historical moment, curriculum inquiry occurs within
national borders. Like the founders of the International Association for
the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, we do not envision a world-
wide field of curriculum studies mirroring the standardization the larger
phenomenon of globalization threatens. In establishing this series, our
commitment is to provide support for complicated conversation within
and across national and regional borders regarding the content, context,
and process of education, the organizational and intellectual center of
which is the curriculum.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14948
 Ashwani Kumar

Curriculum in
International Contexts
Understanding Colonial, Ideological,
and Neoliberal Influences
Ashwani Kumar
Mount Saint Vincent University
Halifax, NS, Canada

Curriculum Studies Worldwide

ISBN 978-3-030-01982-2 ISBN 978-3-030-01983-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01983-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957446

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © imaginima/iStock/gettyimages

Cover design: Oscar Spigolon

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 For
Late Professor K. K. Mojumdar
and
Professor William F. Pinar
 Acknowledgements

I sincerely thank Professor William F. Pinar for including this book in the
Curriculum Studies Worldwide Series. Professor Pinar has been the most
influential academic mentor for me over the past decade. I deeply appre-
ciate him for his generosities, trust, care, and affection. I respectfully and
gratefully dedicate this book to Professor Pinar along with late Professor
K. K. Mojumdar who was my teacher and mentor in India.
I would like to thank my research assistants: Adrian Downey,
Mohamed Kharbach, Bonnie Petersen, Mehrdad Shahidi, and Deborah
Wells-Hopey. Completing this book without their dedicated help
would have been an insurmountable task. I thank Mount Saint Vincent
University for providing funding to hire these research assistants.
I also thank Milana Vernikova (Commissioning Editor) and Linda
Braus (Editorial Assistant) of Palgrave for their support and considera-
tion throughout the preparation of this manuscript.
Last but not least, I thank my wife, Nayha Acharya. I appreciate her
generosity in proofreading and editing this manuscript on short notice,
but most of all, her loving care and understanding as I worked day and
night on completing this project over the past several months.

vii
 The Following Material Is Reprinted
By Permission

An earlier version of Chapter 2 was first published as

[Kumar, Ashwani], [A synoptic view of curriculum studies in South
Africa], [2010], [Journal of the American Association for the Advancement
of Curriculum Studies, 6(2)], reproduced with permission of the journal.
Two earlier versions of Chapter 3 were published as
[Kumar, Ashwani], [Curriculum studies in Brazil: An overview in W. F. Pinar
[Ed.] Curriculum studies in Brazil: Intellectual histories, present circumstances
(pp. 27–42)], [2011], [Palgrave Macmillan] reproduced with permission of
Palgrave Macmillan.
[Kumar, Ashwani], [Curriculum studies in Brazil: An overview], [2012],
[Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum
Studies, 8(1), 1–11] reproduced with permission of the journal.
An earlier version of Chapter 4 was first published as
[Kumar, Ashwani], [Curriculum studies in Mexico: An overview in
W. F. Pinar [Ed.] Curriculum studies in Mexico: Intellectual histories,
present circumstances (pp. 29–48)], [2011], [Palgrave Macmillan], repro-
duced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
Parts of Chapter 5 are taken from
[Kumar, Ashwani], [A review of the book Social education in Asia:
Critical issues and multiple perspectives], [2008], [Education Review:
A Journal of Book Reviews], reproduced with permission of the journal.

ix
x    The Following Material Is Reprinted By Permission

An earlier version of Chapter 6 was first published as

[Kumar, Ashwani], [Indian social studies curriculum in transition: Effects
of a paradigm shift in curriculum discourse], [2012], [Transnational
Curriculum Inquiry, 9(1), 20–53], reproduced with permission of the
journal.
Parts of Chapter 7 are taken from
[Kumar, Ashwani], [Social studies in the postmodern world: An essay
review], [2009], [Education Review: A Journal of Book Reviews, 12(10),
1–21], reproduced with permission of the journal.
Parts of Chapter 8 are taken from
[Kumar, Ashwani], [A review essay of the book Neoliberalism and edu-
cation reform], [2008], [The Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies,
6(2), 218–236], reproduced with permission of the journal.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Curriculum Studies in South Africa: Colonialism,

Constructivism, and Outcomes-Based Education 21

3 Curriculum Studies in Brazil: Marxism, Postmodernism,

and Multiculturalism 49

4 Curriculum Studies in Mexico: Technical Rationality,

Curriculum Communities, and Neoliberal Globalization 79

5 Curriculum as a Process of Conditioning in Asia:

Ideology, Politics, and Religion 113

6 Indian Social Studies Curriculum in Transition: Effects

of a Paradigm Shift in Curriculum Discourse 151

7 Postmodern Turn in North American Social Studies

Education: Considering Identities, Contexts, and
Discourses 197

xi
xii    Contents

8 The Menace of Neoliberal Education Reforms: Where

Capitalism, Behaviourism, and Positivism Meet 235

Index 269
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Journey of Becoming an International Educator

Curriculum in International Contexts: Understanding Colonial,
Ideological, and Neoliberal Influences has emerged from two decades of
my engagement with various aspects of international themes and issues.
My introduction to the notion of the “international” formally happened
when I joined Kirori Mal College of the University of Delhi as an hon-
ours student of the discipline of geography in 1996. Given the expansive
and global character of geography, I learned to appreciate how physical,
political, economic, and cultural processes operate locally, regionally, and
globally, and how these are intimately connected. I also learned how the
diverse, yet indivisible, world of nature has been divided among various
nation states, how Earth’s harmonious and delicate balance has been dis-
turbed by the ideas of growth-driven economic models, and how coloni-
alism and neocolonialism have undermined thousands of years old cultural
groups and their sacred and spiritual relationship to their geographical
environment. Throughout those years, I often questioned why there were
economic disparities among countries and whether it was possible to have
a world full of diversities but free of antagonisms and divisions.
I completed three degrees in geography1 and studied the discipline
for about eight years. Within these degrees, three subjects that deeply
informed my understanding of the world and later contributed to my
work on international curriculum studies, were Geography of Development,
Political Geography, and Geographical Thought. I studied political

© The Author(s) 2019 1

A. Kumar, Curriculum in International Contexts, Curriculum Studies
Worldwide, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01983-9_1
2 A. KUMAR

geography and geographical thought with late Professor K. K. Mojumdar

who was a great teacher and mentor to me for about ten years until I left
to attend the doctoral programme at the University of British Columbia
(UBC). His spontaneity, creativity, and playfulness in teaching, and his
knowledge of geographical thought, politics, religion, philosophy, edu-
cation, and psychology always amazed me. Geographical thought, which
covers the history and philosophy of geography, was my first introduc-
tion to a philosophical subject matter. This subject was my favourite;
it opened my mind to the world of concepts, insights, and perceptions
which allowed me to study and understand how human beings across the
globe have come to relate with and connect with nature, and how this
interaction has brought about a diverse, unique, and rich cultural herit-
age around the globe. This relationship between human beings and their
environment has been studied and interpreted using a variety of world
views and philosophical discourses, including positivism, behaviourism,
Marxism, phenomenology, existentialism, environmentalism, possibilism,
and postmodernism these discourses influenced geographers as they did
curriculum scholars around the world, as we will see in the chapters to
follow.2 Political geography allowed me to see how the world has been
divided into power blocks and how geopolitics has been used as a way
to create conflicting power centres regionally and globally. Professor
Mojumdar’s deep interest in international boundaries and conflicts
ignited my own interests in understanding how history, politics, reli-
gion, culture, as well as psychology underpin the conflicts between nation
states—a theme that I explore in Chapter 5 of this book.3 Geography of
Development, which I studied with Professor Kaushal Kumar Sharma,
introduced me to how hundreds of years of (neo) colonialism and impe-
rialism have brought about a world where the so-called “north” or “the
core” has come to establish an exploitative relationship with “the south”
or “the periphery” and how the Indigenous and native cultures around
the world have been displaced and uprooted and their views of knowl-
edge, education, work, and living have been suppressed by colonial and
imperial world views (see Butlin, 2009; Godlewska & Smith, 1994).4
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this volume illustrate how colonial and imperial—
and now neoliberal—influences have left their mark on the notions of
curriculum, teaching, and learning in South Africa, Brazil, and Mexico.
During my graduate studies, I wrote a thesis under the supervision of
Professor B. Khan that combined political and development geographies.
It was titled “A Geographical Interpretation of the Evolutionary Nature
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

of the Contemporary World Order” (A. Kumar, 2003). I argued that

the contemporary world order has evolved through a cyclic change from
multipolar through bipolar and unipolar, to a multipolar world. During
the late 19th century, political and economic power started diffusing
from Europe to other parts of the world, especially USA and Japan,
allowing the global power structures to shift from being Eurocentric to
multipolar. This multipolarity continued up to 1945, when, after the
Second World War European supremacy was replaced by the emergence
of USA and USSR as world powers, leading to the formation of antag-
onistic ideological, political, and economic systems. The disintegration
of USSR in 1991 ended bipolar power structures leaving behind polit-
ico-military supremacy of the USA and multiple new economic pow-
ers centres including the European Union, China, Japan, and India.
Towards the end of writing this thesis, my mind began to shift from
geopolitics to geopacifics, from the geography of politics to geography of
peace.5 In the light of my growing interest in spirituality and meditation,
I began to question the notions of nationalism, war, nuclear armament,
and the growth-based model of economic development from spiritual
perspectives. Based on my studies of Indian spiritual philosophers like
Kabir, Krishnamurti, and Osho,6 I became more interested in under-
standing the crisis of human consciousness and the ways in which it has
created chaos in every sphere of human life, locally as well globally.
After completing three degrees in geography, I moved to the dis-
cipline of education, where based on my study of Krishnamurti and
the famous Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, I developed an interest in
conceptualizing a notion of global citizenship which would integrate
self-reflection and critical thinking (A. Kumar, 2007). I argued:

