Chapter Eight The Whole Contention Concerning the Workers’ Educational Association
The history of education, like literary history, has been written mainly from the perspective of the suppliers rather than the consumers. The scholarly spotlight has focused on teachers and administrators, bureaucrats and theorists, academic institutions and curricular policy. We have seen that a dramatically different history of primary education emerges when we shift our attention to the students; this perspective can also produce a new history of adult education. The Workers’ Educational Association and Ruskin College were the most influential continuing education movements in twentieth-century Britain, and their institutional histories have been thoroughly chronicled. But here we pose different questions. Who were the students? Why did they enroll? What were their intellectual goals? What cultural equipment did they bring to their classes? What went on inside the classroom? Most importantly, how, if at all, did the WEA and Ruskin College change the lives and minds of its students?
All these issues are relevant to a controversy that erupted early in the twentieth century and continues today, a question that can only be resolved by studying WEA and Ruskin College students at close range. According to Marxist critics, these institutions played an important role in steering the British working class away from Marxism. Roger Fieldhouse has argued that the WEA’s emphasis on objective scholarship and open-mindedness “could have the effect of neutralising some students’ commitments or beliefs and integrating them into the hegemonic national culture.”1 As he sees it, “For all its occasional lapses, the adult education movement was welcomed by the establishment as a bulwark against revolutionism, a moderating influence and a form of social control. . . . It attracted potential working class activists and leaders by its radical image, but diverted them from the communist or revolutionary politics to which they might otherwise have been drawn.”2 Stuart Macintyre makes much the same point, with more subtlety:
Adult education is not an ideological neutral activity whose political character simply reflects the dispositions of teacher and student. Rather, the development of adult education in the inter-war years was an integral aspect of official social policy. . . . The 1917 Commissions into Industrial Unrest . . . urged the provision of civic education in order to rectify the effects of Marxist classes. The WEA was the chief instrument of this state policy of adult education. In making this assertion, I do not mean to impugn the honesty of [A. D.] Lindsay, [R. H.] Tawney and others sympathetic to the labour movement who laboured in this field. It is their educational objective that lends itself to this characterisation. In essence the mission of the WEA was to break down the isolation of working-class students and integrate them in a national culture; in political terms the proletarian intellectual was encouraged to widen his narrow class horizons for a broader progressive polity; in cultural terms the old, dogmatic, autodidact knowledge was discredited in light of university studies.3
The weakness in this argument is a weakness common in theories of social control: it focuses on the controllers rather than the people who are supposed to be controlled. Fieldhouse in particular concentrates on discerning the intentions of educational officials and WEA tutors: his research is thorough but ultimately misdirected. Although Board of Education inspectors and Tory-dominated councils did occasionally accuse the WEA of teaching leftist propaganda, the latter generally stood up to that kind of pressure.4 In the end, Fieldhouse has to concede that “there was little evidence of heavy censorship or control.” He does produce what seems to be a smoking gun in the form of a 1925 memorandum by Lord Eustace Percy, president of the Board of Education:
In adult education there is a continual struggle between the Universities and those bodies, like the Workers’ Educational Association, who work with the Universities, on the one hand, and the Communist or semi-Communist Labour Colleges on the other. Hitherto the Workers’ Educational Association and the University Extension people have been able to make headway against these undesirable propagandists because, largely owing to Government assistance, they can offer better facilities. On the whole, too, I think the education that they do offer is extraordinarily useful. . . . If we force the WEA and the Universities to cut down their work we shall not choke off the demand for local classes which is extraordinarily strong in all parts of the country, but we shall open a wide door to the Labour Colleges, and I believe that the result will be deplorable. In fact my own view is that £100,000 spent annually on this kind of work, properly controlled, would be about the best police expenditure we could indulge in . . . .5
But when we ask what the students were writing and thinking, it becomes apparent that Lord Percy is irrelevant to this discussion. He could not regulate them or their teachers. If he did fund the WEA as agent for social control, he was wasting the taxpayers’ money.
Ruskin Hall was founded in 1899 by three Americans: Walter and Anne Vrooman, a philanthropic couple, and Charles Beard, who would later make a brilliant career as an iconoclastic historian. The principal was Dennis Hird, a former Anglican minister, temperance advocate, and socialist activist. Besides the Vroomans, Ruskin Hall garnered financial support from other well-to-do supporters and from trade unions. Based in Oxford, it offered correspondence courses, which in their first two years enrolled 1,800 students. But it was primarily a residential college: tuition and board were only £31 a year, though students had to do all the housecleaning and cooking. It affiliated with the WEA, and both dedicated themselves to offering a nonideological liberal education to working-class students in cooperation with the universities. Oxford academics lectured at Ruskin and served on its governing council, though it remained independent of the university.
By 1907, after it had been rechristened Ruskin College, political fissures were beginning to appear. The student body was becoming increasingly Marxist, and they could get large helpings of Marxism in Hird’s classes in sociology. But H. B. Lees Smith, lecturer in economics, was an orthodox apostle of the free market. He dismissed Marx’s labor theory of value, arguing that the wages offered in the marketplace (even in sweatshops) represented the true and fair value of the worker’s labor, and could not be raised by unions or legislation without creating unemployment. Worse, he proposed to put some backbone into Ruskin’s unstructured curriculum, introducing examinations, assigning more essays, and discontinuing Hird’s sociology lectures. Nearly unanimous student protests preserved Hird’s course, and most of the students refused to take the first exams.
Meanwhile, an Oxford-WEA joint committee was exploring proposals to allow Ruskin students to take Oxford diplomas in applied economics and politics. From the perspective of university representatives, this was a well-intentioned offer to open up Oxford to workingmen. The militant students, however, were suspicious: they perceived a plot by a bourgeois university to absorb a potentially troublesome working-class college and indoctrinate its students in capitalist ideology. In October 1908 the student rebels and their supporters organized themselves into the Plebs League, with a magazine to be edited by Hird. A struggle for control of the college ended with Hird’s forced retirement, whereupon the majority of students voted to boycott classes: they demanded Hird’s reinstatement and the dismissal of two anti-Marxist lecturers. The governors responded by shutting down Ruskin for two weeks, then readmitting only those students who signed a pledge to obey college regulations.
Some students, disgusted with the militants’ disruptive tactics, remained with Ruskin College. Others seceded in August 1909, when the Plebs League founded the Central Labour College (CLC) in Oxford, with Hird as its warden. The CLC proclaimed that what distinguished it from Ruskin College and the WEA was “Independence in Working-Class Education”—it would have no truck with universities that served the capitalists, and it frankly repudiated “impartial” liberal education for Marxist indoctrination. Relocated to London, the CLC enjoyed financial support from some unions which had backed Ruskin College, particularly the railwaymen’s union and the South Wales Miners’ Federation. To bring Marxist education to the rest of the country, the National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC) was set up in 1921. The CLC and NCLC were therefore competing for the same students and the same trade union subsidies that went to Ruskin College and the WEA, with the result that the ideological differences between the two camps were magnified (as they always are in academia) by battles over enrollment and resources.
Ruskin College quickly recovered from its crisis and successfully prepared many of its students for the university diploma in economics and political science. Its governing council was reconstituted to include only representatives of working-class organizations: trade unions, Co-operative societies, and the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union.6 The college continued to attract militant (though not humorless) students, who sang to the tune of “Keep the Home Fires Burning”:
Put the thing through quickly,
Wage the class war slickly,
Hang the rich to lampposts high—but don’t hang me.
Stick to Marx, my hearties,
Damn the Labour Party,
Keep the hell fires burning bright for the bourgeoisie!7
In the late 1930s Henry Smith, a resident tutor in economics, still had to deal with confrontational Communist students, though he had some sympathy with their politics. Their object was (still) “to discredit the teaching of anything but Marxism and to win converts,” he recalled. “During the war I met a Cambridge don, a Communist Party member, who told me that he had written the admission essay for one of the cell, with mistakes carefully inserted.”8 As that last incident suggests, the question of whether there was enough Marx in the Ruskin curriculum was by then moot: students could now learn Marxism from the Oxford faculty. The same workingmen who, in 1920, regarded universities as ruling-class institutions, were often astonished by the hard leftism of the Oxbridge graduates they met in adult classes in 1946.9 By then, of thirty-one adult education tutors based at Oxford University, at least ten (according to Roger Fieldhouse) and perhaps as many as fifteen were Communist Party members or fellow travelers. Now it was the students’ turn to complain of Marxist indoctrination.10 It was a neat reversal of the 1908 crisis, as well as a measure of changing intellectual trends.
One might see here enacted on a miniature stage the political struggles that would rock universities throughout the Western world sixty years later. Neither was purely a product of ideology. One Ruskin graduate complained that nothing was more grueling than “attempting to wade through a chapter of Marx. . . . For some students the ordeal would be too much and copies of Marx would be thrown across bedrooms.” The Ruskin protest may have been more a rebellion against the study load, the housekeeping chores, and the frictions that naturally arose when poor workingmen were cast among the gilded youth of Oxford, at a time when only one percent of undergraduates came from the working class.11 Moreover, Ruskin students were grown men and trade union activists, who would not tolerate the disciplinary rules applied to adolescent undergraduates. (Women were not admitted until 1919.)
In fact the college could offer a sophisticated political education for Marxists like barber John Paton (b. 1886). He testified that a Ruskin correspondence course trained him in constructing a more organized frame of mind without dampening his political passions. (He went on to found the Glasgow Anarchist Group and became general secretary of the Independent Labour Party.)
Many of the books I’d already read but I was coming to them now under guidance, and seeing them from new and unsuspected angles. . . . I was acquiring knowledge now under discipline, and finding, while doing it, that the masses of undigested, unselected facts, with which my retentive memory teemed, were falling into form and place and becoming altogether more formidable weapons in my armoury. The fear so often expressed that the “tendentious teaching” of Ruskin College destroyed a revolutionary and created instead a spineless politician, was obviously groundless in my case. I ended more revolutionary than I began.12
Engineer George Hodgkinson (b. 1893), a militant shop steward who read Marcus Aurelius during a sit-down strike, likewise saw no conflict between liberal education and radical politics. For him a lecture on Dante “was a philosophical breeding ground in which grew up a spirit of revolt against capitalist competitive society which pitted man against man and put him at no higher level than the beasts of the field.” He passed up a partnership in a new industrial company to enter Ruskin College. Though he adored the spires of Oxford, they only made capitalism seem worse by comparison, and highlighted the class barriers to education: “For me, Oxford had clearly defined what Disraeli called the ‘two nations,’ that the best education was a near monopoly and unless socialists could capture the Town and County Halls, the chances to open up the highway from the elementary schools to the Universities would be minimal.”13
Many Ruskin students, like Welsh miner Jack Lawson, jumped at the chance to attend Oxford lectures. “We were never allowed to forget that we lived in a hostile centre,” he admitted, but they did not withdraw into an embittered ghetto. They socialized with undergraduates who were friends of the working class, and cheerfully stepped into the ring with those who were not:
We were not cast down, but rather enjoyed the situation. In fact, we prided ourselves that we were not as other men, and sought means of showing it. We did not wear cap and gown, but rather delighted in emphasising the difference by deliberately wearing the dingiest clothes. We fixed up Socialist meetings at the Martyr’s Memorial, well knowing that it would precipitate a conflict with masses of undergraduates, who would certainly regard the meeting as a challenge and joyously accept it. We used the most lurid language about the capitalist class, and pointedly included Oxford University, its Fellows, proctors, and undergraduates, in that class. I remember how one of our men, who spoke with a Cockney accent, at one meeting, with a sweep of the arms, included the assembled undergrads as the bourgeoisie. But he called it Bow-jer-wow-sie. Every time he said “Bow-jer-wow-sie” there was a bow-wow-wow like the bark of a dog from the men in cap and gown. The end of it was a free fight, flying Ruskin men, and the windows of the College smashed with bricks. That recurred fairly often.
