_Of Cambridge University, England_.
I am requested to furnish information with reference to the University
Extension Movement in England. It will be desirable that side by side
with the facts I should put the ideas of the movement, for, in matters
like these, the ideas are the inspiration of the work; the ideas,
moreover, are the same for all, whereas the detailed methods must vary
with different localities. The idea of the movement is its soul; the
practical working is no more than the body. But body and soul alike are
subject to growth, and so it has been in the present case. The English
University Extension Movement was in no sense a carefully planned
scheme, put forward as a feat of institutional symmetry; it was the
product of a simple purpose pursued through many years, amid varying
external conditions, in which each modification was suggested by
circumstances and tested by experience. And with the complexity of our
operations our animating ideas have been striking deeper and growing
bolder. Speaking then up to date, I would define the root idea of
'University Extension' in the following simple formula: University
Education for the Whole Nation organized on a basis of Itinerant
Teachers.
But every clause in this defining formula will need explanation and
defence.
The term 'University' Extension has no doubt grown up from the
circumstance that the movement in England was started and directed by
the universities, which have controlled its operations by precisely the
same machinery by which they manage every other department of university
business. I do not know that this is an essential feature of the
movement. The London branch presents an example of a flourishing
organization directed by a committee formed for the purpose, though this
committee at present acts in concert with three universities. I can
conceive the new type of education managed apart from any university
superintendence; only I should look upon such severance as a far more
serious evil for the universities than for the popular movement.
But I use the term 'university education' for the further purpose of
defining the type of instruction offered. It is thus distinguished from
school education, being moulded to meet the wants of adults. It is
distinguished from the technical training necessary for the higher
handicrafts or for the learned professions. It is no doubt to the busy
classes that the movement addresses itself, but we make no secret of the
fact that our education will not help them in their business, except
that, the mind not being built in water-tight compartments, it is
impossible to stimulate one set of faculties without the stimulus
reacting upon all the rest. The education that is properly associated
with universities is not to be regarded as leading up to anything
beyond, but is an end in itself, and applies to life as a whole. And the
foundation for university extension is a change, subtle but clear, that
may be seen to be coming over the attitude of the public mind to higher
education, varying in intensity in different localities, but capable of
being encouraged where it is least perceptible,--a change by which
education is ceasing to be regarded as a thing proper to particular
classes of society or particular periods of life, and is coming to be
recognized as one of the permanent interests of life, side by side with
such universal interests as religion and politics. For persons of
leisure and means such growing demand can be met by increased activity
of the universities. University Extension is to be the university of the
busy.
My definition puts the hope of extending university education in this
sense to the whole nation without exception. I am aware that to some
minds such indiscriminate extension will seem like an educational
communism, on a par with benevolent schemes for redistributing the
wealth of society so as to give everybody a comfortable income all
round. But it surely ought not to be necessary to explain that in
proposing a universal system of education we are not meaning that what
each individual draws from the system will be the same in all cases. In
this as in every other public benefit that which each person draws from
it must depend upon that which he brings to it. University Extension may
be conceived as a stream flowing from the high ground of universities
through the length and breadth of the country; from this stream each
individual helps himself according to his means and his needs; one takes
but a cupful, another uses a bucket, a third claims to have a cistern to
himself: every one suits his own capacity, while our duty is to see that
the stream is pure and that it is kept running.
The truth is that the wide-reaching purpose of University Extension will
seem visionary or practicable according to the conception formed of
education, as to what in education is essential and what accidental. If
I am asked whether I think of shop-assistants, porters, factory-hands,
miners, dock or agricultural laborers, women with families and constant
home duties, as classes of people who can be turned into economists,
physicists, literary critics, art connoisseurs,--I admit that I have no
such idea. But I do believe, or rather, from my experience in England I
know, that all such classes can be _interested_ in economic, scientific,
literary and artistic questions. And I say boldly that to interest in
intellectual pursuits is the essential of education, in comparison with
which all other educational purposes must be called secondary. I do not
consider that a child has been taught to read unless he has been made to
like reading; I find it difficult to think of a man as having received a
classical education if the man, however scholarly, leaves college with
no interest in classical literature such as will lead him to go on
reading for himself. In education the interest is the life. If a system
of instruction gives discipline, method, and even originating power,
without rousing a lasting love for the subject studied, the whole
process is but a mental galvanism, generating a delusive activity that
ceases when the connection between instructor and pupil is broken off.