It is significant to point out that the ideas of Krishnamurti and those of

Freire and Giroux are different but not contradictory; rather, they are
complimentary. For Freire and Giroux, what is significant is the develop-
ment of critical consciousness to understand and change oppressive social
reality, while for Krishnamurti what is more significant is the understand-
ing of how we, as individuals, play a role in bringing about and furthering
the conflicts and problems of society. Both perspectives are essential and
need to be combined for a true education that aims at a just, peaceful, and
democratic society. (A. Kumar, 2007, p. 10)7

As my study deepened, I realized that Freire’s (1973) concept of criti-

cal consciousness was primarily concerned with bringing about changes
4 A. KUMAR

in the structures of the society, but his work did not give profound
attention to the significance of self-understanding. Krishnamurti’s work
(1953, 1954) attributes global educational, economic, and political crises
to the conflicted nature of human consciousness. In his view, the crisis
that is reflected globally in economic and political spheres is a crisis of
the human mind and needs to be approached meditatively and holisti-
cally rather than merely structurally and in a fragmented piecemeal fash-
ion. I developed these ideas more fully later while writing my doctoral
thesis at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
I also taught social studies and geography at Apeejay School
Pitampura in New Delhi for three years. While completely disappointed
by the instrumental and examination-oriented ethos of schooling, I tried
to communicate to my students, through a dialogical pedagogy (which
encouraged them to find their own voices and allowed them the free-
dom to dissent), the significance of: perceiving nature as a living and cre-
ative being, to be related to and learned from, rather than as a collection
of things and resources to be exploited; realizing the intrinsic unity and
wholeness of life that expresses itself in diverse landscapes and cultures;
and considering the role of self-understanding as the basis of understand-
ing and connecting with the world.
After finishing my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education at
the Central Institute of Education (University of Delhi) and hav-
ing worked as a teacher for three years, I joined doctoral studies in
the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at UBC in Vancouver
(Canada) in 2007. Here, I met Professors William Pinar and E. Wayne
Ross whose research further deepened my interest in international edu-
cational themes.
When I joined UBC, Professor Pinar, a world-renowned curric-
ulum theorist, was the Director of the Centre for the Study of the
Internationalization of Curriculum Studies.8 He kindly accepted me as
his graduate research assistant to work on his internationalization of cur-
riculum studies projects.9 In these projects, the main goal was to study
how curriculum studies scholars in five nations—Brazil, China, India,
Mexico, and South Africa—understand and conceptualize local and
global educational issues and their interconnectedness, and how their
scholarship and participation contribute to the intellectual advancement
of these nationally unique fields. These research projects also aimed at
supporting scholars internationally to study, and thereby participate in,
the emergence of a worldwide curriculum studies field which considers
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

significant curriculum issues and questions at national as well as interna-

tional levels (Pinar, 2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2014a, 2015a).
As Professor Pinar’s research assistant, I worked on the first project
that focused on the historical evolution and present circumstances of
curriculum studies in Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa. The project on
each country comprised the following aspects: invitation to six to eight
participant curriculum scholars to give an online interview to Dr. Pinar
and compose chapters on their and their fields’ intellectual histories and
present circumstances; intellectual exchanges between the authors of
the chapters and a panel of international scholars; and Professor Pinar’s
summary of and reflections on these intellectual exchanges. My work
was to read all of this material and write synoptic essays on the nature
and character of the field of curriculum studies in Brazil, Mexico, and
South Africa. These essays (A. Kumar, 2010, 2011a, 2011b) are foun-
dations of the three chapters of this book, with significant updates and
revisions. Working on this project with Professor Pinar provided me with
a strong educational foundation for my interest in international issues
and themes. Through this project, I had the opportunity to read origi-
nal, first-hand research from diverse international contexts, meet inter-
nationally renowned scholars who would visit the Centre for the Study
of the Internationalization of Curriculum Studies, and write about the
evolution of curriculum studies in different countries under the superb
mentorship of Professor Pinar.10
Professor Pinar also supervised my doctoral thesis which was later
published as a scholarly book called Curriculum As Meditative Inquiry
(A. Kumar, 2013). Among other things, this book explored how the cri-
sis of human consciousness manifests itself in economic and political divi-
sions, racial and religious conflicts, wars and nuclear crisis, and ecological
degradation. Drawing upon the insights of J. Krishnamurti and James
Macdonald (1995), I conceptualized a meditative inquiry approach to
teaching, learning, and living. Meditative inquiry has the potential to
allow us, individually and collectively, to understand the crisis of human
consciousness at a profound existential level so that the seeds of transfor-
mation are sown in our consciousness. It is an existential alternative to
the predominant structural approaches that merely look for and depend
on superficial, knee-jerk, and instrumental solutions to deep and compli-
cated human problems including education.
At UBC, I also had the opportunity to work with Professor E. Wayne
Ross who is a widely acclaimed social studies education scholar and
6 A. KUMAR

critical pedagogue.11 With Professor Ross, I learned a great deal about

the nature and purpose of social studies education. With his encourage-
ment and under his guidance, I also published my work on social stud-
ies education and neoliberalism. He advised me to publish my research
on social studies curriculum reform in India (A. Kumar, 2012). He sug-
gested that I write critical essays (A. Kumar, 2008a, 2009) on schol-
arly volumes that focused on various aspects of social studies education
(e.g. Grossman & Lo, 2008; Segall, Heilman, & Cherryholmes, 2006).
He invited me to be a discussant on a panel on neoliberalism and edu-
cation reforms and encouraged me to write a critical essay (A. Kumar,
2008b) on a scholarly volume on the same topic which he edited with
his colleague Rich Gibson (Ross & Gibson, 2007). Chapters 5, 6, 7, and
8 of this book are fully developed, updated, and revised versions of my
work that Professor Ross encouraged me to undertake.
Now, as an international educator at a Canadian institute of higher
education, I draw upon my research on international educational themes
and issues to inform my teaching. In my classroom, I create a medita-
tive and dialogical ethos where my students and I question how colo-
nialism, ideological control of curriculum and teaching, and neoliberal
obsession with measurement, comparison, and competition have under-
mined the possibilities of a rich, holistic, and transformative educational
experience for teacher and their students. We probe how various kinds of
fear-driven conditioning influences have brought about religious, polit-
ical, and economic divisions in the world. And we explore how a deeper
meditative understanding of our social and psychological structures may
help develop a free, creative, critical, and self-aware mind that is capa-
ble of transforming conflicted and fragmented human consciousness
(see A. Kumar, 2013, 2014; A. Kumar & Downey, in press).
Through Curriculum in International Contexts, I present my engage-
ment with and reflections on curricular and pedagogical issues, perspec-
tives, and debates from distinctive and diverse international contexts.
More specifically, in Curriculum in International Contexts, I:

• discuss how political, cultural, historical, and economic structures

and processes shape the nature and character of the curriculum in
diverse international contexts;
• underscore the connections between and among diverse cultural
and political conceptualizations of curriculum and thereby contrib-
ute to the internationalization of curriculum studies discourses;
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

• explore how colonialism and imperialism, state-led ideological control, and

the wave of neoliberalism and capitalism insidiously impact the process of
curriculum development and teaching in different parts of the world;
• develop theoretical and contextual connections between these
themes, drawing out their complex interactions, and their often
entangled influences on curriculum policies;
• emphasize how intellectual movements such as Marxism and post-
modernism have shaped curriculum theory in varied political and
economic settings;
• offer responses from four perspectives—Indigenous, critical, autobi-
ographical, and meditative—to challenge the ideological, colonial,
and neoliberal influences on curriculum.

In a nutshell, Curriculum in International Contexts provides a detailed

and critical account of the multifaceted political, economic, and cultural
forces, and their underpinning ideologies, that have exerted control over
curriculum landscapes globally.

Ideological, Colonial, and Neoliberal

Influences on Curriculum
Curriculum—whether signifying a concept, a document, or a lived
experience—is vulnerable and impressionable to a myriad of influences.
It is controlled, shaped, and influenced by: the culture in which it is situ-
ated, political and religious ideologies that have sway over it, the market
to which it intends to or is expected to cater, and the teachers and the
students who interpret and engage with it and create it in their every-
day lived contexts. Far from being a neutral disciplinary guideline, as it is
usually considered, a curriculum is actually a historical, political, cultural,
autobiographical, and economic construct, as the readers will see in the
chapters to follow. Based on my study of the history and contemporary
character of curriculum studies in a variety of political, economic, geo-
graphical, and cultural contexts, I consider three influences on curricu-
lum to be the most profound: ideological, colonial, and neoliberal.
That state uses education as one of its ideological apparatuses
(Althusser, 1971) to maintain control over its citizens has become com-
mon knowledge, thanks to the work of educators12 who view curricu-
lum as a political text (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995).
The problem with politicization and ideological control over education
8 A. KUMAR

is powerfully expressed by J. Krishnamurti in his widely read book,

Education and the Significance of Life, as follows:

Government control of education is a calamity … This conditioning of

the child’s mind to fit a particular ideology, whether political or religious,
breeds enmity between [human beings]. (1953, p. 77)

