for aid from overseas. In a letter to the committee, McNeill submitted the following proposal for consideration and support: That there be undertaken in Prince Edward Island,

the introduction of suitable school masters and the importa- tion of books from the Mother Country, so as to diffuse more widely among Scotchmen, their descendants in destitute parts of the country, the blessings of a sound and practical and moral education.“

The committee was productive in that it did outline roughly the inef- fectuality of the schooling system. Fixing the required school age bet- ween six and fourteen, John McNeill calculated the number of Island children who should have been in school, but were not. According to the latest census, taken in 1833, there were 32,292 Island residents, 16,206 of whom were under the age of sixteen years. By McNeill’s calculations, if approximately one-half of the latter figure were of school age, 8,000 children should have been enrolled in classes in that year. But there were only 2,000 children attending at the time of the census. Relating these figures to the colony’s Scottish population, the conclusions were as follows: since the Scots formed roughly two-thirds of the Island population, and 6,000 children were not attending school, then in 1833, 4,000 of those 6,000 children were Scottish.

McNeill blamed a portion of the problem on the colonial Legislature which donated 1,000 pounds per annum of the public reve- nue to the support of district schools -— a sum, McNeill argued, that fell short of the basic expenditure. A second area of blame, he felt, should rest with the parents — many of whom were too ignorant to realize that

their children should be better educated than they themselves were.22 A solution? None was really suggested. McNeil] again advocated that books and educators be imported from Scotland, at which time,

we should then enjoy the happiness of seeing introduced into this country the same intellectual training, or at least some approaches to it, which forms the moral character of Scotland, at once her happiness and pride.“

The subject then was virtually dropped from Highland Society concerns for a few years.

The energy spurred by the schooling reform activity filtered into the society’s general meetings of 1839, the club’s most productive year to that time. The first newspaper announcement of an upcoming Highland

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