Education

Glasgow has been a place of learning for almost nine centuries. The High School of Glasgow traces its origins to the choir school of the cathedral in about 1124, which makes it the oldest school in Scotland, and historic schools follows its story alongside the city’s other early schools and academies. The University of Glasgow was founded by papal bull in 1451 at the request of Bishop William Turnbull, making it the fourth oldest university in the English-speaking world.

For four centuries the university occupied buildings off the High Street, in the heart of the old town. In 1870 it moved west to Gilmorehill, where George Gilbert Scott’s Gothic Revival main building still dominates the skyline above Kelvingrove Park. Famous academics profiles some of the scholars who taught there, from Adam Smith and Joseph Black to Lord Kelvin, whose work on thermodynamics and the transatlantic telegraph made him the most celebrated scientist in Victorian Britain.

The city’s other institutions grew out of the needs of an industrial age. The University of Strathclyde began in 1796 as Anderson’s Institution, founded under the will of Professor John Anderson to bring useful learning to working people, and in 1964 it received a royal charter as the first technological university in the United Kingdom. The Glasgow School of Art, founded in 1845, became one of the leading art schools in Europe, housed from 1899 in Mackintosh’s masterpiece.

Schooling for all came with the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872, which created elected school boards and made attendance compulsory for children aged five to thirteen. Victorian education describes the board schools that followed, among them Mackintosh’s Scotland Street School, built between 1903 and 1906 and now a museum of education.