The ideological influence on curriculum manifests itself in a variety of

ways including neoliberal, nationalist, fundamentalist, and ethnocentric
control of education (see Chapter 5). At times, this ideological control
takes on the form of the so-called progressive curriculum reforms as in
the case of recent school reforms in South Africa and India (see Chapters
2 and 6), as well as in instances of No Child Left Behind Act and Race to
the Top policy initiatives in the USA (see Chapter 8).
Colonialism and imperialism can perhaps be considered as the dark-
est tendencies in human history where one group of people oppresses
another group, takes away their sovereignty and selfhood, exploits their
natural and human resources, enslaves them, destroys their cultural herit-
age, divides up cultural groups by artificial boundaries, forcefully imposes
colonial views of education and religion, and in the end leaves them
impoverished, unstable, and divided racially, economically, and politically.
Highlighting the pervasive legacies of colonialism and imperialism and
their impact on education, Willinsky, in his classic, Learning to Divide the
World: Education at Empire’s End, writes:

It is hard to know what to do about a world beset by struggles of eth-

nic nationalism, hardening of racial lines, and staggering divides between
wealth and poverty… How do we help … [our students] … understand
why differences of color and culture, gender and nationality continue to
have such profound consequences? (1998, p. 1)

Colonialism and imperialism have insidiously and deeply shaped the

notion of curriculum around the world, as several chapters in this book
testify (see Battiste, 2013; Willinsky, 1998). For example, in the case of
South Africa, British colonial policies, along with religious influences
from Christian missionaries, undermined native cultures and practices and
have created deep-seated educational, political, and economic inequalities
(see Chapter 2). On the other side of the Atlantic, in Mexico and Brazil,
we notice how US imperialism has not only influenced these countries
politically and economically but has also shaped their educational policies
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

first due to the export of Tylerian rationality13 in the 1970s, and then
through its more recent reinstatement because of the neoliberal educa-
tional notions of “efficiency” and “innovation” (see Chapters 3 and 4).
Neoliberalism has emerged as a dominant economic and political ide-
ology over the past 35 years. It is rooted in capitalist thinking. It under-
mines welfare functions of the state including education. It believes in
free market, competitive, and individual-driven economic policies. In his
widely acclaimed book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey
(2005) argues:

The process of neoliberalization has … entailed much ‘creative destruction’

… It [neoliberalism] holds that the social good will be maximized by max-
imizing the reach and frequency of market transactions, and [therefore] it
seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market…. (p. 3)

In the field of education, as several chapters in this book argue, neoliber-

alism has been responsible for increasing corporatization and standardi-
zation. It promotes comparative, competitive, and measurement focused
education, and is antieducational to its very core. It supports scripted
curricula and standardized testing, and thereby, instrumentalizes educa-
tion and alienates teachers and students from deep and authentic learning
and from each other. Due to its focus on standardized tests and public
display of performance on these tests, it creates anxiety, fear, and mistrust
in teachers, students, and parents. It encourages behaviouristic and pos-
itivistic notions of education and combines them with the profit-driven
and market-based ethos of the capitalist society. In essence, neoliberalism
deepens instrumental tendencies in education and undermines the possi-
bilities of rich and meaningful teaching and learning experiences.
How might we educators respond to these three deep-seated and
devious influences on the curriculum? I propose four responses that will
enable us to understand, reflect upon, and challenge these influences
individually as well as collectively.

Indigenous, Critical, Autobiographical,

and Meditative Responses

An Indigenous response to colonial, ideological, and neoliberal influences

on education implies an intention to “decolonize education” (Battiste,
2013; see also McCoy, Tuck, & McKenzie, 2016; Patel, 2015) on the
part of Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous educators around the
10 A. KUMAR

world. In my view, decolonization is a political, cultural, and spiritual

process of challenging the colonial oppression, violence, impacts of resi-
dential schooling, and intergenerational trauma. It is a process of decon-
ditioning centuries of Eurocentric ideas regarding education, work,
progress, and life which has resulted in the loss of Indigenous cultures
and languages. In my understanding, an Indigenous response is a deep
invocation and calling to connect to one’s roots, histories, and ancestors
in order to reclaim one’s cultural heritage. The Indigenous response is
a spiritual action that calls for living with and learning from nature.14
It is a healing process of reconnecting human beings’ severed relation-
ship with each other and nature. It is a holistic approach to end conflicts
between people by working towards restorative justice, and between
people and nature by working towards restoring ecological balance. An
Indigenous response is not a uniform, homogenous, and ethnocentric
movement. On the contrary, it is a multifaceted, diverse, and spiritual
movement that prioritizes peace, harmony, and holism in living, learn-
ing, and teaching.15
A critical response primarily comprises a wide range of academic per-
spectives, including Marxism, critical theory, critical race theory, femi-
nism, multicultural, hybridity, and postcolonial theories, queer theory,
postmodernism, poststructuralism, cultural studies, and literary theory,
which question and critique the ideologies that underpin curriculum.
While these perspectives approach curriculum from diverse vantage
points, they collectively disregard the neutrality of the curriculum and
consider it an ideological, political, and socially constructed concept
and experience, which needs to be engaged with critically rather than
accepted on its face value. Through adopting various kinds of critical,
anti-oppressive, feminist, racial, and discursive theories and methodol-
ogies, a critical response fights against prejudices, injustices, and dis-
criminations in classrooms and wider social and political spheres.16
An autobiographical response constitutes an existential, phenome-
nological, and psychoanalytic engagement with curriculum, teaching,
and learning. It places self, subjectivity, and subjective experiences at
the core of the educational experience. It promotes subjective inquir-
ies into and reflections upon ideological, colonial, and neoliberal influ-
ences on teachers’ and their students’ lives. An autobiographical response
emphasizes the need for deeper self-understanding of one’s individ-
ual life history and its relationship to the social history. From an auto-
biographical perspective, it is an individual’s interest and intention in
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

self-understanding that allow one to see, through reflexive introspection,

how one is constituted of psychological, political, cultural, religious, and
intellectual influences. It is this introspective and reflexive awareness that
helps one to become capable of responding—subjectively, in the class-
room, and beyond—to the deleterious influences of ideological, colonial,
and neoliberal control on teaching and learning.17
A meditative response emerges out of a deeper understanding of the
nature of human consciousness. The meditative response is rooted in the
meditative inquiry (A. Kumar, 2013, 2014; A. Kumar & Downey, in
press), which is a profound, intense, yet non-judgmental, engagement
with the conflicted nature of human consciousness. Human conscious-
ness here implies a common reservoir which connects us all. It connotes
a shared human existence and condition characterized by conflicts and
antagonisms at every level of humanity, which include the colonial,
neoliberal, and ideological influences that shape and control education
internationally. The notion of meditative inquiry promotes a vision of
teaching, learning, and living where self-awareness is central. It high-
lights the significance of understanding one’s consciousness as it actually
is without distorting it and shaping it according to one’s preferences or
social and religious expectations. Meditative inquiry allows one to see
clearly and deeply how colonial, ideological, and neoliberal influences—
characterized by, but not limited to, racial prejudices, political control
of education, and economistic and superficial view of education—oper-
ate within oneself as one relates with others in day-to day-living. Such
seeing makes it possible for one to understand that what appears to be
merely outer problems—colonialism and neoliberalism, for example—are
in actuality tied intimately to the way the inner consciousness flows, to
how one thinks, feels, and acts on a daily basis. With such deep seeing
comes an awareness which challenges the structural problems at the level
of consciousness and thereby eliminates discrimination, ideological con-
trol, and the tendency to measure at the very root of one’s being. A med-
itative response is thus an existential and holistic way of understanding
and transforming the negative and destructive influences on education.18
These four responses—Indigenous, critical, autobiographical, and
meditative—to the colonial, ideological, and neoliberal influences on
curriculum need not be seen as mutually exclusive. In my view, while
each of these perspectives may have a particularly broad focus within
themselves, they are diverse and rich and have much to offer to other
perspectives to reflect on and deepen one another’s insights. Each of
12 A. KUMAR

these responses can together help us challenge ideological control, colo-

nialism, and neoliberalism and create a world where learning and living
are informed by Indigenous sensibilities, criticality, self-reflection, and a
meditative understanding of human consciousness.

Overview of the Chapters

In Chapter 2, “Curriculum Studies in South Africa: Colonialism,
Constructivism, and Outcomes-Based Education,” I provide a synoptic
view of curriculum studies in South Africa. I begin with a discussion of
the colonial roots of the South African curriculum and trace its devel-
opment from the founding of the first slave school in the 17th cen-
tury up to the apartheid era. Further, I discuss different pedagogical
movements and curricular reforms that marked that period highlighting
their discriminatory and exclusionist approaches towards Indigenous
peoples. Next, I cover the post-apartheid curricula mainly Curriculum
2005, National Curriculum Statement, and Curriculum Policy and
Assessment Statement and argue against their inadequacy as educational
reforms due to their instrumentalist, managerial, and outcomes-based
focus. I conclude with a number of considerations to be addressed in
order to allow curriculum in South Africa to be relevant to the country’s
contemporary conditions.
Chapter 3, “Curriculum Studies in Brazil: Marxism, Postmodernism,
and Multiculturalism,” provides an overview of the field of curriculum
studies in Brazil. I chronicle the development of Brazilian curriculum
over three main periods: pre-Marxist (1950s–1970s), Marxist (1980s–
mid-1990s), and post-Marxist (mid-1990s–present). The pre-Marxist era
was largely dominated by the Tylerian instrumentalism and Bruner and
Ausubel’s cognitivism. In the Marxist era, curriculum studies was par-
ticularly concerned with the relationship between education and social
development. Scholarship from critical theory and sociology of education
theoretically informed much of the debates during this period, bringing
under the limelight concepts of power, ideology, and hegemony, as well
as how these concepts are implicated in the dissemination and organi-
zation of school knowledge. The third period, the post-Marxist, wit-
nessed the rise of the post-discourses (i.e. postmodern, poststructural,
and postcolonial discourses) which emphasize a different set of curricular
concepts, including subjectivity, hybridization, everyday school life, race,
gender, and identity.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