Lawson’s academic background, which consisted of reading his way through a miners’ library, was sufficient to make him feel at home at Oxford:
Did we not stand on ground made sacred by Sir Walter Scott and see on the hill the trees associated with Arnold’s “Scholar Gipsy”? Could we not wander in “the Broad” and imagine where Jude the Obscure had died reciting his Litany of Pessimism from Job, “Let the day be blotted out when it was said a man child is born”? Lincoln College spoke to us of Wesley; University of Shelley; and we walked with Addison in Magdalen . . . . If we trod this ground in shabby clothes, it was worth it, for the things and people we had read about as in a far-off time and distant land had become real and living to us. There was no hardship, for we companied in spirit with the great of the earth, and many of them had been poorer than we.14
Jack Ashley (b. 1922) found that liberal studies at Ruskin College were directly relevant to his work as a trade unionist and ILP activist: “Although I was impatient to study current controversies, rather than the ancient ones of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates, I appreciated that these gave philosophical depth and understanding to fundamental political problems of all times.” He despised Communist dogmatism as much as he enjoyed teachers who used shock treatment to provoke debate. (“The Peterloo Massacre? But only a few old men and a dog were killed that day, so I don’t know why they call it a massacre.”) Ashley was less prepared for Ruskin than most of the students, having read only two books since leaving school: Jack London’s The Iron Heel and the regulations of the Widnes Town Council. But principal Lionel Elvin “appreciated the profound difficulties facing working-class students”:
When I stumbled through the intricacies of the political theories of Marx, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke and T. H. Green, he marked my work frankly yet gave encouragement . . . . He was an excellent teacher, genuinely interested in discussing ideas and persuading students to express their own. It was rather like boxing with a far superior opponent who wants to encourage you and will not take advantage of his greater skill. Yet he never patronised or pretended ignorance; he treated students as his equals in intelligence, if not in knowledge.15
James Sexton, the dockworkers’ MP, served on the Management Committee of Ruskin College, “whose products—let it be frankly admitted—varied a good deal when put to the test in the world.” Some, like Jack Lawson, served the cause of labor admirably. Some were lockstep Marxists, and to others “Oxford imparted what would to-day be called a ‘superiority complex’ that simply made them unmitigated snobs, with a strong dislike for the work to which they had to go to when they left the University.”16 The only generalization one can make about Ruskin graduates is that they were not politically emasculated.
The Ruskin rebels as well defy easy categorization. They included men like Frank Hodges (b. 1887), future general secretary of the Miners’ Federation, who by no means repudiated liberal education or Oxford University. Down in the pits, he had read the complete works of Shakespeare by an old safety lamp until the print was smudged beyond legibility: “The plays stirred my imagination, while the sonnets enlivened my emotions in an indescribable manner.” At Oxford he noted well the hostility of undergraduates toward Ruskin men, but he applauded the Oxford Union for its tradition of fair play, and he thoroughly enjoyed the university, “which for the rest of my life I shall remember with generous affection.” Even while studying at the breakaway Central Labour College, he was happy to accept invitations to tea from curious Oxford society ladies: “Whilst proceeding to discuss in our delightfully dogmatic fashion the right of the State to confiscate the capitalist system, we never allowed the discussion to prevent us from confiscating all the glorious eatables that were laid before us.”17
Another of the Ruskin rebels, Wil John Edwards, offered a remarkable insight into their mentality, which could be more ambivalent than their professed Marxism might suggest. He came from a Welsh valley where miners combined a profound hostility to capitalists with a love of books, yet did not subject literature to political tests. A militant collier might “quote poetry to suit his politics; indeed, he often did so underground where he might be four hundred yards below criticism; but . . . when I heard him years later talking to an audience in the Workmen’s Hall, this bias carried no weight. . . . He appreciated the true value of verse he quoted with no reference whatever to politics.” On Saturdays Edwards browsed the Rationalist Press Association bookstall, but not only for its secularist propaganda: there he bought penny paperbacks of Julius Caesar, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and Fitzgerald’s Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam. He spent Sundays reading through the Miners’ Library, though his sister thought it a sinful distraction from chapel.
It was in the pits—“the centre of culture amongst the miners”—that Edwards was introduced to Karl Marx. None of the miners could really understand him or satisfactorily explain the labor theory of value, but that did not limit their enthusiasm: “Marx was a prophet of the revolution; what he said went, and it could hardly matter where.” Following closely on the heels of the 1904 Welsh evangelical revival, Edwards’s Marxism became
a crusade demanding all the devotion of a religion. It was less a political philosophy than a deeply spiritual cult . . . . I am bound to admit that in those days I was swayed more by emotion than understanding . . . . I was a socialist, but if anyone had asked me why I was a socialist, I could not have given a clear explanation. I was looking for a precisely drawn creed, perhaps for a gospel, something I could grip mentally.
At first, a liberal education appeared to be an essential part of the revolutionary struggle. “The opposing side could afford to buy the use of clever minds”: obviously the workers had to educate themselves so that, “when the time came, the blind would not be led by the blind.” Besides, his grievance against capitalism was that it condemned miners to intellectual as well as economic poverty, a life “without culture and without beauty.” When he won a scholarship to Ruskin College, he leapt at the chance. Some of the women in his family, fearing that he would cease to support them, tried to prevent his going by kidnapping his desk, his bicycle, and his only two suits.
The moment he arrived at Oxford (with two new suits bought on credit) he was wrenched both ways. “What attracted me so much was the promised peace which would, I was certain, enfold my days—days of quiet reading and study, days of placid companionship with others who loved books as I loved books,” he remembered. “There would be no disputes, no fierce arguments and clashing of temperaments, no strikes nor threats of strikes: the days of quiet study would be joined by nights of restful peace in the shadow of the spires of Oxford; and there would be delightful walks in the quadrangles.” But how could that be reconciled with the solemn pledge that he and other Ruskin students had made: that their education “was never meant to be a relish or even a privilege; it was part of a grim plan whose object was the uplift of the workers of our country”? Moreover, his first experience of the university was precisely what John Ruskin had condemned as a monstrosity of industrial capitalism: the railway station. “Ugly exploitation which had so cruelly scarred the face of my lovely valley had placed a dirty hand on Oxford too,” he mourned. “I did not expect that grinding of brakes, hissing of steam and all the noise which every other station can offer.” The result was not a rejection of the university, but inner conflict and guilt:
I think we all secretly found Oxford a dream which had come true, even if we might talk contemptuously of Oxford as a nursery of privilege. We were on the threshold of a new world, a strange new world to us and a delightful one: Candide in his Eldorado was not more enchanted even if our Eldorado offered a less placid existence than his. . . . The spires and quadrangles of my dreams were there . . ., and as satisfying in their warm loveliness as I had known they would be. To me they told a love story, the story of a craftsman’s devotion to his work: and I felt I could picture the faces of those early craftsmen when, at last, the great tapering spires they had built with their small hands might be left alone to point upwards for ever. All this was so different from the drab and uniform structure of our industrial villages; so different, indeed, that, in my mind, Oxford has never lost a quality of unreality.
At Ruskin he enjoyed complete freedom to read and study, but in college lectures “the first thing that struck me was the feeling that we were being treated as if we were children back again in an elementary school which needed only a cane to complete the picture.” His economics instructor was biased against socialism: one of Edwards’s papers was returned with the written comment “A jolly good essay spoilt by discussing the Marxian theory of Value.” When he asked to be excused from the instructor’s lectures, principal Dennis Hird told him that thirty-seven other students had applied for excuses already. In what was supposed to be a workingmen’s college, Welsh colliers did not care to be told that mineowners’ profits represented “the reward of ability.” One student, Noah Ablett, offered his own informal lectures on Marxist economics, over the objections of the college authorities.
In retrospect, Edwards conceded that Ruskin students,
very naturally, had been so concerned with the class struggle that it had become a part of us and a big enough part to crowd out any suspicion that any of our opponents might have a point of view. And how could we, with our background in those days, possibly see any other point of view than our own, that we as a class were being exploited, kept deep in the earth as the foundation of privilege?
Consequently, when Oxford officials made a sincere overture to Ruskin College—offering financial aid and opportunities to matriculate at the university proper—the students rejected it as a sellout. Edwards remembered well his Sunday school lessons, which taught him how the Emperor Constantine had coopted and corrupted Christianity. When he returned home, he removed the family Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress from the front room table and replaced them with The Communist Manifesto, The Origin of Species, and Das Kapital. A Plebs League activist, he taught a class in Marxian economics that attracted a dedicated cadre of students through the 1920s.
The difficulty, as Edwards admitted, was that his economic studies began to take on “the quality of mysticism in religions: invaluable to the elect and sometimes dangerous to the crowd.” Typical of the Ruskin rebels, he developed “a picture of myself as an emancipated human being standing proudly as such on the top of a hill, a wonderful production developed by biological promotion, one who could look down on the lesser animals as poor and rather endearing relations.” Occasionally that arrogance provoked a reaction. One Ruskin student, a fellow Welshman whose father had been killed in the mines, exploded when Edwards talked glibly of the inevitability of revolution: “Are you as Marx-mad as the rest of them in this confounded place? . . . Das Kapital is your Bible and Marx your Jehovah . . . . All the Marxians in the world cannot tell you what is going to happen in the valleys tomorrow, or next year.”
Edwards retained enough Christianity to be offended by Ruskin students who organized a mock revival meeting. When one of them prayed loudly for rain, he dumped a bucket of water on his head from a first-floor window. The weak point of all surrogate religions is that they can run up against their own crises of belief, and send their followers recoiling to the faiths they once abandoned. The failure of the 1921 coal strike and the 1926 General Strike, the emptiness of “mechanical materialism,” and the disillusioning realities of Soviet Communism all ultimately convinced Edwards “that there are factors in Marxism that can produce more suffering to innocent human beings than has ever been inflicted by the most savage dictators.”18
The Difficulty about That
Meanwhile, the Workers’ Educational Association had become embroiled in similar ideological battles. The successor to the mechanics’ institutes, the Working Men’s College, and the University Extension movement, the WEA was more successful than any of them in bringing higher education to working people. Founded by Albert Mansbridge in 1903, it enrolled 111,351 students by 1948–49. A self-governing, democratic, decentralized organization, it was supported by trade unions, co-operatives, political groups (mostly Labour, some Liberal), churches, and chapels. It sponsored university summer schools, rural rambles, art exhibitions, training courses for Sunday school teachers, and lectures on topics ranging from Shakespeare and Ruskin to first aid and child care.
The centerpiece of the WEA was the University Tutorial Class. Under that scheme, university-trained lecturers came to working-class communities to teach three-year courses, ostensibly at the university level. With a maximum of thirty-two students, each class met for twenty-four two-hour sessions each year. One hour of lecturing was followed by an hour of discussion, with fortnightly essays assigned. These courses were funded mainly by the universities, the Board of Education, and local educational authorities.
