Beautiful Biochemistry Educating the workers - Department of ...

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oxford interactions WEA How Oxford pioneered working-class education The Department for Continuing Education is well known locally for the many extramural classes it runs in Oxford and the surrounding area, but what is perhaps less well known is that the University, in the early years of the 20th century, led the movement to establish adult and workingclass education. The University’s early partnership with the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) was celebrated recently at a conference marking the centenary of the first ‘tutorial classes’ launched by Oxford and the WEA together in the autumn of 1908. These classes were designed to take worker-students through a high-level academic curriculum – comparable with studies at a university – in the towns and cities where they lived and worked. The first classes were held in Rochdale in Lancashire and in Longton in the Potteries of North Staffordshire. They were taught by RH Tawney, an Oxford alumnus who was to become one of the most notable historians and political thinkers of the 20th century. Today, the WEA is the UK’s largest voluntary provider of adult education and is a charity supported by government funding. It runs over 10,000 courses each year, providing education for more than 110,000 adults from all walks of life. The organisation was founded in 1903 to support the educational needs of working men and women, the year that Tawney graduated from Balliol College. After leaving Oxford, Tawney went to live at Toynbee Hall in the East End of London, the Oxford University settlement founded in Top: The Rochdale industrial and economic history class, pictured in 1908 with tutor RH Tawney seated in the centre of the front row. A painting of Tawney, dated 1951–2 (below), hangs in the WEA’s London headquarters WEA In a place where no university exists… 1885 where Oxford students and graduates provided social and cultural leadership among the urban poor. Some WEA classes were held there and in 1908 Tawney was engaged jointly by Oxford and the WEA as a peripatetic tutor for six years, the result of a joint determination by the two organisations to bring a university education within reach of working people. A meeting of representatives from the University and more than 200 workingclass organisations (including delegations from trade unions, cooperative societies and local educational groups) had been held in Oxford in August 2007 to begin planning for a ‘democratic education’. After the event, a joint committee representing Oxford and the WEA was established and its resulting report, Oxford and Working-Class Education, published in 1909, set down a model for adult education classes on which Tawney and others drew in subsequent years. Tawney’s first classes covered the ‘Industrial and economic history of England in the 18th and 19th centuries’. Dr Lawrence Goldman of St Peter’s College and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, who is also a former president of the Thames and Solent District of the WEA, gave a paper at the recent centenary conference in Stoke-on-Trent. ‘The class in Longton, which met on Friday evenings, included potters, miners and mechanics as well as shop workers and school teachers,’ he says. ‘Fees, subsidised by the University, were 2s 6d for the year and students were expected to write a fortnightly paper to be set by the tutor. The youngest member of Tawney’s Rochdale class, Alfred Wadsworth, went on to become editor of the Manchester Guardian.’ Tawney went on to teach tutorial classes in several more locations including Chesterfield, Glossop, Littleborough and Wrexham. By 1914 Oxford was responsible for 18 classes and a total of 367 students. The model thus established spread to other places and also to other institutions so that within a few years many universities were in partnership with the WEA and thousands of mature students were in contact with higher education. In addition, the syllabuses developed for tutorial classes were influential at a formative stage in the development of the modern university in Britain: the teaching of subjects as diverse as English, Geography and Economic History to adult students at this time helped to form and shape these and other academic disciplines. Tawney himself continued to serve the WEA, as a member of its executive for over 40 years and then as vice-president and president, alongside an academic career as a lecturer and then professor of economic history at the London School of Economics. A hundred years on, Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education continues to dispatch tutors to extramural classes and to collaborate with the WEA in providing what Tawney called ‘the nucleus of a university in a place where no university exists’. 10 Blueprint January 2009
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