In Chapter 4, “Curriculum Studies in Mexico: Technical Rationality,

Curriculum Communities, and Neoliberal Globalization,” I outline the
evolutionary trajectory of curriculum studies in Mexico. I have attempted
to organize this evolution into three phases. The first phase (the 1970s)
was marked by the importation of the American technicist-behaviourist
models of curriculum. In this phase, several works of American curricu-
lum scholars were translated into Spanish and were drawn on to guide
Mexican curricular policies and programmes. With the start of the sec-
ond phase (the 1980s), this American model came under critique from
Mexican curriculum scholars who viewed it as being reductionist, rigid,
and decontextualized. In subsequent years, these critical scholars con-
verged into various communities (e.g., critical theorists, interpretiv-
ists, constructivists, and professional developmentalists) and pioneered
research on Mexican curricular scholarship. The third (current) phase is
characterized by a general orientation towards economistic visions of edu-
cation with the introduction of globalized educational reforms marked by
neoliberal notions of “innovation” and “accreditation” turning education
into a vocational project evaluated through quantitative measures.
Chapter 5, “Curriculum as a Process of Conditioning in Asia:
Ideology, Politics, and Religion,” discusses the concept of curriculum
as a process of conditioning in the Asian educational context draw-
ing on a number of case studies. Based on the analysis of these studies,
three pertinent themes emerge that illustrate how cultural, ideological,
political, and religious factors influence educational policies and cur-
riculum reforms in these countries. The first theme is about the ideo-
logical control of teaching and curriculum as illustrated in case studies
from Japanese, South Korean, Afghan, Malaysian, and Hong Kongese
educational systems. The second theme is about nationalism, globaliza-
tion, and moral values as manifested in case studies related to the politi-
cal influence on moral education in China, the incorporation of Kokoro
education in Japan, ideological debates on the inclusion of moral and
nationalistic values in Singaporean educational policy, the prioritization
of docility and harmony values in Macau’s education, and the discussion
of Filipino and Vietnamese curriculum designs in developing unique
national identities. The third theme is about religious influence on edu-
cation with a focus on Indian, Pakistani, and Malaysian contexts.
In Chapter 6, “Indian Social Studies Curriculum in Transition: Effects
of a Paradigm Shift in Curriculum Discourse,” I narrate the effects
of the recent curriculum reforms on the curricular discourse related to
14 A. KUMAR

social studies teaching in India. More specifically, I conduct a compara-

tive content analysis of two major curriculum reform documents, namely,
National Curriculum Framework 2000 and National Curriculum
Framework 2005, arguing that the latter constitutes a paradigm shift in
social studies education in India—a shift from “traditional social stud-
ies instruction” to “critical social studies.” The chapter also reports the
results of interviews and a focus-group discussion with social studies
schoolteachers to examine the impact of these curricular reforms on the
lived experiences in the classroom. My findings indicate that although the
National Curriculum Framework 2005 and the new textbooks are stu-
dent-centred, interactive, and critically oriented, many concerns remain
yet to be addressed. Among these concerns are teachers’ lack of adequate
training and time, the dearth of resources, and the predominance of a
behaviouristic-positivistic and exam-focused system that still views curric-
ulum and teaching as atheoretical, apolitical, and ahistorical processes.
Chapter 7, “Postmodern Turn in North American Social Studies
Education: Considering Identities, Contexts, and Discourses,” provides a
discussion of how postmodern and poststructural thought have influenced
research and teaching within social studies education in the USA and
Canada. I begin with an introduction to the notion of postmodernism.
Then, I briefly trace the history of how and why postmodernism emerged
as an important influence and allowed engagement with critical, reflexive,
democratic, and inclusive perspectives in social studies research and teach-
ing. I also discuss various case studies to illustrate what it looks like to
do research and teach social studies from post-perspectives, and conclude
by providing critiques and raising questions regarding the nature of post-
modernist thinking and its usefulness for educational research.
In Chapter 8, “The Menace of Neoliberal Education Reforms: Where
Capitalism, Behaviourism, and Positivism Meet,” I analyse the ram-
ifications of neoliberalism on various sectors with a particular focus on
education. At the economic level, neoliberalism with its emphasis on pri-
vatization, free market, and a decreased state funding of public services
has resulted in economic and social inequalities among individuals and
nations. At the political level, neoliberal policies neutralized the active
role of citizens in building participatory democracies and turned them
into mere spectators devoid of any agency. At the educational level, neo-
liberalism introduced the capitalist corporate rationality into education
resulting in neoliberal reforms that emphasized standardized testing, cor-
poratization of public education, and scripted curricula. Viewing these
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

reforms as antieducational practices that undermine teachers and stu-

dents’ freedom and creativity, I conclude this chapter with a discussion
of three main theoretical concepts to challenge the neoliberal agenda
in education, namely critical pedagogy, autobiography, and meditative
inquiry.

Notes
1. Bachelor of Arts (Honors), Master of Arts, and Master of Philosophy.
2. For an introduction to geographical thought, see Agnew, Livingstone,
and Rogers (1996) and Martin (2005).
3. For an introduction to political geography, see Jones, R. Jones, Dixon,
Whitehead, Woods, and Hannah (2015) and Short (2016).
4. For an introduction to the geography of development, see Potter et al.
(2012) and Smith (2008).
5. See Taylor (1946).
6. Kabir was a fifteenth-century poet and spiritual philosopher from India.
His ideas criticized dogmas of Hindu and Muslim religions. He advo-
cated a path to spirituality free of organized religion and traditions (see
Tagore, 1916). Jiddu Krishnamurti and Osho were twentieth-century
philosophers. Krishnamurti was also deeply interested in education and
founded several schools in India, the UK, and the USA to advocate an
education focused on questioning social conditioning and finding a new
path to teaching and learning free of rigid structures and controls (see
Krishnamurti, 1953; A. Kumar, 2013). Osho is known for his volumi-
nous writings on meditation and commentaries on various religious tra-
ditions and texts from around the world. He emphasized the centrality of
meditation and creativity in living and learning (see Osho, 1996, 1998).
7. This excerpt is taken from my Master of Education thesis that I wrote
under the supervision of Professor Shyam B. Menon.
8. The Centre was closed down in 2010.
9. These projects were funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.
10. Consider reviewing widely acclaimed edited collection by Professor
Pinar titled International Handbook of Curriculum Research (2014b).
This exceptional volume provides synoptic views of curriculum research
from 34 countries. For an introduction to Professor Pinar’s work, see
Educational Experience As Lived: Lived Knowledge, History, Alterity
(2015b). Also see The Reconceptualization of Curriculum Studies:
A Festschrift in Honor of William Pinar (Doll, 2017); this volume is an
edited collection of commentaries on Professor Pinar’s work by renowned
curriculum scholars from around the world.
16 A. KUMAR

11. For an introduction to Professor Ross’s work, see Rethinking Social

Studies: Critical Pedagogy and the Pursuit of Dangerous Citizenship
(2017). Also see Ross (2014).
12. See Darder, Baltodano, and Torres (2009) and Darder, Mayo, and
Paraskeva (2016).
13. Tylerian Rationale connotes four basic questions of curriculum develop-
ment proposed by Ralph Tyler, a professor at University of Chicago, in
his syllabus which later became his book, Basic Principles of Curriculum
and Instruction (1949). These four questions were: What educational
purposes should school seek to attain? What kinds of the educational
experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes? How
can these educational experiences be effectively organized? How can we
determine whether these purposes are being attained (Tyler, 1949, p. 1)?
These questions and their various iterations became the basis of “cur-
riculum development” paradigm in North America (Pinar et al., 1995)
and in many other parts of the world as the current and other chapters
in this volume depict. Tylerian Rationale underpins those educational
approaches which support prescriptive curricula, outcomes-based edu-
cation, behaviourist psychology and measurement, and bureacratiza-
tion of schools, and which show faith in data-driven and standardized
testing-oriented means to educational reforms. For understanding the
key criticisms of Tylerian Rationale, see Eisner (1967), Pinar (2013), and
Pinar et al. (1995).
14. See Coulthard (2014), Coulthard and Simpson (2016).
15. See also Cajete (1994), Stonechild (2016).
16. See Darder et al. (2009, 2016).
17. See Pinar (2011c, 2012, 2015b), Pinar & Grumet (2014).
18. See also Krishnamurti (1953, 1954).