There is no question that the WEA aimed to meliorate class conflict. R. H. Tawney, president of the organization from 1928 to 1944, strove to educate British workers toward an Arnoldian ideal of a “common culture.” The WEA disavowed propaganda in favor of “impartial” and “nonpartisan” education, but it enthusiastically affirmed that the simple act of bringing university teachers and working people together in the same classroom had a political objective. Like Toynbee Hall and other settlement houses, WEA classes were designed to open up communications across class lines, to allay working-class distrust of universities, to educate the “educated classes” in the realities of proletarian life, and to train workers to exercise power in a democracy.
That policy soon drew fire from the far left. When Tawney launched the first tutorial class at Longton in 1908, his students included several members of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, who argued that his ideal of objective scholarship was designed to distract the workers from class warfare. In fact Tawney did what any conscientious teacher tries to do with dogmatic pupils: he suggested alternative points of view and defused confrontations. As one student remembered, “A pertinacious Marxian, arguing with the tutor, challenges point after point of his exposition, until at length baffled, but not defeated, the student retires from the tussle, saying to the tutor: ‘It’s no use; when I point my gun at you, you hop from twig to twig like a little bird’—and laughter comes to ease the strain.” After class there was tea and good fellowship, with teacher and students discussing philosophy and reciting Whitman and Matthew Arnold.19 In 1922 Board of Education inspectors confirmed that Tutorial Classes were indeed rubbing the rough edges off the most strident militants:
Whilst it is impossible to conceive anything more crude, more violent or more absurd, than some of the opinions expressed in the essays of a small proportion of students, the gradual effect of the combined influence of the lectures, the discussions, the reading, the discipline of writing down their thoughts and the criticisms of the tutors, comes out in the essays as the session proceeds. Expression becomes more chastened, judgments become more moderate, a sense of the complexity of the facts shows itself. . . . It is almost universally true that the effect upon students who remain in the classes is to make them reconsider their original crude generalisations, to make them aware of the complexity of the social and economic system in which they live, to make them more sceptical of ready-made nostrums, to introduce an element of cautiousness into their statesmanship.20
That was precisely what militant socialists dreaded. Rowland Kenney, the ILP journalist, accused Mansbridge of seducing workers into “the development of the Servile State”:
He refuses to see that the draining off of what brainy men the labour movement possesses, and the turning of these into university slimed prigs, is one of the most terrible wrongs a man can inflict upon the working classes. And so he innocently pursues his evil course. He nets in hundreds of striving workers, and inoculates them with the virus of university “culture,” and preaches a non-party, unsectarian doctrine which makes a fool of him every time he is lumped up against one of the brutal facts of our modern social system.21
(Apropos, a few years later Kenney would find himself working for the Ministry of Information and then for the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office.) Ethel Carnie, the proletarian novelist, warned that the WEA would “chloroform” the workingman:
After having had the best of his strength and brain power sapped during the day in the interest of the capitalist, in his limited time and valuable leisure, he is taken to look at his being exploited FROM EVERY POINT OF VIEW!. . . Why should I look on the fact that I am robbed, from “every point of view”? If a robber stole something valuable from me, I should not fall into a philosophical survey of the situation, but rush upon him, provided I was armed. . . . What brain power we have left after being exploited we had better spend in concentration on the narrow, rigid, and distinctly not impartial facts deduced from the experience of our own exploited class. Any other form of “looking around” will be similar in effect to riding in a razzle-dazzle at a fair.
WEA students found these assaults enormously condescending, and their responses should make anyone think twice before using the word “hegemony.” “Will Miss Carnie be good enough to show where the chloroforming process comes in?” shot back Lavena Saltonstall, a garment worker. “Greek art will never keep the workers from claiming their world; in fact, it will help them to realise what a stunted life they have hitherto led. Nothing that is beautiful will harm the workers.” Moreover:
The members of the tutorial classes are quite as able as herself to hear a lecture on industrial history, or economics, or Robert Browning, and remain quite sane. As a Socialist, as a trade unionist, as a suffragist—or a suffragette, if you like—I resent Miss Carnie’s suggestion that the WEA educational policy can ever make me forget the painful history of Labour, or chloroform my senses to the miseries I see around me. . . . I say that if Miss Carnie, and those from whom she has imbibed her views concerning the WEA, insist that a working man or woman is liable to be side-tracked or made neutral or impartial because they look at all sides of a question in order to understand it fully, then they are libelling the intelligence of the working classes.
“I am sufficiently class-conscious not to stoop to flatter my own class,” sniffed Miss Carnie.22 But letter-writers to the Daily Herald found something profoundly insulting in the assumption that the workers wanted nothing but propaganda:
Has not the student’s individuality any claim to defence? Must he be put through an educational mould, and be expected to reappear as per pattern? Is the student a failure who reappears with his individuality strengthened?. . . The Socialist movement suffers from the extremists who recognise no teaching as being education which is not designed especially to confirm their views. . . . The whole controversy has been marked by an arrogance scarcely surpassed by anything history can yield. One side has held up the principles of democracy in democratic education, whilst the other, holding up its two gods, Lester Ward and Karl Marx, has demanded, “Thou shalt have no other gods but these.”
[The CLC has] a lamentably narrow conception of the value of education, for it is now generally admitted by progressive educationists that the main object should not be the cramming of predigested text-book information, but the development and culture of character and mental capacity. There is no class antagonism apparent in this. The working class in its struggle for emancipation will require self-reliant sagacious men with constructive and administrative ability; which policy is most likely to achieve satisfactory results in this direction—a course of study catholic in its scope, affording the student opportunities to develop his own mental powers (not his tutor’s) or a course lopsided, narrow and doctrinaire, tending to produce a type of man utterly incapable of giving a considered judgement upon any matter outside his little sphere of knowledge.
The assumption of the CLC is that working-men cannot think for themselves, but will drink in, as truth, all that is told them. For the Socialist with no mental stamina the CLC is an ideal institution.23
The WEA succeeded famously in overcoming working-class distrust of the ancient universities. As the faculty of its 1911 Oxford summer school reported:
The general atmosphere was one of cheery good-fellowship; a certain breezy outspokenness not unwelcome. The public opinion of the meeting was very manifestly against class prejudice and intolerance, and against any approach to giving offence to others. It is true that the students often came up with the most erroneous ideas about the attitude of Oxford to the working classes, about the available resources of the University and colleges, and about the problems of facilitating the admission of poor men to a University course. But it is extraordinary how open their minds are to facts on those subjects. In the same way they are, like some other people, often the victims of formulas, captivated by half-truths, apt to repeat shibboleths, fond of crude generalisations; but it is astonishing how readily they accept criticism in these respects, and what a rapid improvement often begins at once.24
The students were virtually unanimous in applauding the program:
The tutors were very patient, with no “side,” and more concerned to elicit my point of view than to impose their own.
Those who have only known Oxford at a distance, fear class and caste distinctions; as a matter of fact, it simply does not exist.
The idea (so common) that Oxford is out to “nobble” the workers, and to side-track their demands, is soon dispelled. Oxford, as I saw it, is honestly seeking to learn of the workers, and to guide any misdirected zeal of theirs along lines that will not lessen the zeal, but will make it effective, because of the knowledge gained.25
[I appreciated] the gentle and tactful way in which one was brought to see the narrow view that we workmen take of life and the broader and to me, more beautiful view, that our tutor put before us. . . . It is not often that people can go gather and be free from political and spiritual bonds and differences. Here in the free and unfettered exchange of one’s own thoughts with those of our fellow-workmen from other parts and very often with some of the finest scholars of our time, a lot of the rough corners are removed and one’s ideas on many things are knocked into a reasonable shape.26
That sort of praise made Pleb Leaguers howl in vindication. They had fairly warned that once the workingman set foot in Oxford, he would be enthralled by the dreamy spires and gracious dons, and his soul would be lost forever. Their premise was correct, but their conclusion was a non sequitur. Even if summer school students fervently embraced the university, they did not change their minds about capitalism. One tutor drew that distinction clearly: his students showed “an actual increase in the power of impartial analysis, and . . . less desire to make points or to get support for partizan views,” but that did not mean that “any given creed is less keenly felt: far from it.”27 Though many students fell in love with the university, that epiphany only left them, as one of them wrote, with “a feeling of greater rebellion against our present cruel system, and with strength and courage to alter the lot of our co-workers, that they might also know and enjoy at some period of their existence the beauties of such places as Cambridge, instead of becoming mere human profit-making machines.”28 “I feel more keenly than ever the lack of opportunities of the workers for real education, and wonder how different the position of our class might have been had it been otherwise,” concluded another student:
Perhaps at times the tutors may have thought us impatient and extreme, and the discussions somewhat crude, and perhaps rather cold and brutal, yet with it all there was a generous spirit and perfect freedom to express what one really felt. By such free discussions these men will know more of the real life of the worker, . . . the putrid atmosphere of the workshop and factory, and the deadening effect of much of the present-day labour, combined with the insecurity of livelihood. By these means I think they will better understand and appreciate our position, and wonder why we are not more extreme.29
The same undeferential determination to educate their tutors was displayed by the students in A. D. Lindsay’s class on Plato’s Republic: “We often attacked him as though he had written it himself,” recalled Lavena Saltonstall. A don lecturing on conservatism came in for even rougher treatment: “We turned up in full force and endeavoured to crush him but he seemed no worse for his adventure, and no doubt enjoyed himself as much as we did.”30
The atmosphere of those early summer schools appears to have been a mixture of confrontation and good humor, sharp dissent and mutual respect. Albert Mansbridge might describe it in treacly language (“the peer’s son rejoices in the fellowship of the miner’s son, and the casual labourer in the friendship of the don”)31 but it happened to be the truth: Lavena Saltonstall’s favorite tutor was Gerald Collier, the son of Lord Monkhouse (“I never thought a lord’s son could be so sensible or charming”). The essential point is that, in the same breath, Miss Saltonstall denounced the housing conditions of the servants and laborers who maintained Oxford (“one is reminded very forcibly of the pictures one sees in Dickens’ books”).32 Much as she revered the old universities, they did not blunt her militancy. Briefly stranded by the 1911 railway strike, she remembered well that “All is not so serene as this old-world garden of Trinity would suggest. Outside . . . man has been fighting man with batons and bars and cudgels, and the end of the struggle is not yet in sight even if the strike is settled.”33
“We do feel that we belong to the University,” testified Oxford summer school student Sophie Green. “We have been really attached to some of the historic personages we have learned about and have walked with reverent steps over the ground they must have traversed years before in Oxford.” Her class sponsored an entertainment that raised £23 for the Lady Margaret Hall Fellowship Fund: “We did it partly as a compliment to our tutor who was at Oxford University & partly to show we belonged.” Yet that identification with Oxford went hand in hand with a surge of labor activism: she was elected to the Board of Guardians, while a classmate became a garment workers’ union official. “After a visit to the summer school a group of our girls practically organised the Trade Union in our factory,” Sophie Green boasted. The foremen were at once unsettled and impressed by the new intellectual climate at the works. “I admit this set of girls cultivate the social side of life a bit too much for my peace sometimes,” said one, “but I don’t like to be too severe as they talk sense, and you never see them bringing rubbishy literature into the place.” One girl won two guineas for an essay submitted to the Nation, and two or three others published prize articles in a Co-operative magazine. Sophie Green organized two village classes in Victorian literature, while her classmates pushed back the frontiers of knowledge in the domestic sphere: “They help small brothers and sisters, nephews & nieces who are still at school. It may sound like a small thing, but it isn’t really when a boy at the secondary school, struggling with home work on social & historical subjects, says, ‘Do you know, Dad, well I’ll ask Aunt Nelly, I bet she will.’ These are the sort of things I love to hear.”34
Summer schools, however, only lasted a week or two. Could prolonged exposure to WEA instruction produce the kind of political neutralization that Fieldhouse warns against? Tutorial classes spent three years inculcating detachment and objectivity as academic virtues: did that, in the long run, pull students away from the militant left? Some tutors, like Raymond Williams, felt that the WEA carried open-mindedness to the point where it effectively discouraged any kind of political activism. Barbara Wootton complained that “The response to every positive suggestion put forward from any part of the room begins with the words ‘Yes, but . . . .’ And as often as not the next phrase will run ‘. . . the difficulty about that is that . . . .’”35 A 1936 survey found a few students who agreed:
In the discussions, the tutors never had any definite point of view, and seemed to restrain those who wanted to go to the left or the right. The student rapidly gained the idea that no problem was capable of solution, that there was so much to be said on all sides of a problem that one should take no action at all. It was only fools who gave adherence to a party, or had plans of action for changing the status quo.36
Fieldhouse’s own evidence, however, points to a different conclusion: if the WEA had any influence at all, it encouraged political activity and drew some students farther to the left. Fieldhouse interviewed seventy-one persons who took WEA courses before 1951: one in four felt that their tutors influenced their politics, usually in the direction of Labour Party socialism, occasionally towards Marxism, never towards the political right or center. Only one student actually underwent a political conversion, from Liberalism to Labour; for the rest, the tutor only reinforced existing political convictions or spurred the student to greater activism. Eleven percent of the sample joined the Labour Party or became more active in it as a result of taking WEA classes, and 7 percent became Labour councillors.37 Much the same conclusion is suggested by my own survey of twenty-eight autobiographies written by WEA students. Not one of them became politically quiescent, moderate, or conservative as a result of what they had learned in WEA classes, but seven became more militant.
