Science of Discworld III

by many in the eastern United States.
    It would not have been quite so strange if this heterogeneous society involved different groups that picked up on different ideas, according to their various philosophies and theologies. However, what really happened, both to Dickens and to Darwin and later to Wells, was a very general appreciation of their radical ideas, very widely, across all of those diverse groups. The same alternative views were welcomed by many different strata of society. More so, perhaps, than in any other society since, heterodoxy was almost the rule. Working men’s clubs were hotbeds of rational argument, thanks to the establishment of evening classes by the Workers’ Educational Association. Education for the common man was promoted by the new technical colleges and the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
    To some extent, the same went for all the embryo universities which, in Victorian times, had been seeded by philanthropic discussion groups in the big cities. These establishments, dark red-brick buildings found in the centres of all English industrial cities, were very different organisations from the ancient universities. The other half of the building, or the building opposite on the same street, was often the public library, an organisation not to be found in Russia or China at that time. These organisations provided a way up from manual labour to artisan, and there were a thousand such establishments all over Victoriana.
    The real universities, of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, St Andrew’s, were promoting orthodoxy via classics and the literary and governmental arts. The sciences were slowly coming in, mainly as theoretical physics and astrophysics, which needed only brains and blackboards, like mathematics. Practical sciences like geology and palaeontology, chemistry, and zoology went on in dark and dirty laboratories with tall glass and dark wood partitions; botany was backed up by aromatic herbaria. Such work had a very low status compared to mathematics and philosophy – it had associations with manual labour and dirt. However, archaeology, because of its continuing association with the classical world and its artefacts, had quite high status.
    The burgeoning middle class didn’t, by and large, aspire to these arcane practices. They wanted technical and scientific information, not to potter about with theories, however important and romantic. They didn’t want classical anything, certainly not the classics. The universities proper were still requiring a classical education of all aspiring students, and even in the 1970s they continued to require competence in a foreign language from science entrants (as evidence, presumably, of some culture – they never required science or mathematics from arts or classics entrants). The workmen and the artisans’ guilds cooperated to produce the apprenticeship system, and this was in many ways the model for their own educational organisations.These, notably the WEA, provided exactly what was wanted, guided and monitored by the artisans’ guilds and by the elected council representatives who helped oversee their relations with local industry, especially apprenticeship schemes. ‘City and Guilds’ examinations, granting certificates and diplomas, were the educational currency of these self-organised educational systems, and they continued until the 1960s. They were the labels that qualified erstwhile labourers as artisans, worthy of respect by their peers.
    This pulling yourself up by your bootstraps into respectable citizenship contrasts with the attitude to elected local councilmen by the universities that these organisations matured into. Like the ancient universities, new ones like Birmingham and Manchester rewarded local elected dignitaries, mayors, and councillors with honorary degrees. These empty titles, contrasting both with the earned certificates of the artisans and with the honorary degrees given to eminent scholars in recognition and respect, ensured a political allegiance – and devalued academia in general. Unfortunately, the profusion of such young universities in late twentieth-century England has meant that non-technical, even non-scientific subjects have again become fashionable, to the exclusion of that artisan education which was so healthy in late Victorian times. The devaluation of academic degrees of all kinds has continued apace, but at the same time the alternative and more worthy routes to