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Another random document with
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eighteen months—he had received no remuneration; neither had he
been paid for the articles he had purchased for the men; at the same
time, the salary due to him, of ten pounds a year as chirurgeon of the
castle, was now more than two years in arrear. It was the greater
hardship, as those who had furnished the drugs and other articles
were pressing him for the debt, ‘for which he is like to be pursued.’
Moreover, he protested, as something necessary to support a claim of
debt against the state, that ‘he has been always for advancing of his
majesty’s interest, and well affected to their majesties’ government.’
The Council, in this case too, could only recommend the accounts
to the lords of the treasury.[57]
Sinclair of Mey, and a friend of his named 1691. Mar. 8.
James Sinclair, writer in Edinburgh, were
lodging in the house of John Brown, vintner, in the Kirkgate of Leith,
when, at a late hour, the Master of Tarbat and Ensign Andrew Mowat
came to join the party. The Master, who was eldest son of the
Viscount Tarbat, a statesman of no mean note, was nearly related to
Sinclair of Mey. There was no harm meant by any one that night in
the hostelry of John Brown; but before midnight, the floor was
reddened with slaughter.
The Master and his friend Mowat, who are described on the
occasion as excited by liquor, but not beyond self-control, were
sitting in the hall drinking a little ale, while beds were getting ready
for them. A girl named Jean Thomson, who had brought the ale, was
asked by the Master to sit down beside him, but escaped to her own
room, and bolted herself in. He, running in pursuit of her,
blunderingly went into a room occupied by a Frenchman named
George Poiret, who was quietly sleeping there. An altercation took
place between Poiret and the Master, and Mowat, hearing the noise,
came to see what was the matter. The Frenchman had drawn his
sword, which the two gentlemen wrenched out of his hand. A servant
of the house, named Christian Erskine, had now also arrived at the
scene of strife, besides a gentleman who was not afterwards
identified. At the woman’s urgent request, Mowat took away the
Master and the other gentleman, the latter carrying the Frenchman’s
sword. There might have now been an end to this little brawl, if the
Master had not deemed it his duty to go back to the Frenchman’s
room to beg his pardon. The Frenchman, finding a new disturbance
at his door, which he had bolted, seems to have lost patience. He
knocked on the ceiling of his room with the fire-tongs, to awaken two
brothers, Elias Poiret, styled Le Sieur de la Roche, and Isaac Poiret,
who were sleeping there, and to bring them to his assistance.
These two gentlemen presently came down armed with swords and
pistols, and spoke to their defenceless and excited brother at his
door. Presently there was a hostile collision 1691.
between them and the Master and Mowat in
the hall. Jean Thomson roused her master to come and interfere for
the preservation of the peace; but he came too late. The Master and
Mowat were not seen making any assault; but a shot was heard, and,
in a few minutes, it was found that the Sieur de la Roche lay dead
with a swordwound through his body, while Isaac had one of his
fingers nearly cut off. A servant now brought the guard, by whom
Mowat was soon after discovered hiding under an outer stair, with a
bent sword in his hand, bloody from point to hilt, his hand wounded,
and the sleeves of his coat also stained with blood. On being brought
where the dead man lay, he viewed the body without apparent
emotion, merely remarking he wondered who had done it.
The Master, Mowat, and James Sinclair, writer, were tried for the
murder of Elias Poiret; but the jury found none of the imputed
crimes proven. The whole affair can, indeed, only be regarded as an
unfortunate scuffle arising from intemperance, and in which sudden
anger caused weapons to be used where a few gentle and reasonable
words might have quickly re-established peace and good-fellowship.
[59]

The three Frenchmen concerned in this affair were Protestant

refugees, serving in the king’s Scottish guards. The Master of Tarbat
in due time succeeded his father as Earl of Cromarty, and survived
the slaughter of Poiret forty years. He was the father of the third and
last Earl of Cromarty, so nearly brought to Tower-hill in 1746, for his
concern in the rebellion of the preceding year, and who on that
account lost the family titles and estates.

Down to this time, it was still customary Apr.

for gentlemen to go armed with walking-
swords. On the borders of the Highlands, dirks and pistols seem to
have not unfrequently been added. Accordingly, when a quarrel
happened, bloodshed was very likely to take place. At this time we
have the particulars of such a quarrel, serving to mark strongly the
improvements effected by modern civilisation.
Some time in August 1690, a young man named William
Edmondstone, described as apprentice to Charles Row, writer to the
Signet, having occasion to travel to Alloa, called on his master’s
brother, William Row of Inverallan in passing, and had an interview
with him at a public-house in the hamlet of 1691.
Bridge of Allan. According to a statement
from him, not proved, but which it is almost necessary to believe in
order to account for subsequent events, Inverallan treated him
kindly to his face, but broke out upon him afterwards to a friend,
using the words rascal and knave, and other offensive expressions.
The same unproved statement goes on to relate how Edmondstone
and two friends of his, named Stewart and Mitchell, went afterwards
to inquire into Inverallan’s reasons for such conduct, and were
violently attacked by him with a sword, and two of them wounded.
The proved counter-statement of Inverallan is to the effect that
Edmondstone, Stewart, and Mitchell tried, on the 21st of April 1691,
to waylay him, with murderous intent, as he was passing between
Dumblane and his lands near Stirling. Having by chance evaded
them, he was in a public-house at the Bridge of Allan, when his three
enemies unexpectedly came in, armed as they were with swords,
dirks, and pistols, and began to use despiteful expressions towards
him. ‘He being all alone, and having no arms but his ordinary
walking-sword, did rise up in a peaceable manner, of design to have
retired and gone home to his own house.’ As he was going out at the
door, William Edmondstone insolently called to him to come and
fight him, a challenge which he disregarded. They then followed him
out, and commenced an assault upon him with their swords,
Mitchell, moreover, snapping a pistol at him, and afterwards beating
him over the head with the but-end. He was barely able to protect his
life with his sword, till some women came, and drew away the
assailants.
A few days after, the same persons came with seven or eight other
‘godless and graceless persons’ to the lands of Inverallan,
proclaiming their design to burn and destroy the tenants’ houses and
take the laird’s life, and to all appearance would have effected their
purpose, but for the protection of a military party from Stirling.
For these violences, Edmondstone and Mitchell were fined in five
hundred merks, and obliged to give large caution for their keeping
the peace.[60]

Upon petition, Sir James Don of Newton, June 25.

knight-baronet, with his lady and her niece,
and a groom and footman, were permitted 1691.
‘to travel with their horses and arms from
Scotland to Scairsburgh Wells in England, and to return again,
without trouble or molestation, they always behaving themselves as
becometh.’[61]
This is but a single example of the difficulties attending personal
movements in Scotland for some time after the Revolution. Owing to
the fears for conspiracy, the government allowed no persons of
eminence to travel to any considerable distance without formal
permission.

An act, passed this day in the Convention July 8.

of Royal Burghs for a commission to visit
the burghs as to their trade, exempted Kirkwall, Wick, Inverary, and
Rothesay, on account of the difficulty of access to these places!
The records of this ancient court present many curious details. A
tax-roll of July 1692, adjusting the proportions of the burghs in
making up each £100 Scots of their annual expenditure on public
objects, reveals to us the comparative populousness and wealth of
the principal Scottish towns at that time. For Edinburgh, it is nearly
a third of the whole, £32, 6s. 8d.; for Glasgow, less than a half of
Edinburgh, £15; Perth, £3; Dundee, £4, 13s. 4d.; Aberdeen, £6;
Stirling, £1, 8s.; Linlithgow, £1, 6s.; Kirkcaldy, £2, 8s.; Montrose, £2;
Dumfries, £1, 18s. 4d.; Inverness, £1, 10s.; Ayr, £1, 1s. 4d.;
Haddington, £1, 12s.
All the rest pay something less than one pound. In 1694, Inverary
is found petitioning for ‘ease’ from the four shillings Scots imposed
upon them in the tax-roll, as ‘they are not in a condition by their
poverty and want of trade to pay any pairt thereof.’ The annual
outlay of the Convention was at this time about £6000 Scots. Hence
the total impost on Inverary would be £240, or twenty pounds
sterling. For the ‘ease’ of this primitive little Highland burgh, its
proportion was reduced to a fourth.
The burghs used to have very curious arrangements amongst
themselves: thus, the statute Ell was kept in Edinburgh; Linlithgow
had charge of the standard Firlot; Lanark of the Stoneweight; while
the regulation Pint-stoup was confided to Stirling. A special measure
for coal, for service in the customs, was the Chalder of Culross. The
burgh of Peebles had, from old time, the privilege of seizing ‘all light
weights, short ellwands, and other 1691.
insufficient goods, in all the fairs and
mercats within the shire of Teviotdale.’ They complained, in 1696, of
the Earl of Traquair having interfered with their rights, and a
committee was appointed to deal with his lordship on the subject.[62]
To these notices it may be added that the northern burgh of
Dingwall, which is now a handsome thriving town, was reduced to so
great poverty in 1704 as not to be able to send a commissioner to the
Convention. ‘There was two shillings Scots of the ten pounds then
divided amongst the burghs, added to the shilling we used formerly
to be in the taxt roll [that is, in addition to the one shilling Scots we
formerly used to pay on every hundred pounds Scots raised for
general purposes, we had to pay two shillings Scots of the new
taxation of ten pounds then assessed upon the burghs], the stenting
whereof was so heavy upon the inhabitants, that a great many of
them have deserted the town, which is almost turned desolate, as is
weel known to all our neighbours; and there is hardly anything to be
seen but the ruins of old houses, and the few inhabitants that are left,
having now no manner of trade, live only by labouring the
neighbouring lands, and our inhabitants are still daily deserting us.’
Such was the account the town gave of itself in a petition to the
Convention of Burghs in 1724.[63]
Though Dingwall is only twenty-one and a half miles to the
northward of Inverness, so little travelling was there in those days,
that scarcely anything was known by the one place regarding the
other. It is at this day a subject of jocose allusion at Inverness, that
they at one time sent a deputation to see Dingwall, and inquire about
it, as a person in comfortable circumstances might send to ask after a
poor person in a neighbouring alley. Such a proceeding actually took
place in 1733, and the report brought back was to the effect, that
Dingwall had no trade, though ‘there were one or two inclined to
carry on trade if they had a harbour;’ that the place had no prison;
and for want of a bridge across an adjacent lake, the people were
kept from both kirk and market.[64]

Licence was granted by the Privy Council July 23.