Of course, many students were apolitical before and after taking adult classes. R. W. Morris (b. 1895), a Durham colliery worker, gave a very common reason for organizing a WEA class in economics: “None of us had any educational ambitions other than the pleasure of meeting together once a week in an atmosphere conducive to gaining some slight acquaintance with what made the world about us ‘tick.’” He later won a scholarship to Ruskin College, but “as for politics,” he admitted, “I am still rather vague about that even now.”38 The WEA opened up the world of literature to farm laborer Fred Kitchen without disturbing his political indifference.39 His fellow students tried to interest him in an economics class, fruitlessly:
Didn’t he think it was important to study the way in which the wealth of the world was distributed, why he, a producer of essential food, should have to live on thirty-two and six a week? He did not. Thirty-two and sixpence was enough for any man to live on. He could get everything he needed for thirty-two and six a week. Why worry any more?40
At the same time, the WEA did nothing to cool the political passions of militant students like Harry Dorrell (a contributor to the Daily Worker) and Ronald Goldman.41 The NCLC might accuse the WEA of nobbling the workers, but that argument is undermined by the fact that their student bodies overlapped considerably.42 Seven autobiographers took courses with both organizations and, revealingly, they give no hint of any ideological differences between the two.43 Aneurin Bevan denounced the WEA when he was an NCLC organizer: later he was happy to speak from WEA platforms, and his close friend Archie Lush taught for both groups.44 At socialist hotbeds like the Manchester Clarion Club, where most of the members had attended WEA and/or Plebs League classes, there were strident debates over their different approaches to education, but that was hardly a typical case.45 “The average worker-student does not care twopence about the WEA and NCLC squabble,” observed one such student in 1925. “With most workers it is a matter of chance in which movement they eventually find themselves. They join a class in the first place because the time, place, or subject, is convenient to them, or because a fellow worker has persuaded them to join that particular class, the principles on which the class is organised are very seldom considered.”46 Scanning the first quarter-century of Oxford Tutorial Class reports, one is hard put to find much trouble created by Marxists. Here a modern history course is deadlocked between Labourites and Marxists, with each group of students talking past the other.47 There a Communist leaves a politics class, accusing the tutor of “anti-Soviet bias”; no other students follow him.48
In Yorkshire in the early 1930s, WEA instructor Roger Dataller was sometimes accused of serving a “boss-class” organization and urged to “smash capitalism.” He responded by pointing out “that the problems of society are not only economic and political, but biological and psychological, and that to interpret civilization in terms of one aspect alone is to interpret nothing. What of sex? What of religion? What of hero-worship? The cold body of Lenin on perpetual view in Moscow springs to my mind. . . . But I feel I am getting nowhere.” Among Marxist students, “Any suggestion of failure in the Five-Year Plan was laid to the malign intention of the lecturer.” In a literature class one of them exploded:
“I am a wage-slave, and I am out for the class war. That’s everything to me—the class war! Antony and Cleopatra? What do I want with An-to-nee and Clee-o-patra?. . . What does it mean to me?”
“Nothing,” I said.
Overall, though, such clashes seem to have been a minor and occasional nuisance for the WEA. As a fellow collier and WEA activist told Dataller, the Communists were much less of an obstacle than some trade union officials: they feared that the WEA would train a new generation of labor leaders who could compete for their jobs.49
In any case, political militancy was as much at home in the WEA as in the NCLC. Bessie Braddock (b. 1899) credited both organizations with teaching her “the political and economic history I had been denied at elementary school. I began to find out how society evolved, and how trade unions grew up . . . how the capitalists controlled money, business, and the land; and how they hung on to them.”50 Maurice Ridley, a blacklisted Durham miner, began a long series of WEA courses in 1929: he was not thereby diverted from studying with the NCLC and joining the ILP Guild of Youth, the Communist Party, and the Left Book Club Theatre Group.51 Bill Horrocks (b. c. 1900), a Bolton millworker, insisted that his WEA and NCLC classes were both essential to the intellectual enfranchisement of working people:
It was common to hear working chaps say, “Oh aye, they’ve geet brains,” when referring to men in authority. This implied that they themselves hadn’t been endowed with nature’s supreme gift. This was easy to understand when any one expressing any form of initiative was said by such beings to be “too damned forrod”. I once heard a man say to his foreman, “Ah think ah’ve a better way ter do that” and the foreman replied, “Ah’m paid ter do t’ thinkin’ ’ere.” That was an example of the old closed-shop philosophy . . . . With the advent of adult education there was a development towards self-expression by those who had become more enlightened.
Where suffragettes had once been heckled, townsfolk were now more receptive to public dissent:
The Bolton Town Hall steps became a public forum where two or three individuals expressed their opinions on subjects ranging from politics to religion. On summer evenings folk preferred to listen to these orators rather than cram themselves into a cinema . . . . I had my baptism of public speaking on those steps . . . . I gave the history of the circumstances which led to the first world war and how it led to the mass unemployment of the day. One could disagree with what I said, but if it wasn’t for adult education I wouldn’t have been capable of uttering a word on any subject. This form of education brought to light the subject of the Industrial Revolution; before then, all history taught in the schools was full-blooded patriotism, based upon wars and the lives of royalty. (That is why, when the first world war started, everyone thought we’d have Germany begging for mercy within six months.)52
In some cases the WEA moved students to the left, or at least did not discourage them from moving to the left. After taking classes in international relations, T. Dan Smith became a founding member of the Peace Pledge Union in 1936. He joined the ILP and, briefly, the Trotskyites before settling down as a mainstream Labour politician in the 1950s.53 It was WEA classes—as well as hearing Major C. R. Attlee, MP speak from a coal cart—that spurred Marjory Todd to join the ILP in the early 1920s.54 Attending Oxford on a Cassel Scholarship, John Allaway (b. 1902) found that his WEA training, far from fitting him into a university mold, enabled him to criticize the conventional curriculum. Assigned the orthodox economics texts of Alfred Marshall, he read them “with deep suspicion” and made a point of going beyond the set books to study J. A. Hobson, Henry George, Hugh Dalton, and John Maynard Keynes.55
There were some on the far left who argued that the WEA diluted working-class radicalism by diverting students away from economics to literature and the arts. “In the more extreme schools of WEA opinion,” wrote one educationalist in 1938, “literature has become stigmatized as a ‘right wing’ or ‘bourgeois’ subject, and a good many undeviating ‘proletarians,’ continuing to work themselves into frenzies about Nazis and Communists, about distribution and exchange, profits of capital and business power, etc., despise those of their fellows who ‘waste their time reading poetry.’”56
It is true that the proportion of WEA classes studying economics and economic history declined steadily, from 52 percent in 1913 to 32 percent a decade later. Between 1913 and 1933 literature rose from 11.7 to 21.4 percent, the arts from zero to 7.9 percent, natural science from 1.9 to 9.5 percent.57 In part, this reflected a simple broadening of interests on the part of the students. They would commonly begin by organizing a course on economics, and then at the end of three years the class might stay together and tackle another subject. Between 1912 and 1934, for example, one Tunstall class started with industrial history and then took up in succession social and constitutional history, economics, political science, political theory, philosophy, psychology, intellectual history, and the history of science.58 It is ironic that students of the 1930s considered economics a left-wing subject and English literature conservative, when today the two disciplines have reversed positions. But even back then, the study of literature could have revolutionary consequences, as it did for Nancy Dobrin (b. 1914).
Her father was an unemployed shipyard worker who loved to hear Ellen Wilkinson lash out at the Tories, and then voted Conservative. Many autodidacts grew up in homes where learning was valued, but not Nancy: “There was no such thing as discussion in our house, it was either a row or an order.” She read avidly at the public library; but later, as a munitions worker, she managed to get through the Second World War without reading the newspapers or listening to the wireless.59 (This was not unusual: in 1943, 19 percent of working women never read the morning newspapers, and only two out of three read them regularly.)60 After the war, in London and unmarried, she joined the WEA out of sheer loneliness. “I hadn’t a clue what the WEA was, but it was somewhere to go. Maybe there would be eligible males going too. I was thirty-seven, the years were clocking up on me.” She enrolled in a literature class, which tackled War and Peace, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock:
Before the [first] session had finished I was hooked. To hell with fellows, this was interesting . . . . From then on I was reading and learning, I read with new eyes . . . . It was fascinating—everyone in the class seemed to be so well informed, to my astonishment I knew nothing. There was no stopping me, I was empty and needed filling . . . . [I] slowly realised what an ignoramus I had been and bigotted into the bargain.
