Underground education or clandestine education refers to various practices of teaching carried out at times and places where such educational activities were deemed illegal.
Examples of places where widespread clandestine education practices took place included education of Blacks during the slave period in the USA and the Secret Teaching Organization in Poland under the Nazis.
The Scalan was a Scottish Catholic seminary and one of the few places where underground education by the Catholic Church in Scotland was kept alive during the anti-Catholic persecutions of the 16th-19th century.
The Catholic Church in Scotland, overseen by the Scottish Bishops' Conference, is part of the worldwide Catholic Church headed by the Pope. Christianity first arrived in Roman Britain and was strengthened by the conversion of the Picts through both the Hiberno-Scottish mission and Iona Abbey. After being firmly established in Scotland for nearly a millennium and contributing enormously to Scottish literature and culture, the Catholic Church was outlawed by the Scottish Reformation Parliament in 1560. Multiple uprisings in the interim failed to reestablish Catholicism or to legalise its existence. Even today, the Papal Jurisdiction Act 1560, while no longer enforced, still remains on the books.
Throughout the nearly three centuries of religious persecution and disenfranchisement between 1560 and 1829, many students for the priesthood went abroad to study while others remained in Scotland and, in what is now termed underground education, attended illegal seminaries. An early seminary upon Eilean BĂ n in Loch Morar was moved during the Jacobite rising of 1715 and reopened as Scalan seminary in Glenlivet. After multiple arson attacks by government troops, Scalan was rebuilt in the 1760s by Bishop John Geddes, who later became Vicar Apostolic of the Lowland District, a close friend of national poet Robert Burns, and a well-known figure in the Edinburgh intelligentsia during the Scottish Enlightenment.