By this he meant: "the education of each
member of the community as regards the relation in which he stands to
other individual citizens and to the community as a whole." "We have
abandoned," he said further, "and rightly abandoned the attempt to
realise citizenship by separating ourselves from society. We will
never abandon the belief that it has yet to be won amid the stress and
confusion of the ordinary world in which we move." From that day to
this co-operators have always had before them an ideal of education in
citizenship and have organised definite teaching year by year.
Another instance of even greater power lies in the co-operation
between the pioneers of the University Extension Movement at Cambridge
and the working men, particularly of Rochdale and Nottingham, to be
followed later by that unprecedented revival of learning amongst
working people which took place in Northumberland and Durham in the
days before the great coal strike. At a later date, in 1903, the same
kind of united action gave rise to the movement of the Workers'
Educational Association, which has always conceived its purpose to be
the development of citizenship in and through education pursued in
common by university man and working man alike. The system of
University Tutorial Classes originated by this Association has been
based upon an ideal of citizenship, and not primarily upon a
determination to acquire knowledge, although it was clearly seen that
vague aspirations towards good citizenship without the harnessing of
all available knowledge to its cause would be futile.
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