That last sentence needs explaining: when she worked for a German Jew during the war, she demanded to know “What is he doing here when we are at war with them?” She had no idea what was happening to the Jews at the time. In another class she actually did met her future husband, a Viennese Jewish refugee who called himself a Christian Communist.61 Without a WEA education, it is difficult to imagine her finding any rapport with such a man. Even if the WEA had no clear influence on her politics (narrowly defined), it emancipated Nancy Dobrin in the same way that it liberated Edith Hall, an overworked housemaid. Mrs. Hall recalled that she discovered Thomas Hardy in a WEA class in the 1920s, when
Punch and other publications of that kind showed cartoons depicting the servant class as stupid and “thick” and therefore fit subjects for their jokes. The skivvy particularly was revealed as a brainless menial. Many of the working-class were considered thus and Thomas Hardy wrote in Tess of the d’Urbervilles that “Labouring farm folk were personified in the newspaper-press by the pitiable dummy known as Hodge . . .” and it was in this book that Hardy told the story of Tess, a poor working girl with an interesting character, thoughts and personality. This was the first serious novel I had read up to this time in which the heroine had not been of “gentle birth” and the labouring classes as brainless automatons. This book made me feel human and even when my employers talked at me as though I wasn’t there, I felt that I could take it; I knew that I could be a person in my own right.62
Only a few students found WEA tutors patronizing.63 Far more typical was George Gregory, a Somerset mine worker: the WEA helped him break the habit of mind that tends “to conform to an order, indulge in repetition, and find satisfaction as routine is successful,” and it enabled him to work out his own criticism of capitalism. “Words fail to explain what that meant to me, and how I was assisted intellectually on the threshold of adult life.”64
Albert Mansbridge was no shallow paternalist. He realized that the mechanics’ institutes had failed because they “were largely the result of philanthropic effort, set on foot by some local magnate, . . . rather than upon the initiative of the mechanics themselves.”65 As an activist in the Co-operative movement, Mansbridge designed the WEA to give working people a dominant share of control. Tutorial Class students chose the topics they would study, and they exercised a veto (rarely used) over the selection of tutors. No diplomas or certificates were granted: the idea was to eliminate competition and vocationalism from the classroom, as well as to ensure that the tutor could not intimidate his students. The Tutorial Class closely followed the mutual improvement model, but on a more advanced academic plane. “Its essential characteristic is freedom,” Mansbridge argued. “Each student is a teacher, each teacher is a student.”66 The students, by all reports, felt few compunctions about challenging their teachers. In 1914 they badgered the Historical Association to write more about the everyday lives of working people.67 The influence of the WEA on British historiography is another topic, but worth exploring: Tawney insisted that his classic The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century owed much to his Tutorial Class students.68 Another instructor acquired from his Tunstall students a wealth of data for his research into the mining and pottery industries. As one alumnus remembered, the WEA became “a co-operative search for knowledge in which tutor learns as much as student.”69
The best students often became teachers themselves. Some early Tutorial Class pupils in North Staffordshire developed their own local education program: by 1916 they were teaching thirty courses with a total of 650 students.70 In 1927-28, thirty out of 103 instructors teaching shorter courses for the Yorkshire WEA branch were manual workers, most of them Tutorial Class alumni, compared with only eight university-trained lecturers.71
At the grass-roots level, the WEA created an articulate and obstreperous working-class intelligentsia. In their 1936 survey of 410 WEA students and 128 from Ruskin College, W. E. Williams and A. E. Heath found “hundreds” who had published articles in local papers, undertaking
to provide antidotes to the sophistries of the local squire-archies, or to counter-act the log-rolling of the condottieri who misgovern the local Council. . . . The adult student . . . tackles the town Library Committee for banning Shaw’s Black Girl; challenges the local clergy to show more social zeal; tells the mill-owners what is wrong with their policy; ventilates the local lack of facilities for cultural education; indicts the municipal fathers for their failure to provide a park or an adequate tram-service.
At least six students, and in some cases “scores,” had written for each of the following: the Manchester Guardian, Daily Herald, Daily Express, News Chronicle, Yorkshire Post, Sheffield Independent, the Nation, Westminster Gazette, the Listener, Economic Journal, Adelphi, and Contemporary Review.72
Many students felt that the most valuable lesson they had learned in the WEA was to “see it whole.”73 That Arnoldian ideal addressed one of the most basic intellectual hungers of the working-class student: the need to understand how his individual life fitted into the larger society. “Instead of seeing my job in isolation as an individual postal worker, and from that angle only, it began to take shape as a planned industry with a complex structure; one of many in the social structure of the country I live in,” explained George W. Norris, a student who rose to the executive council of the Union of Post Office Workers. “I could now spread my wings and begin to think intelligently about wage claims, hours of work, and conditions in industry, and to compare my industry with other industries.” When he heard his first WEA lectures around 1909, “I discovered that my thinking was mostly propaganda and not thinking at all.” That “propaganda” was not Marx, who was only a name to Norris before he joined the WEA. Rather he meant a general habit of resorting to formulas and slogans, which he found crippling when he became a trade union branch secretary: “It was easy work making propaganda speeches and giving stock answers to stock questions, but I soon found myself stumped for replies when questioned by trained thinkers.” He could scarcely express himself on paper or in debate, until he learned that “to acquire knowledge in the university tradition meant a knowledge of how to use books as tools, and the necessity for bringing some order into my studies.”
In that sense Stuart Macintyre is entirely right to conclude that “the mission of the WEA was to break down the isolation of working-class students and integrate them in a national culture.” He is wrong, however, when he devalues that achievement and suggests that it clipped the political wings of the working-class autodidact. George Norris’s WEA studies in industrial psychology enabled him to argue down postal supervisors who were eager to experiment with time-and-motion studies. After twenty-two years of WEA courses at a total cost of £10, he testified that
I can now hold my own with the finest products of Eton, Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge whether it be in understanding problems of trade and commerce or in the realms of literature, art or music. . . . I’ve learned how to analyse Government blue books and white papers, and to digest statistics; workshop practice, managerial problems, wage rates, currency problems, social planning, local and national government developments have all become understandable as a result of my studies. . . . Training in the art of thinking has equipped me to see through the shams and humbug that lurk behind the sensational headlines of the modern newspapers, the oratorical outpourings of insincere party politicians and dictators, and the doctrinaire ideologies that stalk the world sowing hatred.74
In criticizing the WEA for assimilating independent autodidacts, Macintyre overlooks the loneliness of the self-educated worker. While the Williams–Heath survey found that many adult students enjoyed support and encouragement from their family and friends, there were just as many who encountered only suspicion, hostility, and contempt. Much like their bourgeois counterparts, they felt alienated from their class and pressured to conform to philistine values. For them, the WEA provided a haven—the proletarian equivalent of an artistic cafe, literary magazine, or university common room.75 It offered Lavena Saltonstall a welcome escape from a suffocating hegemonic working-class culture:
I am supposed to make myself generally useless by ignoring things that matter—literature, music, art, history, economics, the lives of the people round me and the evils of my day. . . . There are miles and miles of little-frequented paths on life’s highway and faintly-marked pathways always attracted me more than the beaten road . . . . The world is suffering to-day because men and women merge their individuality into one orthodox mass. In my native place, the women, as a general rule, wash every Monday, iron on Tuesday, court on Wednesdays, bake on Thursdays, clean on Fridays, go to market or go courting again on Saturdays, and to church on Sundays . . . . The exceptions are considered unwomanly and eccentric people . . . . Should any girl show a tendency to politics, or to ideas of her own, she is looked upon by the majority of women as a person who neglects doorsteps and home matters, and is therefore not fit to associate with their respectable daughters and sisters. If girls develop any craving for a different life or wider ideas, their mothers fear that they are going to become Socialists or Suffragettes—a Socialist being a person with lax views about other people’s watches and purses, and other people’s husbands and wives, and a Suffragette a person whose house is always untidy. If their daughters show any signs of a craving for higher things than cleaning brass fenders or bath taps, they put a stop to what they call “high notions.”76
One can always argue that the WEA should have devoted more attention to Marx. Fieldhouse’s analysis of syllabi for Oxford and Cambridge extramural classes between 1925 and 1939 reveals a general slant toward the non-Marxist left. Most tutors seem to have been critical of Marxism, though the Marxist point of view was often discussed in class. Of the seventy-two WEA alumni interviewed by Fieldhouse, half described their teachers as Labour Party supporters; few tutors were characterized as Marxist, Liberal, or Conservative. But does it follow that Marx was treated unfairly in WEA classes? Most of the students Fieldhouse questioned felt that the politics of their lecturers had little or no influence on the way their courses were taught. More than a third of these students could not even guess the political stance of their tutors.
Like all questions of canonization, this one is endlessly debatable. How much Marx is enough? Why should there have been more Marxism in the curriculum? After the implosion of world Communism and the 1997 “New Labour” landslide, the WEA emphasis on non-Marxian socialism seems admirably far-sighted. Besides, Das Kapital was frequently read in economic history classes, and Maurice Dobb’s Marxist treatises sometimes appeared on WEA reading lists.77 Among the leaders of the WEA, A. D. Lindsay, G. D. H. Cole, Harold Laski, and J. M. Mactavish (General Secretary from 1916 to 1927) were all non-Marxists who wrote with some sympathy about Marxism.78 In the early 1920s the Highway, the WEA journal, made an effort to review books on Marx and encouraged students to read his works.79 Though most WEA tutors were not Marxists, their treatment of capitalism could be quite congenial to Marxist students. In 1922 Board of Education inspectors protested that economics instructors often presented socialist doctrines as “scientific generalizations” rather than as one theory among many:
Two ideas—the progress towards social democracy and the growth of trade unionism—tend to monopolise attention to the neglect of equally important aspects. . . . The Industrial Revolution is frequently treated as a rapid transformation of society into two classes of capitalists and proletariat. The process is pictured as a process of the economic and social degradation of the people, relieved only in the latter stages by the rise of socialism and the promise of social democracy. Economic development is thus viewed very largely as a progress towards the socialist state.80
The WEA could hardly have steered many workers away from Marxism, if only because so few of its recruits were Marxists. A 1909 survey of thirty-four prospective students for a Tutorial Class found that nine of them had read Robert Blatchford’s Merrie England, seven Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, six Toynbee on the Industrial Revolution, five each Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories, and Workers and at least parts of The Wealth of Nations; only one had even attempted Marx.81 The batches of student papers saved from early WEA economics classes are equally free of Marxist influence.82 A 1936 survey of London Tutorial Class students suggests their political distribution: nearly 45 percent read the Daily Herald, 26 percent the News Chronicle, 20 percent the Daily Telegraph, 7.5 percent The Times, and only about 5 percent the Daily Worker.83
In any case, the NCLC exaggerated its ideological differences with the WEA, which were steadily narrowing through the 1920s and 1930s. Its attacks on the WEA were largely motivated by competition for resources and students. The NCLC hoped to become the educational arm of moderate trade unions and the Labour Party. By 1925 it had twenty-five affiliated unions: it also received grants from the Labour Party, the Co-operative Union, and the Trades Union Congress. Consequently, it gradually played down the class struggle, shifting to practical training for trade unionists. It also had to fight off assaults on its left flank from the Communist Party. Ultimately, in 1964, the NCLC would be completely absorbed by the Trades Union Congress education department. Tellingly, it was the NCLC, not the WEA, which toned down its radicalism to please its financial patrons, until it offered little more than vocational training for labor functionaries in a welfare capitalist system.84
Nor should one assume that the WEA commitment to nonideological instruction was directed solely against Marxists. Before the Second World War, dissenting religion was still a more potent opponent of liberal education, and tutors had to take care to avoid theological controversies.85 Given that most doctrinaire working-class Marxists began as doctrinaire Nonconformists, the parallels are unsurprising. In 1913–14 one tutor complained that many of the students in his industrial history class at Heywood were
excessively engaged in religious work of a type that militates against good intellectual work. No man can study economic subjects who feels it is immoral to divorce, even for ease and insight, ethical from commercial and industrial questions, and in spite of more than one evening devoted to pointing out the subdivision and “abstraction” of the human sciences, I could not get ahead with the theory. Even apart from this, pious meetings evening after evening interfere with reading and essays.86
In 1924–25 T. W. Harries reported that, in his Tunstall philosophy class, “There is a genuine interest in philosophic thought, for which the strong Nonconformist tradition of the class is responsible. The same tradition is no doubt responsible for the unoriginality and unsensitiveness of the thought. Standard authors are too highly regarded, or rather regarded in the wrong way, being taken as substitutes for thought. Behind a claim of independence by certain members is concealed a lack of it.”87 In 1916, when a WEA organizer requested classroom space from the Clay Cross Education Committee, one member, a preacher and credit draper, objected that “surely coal miners had no reason to study Economics, Philosophy, or European History,” or indeed anything other than “how to dig more coal, and get ready for the next world.”88 Here was the mirror image of the NCLC, which argued that miners should only study how to wage more class warfare, and get ready for the Brave New World. Construction worker Stan Dickens, who described his parents as “bigoted nonconformists,” took WEA courses to get beyond the dogmas of the Plymouth Brethren, which he found “increasingly irksome and unsatisfying. I had tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and for good or ill wanted to eat more of it.”89 And just as the WEA mediated class and political conflict, so it could bridge religious differences. “Well, this is the first time Church and Chapel people in this village have ever met together for a common end,” remarked a student in a rural history class. “And here we are, quite a happy family!”90
In his study of Antonio Gramsci, Harold Entwistle explained why a traditional liberal education can nurture radical thought more effectively than any program of indoctrination. Gramsci’s educational program could have been taken out of any WEA pamphlet: “To the proletariat is necessary a disinterested school, a humanistic school, in short, as was intended by the ancients and more recently by the men of the Renaissance.” One might call this quintessentially Arnoldian—except that similar definitions of culture were offered by Lenin (“the knowledge of all the wealth created by mankind”) and Trotsky (“Culture is the sum total of . . . the whole knowledge and skill accumulated by mankind in its whole preceding history”). Lenin—the Lenin who regretted that young Bolsheviks were rejecting Pushkin for the futurist poet Mayakovsky—was convinced that proletarian culture had to be grounded in cultures inherited from the past, “the natural development of the stores of knowledge which mankind has accumulated under the yoke of capitalist society, landlord society and bureaucratic society.”