But if a teacher makes it his first business to stir up an interest in
the matter of study, the education becomes self-continuing when teacher
and pupil have parted, and the subject becomes its own educator. If then
it be conceded that the essence of education is to interest, does it
not seem a soberly practical purpose that we should open up to the whole
nation without exception an interest in intellectual pursuits?
I take my stand on the broad moral ground that every human being, from
the highest to the lowest, has two sides to his life--his work and his
leisure. To be without work in life is selfishness and sloth. But if a
man or woman is so entangled in routine duties as never to command
leisure, we have a right to say to such persons that they are leading an
immoral life. Such an individual has no claim to the title of a working
man, he is a slave. It may be cruel circumstances that have thus
absorbed him in business, but that does not alter the fact: slavery was
a misfortune rather than a fault to those who suffered it, but in any
case to be content with slavery is a crime. Once get society to
recognize the duty of leisure, and there is immediately a scope for such
institutions as University Extension that exist for the purpose of
giving intellectual interests for such leisure time. The movement is
thus one of the greatest movements for the 'raising of the masses.' With
a large section of the people there is, at the present moment, no
conception of 'rising' in life, except that of rising out of one social
rank into another. This last is of course a perfectly legitimate
ambition, but it is outside the present discussion: University Extension
knows nothing of social distinctions. It has to do with a far more
important mode of 'rising' in life,--that of rising in the rank to which
a man happens to belong at the moment, whether it be the rank in which
he started or any other. There is a saying that all men are equal after
dinner: and it is true that, while in the material wealth we seek in our
working hours equality is a chimera, yet in the intellectual pursuits
that belong to leisure there is no bar to the equality of all, except
the difference of individual capacity and desire. Macaulay tells of the
Dutch farmers who worked in the fields all day, and at night read the
Georgics in the original. Scotch and American universities are largely
attended by students who have had to engage in menial duties all the
summer in order to gain funds for their high education during the
winter. And every University Extension lecturer, highly trained
specialist as he is, will testify how his work has continually brought
him into contact with persons of the humblest social condition whom a
moment's conversation has made him recognize as his intellectual equals.
No one has any difficulty in understanding that in religious intercourse
and experience all classes stand upon an equality; and I have spoken of
the foundation for the University Extension movement as being the
growing recognition of education as a permanent human interest akin to
religion. The experience of a few years has sufficiently demonstrated
the possibility of arousing such interest: to make it universal is no
more than a practical question of time, money and methods.
But no doubt when we come to _modus operandi_ the main difficulty of the
movement is the diversity of the classes it seeks to approach--diversity
in individual capacity, in leisure, means, and previous training.
Opposite policies have been urged upon us. Some have said: Whatever you
do, you must never lower the standard; let the Extension movement
present outside the universities precisely the same education as the
universities themselves are giving, however long you may have to wait
for its acceptance. On the other hand, it has been urged: You must go
first where you are most needed; be content with a makeshift education
until the people are ready for something better. The movement has
accepted neither of these policies, but has made a distinction between
two elements of university training--method and curriculum. So far as
method is concerned we have considered that we are bound to be not less
thorough, but more thorough, if possible, than the universities
themselves, in proportion as our clients work under peculiar
difficulties. But in the matter of curriculum we have felt it our first
duty to be elastic, and to offer little or much as may in each case be
desired. Accordingly, we have elaborated an educational unit--the three
months' course of instruction in a single subject: this unit course we
have used all the resources we could command for making as thorough in
method as possible; where more than this is desired, we arrange that
more in a combination or series of such unit courses. The instruction
can thus be taken by retail or wholesale: but in all cases it, must be
administered on the same rigorous method.
