2014/01/01 by Alexandra Lawrie · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Tourism, Volunteerism, and Development
paper · doi:10.1057/9781137309112_4
openalex publication_date 2014/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
The University Extension Movement first emerged as an organised and functional educational scheme in England during the 1870s, with the aim of providing tertiary teaching for those unable to go to university. The initiative was not unique in this objective; it can be understood as part of the wider developments in adult education that had taken place since the beginning of the century, some of which were discussed in Chapter 1. At this time, the ancient English universities of Oxford and Cambridge continued to prepare the aristocracy for careers in ‘politics, the Church, or the law’, yet they provided no practical training that would assist members of the rising middle class planning to move into the trade or business sector (Kelly, 1992, p. 216). Oxford and Cambridge were even further removed from the working classes, in terms both of the financial costs involved in university attendance,1 and the insufficient level of secondary school education available to the majority of working-class adolescents, which rendered them unable to compete for entry against pupils who had enjoyed the intellectual privileges and preparation of England’s elite public schools.2 On a less tangible level, university education simply existed beyond the ken of rising middle- and working-class people, and these institutions were therefore either disregarded as being utterly irrelevant, or they existed in a romantically distorted form in the popular imagination, as an idyllic way of life that would remain perpetually unattainable for the majority of citizens.3