"The people who founded the Working Men's College understood all this very well. The working men for whom this institution was created had a thirst for education in a way we can scarcely imagine today. It was not to pass examinations and qualify for better wages nor to raise themselves into a higher social class—though these are respectable ambitions and no doubt many of those early students felt them—but to get at knowledge for its own sake because without it their existence would be less worth to them, that the working classes demanded education and got it. This was part of the good life, and they were not to be denied it. To read and write, to borrow books and debate, to study the sciences and learn a foreign tongue—all these were so many steps not of economic advancement but of human dignity."
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Members of the Parliament of the United KingdomPolitical leadersPoets from EnglandPeople from BirminghamAnglicans from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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Speech to the Working Men's College, St. Pancras (14 December 1963), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid: The Thinking of Enoch Powell (1965), p. 41
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Enoch_Powell
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Enoch Powell
politician, linguist, poet
1912 – 1998 · United Kingdom
John Enoch Powell (16 June 1912 – 8 February 1998) was a British politician, classical scholar, author, linguist, soldier, philologist, and poet. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament (1950–1974), then Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP (1974–1987), and was Minister of Health (1960–1963).
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