Our Earlier Outreach - Adult Education and the Arts in New England

Abstract

Prior to the establishment of a full-time adult education officer, A.W. Eberle, at the New England University College in 1948, it can be said that the adult learning provision in the general area of the arts was but piecemeal and not always seen for what it was, a series of volunteer organisations endeavouring to assist successively the various cultural and educative wants of the general northern society, particularly the working class, in the realm of 'useful knowledge'. The earliest activity, the establishment of Mechanics Institutes in the north saw one at Tamworth in 1856, another in Armidale in 1859, Tenterfield's in 1860, Hillgrove's in 1891, while Inverell on the slopes had theirs from 1867, and Grafton on the coast from 1870. Moves in the Church of England led to the local foundation in Armidale in 1898 of St John's College for Anglican theology students, the further north's first form of tertiary education. The institutes themselves had many useful functions - libraries, centres for democratic discussion and as mediating over the early change from a pastoral (frontier) society to one more concerned with local industry and technology. David Drummond, State Minister for Education from 1927 to 1941 had begun then the steady expansion of non-metropolitan education facilities, the building of the decentralised Armidale Teachers' College commencing in 1928. Much like pressure for other provision, came too from: the Country Women's Association, the Agricultural Bureau, Young Farmers' Clubs, the State Department of Agriculture, Mothers' Clubs, Parents and Citizens' Associations, etc. in the 1930s; the 1933 Committee of Enquiry into Technical Education; the Libraries Act of 1939; and from various visitors from North America following Dean John Russell's coming from Columbia University in 1928.