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The primary aim of this work is a study of the relationship between education and the process of industrialisation in nineteenth century Scotland. Although a fairly arbitrary starting date has been selected, the period can be conveniently labelled as the first phase of industrial capitalism, and it terminates with the emergence of the 1872 Education (Scotland) Act. To re-analyse education for the working class not by them, an institutional approach has been abandoned in favour of a sociological one. In a sense concentration upon the working class child, or young worker, encourages this approach as does the statistical analysis used. Children from 5 to 15 years of age appear throughout, on the assumption that it was the highest attainable point of school attendance under favourable circumstances. Both the supply and demand side of the educational equation are often considered together to prove that social stratification in Scottish education was complete before the 1870's. The central theoretical position borrows from the heritage of the Enlightenment, when social circumstances were discovered to mould the character of man. The most applicable social concept used is the concept of labour time. As the demands of the economy expressed as constraints upon the choices of the working class operate to affect attendance, enrolment, and the distribution of knowledge, knowledge thus becomes a question of time i.e. intellectual labour time (time spent upon gathering it) versus manual labour time (time spent at work to reproduce the working class family). Because knowledge here conceived is a function of time not intelligence, the working class are not less well educated because they are less intelligent, only less well educated because less time has been spent on cultivating the art. It is highlighted in the case-studies of transmitted educational deprivation where educational opportunity corresponds definitely with the state of economic circumstances of the parents.