Allan Massie: Back to school: how to breathe new life into old Royal High

Published on Monday 8 February 2010 20:44

DEBATE about the future of Thomas Hamilton's fine neo-classical building on Calton Hill in Edinburgh – the old Royal High School – has been going on for an awfully long time now.

George Kerevan told the story here last week, in response to the latest proposal that it should become "an arts hotel" … whatever that is. He said that the building is worthy of a better use, and so indeed it is.

So far as I remember, amid the various plans, there is one thing that has not been suggested. This is odd, because it seems to me the most obvious and proper use for the building: that it should revert to the function for which it was built, and become a school.

Nobody, I suppose, would suggest that the present Royal High, which moved to Barnton in 1969, should return to its old and famous home; it is doubtless happily settled where it is now. But an educational use for the Hamilton building might well be found. Here, at any rate, is one suggestion.

We have heard much lately about problems of social inequality. Some of the talk may be exaggerated. Some of the complainers don't realise that the apparent decline is, to some extent at least, the consequence of the achievement of greater social equality in the decades after the Second World War, as a result of which there has been a huge increase in the number of people categorised as belonging to the middle-class. Nevertheless, it is clear that society is less equal than it was 20 or 30 years ago, and that the gap between top and bottom is widening.

At the same time, we are all aware that there are too many poor schools in our cities – the polite term is "under-performing" – where exam results are poor, and from which few pupils go on to university. Moreover, there is evidence that a fair number of those who do go to university drop out after their first year, sometimes because they are inadequately prepared for the demands university makes of students.

There is a clear case for the establishment of sixth form colleges, which would select bright pupils from such "under-performing" schools and from what are called "disadvantaged backgrounds". In such colleges, they would find themselves in class alongside other intelligent young people capable of benefiting from a demanding academic education. They would have an opportunity to blossom, and fully to develop their talents. And where better to site such a college than in Thomas Hamilton's masterpiece, in a building which, for almost a century and a half, provided just such an education for clever sons of poor families in Edinburgh as well as for the sons of the middle-class? The old Royal High School was unashamedly elitist, not in the sense that it drew from an already existing elite, but because it aspired to train one.

As one of its distinguished alumni, Paul Henderson Scott, who describes himself as "egalitarian by instinct and entirely opposed to inherited privilege", wrote in his autobiography, "the old High School was not a preserve of the rich or exclusive in spirit". It "drew its pupils from the whole city and further afield…It set high standards and by and large achieved them…Elitism, in the sense of aiming to achieve the best, should not be regarded as something shameful".

We still talk sometimes of Scotland as the home of the "democratic intellect", and the phrase is a fine one. But that Scotland – the Scotland of the "lad o' pairts", the Scotland at whose universities "all classes", as Robert Louis Stevenson put it, "rub shoulders on the greasy benches", was not only democratic in its reverence for intellect, but inevitably elitist. It might be argued that, in that Scotland, the dull and unacademic children of the poor were sadly and unfairly neglected. Conversely, however, one might now argue that today it is the intelligent among them who are held back and often, therefore, may fail to develop their full potential.

The old Royal High School now standing empty and unused on Calton Hill is ideally played to give such children the opportunity they don't have at present. One rector of the school, Farquhar MacIntosh, thought that "the harmony of the old building and the incomparable view from it were an inspiration in themselves and made it impossible not to feel part of a great tradition". Picking up the threads of such a tradition would surely be an incentive to the intelligent under-privileged.

A great deal of nonsense is talked about education, often, indeed, by those styled "educationists" – not the same thing as teachers. One of the more sensible observations on the subject was offered by the Lama in Kipling's Kim: "Education is greatest blessing if of best sort. Otherwise no earthly use". An exaggeration, doubtless, but one with a kernel of truth. What is certain is that, while not every child is suited to a rigorously academic education, those who are so suited, doubtless a minority, should get it, and too often today they are denied this if they are not lucky enough to live in the catchment area of a good school.

We need, for the future intellectual vitality of our nation, to make the most of the talents of all, irrespective of their background. It is evident we are failing to do so. Taking the old Royal High School and turning it into a sixth form college for intelligent young students from poor and underprivileged backgrounds would, in itself, be a good thing to do, giving them an opportunity that they would otherwise be denied; but it would also be an expression, or a re- assertion, of the traditional Scottish belief in the value of education. The 19th-century lord chancellor Henry Brougham, one of the founders of the great Edinburgh Review, and himself a former High School boy, said the school was "intimately connected with the literature and progress of the Kingdom". That was a proud boast. How good it would be to be able to repeat it.

Putting Hamilton's magnificent building, modelled on the Temple of Theseus in ancient Athens – the "Edinburgh of the South" – to the use I suggest, or something very similar, would be a good thing in every way; certainly a more worthwhile use for it than redevelopment as yet another hotel. So I commend it to Edinburgh city council, to whom ownership of the building has reverted, and to education secretary Mike Russell, who is surely capable of the imagination and drive needed to make such a proposal a reality.