The key to the whole system is thus the unit course of three months'
instruction in a single subject. The method of such a course is
conveyed by the technical terms lecture, syllabus, exercises, class. The
lectures are addressed to audiences as miscellaneous as the congregation
of a church, or the people in a street car; and it is the duty of the
teacher to attract such miscellaneous audiences, as well as to hold and
instruct them. Those who do nothing more than simply attend the lectures
will at least have gained the education of continuous interest; it is
something to have one's attention kept upon the same subject for three
months together. But it may be assumed that in every such audience there
will be a nucleus of students, by which term we simply mean persons
willing to do some work between one lecture and another. The lectures
are delivered no oftener than once a week; for the idea is not that the
lectures convey the actual instruction--great part of which is better
obtained from books, but the office of the lecture is to throw into
prominence the salient points of the study, and rouse the hearers to
read, for themselves. The course of instruction is laid down in the
syllabus--a document of perhaps thirty or forty pages, sold for a
trifling sum; by referring for details to the pages of books this
pamphlet can be made to serve as a text-book for the whole course,
making the teacher independent in his order of exposition of any other
text-book. The syllabus assists the general audience in following the
lectures without the distraction of taking notes; and guides the reading
and thinking of the students during the week. The syllabus contains a
set of 'exercises' on each lecture. These exercises, unlike examination
questions or 'quizzes,' are not tests of memory, but are intended to
train the student to work for himself; they are thus to be done under
the freest conditions--at home, with full leisure, and all possible
access to books, notes or help from other persons. The written answers
are sent to the lecturer for marginal comment, and returned by him at
the 'class.' This class is a second meeting for students and others, at
which no formal lecture is given, but there is free talk on points
suggested to the teacher by the exercises he has received: the usual
experience is that it is more interesting than the lecture. This weekly
routine of lecture, syllabus-reading, exercise and class goes on for a
period of twelve weeks. There is then an 'examination' in the work of
the course held for students who desire to take it. Certificates are
given by the university, but it is an important arrangement that these
certificates are awarded _jointly_ on the result of the weekly exercises
and the final examination.
The subjects treated have been determined by the demand. Literature
stands at the head in popularity, history with economy is but little
behind. All the physical sciences have been freely asked for. Art
constitutes a department of work; but it is art-appreciation, not
art-production; the movement has no function to train artists, but to
make audiences and visitors to art-galleries more intelligent. It will
be observed that the great study known as 'Classics' is not mentioned in
this list. But it is an instructive fact that a considerable number of
the courses in literature have been on subjects of Greek and Latin
literature treated in English, and some of these have been at once the
most successful in numbers and the most technical in treatment. I am not
without hope that our English University Extension may react upon our
English universities, and correct the vicious conception of classical
studies which gives to the great mass of university men a more or less
scholarly hold upon ancient languages without any interest whatever in
ancient literatures.
This university extension method claims to be an advance on existing
systems partly because under no circumstances does it ever give lectures
unaccompanied by a regular plan of reading and exercises for students.
These exercises moreover are designed, not for mental drill, but for
stimulus to original work. The association of students with a general
audience is a gain to both parties. Many persons follow regularly the
instruction of the class who have not participated in the exercises.
Moreover, the students, by their connection with the popular audience,
are saved from the academic bias which is the besetting sin of teachers:
more human interest is drawn into the study. The same effect follows
from the miscellaneous character of the students who contribute
exercises. High university graduates, experts in special pursuits,
deeply cultured individuals who have never before had any field in which
to exhibit the fruits of their culture, as well as persons whose
spelling and writing would pass muster nowhere else, or casual visitors
from the world of business, or young men and women fresh from school, or
even children writing in round text,--all these classes may be
represented in a single week's work; and the papers sent in will vary in
elaborateness from a scrawl on a post-card to a magazine article or
treatise. I have received an exercise of such a character that the
student considerately furnished me with an index; I remember one longer
still, but as this hailed from a lunatic asylum I will quote it only for
illustrating the diversity of the spheres reached by the movement. Study
participated in by such diverse classes cannot but have an all-roundness
which is to teachers and students one of the main attractions of the
movement.
But we shall be expected to judge our system by results: and, so far as
the unit courses are concerned, we have every reason to be satisfied.
Very few persons fail in our final examinations, and yet examiners
report that the standard in university extension is substantially the
same as that in the universities--our pass students being on a par with
pass men in the universities, our students of 'distinction' reaching the
standard of honors schools. Personally I attach high importance to
results which can never be expressed in statistics. We are in a position
to assert that a successful course perceptibly influences the _tone_ of
a locality for the period it lasts: librarians volunteer reports of an
entirely changed demand for books, and we have even assurances that the
character of conversation at 'five o'clock teas' has undergone marked
alteration. I may be permitted an anecdote illustrating the impression
made upon the universities themselves. I once heard a brilliant
university lecturer, who had had occasional experience of extension
teaching, describe a course of investigation which had interested him.
With an eye to business I asked him if he would not give it in an
extension course. He became grave. "Well, no," he replied, "I have not
thought it out sufficiently for that;" and when he saw my look of
surprise he added, "You know, anything goes down in college; but when I
have to face your mature classes I must know my ground well." I believe
the impression thus suggested is not uncommon amongst experts who really
know the movement.
