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 self-advancement have atrophied.
Does this matter?
Indeed it does. Perhaps Owen Harry, who had himself risen from a poor Welsh beginning near Cardiffs Tiger Bay to become a very young chief technician in Jack's zoology dept at Birmingham University, and later became a senior lecturer at Belfast University, put this best when he described its main negative consequence as `a lack of sergeants'.
There is a story about officer training and examination in the British Army in the 1950s. One of the most important questions was 'How do you dig a trench?'. The correct answer was `I say "Sergeant, dig me a trench!"' Sergeants are people who organise the doing. They are not experts in what to do, or when: that's the prerogative of officers, who theoretically constitute the brains of the organisation. Officers decide what has to be done, but don't know how to do it. Sergeants don't actually do things, either, except occasionally when they have to. Their role is to organise squads of ignorant men, often incompetent, but well trained to obey orders, so that they cooperate effectively. Sergeants are the layer that makes cooperation effective: they know how to get things done. Privates know how to do what they're told, and are trained not to do anything else.
We didn't say efficient; it's a common mistake to see efficiency as something to be striven for. Efficiency is a concept borrowed from engineering and physics, a measure of how much you get out for how much you put in. Sergeants are in some respects the least efficient way of getting things done; they have a tendency towards repetition and sarcasm, confident that a few of their recruits will graduate from basic training with some degree of competence. But sergeants are very effective, and the system they are part of is very robust.
Darwin and Wallace, Spencer and Wells, all came up through a system that was very robust in this way. All of them, different as they were, knew that writing books was a prime way of affecting the society around you. There was no television, no films, and only a fraction of people went to the theatre or the opera ... mostly to music hall and pantomimes around Christmas. Dickens, Kingsley, the Bronte sisters, and Thomas Hardy made people - lots of people - think new thoughts and lead new lives. The working men's clubs and their links with the public libraries brought reading skills to a higher level than ever before.
So this audience was ripe for persuasive texts that could take them out of simple biblical knowledge into new theologies, even into atheism. Huxley, `Darwin's Bulldog', promoted Darwinism as the antithesis of a God-made world. From the aspiring middle class of Victoriana grew our modern secular age, with God relegated to the plaything of a few of the less modern clergy. Modern clergy don't believe in a twelve-foot Englishman up there in the sky, with Heaven as an eternal Buckingham Palace garden party. Particularly from those French philosophers who continued sophisticated theological criticism in lineages derived from Voltaire, our clerics learned to do without that strong Victorian style of Christianity. That form of Anglicanism, confident that God really was looking after the English, didn't need to embarrass itself with overt prayers. The rituals would suffice (provided they weren't noisy like the Welsh, or showy like the Catholics).
We have lost strong simple religion, we have lost academic excellence, we have gained a secular society that maintains the heterogeneity that made it so robust in Victorian times and later. However, we are now pursuing policies, particularly in education, that fail to provide society with all those able people who built the Victorian and Edwardian edifices, both material and theoretical.
There are routes away from this pessimism. In The Science of Discworld 2 we referred to humans as Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee. Our overall message was that humans need to make stories to motivate themselves, to identify goals, and to distinguish good from evil.
Here we go a step further.
Technological and Civilised Man, we believe, must become Polypan multinarrans,[1] to extend the metaphor rather further. Human beings must become ever more diverse, valuing and enjoying each other's differences rather than fearing them or suppressing them. And mere explanation is not enough. To gain understanding, a useful working philosophy as appropriate for action as for judgement and
[1] Sorry, it's one of those horrible Graeco-Latin hybrids. But, like `television', it's comprehensible.
decision, an explanation is only rarely good enough. People find simple explanations satisfying because they enable thin causal chains of the kind we build for our own personal memories and causalities. But the real world, even the world of other people and their likes, dislikes, and prejudices - sometimes so rigidly held that our own lives and those of our loved ones don't matter to them - doesn't work like that.