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The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought calls
for the reform of higher education and the establishment of provincial
universities to provide adequate commercial and technical tuition
to the sons of the growing middle classes. It was argued that social
and economic change - a rapidly rising urban population, industrialisation
and a growing overseas empire - required the widening of access
and broadening of the course of education beyond the usual study
of theology and the classics to embrace the liberal arts and new
science. To an extent, the Scottish universities, with their tradition
of philosophical and scientific enquiry in the Enlightenment mode,
set an example for reformers south of the border.
The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were slow to initiate
reforms of their archaic syllabuses and provide instruction for
religious minorities - Jews, Roman Catholics and Dissenters - hitherto
largely excluded from higher education by the Test Act. The end
of the Napoleonic Wars furthermore injected renewed vigour into
the reform movement, in which intellectual curiosity and a nascent
religious revival were combined in the pursuit of a wider dissemination
of knowledge for the purposes of moral, social and economic improvement
and individual and collective progress in the national self-interest.
Developing new disciplines
This recognition that the country needed to improve the quantity
and quality of practical, technical and vocational instruction was
elsewhere reflected in the striking growth of Mechanics' Institutions
beginning with George Birkbeck's in 1823. These provided lectures
on the latest advances in the arts and sciences and made available
libraries and reading rooms. They captured a mood of self-help and
impatience for progressive intellectual and moral improvement that
was also manifest in the areas of public policy, electoral reform
and metropolitan renewal. Such institutions proved very popular
and evolved into the polytechnic movement, drawing upon the Prussian
model for inspiration. Particularly influential were the Universities
of Berlin and Bonn, which were established in 1810 and 1818. These
espoused a broad, humanist, approach to learning that incorporated
new disciplines such as natural philosophy that were to prove so
important during the course of the 19th century. continue>
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