Our results are much less satisfactory when we turn to the other side of
our system, and enquire as to curriculum. It must be admitted that the
larger part of our local centres can only take unit courses; there may
be often a considerable interval between one course and another; or
where courses are taken regularly the necessity of meeting popular
interest involves a distracting variety of subjects; while an
appreciable portion of our energies have to be taken up with preliminary
half-courses, rather intended to illustrate the working of the movement
than as possessing any high educational value. The most important
advance from the unit course is the Affiliation system of Cambridge
university. By this a town that becomes regularly affiliated, has
arranged for it a series of unit courses, put together upon proper
sequence of educational topics, and covering some three or four years:
students satisfying the lecturers and examiners in this extended course
are recognized as 'Students affiliated' (S.A.), and can at any time
enter the university with the status of second year's men,--the local
work being accepted in place of one year's residence and study. Apart
from this, the steps in our educational ladder other than the first are
still in the stage of prophecy. But it is universally recognized that
this drawback is a matter solely of funds: once let the movement command
endowment and the localities will certainly demand the wider curriculum
that the universities are only too anxious to supply.
The third point in our definition was that the movement was to be
organized on a basis of itinerant teachers. This differentiates
University Extension from local colleges, from correspondence teaching,
and from the systems of which Chautauqua is the type. The chief function
of a university is to teach, and University Extension must stand or fall
with its teachers. It may or may not be desirable on other grounds to
multiply universities; but there is no necessity for it on grounds of
popular education, the itinerancy being a sufficient means of bringing
any university into touch with the people as a whole. And the adoption
of such a system seems to be a natural step in the evolution of
universities. In the middle ages the whole body of those who sought a
liberal education were to be found crowded into the limits of university
towns, where alone were teachers to listen to and manuscripts to copy:
the population of such university centres then numbered hundreds where
to-day it numbers tens. The first university extension was the
invention of printing, which sent the books itinerating through the
country, and reduced to a fraction the actual attendance at the
university, while it vastly increased the circle of the educated. The
time has now come to send teachers to follow the books: the ideas of the
university being circulated through the country as a whole, while
residence at a university is reserved as the apex only of the university
system.
An itinerancy implies central and local management, and travelling
lecturers who connect the two. The central management is a university,
or its equivalent; this is responsible for the educational side of the
movement, and negotiates for the supply of its courses of instruction at
a fixed price per course.[53] The local management may be in the hands
of a committee formed for the purpose, or of some local
institution--such as a scientific or literary club or institute--which
may care to connect itself with the universities. On the local
management devolves the raising funds for the university fee, and for
local expenses, as well as the duty of putting the advantages of the
course offered before the local community. The widest diversity of
practice prevails in reference to modes of raising funds. A considerable
part of the cost will be met by the tickets of those attending the
lectures, the prices of which I have known to vary from a shilling to a
guinea for the unit course, while admission to single lectures has
varied from a penny to half a crown. But all experience goes to show
that only a part of this cost can be met in this way; individual courses
may bring in a handsome profit, but taking account over various terms
and various districts, we find that not more than two-thirds of the
total cost will be covered by ticket money. And even this is estimated
on the assumption that no more than the unit course is aimed at: while
even for this the choice of subjects, and the chance of continuity of
subject from term to term are seriously limited by the consideration of
meeting cost as far as possible from fees. University Extension is a
system of higher education, and higher education has no market value,
but needs the help of endowment. But the present age is no way behind
past ages in the number of generous citizens it exhibits as ready to
help good causes. The millionaire who will take up University Extension
will leave a greater mark on the history of his country than even the
pious founder of university scholarships and chairs. And even if
individuals fail us, we have the common purse of the public or the
nation to fall back upon.
The itinerant lecturers, not less than the university and the local
management, have responsibility for the progress of the cause. An
extension lecturer must be something more than a good teacher, something
more even than an attractive lecturer: he must be imbued with the ideas
of the movement, and ever on the watch for opportunities of putting them
forward. It is only the lecturer who can maintain in audiences the
feeling that they are not simply receiving entertainment or instruction
which they have paid for, but that they are taking part in a public
work, and are responsible for giving their locality a worthy place in a
national scheme of university education. The lecturer again must mediate
between the local and the central management, always ready to assist
local committees with suggestions from the experience of other places,
and equally attentive to bringing the special wants of different centres
before the university authorities. The movement is essentially a
teaching movement, and it is to the body of teachers I look for the
discovery of the further steps in the development of popular education.