to Dr Andrew Brown to print, and have sole
right of printing, a treatise he had written, entitled A Vindicatorie
Schedule about the New Cure of Fevers.[65]
 This Dr Andrew Brown, commonly called 1691.
Dolphington, from his estate in
Lanarkshire, was an Edinburgh physician, eminent in practice, and
additionally notable for the effort he made in the above-mentioned
work to introduce Sydenham’s treatment of fevers—that is, to use
antimonial emetics in the first stage of the disorder. ‘This book and
its author’s energetic advocacy of its principles by his other writings
and by his practice, gave rise to a fierce controversy, and in the
library of the Edinburgh College of Physicians there is a stout shabby
little volume of pamphlets on both sides—“Replies” and “Short
Answers,” and “Refutations,” and “Surveys,” and “Looking-glasses,”
“Defences,” “Letters,” “Epilogues,” &c., lively and furious once, but
now resting as quietly together as their authors are in the Old
Greyfriars’ Churchyard, having long ceased from troubling. There is
much curious, rude, hard-headed, bad-Englished stuff in them, with
their wretched paper and print, and general ugliness; much also to
make us thankful that we are in our own now, not their then. Such
tearing away, with strenuous logic and good learning, at mere clouds
and shadows, with occasional lucid intervals of sense, observation,
and wit!’[66]
Dolphington states in his book that he visited Dr Sydenham in
London, to study his system under him, in 1687, and presently after
returning to Edinburgh, introduced the practice concerning fevers,
with such success, that of many cases none but one had remained
uncured.
Some idea of an amateur unlicensed medical practice at this time
may be obtained from a small book which had a great circulation in
Scotland in the early part of the eighteenth century. It used to be
commonly called Tippermallochs Receipts, being the production of
‘the Famous John Moncrieff of Tippermalloch’ in Strathearn, ‘a
worthy and ingenious gentleman,’ as the preface describes him,
whose ‘extraordinary skill in physic and successful and beneficial
practice therein’ were so well known, ‘that few readers, in this
country at least, can be supposed ignorant thereof.’[67]
When a modern man glances over the pages of this dusky ill-
printed little volume, he is at a loss to 1691.
believe that it ever could have been the
medical vade-mecum of respectable families, as we are assured it
was. It has a classification of diseases under the parts of the human
system, the head, the breast, the stomach, &c., presenting under each
a mere list of cures, with scarcely ever a remark on special
conditions, or even a tolerable indication of the quantity of any
medicine to be used. The therapeutics of Tippermalloch include
simples which are now never heard of in medicine, and may be
divided into things capable of affecting the human system, and
things of purely imaginary efficacy, a large portion of both kinds
being articles of such a disgusting character as could not but have
doubled the pain and hardship of all ailments in which they were
exhibited. For cold distemper of the brain, for instance, we have
snails, bruised in their shells, to be applied to the forehead; and for
pestilential fever, a cataplasm of the same stuff to be laid on the soles
of the feet. Paralysis calls for the parts being anointed with
‘convenient ointments’ of (among other things) earthworms. For
decay of the hair, mortals are enjoined to ‘make a lee of the burnt
ashes of dove’s dung, and wash the head;’ but ‘ashes of little frogs’
will do as well. Yellow hair, formerly a desired peculiarity, was to be
secured by a wash composed of the ashes of the ivy-tree, and a fair
complexion by ‘the distilled water of snails.’ To make the whole face
well coloured, you are coolly recommended to apply to it ‘the liver of
a sheep fresh and hot.’ ‘Burn the whole skin of a hare with the ears
and nails: the powder thereof, being given hot, cureth the lethargy
perfectly.’ ‘Powder of a man’s bones burnt, chiefly of the skull that is
found in the earth, cureth the epilepsy: the bones of a man cure a
man; the bones of a woman cure a woman.’ The excreta of various
animals figure largely in Tippermalloch’s pharmacopœia, even to a
bath of a certain kind for iliac passion: ‘this,’ says he, ‘marvellously
expelleth wind.’ It is impossible, however, to give any adequate idea
of the horrible things adverted to by the sage Moncrieff, either in
respect of diseases or their cures. All I will say further on this matter
is, that if there be any one who thinks modern delicacy a bad
exchange for the plain-spokenness of our forefathers, let him glance
at the pages of John Moncrieff of Tippermalloch, and a change of
opinion is certain.
In the department of purely illusive recipes, we have for
wakefulness or coma, ‘living creatures applied to the head to dissolve
the humour;’ for mania, amulets to be worn about the neck; and a
girdle of wolf’s skin certified as a complete preventive of epilepsy. We
are told that ‘ants’ eggs mixed with the juice 1691.
of an onion, dropped into the ear, do cure
the oldest deafness,’ and that ‘the blood of a wild goat given to ten
drops of carduus-water doth powerfully discuss the pleurisy.’ It is
indicated under measles, that ‘many keep an ewe or wedder in their
chamber or on the bed, because these creatures are easily infected,
and draw the venom to themselves, by which means some ease may
happen to the sick person.’ In like manner, for colic a live duck, frog,
or sucking-dog applied to the part, ‘draweth all the evil to itself, and
dieth.’ The twenty-first article recommended for bleeding at the nose
is hare’s hair and vinegar stuffed in; ‘I myself know this to be the best
of anything known.’ He is equally sure that the flowing blood of a
wound may be repelled by the blood of a cow put into the wound, or
by carrying a jasper in the hand; while for a depraved appetite
nothing is required but the stone ætites bound to the arm. Sed jam
satis.
In Analecta Scotica is to be found a dream about battles and
ambassadors by Sir J. Moncrieff of Tippermalloch, who at his death
in 1714, when eighty-six years of age, believed it was just about to be
fulfilled. The writer, who signs himself William Moncrieff, and dates
from Perth, says of Tippermalloch: ‘The gentleman was, by all who
knew him, esteemed to be eminently pious. He spent much of his
time in reading the Scripture—his delight was in the law of the Lord.
The character of the blessed man did belong to him, for in that he did
meditate day and night, and his conversation was suitable thereto—
his leaf did not wither—he was fat and flourishing in his old age.’[68]

Dame Mary Norvill, widow of Sir David Aug. 11.

Falconer, president of the Court of Session,
and now wife of John Home of Ninewells, was obliged to petition the
Privy Council for maintenance to her children by her first husband,
their uncle, the Laird of Glenfarquhar, having failed to make any
right arrangement in their behalf. From what the lords ordained, we
get an idea of the sums then considered as proper allowances for the
support and education of a set of children of good fortune. David, the
eldest son, ten years of age, heir to his father’s estate of 12,565 merks
(about £698 sterling) per annum, over and above the widow’s
jointure, was to be allowed ‘for bed and board, clothing, and other
necessaries, and for educating him at schools and colleges as
becomes his quality, with a pedagogue and 1691.
a boy to attend him, the sum of a thousand
merks yearly (£55, 11s. 1⅓d. sterling).’ To Mistress Margaret, twelve
and a half years old, whose portion is twelve thousand merks, they
assigned an aliment for ‘bed and board, clothing, and other
necessaries, and for her education at schools and otherwise as
becomes her quality,’ five hundred merks per annum (£27, 15s. 6½d.
sterling). Mistress Mary, the second daughter, eleven years of age,
with a portion of ten thousand merks, was allowed for ‘aliment and
education’ four hundred and fifty merks. For Alexander, the second
son, nine years of age, with a provision of fifteen thousand merks,
there was allowed, annually, six hundred merks. Mistress Katherine,
the third daughter, eight years of age, and Mistress Elizabeth, seven
years of age, with portions of eight thousand merks each, were
ordained each an annual allowance of three hundred and sixty
merks. George, the third son, six years old, with a provision of ten
thousand merks, was to have four hundred merks per annum. These
payments to be made to John Home and his lady, while the children
should dwell with them.[69]
‘Mistress Katherine’ became the wife of Mr Home’s son Joseph,
and in 1711 gave birth to the celebrated philosopher, David Hume.
Her brother succeeded a collateral relative as Lord Falconer of
Halkerton, and was the lineal ancestor of the present Earl of Kintore.
It is rather remarkable that the great philosopher’s connection with
nobility has been in a manner overlooked by his biographers.
That the sums paid for the young Falconers, mean as they now
appear, were in accordance with the ideas of the age, appears from
other examples. Of these, two may be adduced:
The Laird of Langton, ‘who had gotten himself served tutor-of-law’
to two young persons named Cockburn, fell about this time into ‘ill
circumstances.’ There then survived but one of his wards—a girl
named Ann Cockburn—and it appeared proper to her uncle, Lord
Crossrig, that she should not be allowed to stay with a broken man.
He accordingly, though with some difficulty, and at some expense,
got the tutory transferred to himself. ‘When Ann Cockburn,’ he says,
‘came to my house, I did within a short time put her to Mrs Shiens,
mistress of manners, where she was, as I remember, about two years,
at £5 sterling in the quarter, besides presents. Thereafter she stayed
with me some years, and then she was 1691.
boarded with the Lady Harvieston, then
after with Wallyford, where she still is, at £3 sterling per quarter.’[70]
In 1700, the Laird of Kilravock, in Nairnshire, paid an account to
Elizabeth Straiton, Edinburgh, for a quarter’s education to his
daughter Margaret Rose; including, for board, £60; dancing, £14,
10s.; ‘singing and playing and virginalls,’ £11, 12s.; writing, £6; ‘satin
seame,’ £6; a set of wax-fruits, £6; and a ‘looking-glass that she
broke,’ £4, 16s.; all Scots money.[71]
It thus appears that both Mrs Shiens and Mrs Straiton charged
only £5 sterling per quarter for a young lady’s board.
The subject is further illustrated by the provision made by the
Privy Council, in March 1695, for the widowed Viscountess of
Arbuthnot (Anne, daughter of the Earl of Sutherland), who had been
left with seven children all under age, and whose husband’s
testament had been ‘reduced.’ In her petition, the viscountess
represented that the estate was twenty-four thousand merks per
annum (£1333 sterling). ‘My lord, being now eight years of age, has a
governor and a servant; her two eldest daughters, the one being
eleven, and the other ten years of age, and capable of all manner of
schooling, they must have at least one servant; as for the youngest
son and three youngest daughters, they are yet within the years of
seven, so each of them must have a woman to wait upon them.’ Lady
Arbuthnot was provided with a jointure of twenty-five chalders of
victual; and as her jointure-house was ruinous, she desired leave to
occupy the family mansion of Arbuthnot House, which her son was
not himself of an age to possess.
The Lords, having inquired into and considered the relative
circumstances, ordained that two thousand pounds Scots (£166, 13s.
4d. sterling) should be paid to Lady Arbuthnot out of the estate for
the maintenance of her children, including the young lord.
The lady soon after dying, the earl her father came in her place as
keeper of the children at the same allowance.[72]

