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From Refugee Assistance to Freedom of Learning: the Strategic Vision of A. V. Hill, 1933–1964

Paul Weindling

in In Defence of Learning: The Plight, Persecution, and Placement of Academic Refugees, 1933-1980s

The founding of the Academic Assistance Council (AAC) in May 1933 was a rapid and constructive response to the Nazi threat to science and learning. Among the far-sighted academics involved was the ... More

The founding of the Academic Assistance Council (AAC) in May 1933 was a rapid and constructive response to the Nazi threat to science and learning. Among the far-sighted academics involved was the physiologist A. V. Hill (1886–1977). He was to be a consistent, effective, and loyal supporter of the AAC and, as it became in 1936, the Society for Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL). Hill was remarkable in terms of his scientific achievements and his support of scientific organizations, most notably the Royal Society. Accompanying these activities was a set of social values concerning the scientist as citizen in a parliamentary democracy, and an agenda for science to modernize health care provision. Hill's commitment to the cause of academic refugees can be understood within a broader set of commitments and activities. Apart from many acts of practical assistance, Hill contributed to a broadening of the agenda of the SPSL, making academic freedom a core value. This chapter examines Hill's broader political vision of the defence of learning.Less

Introduction1

Shula Marks

in In Defence of Learning: The Plight, Persecution, and Placement of Academic Refugees, 1933-1980s

The contributions to this collection were originally given at a conference held at the British Academy on 3–4 December 2008, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Academic ... More

The contributions to this collection were originally given at a conference held at the British Academy on 3–4 December 2008, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Academic Assistance Council in 1933, later the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (1936–98), and now the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics. This introductory chapter discusses the story of the SPSL and the flood of European refugee scholars and scientists from Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and their subsequent contribution to specific disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less

The Bourgeois as Scientist and the Sociability of the Learned Society

Carol E. Harrison

in The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation

This chapter addresses the importance of education, particularly scientific competence, to the bourgeois man. The learned society, commonly known as an ... More

This chapter addresses the importance of education, particularly scientific competence, to the bourgeois man. The learned society, commonly known as an emulation society, presented its members' grasp of science as evidence of their dedication to and fitness for community leadership. The importance of education, particularly modern, scientific instruction, was an issue around which diversity of individual interests could be amalgamated into a bourgeois consensus. In learned societies, the emulative desire to display superior knowledge and civic generosity displaced the destructive rivalries of politics and the market. Although the men who joined learned societies did not abandon their particular and diverse interests, they agreed that participation in the culture of learning, particularly scientific learning, set the bourgeois apart from the ordinary citizen. Learned societies transformed formal education into capacité by giving bourgeois Frenchmen the opportunity to translate their learning into public monuments such as libraries and museums.Less

Institutionalization and Professionalization

Monika Baár

in Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 3, ‘Institutionalization and Professionalization’, examines the institutional setting of the five scholars' activities and investigates their role in the professionalization and ... More

Chapter 3, ‘Institutionalization and Professionalization’, examines the institutional setting of the five scholars' activities and investigates their role in the professionalization and institutionalization of the discipline. It explores the role of patriotic and scholarly societies in the organization of national culture and the historians' contribution to those activities. This is followed by the study of the universities' limited role in the promotion of historical studies in the region. Thereafter, the historians' contribution to the creation of periodicals and source collections is discussed and the claim is put forward that such ventures were instrumental in the formation of a unified national culture and language. Finally, examples of censorial intervention in their work are analysed, alongside the strategies which they devised in order to alleviate the impact of censorship.Less

British geography 1500–1900: an imprecise review

David N. Livingstone

in A Century of British Geography

This chapter presents an impressionistic, and thus imprecise, sketch of the history of British geography from 1500 to 1900. Over these 400 years, British geography has assumed many different forms in ... More

This chapter presents an impressionistic, and thus imprecise, sketch of the history of British geography from 1500 to 1900. Over these 400 years, British geography has assumed many different forms in many different arenas. Whether as a species of natural philosophy and mathematics, as a form of regional portraiture, as overseas lore, or expeditionary travel; whether in universities curricula or at royal courts, in school texts or learned societies; whether as a vehicle of national and local identity or as a channel of imperial desire: geography has been inextricably intertwined with the social, intellectual, political and religious history of the British Isles.Less

Eva and Esther

Lewis Elton

in In Defence of Learning: The Plight, Persecution, and Placement of Academic Refugees, 1933-1980s

This chapter presents the story of how two women, the author's mother, Eva Ehrenberg, and the late Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, Esther Simpson, saved his life ... More

This chapter presents the story of how two women, the author's mother, Eva Ehrenberg, and the late Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, Esther Simpson, saved his life and gave him an academic career. He believes that his story might not be worth telling but for the fact that few who escaped from the clutches of Hitler can have been as fortunate as he had been.Less

