If education is all about getting a job, the humanities are left just to the rich

‘The utilitarian view of education is often presented as a means of advancing the needs of working-class students by training them for the job market.’ Illustration: Dom Mckenzie/The Observer

‘We rented a garret, for which we paid (I think) 25s a year, bought a few second-hand forms and desks, borrowed a few chairs from the people in the house, bought a shilling’s worth of coals… and started our college.”

So remembered Joseph Greenwood, a cloth cutter in a West Yorkshire mill, about how, in 1860, he helped set up Culloden College, one of hundreds of working-class mutual improvement societies in 19th-century Britain. “We had no men of position or education connected with us,” he added, “but several of the students who had made special study of some particular subject were appointed teachers, so that the teacher of one class might be a pupil in another.”