IV. _Education of the Young and University Reform._
The care and anxiety of our reformers were not confined to the adult members of the church. They were extended in a special manner to the young, and were manifested towards them, if possible, with more intense earnestness and loving tenderness. Though parish schools, in the later sense, were not yet devised, detailed arrangements were made that the readers at the several kirks should impart religious knowledge and the elements of primary education to the young of the flock, and that those who showed an aptitude for learning and capability of being trained to be of service to kirk or common-weal should have access at various centres to higher training. "Seeing," they say in their importunate pleading with the nobles on their behalf, "that God hath determined that His kirke here in earth shall be taught not by angels but by men, and seeing that men are borne ignorant of God and of all godlinesse, ... of necessity it is that your honours be most careful for the vertuous education and godly upbringing of the youth of this realm, if either ye now thirst unfainedly [for] the advancement of Christ's glorie or yet desire the continuance of His benefits to the generation following; for as the youth must succeed to us, so we ought to be carefull that they have knowledge and erudition to profit and comfort that which ought to be most deare to us, to wit, the kirk and spouse of our Lord Jesus."[213] To secure this noble end it was deemed necessary that, besides the readers' schools, every considerable town should have at least one schoolmaster appointed who was competent to teach grammar and the Latin tongue; and that in the more notable towns, especially the old cathedral cities, where the revenues of the prebendaries or of the monks might be made available, there should be a college in which at least logic, rhetoric, and the languages--_i.e._, Latin and Greek--should be taught by competent masters, for whom and for the poorer scholars attending them suitable stipends and bursaries should be provided out of the aforesaid revenues. The fruit of such an organisation, it is affirmed, would soon appear. "For first, the youthhead and tender children shall be nourished and brought up in vertue _in presence of their friends_, by whose good attendance many inconveniences may be avoyded in which the youth commonly fall either by overmuch libertie which they have in strange and unknowne places while they cannot rule themselves, or else for lack of good attendance and of such necessaries as their tender age requires. Secondly, the exercise of children in every kirke shall be great instruction to the aged and unlearned," who had never been taught to read, and in whose presence in the Sunday afternoon service they were examined. Lastly, "the great Schooles called the Universities shall be replenished with these that shall be apt to learning; for this must be carefully provided that no father, of what estate or condition that ever he be, use his children at his own fantasie especially in their youthhead; but _all must be compelled_ to bring up their children in learning and vertue." Thus boldly did our reformers lay down the principle of compulsory education, which men in our own day have only hesitatingly adopted, but with greater consistency or daring than our contemporaries have yet evinced, for they proposed to apply the principle to the children of the rich and potent, as well as to those of the poor and vicious. Those higher classes, they say, "may not be permitted to suffer their children to spend their youth in vaine idleness as heretofore they have done, but they must be exhorted, and by the censure of the kirk compelled, to dedicate their sonnes by training them up in good exercises to the profite of the kirk and commonwealth." This they expect the rich to do at their own expense, while they desire the children of the poor to be supported at the charge of the kirk. The sons neither of rich nor poor are to be permitted to reject learning if they develop any aptitude for it, but are to be "charged to continue their studie that the commonwealth may have some comfort by them." To secure this object, discreet and learned men are to visit the schools every quarter, and examine what proficiency the pupils have attained.[214]