‘Dedicated to Represent the True Spirit of the German Nation in the World’: Philipp Schwartz (1894–1977), Founder of the Notgemeinschaft

Gerald Kreft

in In Defence of Learning: The Plight, Persecution, and Placement of Academic Refugees, 1933-1980s

This chapter focuses on the importance of Philipp Schwartz's role in the establishment of the Notgemeinschaft outside Germany, his remarkable success in placing thirty refugee scholars in the new ... More

This chapter focuses on the importance of Philipp Schwartz's role in the establishment of the Notgemeinschaft outside Germany, his remarkable success in placing thirty refugee scholars in the new University of Istanbul within a few months in 1933 (and, over the next twenty years, in recruiting some 250 ‘first-rate scientists (émigrés) for the Turkish Government’), and the close ties established with the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL) by his successor, Dr Fritz Demuth. Between 1936 and 1946, the Notgemeinschaft actually shared the SPSL's accommodation, and provided an invaluable database of refugee academics to the Society and to the American Emergency Committee. In 1937 Demuth was recognized as advisor to, and honorary member of, the SPSL Executive Committee.Less

Institutions: The Culture of Curiosities Discursive Tendencies: Collecting

NEIL KENNY

in The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany

This chapter focuses on a cluster of institutions, in both France and the Germanic territories, that produced and disseminated knowledge outside the confines of university or church: academies, ... More

This chapter focuses on a cluster of institutions, in both France and the Germanic territories, that produced and disseminated knowledge outside the confines of university or church: academies, learned societies, publishing houses, networks of savants, naturalists, collectors, travellers, and antiquarians. What they had in common, from the point of view of curiosity, is that they introduced two great semantic changes into it. First, they reshaped curiosity into something that was usually good, in opposition to church and even much university discourse. Secondly, they turned a wide range of knowledge and matter into curiosities, into objects — whether material or discursive — whose role it was to satisfy people's curiosity. This cluster of institutions included some that fostered the practice of collecting in a literal or proper sense, that is, the collecting of material objects in cabinets of curiosities and the like. However, more broadly, these institutions tended also to shape knowledge as a metaphorical collection of curiosities. Books were presented as figurative cabinets of curiosities or as collections of recipes, facts, anecdotes, news, and so on. Even where no collecting metaphor was explicit, many books on history, antiquities, nature, occult sciences, travel, and so on were presented as containing discrete, ‘curious’ items. This culture of printed curiosities was especially prominent in the Germanic territories in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. These institutions' uses of curiosity often involved commodifying knowledge, marketing it, popularizing it, purveying it in convenient form for practical manipulation, promoting sociability within male networks of collectors or naturalists, and so on. Yet it is impossible to describe this culture of curiosities as a whole as being always positive about curiosity. However much it celebrated curiosity, even it was still haunted by old anxieties surrounding it.Less

A Learning Economy

Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald

in Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social Progress

This chapter explores some of the elements that make for a learning society—in the case of a developing country, one which more quickly closes the gap between itself and the more advanced countries; ... More

This chapter explores some of the elements that make for a learning society—in the case of a developing country, one which more quickly closes the gap between itself and the more advanced countries; in the case of a developed country, one which moves out the frontier of knowledge at a faster pace; in the case of all economies, one which reduces the gap between average and best practices. It first discusses what is to be learned, the process of learning, and the determinants of learning. It provides a taxonomy of the basic ingredients to a learning society and then looks in depth at two of the major determinants of a learning society: spillovers and motivation. After discussing some of the important impediments to creating a learning society, the final section analyzes some of the key trade-offs in the design of a learning society.Less

Civic Cultures and Civic Colleges in Victorian England*

Samuel J. M. M. Alberti

in The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain

This chapter discusses the role played by civic colleges in the emergence of autonomous professional groups associated with new disciplines between 1860 and the Great War. It also discusses the role ... More

This chapter discusses the role played by civic colleges in the emergence of autonomous professional groups associated with new disciplines between 1860 and the Great War. It also discusses the role of local learned societies, particularly literary and philosophical societies in the founding and support of the young colleges and their impact on college growth and curricula.Less

Proceedings and the Public: How a Commercial Genre Transformed Science

Alex Csiszar

in Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Constructing Scientific Communities

How did learned societies come to be closely associated with journal publishing and what were the consequences of this development? This chapter locates this shift in the emergence of “Proceedings” ... More

