The eviction of the Occupy London protesters from their tents outside St Paul’s Cathedral marks the end of one of the most interesting experiments in popular education in recent times. For the past few months a string of leading writers, activists, journalists and academics have held workshops, led discussions and given lectures beneath the draughty canvas of the Tent City University. The facilities may have been basic – not much more than a sound system with a few tatty sofa cushions dotted around – but there was no shortage of speakers keen to swap the relative comfort of the lecture theatre for this sparse and lively space in which teaching was thought of more as a collaboration than a process of transmission. They won a varied, informed and, often, challenging audience of activists, shoppers, students and tourists, as well as a cross-section of Londoners, many with no background of higher learning. It is one example – albeit the most striking and high-profile – of a wider movement keen both to capture what campaigners see as the spirit of the public university – as places, first and foremost, in which people are free to think, to debate and to shape the future – and to resist the marketisation of higher education, a critical issue for many Occupy protesters, brought to a head by cuts to the teaching grant and the trebling of tuition fees. ‘Alternative universities’ have sprung up in London, Liverpool, Leeds and Lincoln, with academics more than willing to volunteer their time and expertise to get them off the ground. While the organisers of these initiatives do not necessarily think of themselves as providing a straightforward alternative to mainstream higher education – the public university remains for most a cause worth fighting for – they do all recognise a pressing need to create new spaces, genuinely public spaces, in which people who might be reluctant to incur substantial debts in return for their education can come together to share ideas and learn new things. For Mike Neary, Dean of Teaching and Learning at the University of Lincoln, and one of the organisers of the Social Science Centre – a ‘co-operative education centre’ based in Lincoln (though it has no formal links to the university) with no fees and no formal distinction between students and staff – the work of these activists is rooted in ‘the history of how those excluded from higher education have organised their own intellectual lives and learning in collaboration with university academics’. He makes a direct connection with some of the milestone interventions of the adult education movement – university settlements, extension classes, free libraries, Ruskin College and the Workers’ Educational Association. The free university movement is ‘absolutely embedded in the history of adult education’, he says. The Social Science Centre draws on the ‘popular education model’ in which ‘teachers and students recognise that they have much to learn from each other’ and approach education as a collaborative project. Teacher and student are seen as part of a community, a cooperative endeavour, intended to fulfil what Dougald Hine, founder of the University Project to ‘reimagine and reinvent the university’, calls ‘the promise at the heart of the university’: to cultivate knowledge and promote the spirit of enquiry, rather than simply to enhance economic competitiveness and promote graduates’ employment prospects.
Tent City University That there is an appetite for less formal – and less expensive – higher educational spaces is obvious from the spontaneous way in which some of these experiments have developed. The Tent City University emerged in the early days of the Occupy London protest as organisers sought to get their message out to a wider audience. Within a few days of the camp being set up last October, a series of informal ‘teach-outs’ had been organised which quickly grew into a programme of lectures, debates and workshops. The organisers, says Katherine Stanley, a member of the working group which ran the Tent City University, wanted ‘not only to hold workshops but to foster debate’, to create a space in which ideas could be exchanged and questioned, and where political and educational conventions could be challenged. They found a ready audience, not only among activists but from passers-by, shoppers, tourists and others, some of whom came to see the university as part of their daily routine. The audience, Stanley says, tended to be more vocal and, often, better informed than a typical university audience. ‘There’s a lot more dialogue, a lot of energy, and a lot of discussion and opinion, and discussion of opinion. The audience is dynamic and there’s quite a lot of movement in terms of numbers. We have regulars who don’t come from academic backgrounds who have become increasingly involved.’ The dynamic nature of the exchange has been welcomed by academics who have usually responded keenly to the less formal, non-hierarchical teaching environment. Word about the space spread fast and speakers quickly
22 ADULTS LEARNING SPRING 2012
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