amongst all ranks by education acts and parish schools. The Parliament of Scotland passed some ten such acts between 1494 and 1698. In 1609 nine Gaelic chieftains were abducted and forced to sign the Statutes of Iona, which would seem to have been designed specifically to Anglicize leaders and institutions of Gaelic society, in order to bring it under control of central government. Among the items listed in this agreement was the "planting of the gospell among these rude, barbarous, and uncivill people" by Protestant churches; the outlawing of bards who were traditionally on circuit between the houses of noblemen; the requirement that all men of wealth send their heirs to be educated in Lowland schools where they would be taught to "speik, reid, and wryte Inglische." The then King James VI, followed this by the School Establishment Act 1616, which sought to establish schools in every parish in the Scottish Highlands so that "the youth be exercised and trayned up in civilitie, godlines, knawledge, and learning, that the vulgar Inglische toung be universallie plantit, and the Irische language, whilk is one of the chief and principall causes of the continewance of barbaritie and incivilitie amongis the inhabitantis of the Ilis and Heylandis, may be abolisheit and removeit." In 1709 the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) was established in order to further funding sources for Highland church schools. All manner of incentives and punishments were used to stop children from speaking Scottish Gaelic. The SSPCK had five schools by 1711, 25 by 1715, 176 by 1758 and 189 by 1808, by then with 13,000 pupils attending. At first the SSPCK avoided using the Gaelic language with the result that pupils ended up learning by rote without understanding what they were reading. In 1741 the SSPCK introduced a Gaelic-English vocabulary, then in 1766 brought in a New Testament with facing pages of Gaelic and English texts for both languages to be read alongside one another, with more success. After a number of years of unsuccessful attempts at English-only teaching methods, it was realized that literacy in Gaelic was a much more effective means of teaching and a bridge towards fluency in English. Since 1918 education acts have provided for teaching Gaelic in Gaelic-speaking areas, but development was very slow until Gaelic became an initial teaching medium in the Gaelic areas of Inverness-shire and Ross-shire from 1958. In 1975