Simon Somerville Laurie (1829-1909)

Simon Somerville Laurie (1829-1909), portrait by George Fiddes Watt (University of Art Collection, EU0095)

Simon Somerville Laurie (1829-1909) was the first holder of the Bell Chair of Education from 1876 to 1903.

Laurie was educated at Edinburgh High School (1839-1844) and Edinburgh University (1844-1849). While studying for his degree, he worked as a class assistant to James Pillans (1778-1864), Professor of Humanity. Pillans was an enthusiastic early advocate of professional training for teaching, and must surely have influenced Laurie's decision to become an educationalist. After five years as a private tutor, Laurie became secretary of the Church of Scotland's education committee in 1855, a post he held for the next fifty years. The Church supervised and co-ordinated school education in Scotland until 1872, when responsibility was passed to the state and the Scotch Education Department was created. The Church's Education Committee nonetheless retained an important role as it remained in control of three major teacher training colleges which only passed into state hands in 1905.

In 1856 Laurie became a school inspector for the Dick bequest, an endowment which supported rural parish schools in Aberdeen, Banff, and Moray. In this capacity, Laurie examined schoolmasters and used his reports to the governors to set out his general educational principles. At the same time he began a prolific and influential writing career. The Education Act (Scotland) 1872, and the equivalent 1870 Acts for England and Wales, led to a massive expansion of primary teaching. Laurie's writings on the subject, particularly Primary Instruction in Relation to Education (1867), became set-texts for generations of trainee teachers.

By the 1870s, Laurie was widely recognized as Scotland's leading expert on education. He was a thus a natural choice when Edinburgh University's Bell Chair of Education was created in 1876. One of his chief aims in this role was to bring the University and teaching training colleges closer together and, ultimately, to entrust the training of teachers to the University alone. He was convinced that teaching should be regarded as a profession like medicine or law, and that training teachers should enjoy the benefits of a liberal university education. The Scotch Education Department was determined, however, that teacher training should remain in the hands of the specialist church-run colleges. Laurie nonetheless ensured that good students at the existing Church of Scotland Training College and Free Church of Scotland Training College were encouraged to take University classes during their college course and to go on to a degree. It was also due to his influence that a Schoolmaster's Diploma was instituted by the University. This was open to Arts graduates who had attended the University's Education Class, taken a teaching training course at one of the church colleges, and passed an examination in the theory and practice of Education. The Diploma was recognized by the Scotch Education Department as qualifying the holder to teach in Scottish schools.

Laurie was also involved in wider educational movements. In the 1860s he supported the foundation of higher education courses for women in Edinburgh, and advocated reform of the residential ‘hospitals’ which provided education on charitable grounds for a limited number of children. The Merchant Company of Edinburgh, which administered several of these, commissioned a report from Laurie which condemned the boarding regime (1868), and this strongly influenced the conversion of hospitals into large day schools by the Merchant Company in 1869–70, and later by other educational trusts. In 1872 Laurie was appointed secretary of the royal commission on Scottish endowed schools chaired by Sir Edward Colebrooke, and its report of 1875, which sought to use endowed funds to create a coherent network of secondary schools throughout Scotland, was drafted by him and clearly reflected his ideas. He kept the impetus alive by founding the Association for Promoting Secondary Education in Scotland, the aim of which was at least partly achieved by legislation in 1878. While Laurie thus encouraged the development of secondary schools, his experience with the Dick bequest also made him a champion of the parish school tradition, and he sought to perpetuate its values within the evolving state system. His educational principles stressed the personal influence of the teacher and the training of the faculties, especially through the study of language, rather than the accumulation of facts. He was hostile to vocational and utilitarian approaches to education, represented at the time by the doctrines of Herbert Spencer, and argued that even in elementary schools the aim should be to give a humanistic and ethical training. By the end of his career these views appeared old-fashioned, and brought him into conflict with the policies of the SED, notably over its code of 1903, which encouraged vocational training for older pupils.

Laurie had a lifelong interest in philosophy, and derived his educational principles from a metaphysical scheme of his own devising. He published preliminary studies on ethics in the 1860s, and was an unsuccessful candidate for the Edinburgh chair of moral philosophy in 1868. More substantial work followed with Metaphysica nova et vetusta in 1884 and Ethica, or, The Ethics of Reason in 1885, both initially published under the pseudonym Scotus Novanticus. In 1905–6 Laurie gave the Gifford lectures in natural theology at Edinburgh University, and these were published in 1906 as Synthetica, being Meditations Epistemological and Ontological. Laurie's philosophy of ‘natural realism’, in seeking a rational basis in experience for theism and for ethical idealism, may be seen as a late expression of the Scottish ‘common-sense’ tradition, and was perhaps influenced by the contemporary revival of interest in Kant. He was a close personal friend of the pioneering British exponent of Hegel, James Hutchison Stirling, but did not subscribe to the neo-Hegelianism which was then dominant in university philosophy chairs. He preferred to use his own terminology, and not to make explicit connections either with the philosophical schools of the past or with the main currents of contemporary thought. His ideas thus had little permanent influence. He did, however, attract a Belgian disciple, Georges Remacle, who translated his 1884 and 1885 books into French, and published La philosophie de S. S. Laurie in 1909.

Laurie resigned from his university chair in 1903, and from the Dick bequest in 1907. He received honorary doctorates from the universities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and St Andrews, and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1870) and an honorary fellow of the Educational Institute of Scotland (1891). He was married twice: in 1861 to Catherine Ann (d. 1895), daughter of William Hibburd of Egham, and in 1901 to Lucy, daughter of Sir John Struthers, professor of anatomy at Aberdeen University; she survived her husband. There were two sons and two daughters of the first marriage. Laurie died on 2 March 1909 from heart failure at his residence, 22 George Square, Edinburgh, and was buried three days later in the city's Grange cemetery. His elder son, Arthur Pillans Laurie (1861–1949), was trained at Cambridge as a chemist and became principal of the Heriot-Watt College, Edinburgh, in 1900.

One of his chief aims was to bring the University and teaching training colleges closer together and, ultimately, to entrust the training of teachers in Scotland to the Universities of Scotland. At the time of his appointment, teacher training in Edinburgh was still the exclusive province of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland. It would remain so until the Scottish Education Department established the Edinburgh Provincial Training Centre at Moray House in 1907. Nonetheless Laurie ensured that good students at the existing Church of Scotland Training College and Free Church of Scotland Training College were encouraged to take University classes during their college course and to go on to a degree. It was also due to his influence that a Schoolmaster's Diploma was instituted by the University. This was open to Arts graduates who had attended the University's Education Class, taken a teaching training course at one of the church colleges, and passed an examination in the theory and practice of Education. The Diploma was recognized by the Scottish Education Department as qualifying the holder to teach in Scottish schools.

Laurie was succeeded in the Chair by Alexander Darroch (1862-1924).

Recognition

He also enjoyed a wide readership in the United States, and was a corresponding member of the American National Educational Association. His publications included several works on the history of education, and although these were not based on original research his study of Comenius (1881) was a popular success.

Sources

• James Drever, 'The New Developments in the Education Department', University of Edinburgh Journal, 1 (1925), 4-8.