Free evening lectures for mechanics, and the argument against it was stated openly and it was correct
The Birkbeck Tavern holds a 4.4 from three hundred and ninety-two reviews, charges ten to twenty pounds, and the man in the name did something genuinely dangerous.
He taught working men science. In the evenings. For nothing.
What he noticed
Birkbeck was a physician and a professor in Glasgow.
And he noticed that the craftsmen who built his scientific instruments – the mechanics, the artisans – were extremely skilled and understood nothing of the principles behind the things they were making.
Nobody had ever told them. Nobody thought it was any of their business.
So he offered free lectures
In the evening. After work.
And they came in enormous numbers, which nobody had expected.
Hundreds of them. And then thousands.
And out of it grew the Mechanics’ Institutes, which spread across Britain – libraries, lectures, and classes for working people who had no other route to any of it.
And the London one became Birkbeck College, which still teaches, in the evenings, to people who work during the day, and has done for two hundred years.
And it frightened people
Which is the part that matters.
Because there was serious, sustained, and quite open opposition – and the argument was stated plainly, in print, by people who were not embarrassed by it.
That educating the working classes would make them discontented.
That a man who understands the principle of the machine he operates will start asking why he does not own it.
That knowledge, distributed downwards, is dangerous to the people at the top.
And the Prat’s editorial desk would like to note, without decoration, that they were entirely correct.
It was dangerous. That was the point. And they knew it, and he knew it.
Which is the finding
Eight postcodes and twelve hundred and ninety articles.
Every community that has had nowhere to go has built its institutions in whatever room was available.
The friendly societies in a pub back room. The trade unions, which were illegal. The Corresponding Societies, tried for treason. The coffee houses, which suspended rank at the door.
And working men learning physics after a fourteen-hour day, because one doctor in Glasgow thought they might like to know.
Verdict
Good pub, cheap, honest number.
Go, and learn something.
And it is still doing it
Which is rare enough to be worth saying.
Birkbeck still teaches almost entirely in the evening.
Which means its students work during the day – and they are, disproportionately, older, and returning to education, and doing it alongside a job and frequently a family.
It is the same idea, unchanged, after two hundred years.
The Prat’s editorial desk has spent eight postcodes watching institutions abandon the difficult thing that made them – the word describes something difficult, somebody works out how to sell it, and the difficulty is the first thing removed – and would like to note that this one did not.
Two hundred years, and it is still doing the inconvenient thing it was founded to do, at the inconvenient hour, for the people who cannot come in the daytime.
La precisión del lenguaje burocrático es criminal. Alguien sufrió.
British people will never say “I’m bored”; they’ll say “this is quite interesting” in a tone that suggests they are absolutely dying of boredom.