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William Boyd
(1874-1962)
Educationalist
Dr William Boyd was the
head of the Education Department at Glasgow University for most of the
first half of the twentieth century and was a noted educational
historian. He was educated at Kilmarnock Academy and gave a
comprehensive account of the school and its rector in his time, Dr Hugh
Dickie , in his Education in Ayrshire through Seven Centuries (1961). He
wrote of Dickie:
As rector of the Academy
he became responsible for a school of mixed character; required to
devote itself to elementary work if it was to enjoy government grants
but expected by School Board [sic] to reach a high academic level. Like
the rectors of the other Academies he was a full-time teacher; as at the
outset he was the only graduate he had the whole burden of the upper
school on his shoulders. He had to teach all the higher subjects. This
he did so effectively that in a year or two Kilmarnock Academy was
sending a succession of well-trained pupils to Glasgow University and
year by year two or three of them were making their appearance on the
Bursary list. So far as scholarship was concerned he had made his
’elementary' school a real Academy.
Boyd was among those whom
the school was to send to Glasgow University where he took an MA and a
BSc. He taught both in schools and university before being made head of
the Department of Education at Glasgow University in 1907, a post he
held until his retiral in 1946. He was awarded a PhD in 1911.
His teaching at Glasgow
University was described in his obituary in The Times as being
’vigorous, unconventional and iconoclastic but always inspiring'. He was
one of the principal individuals involved in the University establishing
the BEd degree in 1918. He founded a child guidance clinic, one of the
first in the country, in the Department in 1926 which he ran with the
assistance of teacher volunteers until Glasgow Corporation began its own
clinic. He also helped introduce the Workers Educational Association to
Scotland , an organisation which is a national provider of
community-based learning and which provides adults with access to
organised learning. In 1920 he became the president of the Educational
Institute of Scotland, the principal representative body for Scottish
teachers.
His magnum opus was The
History of Western Education (1 st edn 1921), a magisterial one-volume
survey in the nineteenth-century tradition of the broad generalization
which became the standard textbook of its time.
It was translated into
several languages and still, in the early twenty-first century, turns up
on bibliographies for educational courses, having gone through eleven
editions and having been reprinted as recently as 1980. Boyd was an
advocate of the ’New Education', associated in America with the
philosopher John Dewey, ’with its faith in the free development of
personality' (Boyd, History of Western Education ). It attempted to
enliven education by centring school work on the interests of the child
and broadened the function of the school to include intervention in
health care and community life. Boyd particularly commended the Scottish
Education Act of 1908 for making schools welfare centres, requiring the
medical examination of the pupils and authorising the employment of
doctors and nurses.
After his retiral Boyd
produced several books. As well as his history of Ayrshire education,
which is still to be surpassed, he wrote Emile for Today (1956) and
Plato’s Republic for Today (1962). He also assisted John Strawhorn in
writing the volume on Ayrshire in the Third Statistical Account of
Scotland (1951). Before his death he was working on a commentary and new
translation of the New Testament. He died in Totnes, Devon. His Times
obituary stated that ’Boyd's complete integrity and kindness were
coupled in a unique way with an indomitable courage.'
The work of William Boyd and the Educational
Institute of Scotland's Research Committee in the 1920s (pdf)
From the Scottish Review
(March 2016)
Tonight I am a guest at
Kilmarnock Rotary Club, having been invited to speak about
the achievements of a distinguished former pupil of
Kilmarnock Academy, William Boyd (1874-1962). Dr Boyd was an
important figure in Scottish education, whose contribution
deserves to be better known. Appointed to Glasgow University
as a lecturer in 1907, he helped to develop the study of
education through his extensive writings and popular
teaching. But he was much more than a conventional academic.
He became an energetic activist, not only in Scotland but
internationally, through his involvement in the New
Education Fellowship, a progressive movement aimed at
reforming the school curriculum and treating children more
humanely.
He started the first child
guidance clinic in Britain in 1926 and by the mid-1930s it
was treating more than a 150 youngsters a year, with the
caseload being carried by graduates who had attended Boyd’s
courses. Both as an undergraduate, living in a students’
settlement in a poor part of Glasgow, and during the
unemployment of the 1930s, Boyd was engaged in admirable
community work, offering various forms of support to those
in need. The Clydebank Mutual Service Association was
founded by Boyd and his second wife, Dorothy, and was open
to the whole community, employed and unemployed, men and
women, old and young. The aim was to promote 'a fellowship
of neighbourly help’ and 'a right conception of
citizenship’.
I end my talk by asking why Boyd
was never made a professor by Glasgow University, despite
having worked there with distinction for nearly 40 years.
There are several possible answers, none of which reflects
well on the university. His brilliance as a teacher and his
strong public profile may have been resented by more
conservative academics. Again, his work with the unemployed
raised wholly unjustified suspicions that he may have been a
communist: he described himself as a 'Christian socialist’
and was certainly not involved in revolutionary politics.
Another factor may have been
that education as a university subject enjoyed relatively
low status, compared with established fields such as
classics and philosophy. Finally, some reports suggest that
on occasion Boyd deliberately exaggerated his Ayrshire
accent to prick the pomposity of traditionalists: for the
more precious among the academic community, that may have
been the clincher. Whatever the explanation, Boyd’s place in
the history of Scottish education is worthy of recognition
and celebration.
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