LONDON ADAPTS TRADES’ SCHOOL TO ADULT NEEDS

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6867, 23 March 1929, Page 4

LONDON ADAPTS TRADES’ SCHOOL TO ADULT NEEDS

RENAL INSTITUTION HAS BEEN RECONDITIONED AND ADAPTED FOR CULTURAL PURPOSES. LONDON, Feb. 9. How university graduates, even those of distinguished attainments are learning for the first time how to look at pictures and how to listen to music in tho literary institutes of London was brought out recently when the City Literary Institute was opened by the Lord Mayor, in Goldsmith Street, Drury Lane. The new institute was formerly an industrial school. It had been lying derelict for some years, and now. having been reconditioned at a cost of between £IO,OOO and £20,000, has been adapted for cultural studies for adult students. Tho membership of the institute is already over 4000 men and women, and there is a staff of 120 lecturers.

The institute is one of 200 part time educational institutions in London which, under the auspices of the London County Council, provide educational facilities for people of all tastes and all ages. To get over the difficulties of accommodation the expedient was adopted of organising lectures inside the offices vacated by city workers, and tbo principal of the institute looked back with fond recollection on a little group of 13 students who came together in the General Post Office North for 10 weeks during the summer of 1921 to discuss economic problems, and laid tbe foundation of the present widespread organisation. The students of the City Literary Institute, and indeed those of any of the Council’s other literary institutes—there are 12 in all—are not spoking oportunitios for further education in order to use them for purposes of material profit; they aro seeking them •that they may develop a fuller appreciation of “tho finer values of life,” and they are finding them in thoso institutes. . The curriculm of a literary institute is not imposed by tho authority. It is worked out in accordance with the wishes of the students themselves; it presents intellectual pleasure in which thousands of men and women find relief from their ordinary business lives. Tho students are not necessarily uneducated men and women. Many of them have enjoyed excellent educational opportunities, and now seek to extend the field of their interests. The curricula of tho institutes . are rapidly expanding. True to their ideal of adhering to a non-vocational basis and supplying general culture they include a wide range of liberal and educational studies and interests. Literature and literary criticism and language are the largest and most permanent single elements.