Oxford and Cambridge are among the most famous universities in the world, but the story of university education in the UK goes far beyond these two ancient institutions.
In this episode, I want to tell you the history of how universities developed in Britain. You’ll learn about medieval education, the expansion of higher education during the Industrial Revolution, and how universities were transformed in the 20th century.
At the same time, we’ll also focus on a special piece of grammar: the interrogative passive voice, or passive questions.
Passive questions can be a little difficult to use naturally in a podcast episode, so I’ve decided to make them the “signposts” of today’s story. Each new section will begin with a passive question, and we’ll see how this grammar structure works in real English while also talking about the history of university education in the UK.
Here is today’s grammar lesson!
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Interrogative Passive Voice: Grammar Lesson
When we make questions in the passive, we invert the subject and the auxiliary verb (be, was, were, will, is, etc.).
Structure:
[Helping Verb] + [Subject] + [Past Participle] (+ by + agent)?
- Active: Did the teacher correct the test?
- Passive: Was the test corrected (by the teacher)?
- Active: Is someone cleaning the office?
- Passive: Is the office being cleaned?
- Active: Will someone announce the results?
- Passive: Will the results be announced?
You can also use who, what, when, where, how, why in passive questions.
- When was the law introduced? (= When did someone introduce the law?)
- Where was democracy first practiced? (= In which place did people first practice democracy?)
- How were the pyramids built? (= In what way did people build the pyramids?)
- Why was the decision made? (= For what reason did someone make the decision?)
We use passive questions when:
- We don’t know who did the action
- When was the castle built? (We don’t know the builders, but we care about the time.)
- The person/agent is not important
- How is paper recycled? (The process matters, not who does it.)
- The action itself is more important than the doer
- Why was the law changed? (Focus on the reason, not the politician.)
- The doer is obvious from context
- Was the suspect arrested? (Obviously, by the police.)
Medieval Beginnings of Universities
[00:04:00] Universities are very old, but they haven’t always been around.
In fact, where were the first European universities founded?
If we look back to the Middle Ages, the earliest universities were established in places like Bologna, Paris and Oxford. These institutions became places and examples of learning across Europe and inspired other countries to follow.
How were people educated in England before universities existed?
This is a question I used to think about often.
For the most part, knowledge was passed on in monasteries and cathedral schools. Young people, often those who were going to become priests or study for the church were taught to read and write Latin. They were taught to study scripture and they were also taught about religious [00:05:00] traditions.
Ordinary people rarely received formal education. Those higher levels of learning were restricted to the church, people in the church.
This is actually one of the reasons behind England’s strange school names.
In the UK, “public school” does not mean a school for the public like it does in the US. Instead, public schools are some of the most expensive and elite private schools in the UK.
Why? Well, they were founded at a time when education was just for people becoming priests. The first public school in the UK was founded a thousand years ago.
If you wanted to educate your child, but you didn’t want your child to be a priest or have a life in a monastery, there were no schools. You had to hire a tutor.
Public schools were set up to teach the public, not just future priests, [00:06:00] but this didn’t mean they were free.
When was Oxford University founded?
Well, Oxford began to grow as a center of study in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. By around the year 1200 teaching in the town of Oxford was established, and students were moving there in relatively large numbers.
This makes Oxford the oldest university in the English speaking world.
But how was knowledge actually taught in the Middle Ages?
Think about university today. You usually need to read a lot of articles, books, and textbooks. But this was not possible a thousand years ago.
Books were very scarce, expensive, and they were copied by hand. So the main method of teaching was lectures. A teacher would read aloud from a Latin text and students would listen, memorize and debate the [00:07:00] meaning.
The church had an enormous influence on what was taught at university. Theology, philosophy, and classics, so Latin and Greek, formed the foundation of most medieval education.
And who was allowed to study?
Certainly not everyone. Only men could attend and most came from wealthy backgrounds. Education was a privilege for the few, often those preparing for a career in the church or positions of power in society.
Expansion & Rivalries
While Oxford was the first university in England. You have probably also heard of Cambridge too.
Why was Cambridge University founded?
Oxford had grown into a bustling center of learning by the early 13th century. But with so many students in one town, tensions were growing.
In the year 1209, [00:08:00] after a serious dispute between local residents and scholars, a group of Oxford students and teachers left the city. They were welcomed in the town of Cambridge, and so a new university was born.
From its very beginning, Cambridge started developing traditions that were, in some ways, similar to Oxford, but in other ways would set it apart from its older neighbor.
And Cambridge and Oxford have had a rivalry since its founding.
How were students organized in these early universities?
Medieval universities weren’t like the schools, the universities we know today. Students were grouped into colleges or halls, which were more like smaller communities than classrooms. They lived, ate and studied together with tutors all in their same college.
There is still a legacy of this today in British universities, especially Oxford and [00:09:00] Cambridge, but some other ones, I think perhaps St. Andrews in Scotland and Durham in the north of England. They still have a collegiate system where when you enter the university, you are assigned to a college.
How was the rivalry expressed between Oxford and Cambridge?
Competition was of course, inevitable. Students and scholars often boasted about their own university and debates could become intense. Sometimes in the past there were even conflicts on the streets of the towns themselves, people fighting.
Over the centuries, the rivalry evolved into traditions like the famous boat race, where both universities compete for prestige and honor. Oxford and Cambridge regularly have varsity sports games, rugby games, cricket games, boat races.
19th Century Reforms
When were women first admitted to universities in the UK?
For centuries, higher education had been reserved almost [00:10:00] entirely for men. But in the 19th century, pressure for change began to grow.
In 1868, the University of London became the first British University to allow women to enroll. Colleges for women were established at Oxford and Cambridge (although they weren’t allowed to graduate in the same way as men until 1920 and 1948 respectively).