For such a purpose lecturers and directors alike must be imbued with the
missionary spirit. For University Extension is a missionary university,
not content with supplying culture, but seeking to stimulate the demand
for it. This is just the point in which education in the past has shown
badly in comparison with religion or politics. When a man is touched
with religious ideas he seeks to make converts, when he has views on
political questions he agitates to make his views prevail: culture on
the other hand has been only too often cherished as a badge of
exclusiveness, instead of the very consciousness of superior education
being felt as a responsibility which could only be satisfied by efforts
to educate others. To infuse a missionary spirit into culture is not the
least purpose of University Extension.
I cannot resist the temptation to carry forward this thought from the
present into the future. In University Extension so described may we
not see a germ for the University of the Future? I have made the
foundation of our movement the growing conception of education as a
permanent interest of adult life side by side with religion and
politics. The change is at best only beginning; it tasks the imagination
to conceive all it will imply when it is complete. To me it appears that
this expanding view of education is the third of the three great waves
of change the succession of which has made up our modern history. There
was a time when religion itself was identified with a particular class,
the clergy alone thinking out what the rest of the nation simply
accepted; then came the series of revolutions popularly summed up as the
Reformation, by which the whole adult nation claimed to think for itself
in matters of religion, and the special profession of the clergy became
no more than a single element in the religious life of the nation.
Again, there has been in the past a distinct governing class, to which
the rest of society submitted; until a series of political revolutions
lifted the whole adult population into self-government, using the
services of political experts, but making public progress the interest
of all. Before the more quiet changes of the present age the conception
of an isolated learned class is giving way before the ideal of a
national culture, in which universities will still be centres for
educational experts, while University Extension offers liberal education
to all, until educationally the whole adult population will be just as
much within the university as politically the adult population is within
the constitution. It would appear then that the university of such a
future would be by no means a repetition of existing types, such as
Oxford or Cambridge, Harvard or Johns Hopkins. These institutions would
exist and be more flourishing than ever, but they would all be merged in
a wider 'University of England,' or 'University of America'; and, just
as the state means the whole nation acting in its political capacity
through municipal or national institutions, so the university would mean
the whole adult nation acting in its educational capacity through
whatever institutions might be found desirable. Such a university would
never be chartered; no building could ever house it; no royal personage
or president of the United States would ever be asked to inaugurate it;
the very attempt to found it would imply misconception of its essential
character. It would be no more than a floating aggregation of voluntary
associations; like the companies of which a nation's commerce is made up
such associations would not be organized, but would simply tend to
coöperate because of their common object. Each association would have
its local and its central side, formed for the purpose of mediating
between the wants of a locality and the educational supply offered by
universities or similar central institutions. No doubt such a scheme is
widely different from the ideal education of European countries, so
highly organized from above that the minister of education can look at
his watch and know at any moment all that is being done throughout the
country. On the contrary the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race leans
towards self-help; it has been the mission of the race in the past to
develop self-government in religion and politics, it remains to crown
this work with the application of the voluntary system to liberal
education.
In indulging this piece of speculation I have had a practical purpose
before me. If what I have described be a reasonable forecast for the
University of the Future, does it not follow that University Extension,
as the germ of it, presents a field for the very highest academic
ambition? To my mind it appears that existing types of university have
reached a point where further development in the same direction would
mean decline. In English universities the ideal is 'scholarship.'
Scholarship is a good thing, and we produce it. But the system which
turns out a few good scholars every year passes over the heads of the
great mass of university students without having awakened them to any
intellectual life; the universities are scholarship-factories producing
good articles but with a terrible waste of raw material. The other main
type of university enthrones 'research' as its summum bonum. Possibly
research is as good a purpose as a man can set before him, but it is not
the sole aim in life. And when one contemplates the band of recruits
added each year to the army of investigators, and the choice of ever
minuter fields--not to say lanes and alleys--of research, one is led to
doubt whether research is not one of the disintegrating forces of
society, and whether ever increasing specialisation must not mean a
perpetual narrowing of human sympathies in the intellectual leaders of
mankind. Both types of university appear to me to present the phenomena
of a country suffering from the effects of overproduction, where the
energies of workers had been concentrated upon adding to the sum of
wealth, and all too little attention had been given to the distribution
of that wealth through the different ranks of the community. Just at
this point the University Extension movement appears to recall academic
energy from production to distribution; suggesting that devotion to
physics, economics, art, can be just as truly shown by raising new
classes of the people to an interest in physical and economic and
aesthetic pursuits, as by adding to the discoveries of science, or
increasing the mass of art products. To the young graduate, conscious
that he has fairly mastered the teaching of the past, and that he has
within him powers to make advances, I would suggest the question
whether, even for the highest powers, there is any worthier field than
to work through University Extension towards the University of the
Future.