The Quakers residing at Glasgow gave in Dec.

to the Privy Council a representation of the
treatment they received at the hands of their neighbours. It was set
forth, that the severe dealings with the 1691.
consciences of men under the late
government had brought about a revolution, and some very tragical
doings. Now, when at last the people had wrestled out from beneath
their grievances, ‘it was matter of surprise that those who had
complained most thereupon should now be found acting the parts of
their own persecutors against the petitioners [the Quakers].’ It were
too tedious to detail ‘what they have suffered since the change of the
government, through all parts of the nation, by beating, stoning, and
other abuses,’ In Glasgow, however, ‘their usage had been liker
French dragoons’ usage, and furious rabbling, than anything that
dare own the title of Christianity.’ Even there they would have
endured in silence ‘the beating, stoning, dragging, and the like which
they received from the rabble,’ were it not that magistrates connived
at and homologated these persecutions, and their continued silence
might seem to justify such doings. They then proceeded to narrate
that, on the 12th of November, ‘being met together in their hired
house for no other end under heaven than to wait upon and worship
their God,’ a company of Presbyterian church elders, ‘attended with
the rude rabble of the town, haled them to James Sloss, bailie, who,
for no other cause than their said meeting, dragged them to prison,
where some of them were kept the space of eight days.’ During that
time, undoubted bail was offered for them, but refused, ‘unless they
should give it under their hand [that] they should never meet again
there.’ At the same time, their meeting-house had been plundered,
and even yet the restoration of their seats was refused. ‘This using of
men that are free lieges would, in the case of others, be thought a
very great riot,’ &c.
The feeling of the supreme administrative body in Scotland on this
set of occurrences, is chiefly marked by what they did not do. They
recommended to the Glasgow magistrates that, if any forms had
been taken away from the Quakers, they should be given back![73]
There were no bounds to the horror with which sincere
Presbyterians regarded Quakerism in those days. Even in their
limited capacity as disowners of all church-politics, they were
thought to be most unchristian. Patrick Walker gravely relates an
anecdote of the seer-preacher, Peden, which powerfully proves this
feeling. This person, being in Ireland, was indebted one night to a
Quaker for lodging. Accompanying his host to the meeting, Peden
observed a raven come down from the 1691.
ceiling, and perch itself, to appearance, on a
particular person’s head, who presently began to speak with great
vehemence. From one man’s head, the appearance passed to
another’s, and thence to a third. Peden told the man: ‘I always
thought there was devilry amongst you, but I never thought he
appeared visibly to you; but now I see it.’ The incident led to the
conversion of the Quaker unto orthodox Christianity.[74]
On the 5th of April 1694, there was a petition to the Privy Council
from a man named James Macrae, professing to be a Quaker, setting
forth that he had been pressed as a soldier, but could not fight, as it
was contrary to his principles and conscience; wherefore, if carried to
the wars, he could only be miserable in himself, while useless to
others. He was ordered to be liberated, provided he should leave a
substitute in his place.[75]
It would have been interesting to see a contemporary Glasgow
opinion on this case.

Irregularities of the affections were not 1692.

now punished with the furious severity
which, in the reign of Charles I., ordained beheading to a tailor in
Currie for wedding his first wife’s half-brother’s daughter.[76] But
they were still visited with penalties much beyond what would now
be thought fitting. For example, a woman of evil repute, named
Margaret Paterson, having drawn aside from virtue two very young
men, James and David Kennedy, sons of a late minister of the Trinity
College Church, was adjudged to stand an hour in the jougs at the
Tron, and then to be scourged from the Castle Hill to the Netherbow,
after which a life of exile in the plantations was her portion. The two
young men, having been bailed by their uncle, under assurance for
five thousand merks, the entire amount of their patrimony, broke
their bail rather than stand trial with their associate in guilt. There
was afterwards a petition from the uncle setting forth the hardship of
the case, and this was replied to with a recommendation from the
lords of Justiciary to the lords of the treasury for a modification of
the penalty, ‘if their lordships shall think fit.’ In the case of Alison
Beaton, where the co-relative offender was a man who had married
her mother’s sister, the poor woman was condemned to be scourged
in like manner with Paterson, and then 1692.
transported to the plantations. It was a
superstitious feeling which dictated such penalties for this class of
offences. The true aim of jurisprudence, to repress disorders which
directly affect the interests of others, and these alone, was yet far
from being understood.
In January 1694, there came before the notice of the Court of
Justiciary in Edinburgh, a case of curiously complicated wickedness.
Daniel Nicolson, writer, and a widow named Mrs Pringle, had long
carried on an infamous connection, with little effort at concealment.
Out of a bad spirit towards the unoffending Jean Lands, his wife,
Nicolson and Pringle, or one or other of them, caused to be forged a
receipt as from her to Mr John Elliot, doctor of medicine, for some
poison, designing to raise a charge against her and a sister of hers, of
an attempt upon her husband’s life. The alleged facts were proved to
the satisfaction of a jury, and the court, deeming the adultery
aggravated by the forgery, adjudged the guilty pair to suffer in the
Grassmarket—Nicolson by hanging, and Pringle by ‘having her head
severed from her body.’
There were, however, curious discriminations in the judgments of
the Justiciary Court. A Captain Douglas, of Sir William Douglas’s
regiment, assisted by another officer and a corporal of the corps, was
found guilty of a shocking assault upon a serving-maid in Glasgow, in
1697. A meaner man, or an equally important man opposed to the
new government, would have, beyond a doubt, suffered the last
penalty for this offence; Captain Douglas, being a gentleman, and
one engaged in the king’s service, escaped with a fine of three
hundred merks.[77]

King William felt impatient at the Feb. 13.