Entwistle was criticizing—from the left—the “new sociology of education” that emerged in Britain in the 1970s, a doctrine echoed today by critics of the “cultural literacy” movement. It held that the content of education is problematic and socially constructed, that the learner is competent to define that content, that all subcultures are equally valuable, that academic knowledge is not superior to other kinds of knowledge. Rather than offering all classes the kind of education traditionally enjoyed by the elite, schools should value and preserve folk cultures. The difficulty is that all this closely resembles the theories of Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini’s first minister of public instruction. His educational reforms of 1923 encouraged spontaneity and disdained intellectualism, emphasizing ideas and beliefs over facts, figures, names, and dates. “Teaching is formative, not informative,” proclaimed one of Gentile’s supporters. “The Italian school of today does not limit itself to the imparting of mere information and to the furnishing of cultural instruments. Its aim is to mould and fashion souls.” It sounds deceptively progressive, but as Gramsci realized, it only made indoctrination easier. Without a knowledge of the past, students had no standards for judging the present. Without a fund of basic information, they could not intelligently form their own opinions or criticize what they were taught. And preserving traditional cultures meant, in effect, preserving the status quo. To say that classical education represents an imposition of middle-class culture on the masses overlooks an insistent working-class demand for that kind of culture. Gramsci noted that his proletarian colleagues experienced “a new feeling of dignity and freedom when they read poetry or heard references to artists and philosophers, and they asked, regretfully, ‘Why didn’t the schools teach these things to us as well?’”91 “You can say what you like about the advantages or disadvantages of various forms of education,” said one WEA student, a colliery blacksmith and published author, “but I think the point about public school and university education is that at their best they teach you to think.”92 As the next chapter will explain, Marxism failed to find a large working-class following in Britain for many reasons. The WEA was not one of them.
Why did students enroll in the WEA and Ruskin College? The 1936 Williams–Heath survey found that some pursued continuing education purely for individual cultural enrichment, and some were solely motivated by political concerns: equality, peace, social justice. The clear majority, however, mentioned both of these goals, convinced that one could not be attained without the other:
To provide for the fullest expression of the faculties of the individual, and to direct energy towards the realisation of individual happiness through those faculties; and in addition to provide for the maximum co-operation of the individual towards the happiness of the group of which he is a part.
Individually, to develop the student’s personality and latent abilities so that he may be more effective in his spheres of work and influence. Socially, to encourage a critical but constructive attitude of mind towards social problems, etc. The quest for “pure knowledge” is futile unless others besides the student are influenced.
First, to equip the student with adequate knowledge in order that he or she may make a more adequate and effective response to his or her social obligations. Secondly, to enable one to appreciate and cultivate a desire for the best in art, literature, music, etc., to more readily understand the significance of science, and generally to raise the level of intelligence in order that the student may enjoy a fuller and more harmonious existence, freer from the trammels of prejudice, superstition and dogmatism.93
Few believed that adult education should aim exclusively at building socialism. Even some of the most militant Marxists argued that only a broad liberal education could prepare the workers for political struggle:
When education is purposely made available to fit the student, say for the class war, the result is mostly undigested dogma, consequently the class war suffers. Were Engels, Marx, Hyndman, Trotsky, Lenin, educated solely for the class war? Consider also the usefulness of Francis Place to the working-classes, and J. S. Mill, etc.94
Except for the occasional partisan of class warfare, students generally appreciated the impartiality of their teachers:
He was always suggesting some other point of view which must be recognised. This has also struck me about other tutors: their desire that knowledge should be as wide as possible, and their ability to state, whenever opportunity offered, the opposite argument.
My tutor . . . did me most good because I disagreed with him. It led me into having to explain myself and to avoid too much speaking without thinking.
His habit of pointing out the ambiguous nature of one’s contribution has taught me to consider well before committing myself.95
Intellectual independence was frequently cited as a prime educational goal:
The development of the whole man or woman, mental, spiritual, physical, particularly the remedial work necessary where deficiency in previous training is very marked. The stimulation of thought on all subjects . . . so that life may be lived according to one’s own findings, making no ignominious compromise with the findings of other people whom one never knew.
To enable a man to stand on his own feet. To equip him to be able to endure his own company on occasions, communing with the inner world of his thoughts, instead of rushing out to mix with the crowd.
To teach people to think for themselves, to allow for the other person’s point of view. To show how a great deal of pleasure and content can be obtained from the things inside us, and also to teach people a quiet enjoyment of the beautiful things of life which will provide a contrast and refuge from the everyday drabness.96
Alongside self-realization, the social motive was also a compelling reason for joining WEA classes:
It was something to do and I liked the friend who was already in the class.
I felt the need for social contact with men and women of similar tastes and ideas, and an association with them.
One good reason. To try to keep from too frequently visiting the village pub.97
One of the most commonly cited motives for pursuing adult education was very Arnoldian: “Disinterestedness.” This involved not only the effort to overcome bias, though it certainly included that. It meant as well that education should be pursued with no thought of competitiveness or economic gain, that knowledge must be acquired for its own sake in an environment where students helped each other. Of course, WEA classes afforded excellent training for careers in the trade unions and the Labour Party, and WEA students often took vocational courses with other educational institutions. But the competitive pressures they faced in the workplace made them all the more insistent that the WEA should be completely noncompetitive and nonvocational:
It is the only movement available, for many, that considers non-material values. Religious bodies fulfil the function for some, but adult education should do it for many more.
The giving of prominence to things of the mind and spirit and the encouraging of an attitude of mind which places man first and his economic function second; freedom from commercialism; disinterestedness. All of which, I believe, go to stimulate the student to social service.
As helping to make it disinterested; it emphasises the group factor (the co-operative effort in search for truth) rather than a narrow personal outlook; it brings together workers from many trades and with varying experience, not from one limited circle.
I prefer it to be distinctly separated from the working-day affairs of students, because that leads to a disinterested attitude of enquiry, avoids the association of one’s own selfish interest with matter that is being studied, and widens the outlook and corrects the perspective of the student.98
Many joined the WEA in search of an escape from the industrial machine:
With nothing but hard work and less than the real necessities of life, I felt there was something wrong with a system that condemned honest people to such a life. I had no personal or selfish ambitions, but I wanted to learn the “why and wherefore” of this system of society.
I was beginning to feel life a drudgery, a repetition of going to work and finding nothing to while away the time after it was over. On the other hand there was much I was wanting to know about life. Books written around so-called Socialist Problems, e.g. Shaw’s Man and Superman, had come to me and after first shocking me (I had such child-like faith in the Bible then that I had never even thought of the problems it contained) had urged me to seek the truth of all things. . . . By then I had realised that some people fully appreciated and enjoyed life, because, I thought, they had solved life’s problems for themselves, and the rest of the world were mere drudges, slaves, and drunkards, and I did not wish to be classified with this latter class.
I thought (largely due to my intimate conversation with my WEA miner friend) that I could be developed into a more understanding and therefore intelligently useful human. I used often to listen to the idealism of this miner friend who had his eye in the heavens and his feet in the muck. As I look back upon our returning from the pit, in the early dawn of summer mornings, talking our way to a finer and higher economic and industrial and social world, I experience certain feelings which almost cause me to say that there is an advantage in having plodded one’s own way in the world from a school-leaving age of 13 years.99
Although the WEA always attracted more skilled than unskilled workers, it was the latter who insisted more vehemently on the value of a purely liberal education. Those with more interesting jobs—clerks, carpenters, metalworkers—often suggested that the WEA might relax its ban on vocational training: but there was “a chorus of ‘Noes’ from the machine-minders, from the coal-miners, from the hammer-and-file brigade of the engineering industry, from the telephonists, the postmen”:
I would not. Knowledge for its own sake is a better principle. The working life of students is becoming more and more mechanical, and sectionalised, and technical education already looks well after that side. Adult education is often a way of escape from the tedious monotony of working life. Give as wide a range of subjects as possible and let the student follow his bent.
The actual working life of most manual workers is in the main semi-slavery, with the fear ever before them that even that will be taken away. My opinion is that adult education should be as far removed from the actual working life as possible. To simply use up all one’s time and thoughts for the purpose of obtaining the necessaries of life is a very low standard of life for a human being.
