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Institute of Continuing Education (ICE)

 

The Institute of Continuing Education’s accessible programme of part-time adult learning pre-dates Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. Inside ICE digs into the Institute’s history and shows how its founders may have been 150 years ahead of their time.

Earning the right to learn

Professor James Stuart often gets the credit as the father of ‘University Extension’, as it was known, but it was two Victorian suffragists, Anne Clough and Josephine Butler, who paved the way for Stuart’s opportunity.

Clough’s campaigning led to the creation of the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women in 1867, of which Butler was President and where Stuart was asked to lecture. Stuart, a University of Cambridge scientist, took his lectures across the towns of England anticipating 30 students would sign up – he got 300.

The University of Cambridge, forced to take note, sanctioned Stuart to create the Local Lectures Syndicate in 1873, from which ICE was born. It was, perhaps, the right time and place. Calls for women to be given the vote and receive better education, supported by key thinkers like J.S. Mill, were growing alongside the more general demand for skilled workers encouraged by the Second Industrial Revolution.

Learning the right to earn

This year, we have had over 6000 student enrolments on ICE courses and the foundations that Clough, Butler and Stuart laid are even more essential at the start of a Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Traditional Universities have operated on the principle that those earning degrees at age 21 are set up with the skills to steer their careers for life. But today’s skills have a short shelf-life and, whether you relish or rail against the prospect, the expectation of 100-year lives will probably mean working into your 80s.

Continuous learning is so vital to our world that it forms part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Alongside CEOs and CFOs, businesses now employ CLOs – Chief Learning Officers – to ensure talented staff can adapt and be retained as old knowledge becomes redundant and technology takes on tasks once considered highly skilled.

Our future will require us to guide people towards learning throughout their lives, and educational institutions across the world are beginning to adapt their fixed, three-year model to meet the more flexible, ongoing development essential for our rapidly changing society. Thanks to the legacy created by Anne Clough, Josephine Butler and James Stuart, ICE has always been committed to helping adults learn and live in tandem.

Learn more

Find out about ICE’s programme of part-time courses at: www.ice.cam.ac.uk/courses

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This article was originally published as part of the 2019 Michaelmas edition of Inside ICE. Updated March 2021.

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