unsubmissiveness of the Jacobite clans,
chiefly Macdonalds of Glengarry, Keppoch, and Glencoe, the Grants
of Glenmoriston, and the Camerons of Locheil, because it caused
troops to be kept in Scotland, which he much wanted for his army in
Flanders. His Scottish ministers, and particularly Sir John
Dalrymple, Master of Stair, the Secretary of State, carried towards
those clans feelings of constantly growing irritation, as latterly the
principal obstacle to a settlement of the country under the new
system of things. At length, in August 1691, the king issued an
indemnity, promising pardon to all that had been in arms against
him before the 1st of June last, provided 1692.
they should come in any time before the 1st
of January next year, and swear and sign the oath of allegiance.
The letters of Sir John Dalrymple from the court at London during
the remainder of the year, shew that he grudged these terms to the
Highland Jacobites, and would have been happy to find that a refusal
of them justified harsher measures. It never occurred to him that
there was anything but obstinacy, or a hope of immediate assistance
from France to enable them to set up King James again, in their
hesitation to swear that they sincerely in their hearts accepted King
William and Queen Mary as the sovereigns of the land equally by
right and in fact. He really hoped that at least the popish clan of the
Macdonalds of Glencoe would hold out beyond the proper day, so as
to enable the government to make an example of them. It was all the
better that the time of grace expired in the depth of winter, for ‘that,’
said he (letter to Colonel Hamilton, December 3, 1691), ‘is the proper
season to maul them, in the cold long nights.’ On the 9th of January,
under misinformation about their having submitted, he says: ‘I am
sorry that Keppoch and M‘Ian of Glencoe[78] are safe.’ It was the sigh
of a savage at the escape of a long-watched foe. Still he understood
Glengarry, Clanranald, and Glenmoriston to be holding out, and he
gave orders for the troops proceeding against them, granting them at
the utmost the terms of prisoners of war. In the midst of a letter on
the subject, dated the 11th January,[79] he says: ‘Just now my Lord
Argyle tells me that Glencoe hath not taken the oaths; at which I
rejoice—it’s a great work of charity to be exact in rooting out that
damnable sect, the worst in all the Highlands.’ Delighted with the
intelligence—‘it is very good news here,’ he elsewhere says—he
obtained that very day a letter from the king anent the Highland
rebels, commanding the troops to cut them off ‘by all manner of
hostility,’ and for this end to proclaim high penalties to all who
should give them assistance or protection. Particular instructions
subscribed by the king followed on the 16th, permitting terms to be
offered to Glengarry, whose house was strong enough to give trouble,
but adding: ‘If M‘Ian of Glencoe and that tribe can be well separated
from the rest, it will be a proper vindication of the public justice to
extirpate that sect of thieves.’ On the same day, Dalrymple himself
wrote to Colonel Hill, governor of 1692.
Inverlochy, ‘I shall entreat you that, for a
just vengeance and public example, the thieving tribe of Glencoe be
rooted out to purpose. The Earls of Argyle and Breadalbane have
promised they shall have no retreat in their bounds.’ He felt,
however, that it must be ‘quietly done;’ otherwise they would make
shift both for their cattle and themselves. There can be no doubt
what he meant; merely to harry the people, would make them worse
thieves than before—they must be, he elsewhere says, ‘rooted out
and cut off.’
In reality, the old chief of the Glencoe Macdonalds had sped to
Inverlochy or Fort William before the end of the year, and offered his
oath to the governor there, but, to his dismay, found he had come to
the wrong officer. It was necessary he should go to Inverary, many
miles distant, and there give in his submission to the sheriff. In great
anxiety, the old man toiled his way through the wintry wild to
Inverary. He had to pass within a mile of his own house, yet stopped
not to enter it. After all his exertions, the sheriff being absent for two
days after his arrival, it was not till the 6th of January that his oath
was taken and registered. The register duly went thereafter to the
Privy Council at Edinburgh; but the name of Macdonald of Glencoe
was not found in it: it was afterwards discovered to have been by
special pains obliterated, though still traceable.
Here, then, was that ‘sect of thieves’ formally liable to the
vengeance which the secretary of state meditated against them. The
commander, Livingstone, on the 23d January, wrote to Colonel
Hamilton of Inverlochy garrison to proceed with his work against the
Glencoe men. A detachment of the Earl of Argyle’s regiment—
Campbells, hereditary enemies of the Macdonalds of Glencoe—under
the command of Campbell of Glenlyon, proceeded to the valley,
affecting nothing but friendly intentions, and were hospitably
received. Glenlyon himself, as uncle to the wife of one of the chief’s
sons, was hailed as a friend. Each morning, he called at the humble
dwelling of the chief, and took his morning-draught of usquebaugh.
On the evening of the 12th of February, he played at cards with the
chief’s family. The final orders for the onslaught, written on the 12th
at Ballachulish by Major Robert Duncanson (a Campbell also), were
now in Glenlyon’s hands. They bore—‘You are to put all to the sword
under seventy. You are to have a special care that the old fox and his
son do on no account escape your hands. You’re to secure all
avenues, that none escape; this you are to put in execution at five
o’clock precisely, and by that time, or very 1692.
shortly after it, I’ll strive to be at you with a
stronger party. If I do not come to you at five, you are not to tarry for
me, but to fall on.’
Glenlyon was but too faithful to his instructions. His soldiers had
their orders the night before. John Macdonald, the chief’s eldest son,
observing an unusual bustle among the soldiers, took an alarm, and
inquired what was meant. Glenlyon soothed his fears with a story
about a movement against Glengarry, and the lad went to bed.
Meanwhile, efforts were making to plant guards at all the outlets of
that alpine glen; but the deep snow on the ground prevented the duty
from being fully accomplished. At five, Lieutenant Lindsay came with
his men to the house of the chief, who, hearing of his arrival, got out
of bed to receive him. He was shot dead as he was dressing himself.
Two of his people in the house shared his fate, and his wife,
shamefully treated by the soldiers, died next day. At another hamlet
called Auchnaion, the tacksman and his family received a volley of
shot as they were sitting by their fireside, and all but one were laid
dead or dying on the floor. The survivor entreated to be killed in the
open air, and there succeeded in making his escape. There were
similar scenes at all the other inhabited places in the glen, and before
daylight, thirty-eight persons had been murdered. The rest of the
people, including the chief’s eldest son, fled to the mountains, where
many of them are believed to have perished. When Colonel Hamilton
came at breakfast-time, he found one old man alive mourning over
the bodies of the dead; and this person, though he might have been
even formally exempted as above seventy, was slain on the spot. The
only remaining duty of the soldiers was to burn the houses and harry
the country. This was relentlessly done, two hundred horses, nine
hundred cattle, and many sheep and goats being driven away.
A letter of Dalrymple, dated from London the 5th March, makes us
aware that the Massacre of Glencoe was already making a sensation
there. It was said that the people had been murdered in their beds,
after the chief had made the required submission. The secretary
professed to have known nothing of the last fact, but he was far from
regretting the bloodshed. ‘All I regret is that any of the sect got away.’
When the particulars became fully known—when it was ascertained
that the Campbells had gone into the glen as friends, and fallen upon
the people when they were in a defenceless state and when all
suspicion was lulled asleep—the transaction assumed the character
which it has ever since borne in the public 1692.
estimation, as one of the foulest in modern
history.
The Jacobites trumpeted it as an offset against the imputed
severities of the late reigns. Its whole details were given in the
French gazettes, as an example of the paternal government now
planted in Britain. The government was compelled, in self-defence,
to order an inquiry into the affair, and the report presented in 1695
fully brought out the facts as here detailed, leaving the principal
odium to rest with Dalrymple. The king himself, whose signature
follows close below the savage sentence, ‘If M‘Ian of Glencoe,’ &c.,
did not escape reproach. True it is, that so far from punishing his
secretary, he soon after this report gave him a full remission, and
conferred on him the teinds of the parish in which lay his principal
estates.[80]

The Privy Council had before them a Feb. 16.

petition from Lieutenant Brisbane of Sir
Robert Douglas’s regiment, regarding one Archibald Baird, an Irish
refugee, imprisoned at Paisley for housebreaking. The sheriff
thought the probation ‘scrimp’ (scanty), and besides, was convinced
that ‘extreme poverty had been a great temptation to him to commit
the said crime.’ Seeing he was, moreover, ‘a proper young man fit for
service,’ and ‘willing and forward to go over to Flanders to fight
against the French,’ the sheriff had hitherto delayed to pronounce
sentence upon him. Without any ceremony, the Council ordered that
Baird be delivered to Brisbane, that he might be transported to
Flanders as a soldier.
The reader will probably be amused by the sheriff’s process of
ideas—first, that the crime was not proved; and, second, that it had
been committed under extenuating circumstances. The leniency of
the Privy Council towards such a culprit, in ordering him out of the
country as a soldier, is scarcely less characteristic. The truth is, the
exigencies of the government for additional military force were now
greater than ever, so that scruples about methods of recruiting had
come to be scarcely recognisable. Poor people confined in jail on
suspicion of disaffection, were in many instances brought to a
purchase of liberty by taking on as soldiers; criminals, who had pined
there for months or years, half-starved, were glad to take soldiering
as their punishment. Sturdy vagrants were 1692.
first gathered into the jails for the offence of
begging, and then made to know that, only by taking their majesties’
pay, could they regain their freedom. But freedom was not to be
instantly gained even in this way. The recruits were kept in jail, as
well as the criminals and the disaffected—little distinction, we may
well believe, observed between them. Not till ready to go on board for
Flanders, were these gallant Britons permitted to breathe the fresh
air.
An appearance of regard for the liberty of the subject was indeed
kept up, and on the 23d February 1692, a committee of the Privy
Council was appointed to go to the prisons of Edinburgh and
Canongate, and inspect the recruits kept there, so as to ascertain if
there were any who were unjustly detained against their will. But this
was really little more than an appearance for decency’s sake, the
instances of disregard for individual rights being too numerous even
in their own proceedings to allow any different conclusion being
arrived at.[81]

Two ministers at Dumfries, who had been Feb.

‘preachers before prelacy was abolished,’
gave displeasure to the populace by using the Book of Common
Prayer. On a Sunday, early in this month, a party of about sixteen
‘mean country persons living about four or five miles from Dumfries,
who disowned both Presbyterian and Episcopal ministers, and
acknowledged none but Mr Houston,’ came and dragged these two
clergymen out of the town, took from each his prayer-book, and gave
them a good beating, after which they were liberated, and allowed to
return home. At an early hour next morning, the same party came
into the town and burned one of the books at the Cross, on which
they affixed a placard, containing, we may presume, a declaration of
their sentiments. The Privy Council indignantly called the provost of
Dumfries before them, and while censuring him for allowing such a
riot to take place, enjoined him to take care ‘that there be no
occasions given for the like disorders in time coming.’ That is to say,
the Privy Council did not desire the Dumfries magistrates to take any
measures for preventing the attacks of ‘mean country persons’ upon
unoffending clergymen using the forms of prayer sanctioned in
another and connected kingdom not thirty miles distant, but to see
that such clergymen were not allowed to give provocations of that
kind to ‘mean country persons.’
Dumfries had at this time another trouble 1699. Mar.
on its hands. Marion Dickson in Blackshaw,
Isobel Dickson in Locherwood, Agnes Dickson (daughter of Isobel),
and Marion Herbertson in Mousewaldbank, had for a long time been
‘suspected of the abominable and horrid crime of witchcraft,’ and
were believed to have ‘committed many grievous malefices upon
several persons their neighbours and others.’ It was declared to be
damnifying ‘to all good men and women living in the country
thereabouts, who cannot assure themselves of safety of their lives by
such frequent malefices as they commit.’
Under these circumstances, James Fraid, John Martin, William
Nicolson, and Thomas Jaffrey in Blackshaw, John Dickson in Slop of
Locherwoods, John Dickson in Locherwoods, and John Dickson in
Overton of Locherwoods, took it upon them to apprehend the
women, and carried them to be imprisoned at Dumfries by the
sheriff, which, however, the sheriff did not consent to till after the six
men had granted a bond engaging to prosecute. Fortified with a
certificate from the presbytery of Dumfries, who were ‘fully
convinced of the guilt [of the women] and of the many malefices
committed by them,’ the men applied to the Privy Council for a
commission to try the delinquents.
The Lords ordered the women to be transported to Edinburgh for
trial.[82]

The government beginning to relax a little Mar. 29.

the severity it had hitherto exercised