No. Rightly or wrongly (it is possibly a defect of the present industrial system) many of us are disgruntled with our working life. We want freedom of mind, power and expression, and for that reason wish to dissociate work and study.100
One critic has argued that the WEA promoted a liberal education “hardly distinguishable from the conservatism of Newman.”101 But by Newman’s definition, liberal education would prepare the student not for a particular vocation, but for any profession he chose to pursue. If he elected to become a labor activist, then the Arnoldian ideal of “seeing it whole” could have radical implications. One collier, having studied science and history via H. G. Wells (among others), found that he was
able to take a more intelligent view of the works where I earn my living. I never used to trouble about profits, machinery, etc. I was satisfied with my wages, never troubled how or where they came from. . . . But when I had learned a little I wanted to know how profits were made, and why workers did not have a more reasonable share of them. So I think, on the whole, that education gives a desire for one to take an interest both technically and otherwise in the occupation they are engaged in.102
Residential institutions like Ruskin College had one drawback: full-time students could find themselves cut off from their old working-class milieu. Many of them were aiming for a white-collar job, even if it was usually as a trade union officer or adult education teacher.103 As one woman conceded, her studies at Ruskin College had created
a certain gulf due to lack of understanding on the one side and impatience or lack of understanding, on my part. These differences have grown less of recent years. At home they were always vexed that my promotion to my present post should have been so much delayed on account of my year in Oxford—particularly that I missed a good opportunity of promotion which fell vacant at the time I went to Oxford. Owing to the very intensive training at Ruskin College, I finished with (as I thought) a completely new outlook on life and was anxious that every one else should arrive at the same conclusion! I am afraid that I did not give sufficient thought to the fact that they had not had my opportunities of living at Oxford for a year and expected them to accept all I told them! As I was very enthusiastic I wanted to implant new ideas in every one with whom I came in contact. I imagine this made me somewhat of a nuisance at times, but after reflection and further reading, I settled down into wiser paths!104
WEA students, who continued to work in their old jobs and remained in their communities, were less likely to feel that alienation. Nevertheless, a WEA course could have a very mixed impact on home life. The family that took classes together might grow closer. Sometimes a man would bring his wife into the WEA and make her, as one put it, “an intellectual pal.” But women rarely persuaded their husbands to join. When one spouse enrolled in the WEA and the other did not, tensions were likely to develop as the educational gaps grew:
My wife says I’m all blasted Economics and British working class. I have refused offers of better-paid jobs which would have made WEA work impossible. My wife does not think it is a good paying proposition and would prefer the flesh-pots to a place in heaven.
Having attended Ruskin College, a newsagent found himself drifting apart from his wife: he became a philosophic materialist while she took up spiritualism. “In later years of our married life we always seemed to see the opposite sides of almost every question that cropped up,” he recalled, until she went to visit her sister in New Zealand and never came back. A laborer’s wife with no formal schooling, after the birth of her tenth child, signed up for courses in Esperanto, psychology, economics, music, and geography, despite relentless ridicule and opposition from her husband. She stuck with it for at least ten years, though she had to smuggle public library books into her home. These were extreme cases, but many other students had to cope with lesser rifts:
We lost touch with each other with the result she ceased to be interested in my work as it advanced. She followed, but a long way behind. She found her interests in other ways and we settled the changed relation to accommodate each other: but much is lost in sympathy . . . . Our intellectual lives are separate and apart from each other and there is now little or nothing in common. This is a real loss to us both and I think the loss is mine mostly, since my wife has filled her life with her own domestic affairs and her own limited reading and conversation. I may share hers, but she never shares mine. She can’t.
As a power-loom overlooker noted, a wife might not voice any objection when her husband went out to attend a mixed-sex class,
but behind the wifely mind there is—I won’t call it a suspicion, or even a distrust, but it is there. It is an activity of which she either cannot or will not partake, it keeps her husband from home, and he is obviously enjoying himself. Thus there are two different streams of interest—the home, and immediate affairs in the case of the wife, the new field of knowledge in the case of the husband. And as time goes on they become more and more distinct; the husband becomes engrossed in something the wife cannot understand. . . . I have raised this topic with several students of fairly long experience and they have all (and some painfully) been aware of the experience. . . . The difference . . . between acquiring knowledge almost surreptitiously—a sort of an interest which is alien from the family life—and paddling the cultural canoe together with the wife is tremendous.
The strains were not limited to married couples. One railway clerk (single) reported that his brother, a married commercial traveler, was concerned solely with supporting his family and therefore
finds my interest in education for its own sake rather puzzling. . . . Art, literature, social conditions of the masses, politics, economics, even sport mean little or nothing to him. Hence there has been an ever-increasing divergence of opinion between us. His attitude towards my outlook is one of veiled hostility, and an unshakeable belief that I am none the better for the years I have spent with WEA classes. Once we were inseparable. Now we have practically nothing in common, though of course remain quite friendly.
Likewise, a young millworker protested that the WEA
has completely alienated my sister. She is the only one now who has not had educational training. I have tried in vain to get her to study, especially the 2½ years she was at home, unemployed. No use. She will not. Naturally she feels jealous to think we were both weavers and now I have a better position. She is making my life so intolerable with suspicion and jealousy that with my mother’s consent I am seriously considering getting work away from home again. I am changed myself, that is why I cannot blame my sister. We have nothing whatever in common. She hates the WEA and all it stands for.
Male and female students alike often encountered a solid wall of family hostility:
My family think me an idiot, say I am wasting my time, call me funny names, and want to know where I am hoping to get to.
Doing something different from the rest of the family has made them regard my actions somewhat suspiciously.
They look on me as the prize rabbit.
They think you are a snob, and you have the conflict between intellectual isolation or running away from your family and friends.
That last respondent touched upon a common source of tension: adult students were often viewed as people who were getting above themselves, presuming to “improve” their kinfolk, disturbing the equilibrium of family life and the class hierarchy. “My early association with the WEA brought me into touch with people who were known to, but regarded by, my people as ‘superior’ folks,” wrote one Ruskin student, “and their visits to my home were looked upon as, more or less, a move to ‘uplift’ the family and, as such were not encouraged.” A typist complained that her insistence on gaining further education “led to many phrases of bitterness. I was accused of ‘getting too big for my shoes,’ learning to look down on my family, and filling my head with dangerous ideas, and certainly with ideas about things which were no concern of mine and ought to be left to my ‘betters’.” She was picking up notions about politics and religion quite unlike anything her parents had taught her. These new attitudes in turn “brought about desires for changes in my way of life, and most of these were resented—and often resisted.” In a large family with children at several different educational levels (elementary school, secondary school, working) the tensions were compounded, with everyone accusing the one adult student of “showing off” and being “too bookish.”
These frictions could be reduced by making adult education a family project. “My brother and I might not have been such good friends if we had not belonged to the same educational society,” wrote one housewife. But in these cases another kind of tension might appear: instead of one student asserting her independence, there were several. Even if they were on a common intellectual plane, their differences had to be negotiated. One miner who had attended Ruskin College discovered that when he brought other family members into the WEA. “On the whole things go very smoothly at home, but I am constantly reminded that since my coming home from Ruskin College, our house is more like a debating shop than a dwelling-house,” he wrote. His brothers were more ready to speak up at trade union meetings and where they had once turned their wages over to their mother, they now insisted on paying their board and handling their own personal budgets (“Those who control finance control policy”).105
For growing numbers of women, the WEA provided the social and intellectual outlet that the mutual improvement society had provided for workingmen:
I thought it would break the monotony of village life in winter for a mother of a family like me. It would keep my mind more active and prevent my feeling that I was getting into a rut. It would help me to understand more fully modern problems, and I have hopes that it will keep me advanced and thoughtful enough for me to be a help “intellectually” to my son as he grows older. I did not expect it to fulfil any social purpose, but I have found other people in the WEA who are glad to visit married stay-at-homes, and who are happy to arrange events, outings, and little social affairs and visits to suit the needs of married people with children or those handicapped by household ties.106
Another housewife “noticed that many marriages failed after several years, especially after children had grown up.” The problem was that “too many women had not any interests outside the home, that they did no reading of any moment and that their conversation consisted of prices of food-stuffs and house-cleaning.” Though she and another woman had young children, their husbands were agreeable to minding the kids while they attended classes.107
Female students had often been reluctant to speak up in early Tutorial Classes, especially where they were greatly outnumbered. A woman might find it difficult to disagree openly with a male student who was also a neighbor. Unlike the men, most women were not used to voicing their opinions on the shop floor, in offices, at trade union and Labour Party meetings. The WEA addressed this issue by setting up a Women’s Advisory Committee in 1909, dedicating a full-time organizer to women in 1910, and sponsoring (as a temporary transition) some all-female classes.108 Those policies, combined with liberal trends in society at large, brought more women into the WEA. By 1922 educational inspectors noted “that the extension of the franchise is producing a profound change in the attitude of women towards education and towards each other.”109 Women made up about 5 percent of CLC students110 and, in 1935, only 4 percent of enrollment in NCLC correspondence courses,111 but the proportion in WEA Tutorial Classes rose from 13.6 percent in 1911–12 to 44.2 percent in 1937–38.112 This was partly the result of offering more courses in literature, always a favorite subject among women, but the percentage of female students was increasing in every discipline (Table 8.1, p. 290).
A 1936 survey of Tutorial Class students in the London area found that the women enjoyed cultural lives that were by any measure as rich and varied as the men’s. The 200 men in the survey (mostly clerks, salesmen, and manual workers) worked an average of 43.3 hours per week, compared with 39.3 hours for the 236 women (mostly clerks and homemakers). Though 34.1 percent of the men and only 7.5 percent of the women worked more than 44 hours, the men generally devoted more hours to reading each week than women:
Table 8.1: Percentage of Female to Male WEA Students, 1913–28113 |
|||||||
|
Total |
Economics |
Politics |
History |
Science |
Philosophy |
Literature |
1913–14 |
30.1 |
20.4 |
28.7 |
35.7 |
33.3 |
59.6 |
87.9 |
1927–28 |
65.0 |
27.2 |
33.0 |
54.8 |
62.9 |
89.3 |
145.5 |
Table 8.2: Hours Per Week Devoted to Reading, London WEA Students, 1936 |
||||||
|
Men |
Women |
Male Clerks |
Female Clerks |
Manual Workers |
Housewives |
Non-fiction |
24.1 |
16.4 |
26.4 |
16.0 |
25.5 |
15.6 |
Newspapers |
6.4 |
4.1 |
6.4 |
4.2 |
7.2 |
4.5 |
Fiction |
12.1 |
17.5 |
13.0 |
17.4 |
12.4 |
13.3 |
Periodicals |
3.2 |
2.4 |
2.5 |
2.1 |
3.9 |
2.4 |
Total |
45.8 |
40.4 |
48.3 |
39.7 |
49.0 |
35.8 |
The results are equally unexpected on other counts. Male manual workers devoted as much time to reading as male clerks. (A century earlier Hugh Miller found that he accomplished less reading as a bank clerk than he had as a stonemason. The exhaustion that came from hours of adding up figures left little mental energy for study.)114 It has been argued that the constant interruptions of housework left women less able to pursue serious study than men, who could at least count on large blocks of free time outside work hours. But women actually read more quickly—an average of 7.1 hours per non-fiction book compared with 10.0 hours for men—with the result that both sexes managed to read the same number of volumes (2.3 per month). Not many young mothers had the time for demanding courses: only 39.0 percent of all women students and 11.2 percent of women students under thirty were married, compared with 48.5 percent of all men. On the other hand, older women with grown children might find themselves with more leisure to devote to adult education. Under age twenty-five, men were more likely than women to enroll in the WEA, but the reverse was true after age forty-four, and such diversions as theatergoing and art galleries were most popular among women forty-five and over. It was men, not women, whose leisure activities tended to become narrower and more domestic with age. Overall, women were more likely than men to attend the theater (56.4 to 38.0 percent), lectures other than the WEA (51.3 to 38.0 percent), art galleries (31.8 to 19.5 percent), concerts (33.1 to 20.0 percent), and museums (28.8 to 24.5 percent). While fewer women than men devoted time to politics (16.5 to 28.0 percent) and trade union business (8.1 to 21.0 percent), women were more likely to indulge in singing (21.2 to 14.0 percent), photography (16.1 to 11.5 percent), and amateur theatricals (18.6 to 11.0 percent). They were far more likely to play a musical instrument (24.6 to 4.5 percent), just as likely to dabble in painting (about 5.0 percent each), and not much less fond of debating (20.3 to 27.0 percent).115 Granted, a similar survey in the provinces might have yielded different results, but women throughout the country described Tutorial Classes as a liberating experience:
I very often get chaffed since joining the WEA about what a lot I have to say and how prepared I am to argue. My husband and brothers obviously notice that I am much more ready to join in conversations on world outlook—economic problems and even political ones, which previously I dismissed as “men’s subjects”, but the WEA has taught me otherwise.
