Transcript Beyond the walls: University lifelong learning and the

Beyond the walls:
University lifelong learning and
the legacy of James Stuart
Adrian Barlow
UALL Conference, Clare College Cambridge
20 March 2012
Mill Lane: The Local Examinations and Lectures
Syndicate (left) and Stuart House (right)
Stuart House (1925) and the Mill Lane Lecture Rooms (1926)
James Stuart (1843 – 1911)
and the ideal of ‘social good’
• “Among those classes whose circumstances
inevitably debar them from residing at an
University, there exists a wide-spread desire for
higher education education of a systematic kind.
….
• When these people cry for bread, a stone should
not be given to them, as is too frequently the
case with those popular lectures which are got up
by the Mechanics’ Institutes and the like.”
Letter to the University 23 November 1871
1871Lecture to the
Leeds Ladies’
Educational
Association:
‘University Extension’
“The object of all education is to
teach people to think for
themselves, that is the direct or
specified object of what is called
Higher Education. Reading and
writing are one of the many means
of acquiring education … but
reading and writing are not
education any more than a fork
and knife constitute a good dinner,
and a man who is educated in the
truest sense may even be unable to
read or write, for an educated man
is a man who is capable of thinking
about what he sees.”
Extension Lectures – for whom?
• Derby Public Meeting 2 May 1873:
• Young Men of the Middle and Upper Classes
• Ladies: (i) Those who have left school (ii)
Governesses and Schoolmistresses
• Working Men
“One of the advantages of the system about to be inaugurated
would be that it would offer a more liberal education to those
about to become teachers in elementary schools.”
Key elements of James Stuart’s
‘peripatetic university’
• Run from an ancient university: lecturers
appointed by Cambridge
• Establishment of Local Centres and
university colleges in large cities
Different levels of commitment: Lecture
(with syllabus), Class (with questions),
weekly papers, examinations leading to
Certificates
• Affiliated colleges (Nottingham, Leeds,
Exeter etc.)– able to support students
financially; remission of one year of
Cambridge tripos.
Royal Albert Memorial
Museum, Exeter: home of the
Exeter Technical and Extension
College
“In grateful recollection of the
Right Honourable Sir Thomas
Dyke Acland, Bart. and as a
memorial of the part he bore in
the advancement of education
through the methods of local
examination and of teaching
beyond the limits of the
university this tablet is set here
by some who knew how wisely
and how well he worked.”
“A career of almost
unbounded
usefulness seems
open to the
Universities if they
will respond to the
call of the nation for
aid in supplying a
better general
education to the
great body of their
countrymen.”
Thomas Acland: 1858
James Stuart’s legacy (i)
“The degree in which Cambridge has,
during the last twenty years, come into
useful relations with sections of the
community which were previously
regarded as beyond the sphere of its
influence is, we hold, largely attributable to
your inspiring initiative and to the wise
principles of administration which, mainly
under your guidance, the University laid
down.”
James Stuart’s legacy (ii)
Report of the Conference on ‘The Universities and Adult
Education’ (6 December 1945)
• ‘The Universities recognise extra-mural
teaching as one of their normal functions and
regard its maintenance as one of national
importance.
• The Universities make a special contribution
to adult education in maintaining intellectual
freedom and standards, and generally in
advancing and enriching the cultural life of the
community.’
James Stuart’s legacy (iii)
•
•
•
•
Widening participation
Encouraging access to higher education
Asserting the value of adult liberal education
Gaining recognition for lifelong learning within
higher education
• Insisting on universities’ social obligation to
engage with the wider community
Social value and social good
• ‘Add in social value to reveal true
worth, report advises’
Times Higher Education, 22.December 2012
Through a Glass, Darkly: Measuring the Social Value
of Universities
McNicholl and Kelly, 2012
Social value vs. social good
“There is still a tendency to confine any
possible social good to the usual litany about
‘productivity’. ‘competitiveness’, ‘innovation’
and ‘growth’. This discourse tends to be
structured so that the non-economic is
equated with the private, the economic with
the public.”
Stefan Collini, What are Universities For? (2012)
Past, Present & Future: the Public Value of
Humanities & Social Sciences (British Academy 2010)
• “The humanities explore what it means to be
human: the words, ideas, narratives and the
art and artefacts that help us make sense of
our lives and the world we live in; how we
have created it and are created by it.”
Sir Adam Roberts
• “English is a discipline which attends to the
imaginative exploration of human
experience.”
David Holbrook, English in a University Education (1995)
“If we lose the focus on lifelong learning, we lose
the whole raison d’être of the university.”
Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, UALL Conference 19.3.2012
Madingley Hall,
University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education