"We rented an attic for 25 shillings a year, bought a few old benches and tables, borrowed chairs from people in the building, bought coal for 1 shilling ... that was the beginning of our college."
So spoke Joseph Greenwood, a tailor in a weaving mill in West Yorkshire, recalling how in 1860 he helped start Culloden College, one of hundreds of workers' schools founded in the mid-19th century in Great Britain. "Among us there were no people in high positions or those with university degrees. Students who excelled in their knowledge in certain fields were appointed as lecturers, so it happened that the teacher of one subject was a listener in classes from another subject."
Greenwood's story is one of many collected by Jonathan Rose and published in a classic under the title The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class, the glorious history of working people's struggle to gain an education, beginning with the earliest self-taught attempts of the Workers' Education Society. For people who belonged to that tradition, education was not about opening the way to better-paid jobs, but meant developing a new way of thinking about the world.
"Books became for me a symbol of social revolution," wrote James Clunie, a painter who became the Labor MP for Dunfermline in the 50s. "The worker is no longer the one who 'cuts wood and carries water' but has become... his own leader, lawyer, writer, equal with other people". By the time Rose's book was published in 2001, that tradition had largely died out. In the following two decades, the notion of education as a means of broadening horizons also disappeared.
The University of Roehampton in south-west London confirmed last week that it is to sack and re-employ half of its teaching staff. At least 65 employees will lose their jobs permanently. 19 departments, including classical philology and anthropology, are likely to be closed. The university wants to focus on "career education".
It is the latest in a long line of cuts to humanities programs at British universities, from languages at Aston to English literature at Sheffield Hallam. Such changes show the transformation of the university's role, which is the result of the action of three current trends: the entry of higher education into the market, the treatment of students as consumers, and instrumental access to knowledge.
The Robbins Report on Higher Education in 1963 contained a proposal to expand the university network on the grounds that education is a good in itself. "The search for truth is a fundamentally important function of institutions of higher education," the report said, "and the process of education is important because of the role it plays in acquiring new knowledge."
Browne's 2010 Higher Education Funding Report takes a very different approach. The importance attributed to universities is primarily economic. "Higher education is important," the report says, because it enables students to find jobs that "are better paid, more satisfying, and contribute to the economic growth of society."
A utilitarian approach to education is often presented as an attempt to help working-class students prepare for the labor market. But what such an approach actually tells them is that they should stick to the education that is appropriate for their social position. Hence, philosophy, history and literature become the exclusive ban of the rich and privileged.
The relationship between education and class has changed in another way. A report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) from last week points to the absence of diversity and proportional representation in the population of parliamentary representatives, which has been the subject of numerous debates recently. The IPPR report reveals a "representation gap" of 5% according to the criterion of ethnicity - ethnic minorities that make up 15% of the total population provide 10% of MPs. The difference in representation in parliament and the general population is 17% for women and 27% for the working class. However, the biggest difference is obtained by the level of education - 86% of parliamentarians attended university, while for the general population that percentage is 34%. The gap between voters and those who govern manifests itself in the domain of education even more than through class divisions.
In the last 30 years, the share of women and members of parliament belonging to minorities has increased. The number of MPs from the working class has dropped dramatically. In the 1987-1992 convocation of parliament, before entering parliament as many as 28% of Labor MPs worked in production or performed tasks that did not require high qualifications. By 2010, that share had dropped to 10%, and by 2019 it would have risen to 13%. Quite expectedly, for the Tories, that share was 5%, and in 2019 it would drop to 1%.
The decline in the number of deputies from the working class is partly caused by the fact that the institutions that provided workers with a public platform, especially trade unions, practically disappeared. Mick Lynch of the National Transport Workers Union and his successes in defending workers' rights have attracted a lot of attention. 50 years ago, there were many more such people, because the working class then had a more important role in political life.
Education, meanwhile, has become a signifier of social differences in yet another way. Political scientist David Runciman says that with the acceptance of the technocratic system in Western societies, "a new class of experts for whom education is a prerequisite for entry into the ranks of the elite" was formed - bankers, lawyers, doctors, public servants, experts, academics. The real division in education is not "between knowledge and ignorance". It is a "clash of different worldviews". That is why educational level was an important marker in the divisions produced by Brexit.
All this leads some people to conclude that the main line of political division in Britain today is education, not class. Education is both one of the most important expressions of class division and a means of concealing it.
"If anyone in this world needs education," Jack Lawson, a miner from Durham, wrote in 1932, "it is the man who does the work we need most and gets the least reward for it." Those words are as true today as they were 90 years ago.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net; translation: Đ. Tomić)
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