How did learned societies come to be closely associated with journal publishing and what were the consequences of this development? This chapter locates this shift in the emergence of “Proceedings” publications in the 1820s. Proceedings journals began as excerpts from commercial journals such as the Philosophical Magazine and they were initially seen as a form of broader public outreach. Gradually, however, societies sought to tame these new journals by establishing formal routines by which to decide what to publish, by setting up generic expectations regarding originality and style, and by encouraging the notion that certain journals were the only legitimate venues for original scientific claims. This was a structural transformation in the politics of knowledge that had far-reaching consequences for the basis of claims to scientific expertise. Following proceedings publications from their origins in attempts to diffuse science to their transformation into a preeminent form for specialized publishing shows that the rise of popular genres for communicating science has been important not simply because it allowed new social groups to participate in knowledge. These genres have sometimes been incorporated into elite science itself, reshaping elite institutions in the image of publics that they have sometimes sought to exclude.Less

Industrial Strategy and Economic Transformation: Lessons from Five Outstanding Cases

Akio Hosono

in Industrial Policy and Economic Transformation in Africa

Lessons for Africa from “outstanding cases” of success with industrial policies in a variety of sectors (including agriculture) and country contexts.

Competing perspectives on lifelong learning and their implications for people with learning difficulties

Sheila Riddell, Stephen Baron, and Alastair Wilson

in The Learning Society and people with learning difficulties

This chapter explores the ways in which learning difficulties are understood at the present time, demonstrating the inadequacy of explanations based solely on biological or social constructions. It ... More

This chapter explores the ways in which learning difficulties are understood at the present time, demonstrating the inadequacy of explanations based solely on biological or social constructions. It argues that it is possible to discern many versions of a Learning Society, each having particular connotations for people with learning difficulties and wider implications for the future nature of citizenship. The chapter explores the range of education, training, and employment opportunities available to people with learning difficulties. It aims not only to understand the contexts and experiences of this significant minority but also, through the analysis of the group specifically marginalized in a Learning Society, to understand the nature of that type of society more generally.Less

Investigation and Improvement

Stephen Conway

in Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Similarities, Connections, Identities

This chapter examines the British and Irish involvement in a European community of schoalrs and intellectuals, and how scholarship itself might help to further European consciousness. It looks first ... More

This chapter examines the British and Irish involvement in a European community of schoalrs and intellectuals, and how scholarship itself might help to further European consciousness. It looks first at the infrastructure of inteleectual exchange — especially universities and learned societies in Britain, Ireland, and on the Continent, but also at the periodicals designed to publicize the findings of the ‘Republic of Letters’, and the role of the newspaper press and translations of French-language texts in bringing new thinking to a wider audience. Attention is then turned to the role of certain individuals, culminating in a brief study of the English and European dimensions of the life and work of the philosopher and jurisprudent, Jeremy BenthamLess

Conclusion: Implications of different versions of the Learning Society for people with learning difficulties

Sheila Riddell, Stephen Baron, and Alastair Wilson

in The Learning Society and people with learning difficulties

This chapter considers the extent to which the human-capital, social-capital, and social-control versions of a Learning Society are in evidence, and their implications for people with learning ... More

This chapter considers the extent to which the human-capital, social-capital, and social-control versions of a Learning Society are in evidence, and their implications for people with learning difficulties. It concludes by suggesting some more fruitful directions for the Learning Society of the future that might enable it to be an inclusive rather than exclusive force. The chapter notes that a large part of the argument of this book has been that, for people with learning difficulties, lifelong learning has failed to deliver social inclusion. It believes that there are ways of envisioning a Learning Society for people with learning difficulties which offer a high-quality general education, appropriate vocational training, and a job (or series of jobs) worthy of a human being, while allowing continued participation in education and training throughout those people's lives.Less

Social connections and lifelong learning

John Field

in Social capital and lifelong learning

This chapter examines the idea of both social capital and lifelong learning, and evaluates the relationship between them. It does so in the context of the notion of the learning society, along with ... More

This chapter examines the idea of both social capital and lifelong learning, and evaluates the relationship between them. It does so in the context of the notion of the learning society, along with such related ideas as the learning region, the learning city, and the learning organization. The chapter notes that what all these ideas have in common is the belief that the architecture of people's relationships with one another, and the quality of the learning they undertake, are fundamentally linked, and that the two can be harnessed to one another in a mutually beneficial manner. It provides an account of current debates over the social contexts of adult learning. Next, the chapter elaborates the concept of social capital, which has developed rapidly across the social sciences. It then analyses the ways in which social capital and adult learning might be related to one another. The chapter concludes by outlining a hypothetical taxonomy of possible relationships.Less

Networks, schooling and learning in adult life: interview evidence

John Field

in Social capital and lifelong learning

This chapter analyses empirical evidence on the connection between people's networks and both their informal and formal learning. It examines the findings of a field-based study of adult learning and ... More

This chapter analyses empirical evidence on the connection between people's networks and both their informal and formal learning. It examines the findings of a field-based study of adult learning and social capital in Northern Ireland. The chapter provides an evaluation of interview data gathered in the course of a research project funded through the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)'s Learning Society Programme.Less