Appendix.-List of free libraries and other benefactions founded by Andrew 1046 1050 1051 Carnegie...... ED 99-61 1054 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION IN GREAT BRITAIN. PREFACE. The first American account of University Extension in England appeared in the Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1885-86, pp. 748-749, in the Johns Hopkins University Studies in November, 1887, and in the Amherst Literary Monthly, December, 1887. About that time the writer began to collect materials for this present report. In the American Review of Reviews for July, 1891, he published some preliminary account of "University Extension and its leaders." In The Forum for July, 1891, he described "University Extension in America." This more elaborate report is published as an American contribution to English educational history and withal as an introduction to "Educational Extension in America" or to the more significant popular educational movements now in progress in America. While the present report is more strictly historical, relating to the origin and development of the English University Extension movement, the writer, in the summer of 1896, personally attended summer meetings of University Extension students at Cambridge and Edinburgh and contributed to the Education Report for 1897–98 an account of "Summer schools in England, Scotland, France, and Switzerland." In that supplementary account attention was devoted to the following special subjects: (1) The National Home Reading Union and its summer meeting at Chester; (2) A summer meeting in Cambridge; (3) The Edinburgh summer school; (4) An Oxford summer meeting; (5) Vacation courses in Paris; (6) Summer schools in Switzerland. I. HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION. University Extension is undoubtedly a part of a larger democratic movement which in England has gradually advanced during the nineteenth century. It is remarkable that so many great landmarks of popular progress in our mother country have been established within the memory of living men. The widening of the suffrage by successive reform bills, the emancipation of Catholics, Jews, and women, the institution of compulsory education for children, the establishment of local examinations, local lectures, local colleges, and colleges for women, these are all very recent events and indicate the popular direction in which England has been moving. The extension of political privileges to the English people only foreshadowed the extension of the universities and of higher adult education. The democratization of learning, religion, government, and society is the essence of modern history. Popular education, like popular government, reformed religion, and classical revivals, is not absolutely new in principle or practice. There is nothing new under the sun, not even electricity, or the gold of Klondike. Men simply find things; they rediscover old facts, ancient principles, the primordial laws and forces of Nature; they make fresh applications of eternal truth to wider human needs. Education, like all science, comes as fast as the growing wants of society and the developed capabilities of man. In a certain sense, as Lessing and Herder showed, true educa tion and revelation are identical. New inspirations continually break forth from sacred scriptures and from the infinite books of Nature and human experience which men call history. Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old. Popular education is as old as the recorded experience of the chosen people, who were, in a religious sense, the educators of Europe, the heralds of the essential truths of Christianity. The Priests and Levites "went about throughout all the cities of Judah and taught the people" (II Chronicles, xvii, 9). Itinerant teachers and preachers were thus foreordained. In the year 64 A. D. the high priest Joshua Ben Gamala imposed upon every Jewish town and village the obligation to sustain a common school. Thus, by nearly sixteen centuries, was anticipated the Massachusetts' idea of compulsory education. Rabbinical schools, with popular teaching in synagogues, flourished throughout the Middle Ages, as did the catechetical, monkish, and cathedral schools of the Christian Church. The educational essays of Brother Azarias, that faithful Catholic scholar and true poet, the lamented head of Rock Hill College, Ellicott City, Md., proved conclusively to American readers that the medieval church did not neglect either primary or popular education. All was given that the times really needed or demanded. The rise of colleges and universities can not be explained without reference to the cathedral and cloister schools of the Middle Ages. Even the education of women, which some modern universities still obstruct, was provided for in mediæval nunneries, the historic forerunners of all modern seminaries and colleges for women. Witness that cloistered school at Gandersheim in north Germany, where, in the tenth century, a clever nun Roswitha1 wrote Latin plays in imitation of Terence, for her companions to act. Verily there is nothing new in education. The miracle plays of the Middle Ages were popular dramas. Monks and nuns, priests and friars, Christian poets, and wandering minstrels were teachers of the common people. Folk-lore, folk-songs, popular lives of the saints, Christian art and architecture, frescoes or wall paintings, cathedral portals, and parish churches were veritably open books, known and read of all men and women in the "Dark Ages" (falsely so called) before printing was invented and learning made easy. The gymnasia of modern Germany were based upon mediæval and monkish foundations, upon confiscations of ancient religious endowments. In reading an autobiographical account of the German school training of the late Dr. Frederic Henry Hedge, of Harvard University, one is impressed with a graphic account of the first gymnasium which he attended. It was situated in a romantic valley on the southern side of the Harz Mountains: The school buildings, a congeries of quadrangles with other structures, including a church, had once been a monastery; the boys' rooms, stretching along two or three corridors, were the identical cells formerly occupied by the monks, rooms about 10 feet square, with little bedrooms (Kammern) attached. Underneath the portion of the building inhabited by the officers and scholars was the crypt, lined with perpendicular tombstones, each faced with an effigy in relief of the sainted brother who slumbered beneath. * * * Is not this a striking picture of the historic relation of modern schools and schoolmasters to their mediæval forerunners? Frederic Henry Hedge, taken when a little boy to Germany by George Bancroft to be educated, was probably one of the first native Americans to discover with his own eyes the monkish foundations of European culture. He spent two years in that German gymnasium in the Harz Moun 1 Pertz, Monumenta Germaniæ, iv. 306–335; Giesebrecht, Deutsche Kaiserzeit, i. 780. On the subject of "Nuns" in medieval times, see Montalembert, Monks of the West, v. 213-361; Lingard, AngloSaxon Church, i. chap. v; ii, 263-266; Alice C. Osborne, Roswitha, the Nun of Gandersheim, New Englander, Nov. 1881; On the learned women of Bologna, see Madame Villari in Popular Science Monthly, 1878, p. 185, or the International Review, March and May, 1878. |