It took even longer for women to have access on the same terms as men across all English universities.
So far, I’ve only really mentioned Oxford and Cambridge, but there are a lot more universities in the UK today.
What new universities were established during the Industrial Revolution?
New universities, often called red brick universities, were founded in industrial towns such as Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds.
These institutions were designed to meet the needs of a [00:11:00] growing society. There were now more people in these industrial towns and so universities were required.
How was teaching adapted to meet new demands?
Subjects were expanded beyond the traditional focus on theology, philosophy, and classics.
Science and technical subjects became more popular. Research also began to take a central role. Students were not only expected to learn, established knowledge, but also contribute to it.
This is where the idea of a student working in a research environment came from. You want your teachers to be actively researching, not just reading from old copies of the Bible or old copies of Greek philosophy.
Instead thinking themselves, writing their own books, writing their own papers, and starting to research things, discover new things.
Laboratories and scientific societies were set up to [00:12:00] research and work, not just study.
Who benefited from these reforms and new universities?
Well, it did create more opportunities for talented students from non-traditional backgrounds.
The expansion of new universities meant that education was slowly moving towards a more inclusive model, but by no means was it inclusive. Many of these universities accepted students primarily from the top private schools and maybe top grammar schools in the UK.
But for normal working class people, university was often out of reach.
20th Century & Mass Education
How was university education expanded after World War II?
The post-war period brought a big transformation. Universities were no longer just for elite people. Government reforms were introduced to expand access and funding was provided to support talented students from [00:13:00] working class families.
There were now more scholarships and grants and policies ensured that higher education could be pursued by far more people than ever before.
In the 1960s, some other famous universities were also founded. Places like Warwick University, which is now one of the world’s top universities, specifically in maths and economics and business, but it’s relatively young. It was only founded in the 1960s.
When were polytechnics turned into universities?
Another significant change came in 1992 when polytechnics, which were institutions that focused on practical or vocational education, were granted full university status.
This reform increased the number of universities across the UK. It might have even tripled the amount of universities in the UK.
The older universities tend to still be more prestigious and [00:14:00] famous. You can often tell a former Polytechnic College that turned into a university by its name. It will be named something like Metropolitan or City.
For example, the University of Manchester is the very prestigious university while Manchester Metropolitan is a former polytechnic school.
Universities like University of Leeds, University of Nottingham, University of Edinburgh, University of London. These tend to be the better, more difficult to enter universities with higher quality of teaching and higher quality of students as well.
Whereas universities like Nottingham Trent, or Leeds Beckett or London City or London Metropolitan, these kinds of universities tend to be a bit easier to get into. They might offer non-academic subjects.
So for example, if you want to study film directing, you probably can’t do that at [00:15:00] Oxford. It’s probably not a subject Oxford offers, whereas a former Polytechnic University might offer that.
So if you’re going to study in the UK, some of you listening to this might want to study at university in the UK, I would really recommend looking at the prestige and quality of education at the school you want to attend.
If you are paying a lot of money, international student fees, to go to a relatively bad British university, it might just be a waste of money because people in the UK discriminate in many cases against lower reputation universities.
How was technology changing university life?
By the late 20th century, technology began to influence teaching and research. Laboratories, libraries, lecture halls were all equipped with new tools. And then computers and digital resources have transformed the way universities taught, how students learned and how research was [00:16:00] conducted.
Today and the Future
How is higher education funded today?
Today, university education in the UK is funded in a very different way than it was just a few decades ago.
Now we have to pay tuition fees. It used to be free to attend university in the UK. Then from the 1990s until the 2010s, it was about £3000 a year to attend university and now it is over £9,000.
These tuition fees are often paid with loans, government backed loans. The loans allow access to higher education to more people, including me. I would never have been able to afford £9,000 a year, plus living costs to go to university.
But they also mean that many graduates begin their careers carrying significant debt. Including me.
Where are international students recruited from?
Universities in the UK welcome students from all around the world. [00:17:00] Large numbers of students come from China and India, Europe, and other countries.
In fact, international students have become very, very important to how many British universities operate today. Universities are often limited in how many UK based students they can recruit and how much they can charge for UK based students. So they rely on international students to make money.
And this relates to my previous point. If you are from perhaps a country like China or India and you have an ambition to study in the UK, do not trust what the universities are telling you.
Often they’re lying. Often they’re not very good. They just rely on international students. The lower ranked universities in the UK only exist because they can convince international students to attend their universities and pay the much higher tuition fees.
How has access changed to [00:18:00] university in recent decades?
Although challenges remain, access has expanded significantly. More students from diverse social backgrounds are now entering higher education in the UK.
Efforts to encourage the participation of underrepresented groups have often been widely implemented.
This is what I used to do at university. I worked for the widening participation department for two, two and a half years.
So I think university has definitely become a much more diverse and inclusive experience, but there are lots of inequalities and problems in the UK system.
It’s incredibly expensive now. There’s a lot of debt. University education has become lower quality. And universities themselves are struggling with funding and finance.
Final Thought
From the first scholars gathering in Oxford and Cambridge, to the expansion of new universities during the Industrial Revolution, to the global, technology-driven institutions of today, higher education in the UK has been constantly transformed.
Throughout this episode, you’ve heard many examples of the interrogative passive voice, or passive questions, guiding our story. Remember: we use the passive when the action is more important than the person doing it, when the doer is unknown, or when it doesn’t matter who exactly was responsible.
In this episode, the passive questions have helped us explore history while also practicing grammar.
Listen again to these examples:
- When was Oxford University founded?
- How was knowledge taught in the Middle Ages?
- When were women first admitted to universities?
- How is higher education funded today?
In each case, the focus is on the action or event, not on who did it.
Try making your own passive questions about history, your culture, or even events in your own life.
What do you think?
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