Particularly with my husband, I fill a much more important place in the home and in his mind. He asks my opinion and likes to discuss vital things with me, which was entirely absent before I took WEA classes.
It has not only given me more confidence in myself, but I am myself—I have an individuality of my own. It has made me understand my husband better: there is more comradeship in our lives, more give and take, more freedom for both of us.116
The most revealing question asked in the Williams-Heath survey was this: “Do you consider, on reflection, that your adult educational activity has made you less, or more, happy?” The replies were almost 95 percent positive, but what is most significant is that they often began by thinking about the meaning of happiness. Many, like John Stuart Mill, distinguished between higher and lower forms of happiness: adult education imparted depth along with pleasure. Far from doping the workers by imposing middle-class cultural hegemony, Ruskin College and the WEA did precisely the opposite: they made their students happier but less content.
The more I know, the more I realise the mistakes one makes. . . . When I look back I realise that, without my acquired adult knowledge, my life would have been blind, unconscious and animal-like. I now have a purpose in life. . . . I did not know the joy of living until I was enabled to understand the problems of life. . . . It has extended my range of thought and feeling. . . . Even if it had made economic conditions more difficult for me, I think I would not regret the time given it. It has made life so much more interesting. . . . As I grow older, and as I learn, I become more tolerant. This is happiness.
Life came to mean something. It no longer consisted of going to work, bed or the pictures. . . . When important things were reported in the newspaper, one could have a shot at explaining them, and in doing so felt much happier than in merely resignedly saying “Such things are for other folk”. . . . I feel my work is a real contribution to progress. . . . Since my life has led me into social and political and industrial movements I am glad that I discovered adult education in my early twenties. For it has added to the interest-content of my contacts, and has revealed subtle facts of knowledge and shades of understanding which could hardly have come to me otherwise. I am not necessarily happier, but my life is fuller.
I have found that education tends to make one more sensitive and to feel things more keenly. In a world where there is so much that hurts and leads to despair, as well as so much that delights and heartens, a sensitive nature touches deeper notes of unhappiness as well as higher ones of great happiness.
I have lost many illusions but I do not regret them, for education has taught me that it is better to see things as they are. I really cannot say that I am more or less happy; what I can say is that the happiness is of a different kind.
Adult education is its own reward—and its own revenge.117
The Reward
The WEA clearly succeeded in training an effective corps of working-class leaders. Of 303 students attending Oxford University Tutorial Classes in 1917–18, 195 were engaged in some kind of public work, including fifty-three trade union officials, twenty-six members of trades and labor councils, twenty-five Co-operative society officers, eleven members of local government bodies, thirty-eight involved in the Adult School movement, and twenty-six engaged in volunteer teaching.118 By the 1930s the WEA was educating about 60,000 students, of whom one in five was enrolled in University Tutorial Classes. (In contrast, the NCLC peaked in the mid-1920s at 30,000 students, and was down to about 13,000 by 1937–38.)119 An incomplete 1938 survey of England and Wales found more than 2,300 WEA students and alumni currently holding public office, including fifteen MPs.120 The Labour victory of 1945 moved A. E. Zimmern to proclaim, “It is an England largely moulded by the WEA that has been swept into power.”121 The new prime minister, the chancellor of the exchequer, and twelve other members of the government had been WEA tutors or executives. A total of fifty-six WEA supporters, teachers, and students were sitting in the House of Commons.122 John Langley, a railway coach builder elected a Brighton councillor in that annus mirabilis, credited his political consciousness to WEA lectures:
The subjects that we discussed were terrific. I got really fascinated by them, and the speakers were so good that I never missed a week. I went as regular as clockwork. I could read a newspaper much better after going to these classes. I could see behind what they were trying to pump into me. . . . The working class has become educated. They can read the financial news in the newspaper, if they want to, and understand it. They wouldn’t be able to get involved in it, but they could see which way the wind’s blowing. They should know whether they’re being done or not. . . . We’re more aware of the craftiness of things today [1976] than we were before. They could pull the wool over our eyes before, but they can’t now.123
Building on a long autodidact tradition, the WEA had produced an army of postwar Labour politicians passionately committed to education, and thus contributed an all-party consensus for government aid to the arts. T. Dan Smith’s father, a frequently unemployed miner, introduced him to opera, Chaliapin, Plato’s Republic, Marx, and Bernard Shaw. His mother held down two cleaning jobs to buy a new piano for her children. Smith entered Newcastle politics on a personal mission to promote arts and culture in the north. He fought relentlessly to channel government money into libraries, public sculpture, and the Northern Sinfonia Orchestra. He took pride in building a university complex in the city center, though he admitted “we were uprooting a whole neighborhood.” He provocatively installed abstract art in the Civic Centre Rates Hall, so that property owners could see where their taxes were going as they wrote out their checks. “How necessary for ballet dancers to communicate with footballers,” he once wrote: it might have been his campaign slogan.124
Having accounted the real achievements of the WEA, it remains to acknowledge its limitations. Though Tutorial Classes accomplished much good work, the goal of educating students up to a university honors standard was, as even sympathizers conceded, “a polite fiction.” Board of Education inspectors tried to be charitable, but in 1922 they were compelled to admit that the quality of written work in Tutorial Classes
varies so enormously as to make it impossible to generalise about it. . . . Some essays are fully up to the standard of the best Honours work by University Students; and these are not always the work of men of previous good education. Some essays by mere beginners display remarkable power of clear and forcible expression. The essays of nearly the whole of one class of working women seen two years ago reached a remarkable standard both in expression and in the rarer academic quality of detachment. On the other hand another batch of essays from a small group of artisans were deficient in every good quality, and breathed only sound and fury. . . .
On the whole, the essays show that at least half the students are profiting very much by the courses. As to the rest it is doubtful whether Tutorial class work—except for its political value—is the most appropriate means by which they can receive education. The treatment of the subjects is beyond them: they cannot read the best books with understanding, and they fail to make adequate progress.125
It could hardly have been otherwise. A Cambridge undergraduate reading for the English Literature Tripos might in three years attend 216 lectures and enjoy seventy-two hours of personal direction by his tutor. A WEA student, with far less leisure time at his disposal, had seventy-two hours each of lectures and of class discussion.126 The first Tutorial Class, a 1908 seminar on economic history taught by R. H. Tawney, based in the Potteries town of Longton, became a legend in the WEA for the zeal of its students, but it was a struggle for many of them. Remedial classes in English industrial history and essay writing had to be organized for students unprepared for university-level work. Boom times in the Potteries meant more overtime, which depressed attendance. Recessions could be equally disruptive, as students became demoralized or left town in search of work. One pottery engineer recorded that, over a 26-week period, he worked an average of 74.5 hours a week and then wrote fourteen essays for the Tutorial Class, read another ten papers to the remedial class, and delivered a total of fifteen lectures to other workers’ classes and a literary society.127
As the hard sciences were even more demanding, the WEA never developed a broad range of course offerings in that field. In 1938–39 all the natural sciences accounted for only 7.0 percent of WEA classes, compared with 58.4 percent for the social sciences (mainly politics, economics, history, and psychology) and 24.3 percent for literature and the arts.128 (The sciences attracted a still smaller proportion of students in the less challenging adult courses offered by Local Education Authorities: only 1.8 percent of enrollment in 1927–28.)129 Astronomy, physics, and chemistry were rarely offered by the WEA, because they required expensive equipment and sophisticated mathematical skills. Biology, botany, zoology, and geology were more feasible, since classes could resort to museums, zoos, botanical gardens, and country rambles. They could also draw on what remained of the dying tradition of working-class naturalists, who were meeting in pubs as late as the 1920s.130 By then an instructor might still work with an occasional student “who has spent his Sunday mornings for twelve years collecting fossils from colliery tip-heaps with excellent results,”131 or who had built his own microscope and chemical apparatus, but such versatility was increasingly rare.132 As for the WEA policy of educating students up to an honors standard, “I must confess that I never took it seriously,” wrote one biology tutor from Leeds University.
It could never have been intended to refer to Science Courses. How could a class meeting for two hours a week in town which provided, let us say, only one microscope and no other equipment whatever, be expected to reach Honours Standard . . . in a Biology course? Science must be experienced and not read. Midnight oil is of no avail. . . . To merely lecture the students that offer themselves, or to get them to read books is to produce nothing but inflation and arrogance. An individual so trained would have a bad influence—I have seen it at work—and contact with him would be sufficient to make anyone hate science.
His university students in biology had to study botany, zoology, human physiology and histology, and pathology and bacteriology, each course consuming at least twelve hours a week (in practice much more) for three years. A Tutorial Class student would take seventy-two years to cover the same ground, not counting the introductory training university students received in chemistry and physics. At most a WEA tutor could offer a basic introduction to science. In place of real lab work he might bring specimens to class, share his research with the students, set up vivaria and aquariums, hold a class in his own laboratory, or conduct museum visits and nature walks.133
For some students, adult education produced more stress than gratification. When postal worker Paddy Molloy took his first class (in European history) in 1932–33, “An entire new field of learning was opened up for me, although I must confess that I understood very little of what was being taught.” A few years later he attended Ruskin College, where he studied history and psychology, was introduced to classical music, and was immensely impressed by the objectivity and rigor of his tutor. But when he returned to his post office and trade union work,
Many of my colleagues did not know quite what to make of me. Coming from Ruskin I was not comfortable with them, nor they with me. It is difficult to portray the peculiar situation I found myself in. The WEA and Ruskin experience had, to put the matter bluntly, lifted me out of the relatively uneducated working class rut. They only knew I had been to college. It seemed odd that I should only be a postman. I felt often compelled to argue against, as I saw it, their unsubstantiated prejudices.
He defended Gandhi against a former sergeant major, who lashed back fiercely: “Don’t argue with me you bloody educated nincompoop.” “For some months after I left Ruskin I did not want to do any serious reading, or study at all,” Molloy recalled. He recovered and became WEA organizer for Hertfordshire, only to face attack on another flank. One of his faculty was a German academic refugee, whose nerves had been shattered by Nazi persecution, but his classes were harassed by Communists who wanted him dismissed as an ideological traitor, and Molloy had to travel and argue past midnight to defend him.
By the end of the war Molloy was disillusioned with the WEA. He saw it becoming more and more a middle-class organization, steeped “in the high flown jargon of the University lecture, or Common Room.”134 The proportion of worker-students in the WEA had fallen from nearly half (48.2 percent) in 1937/38 to just under a third in 1949/50, and would decline further to 28.0 percent by 1958/59.135 Autodidacts, the traditional constituency of the WEA, were becoming an endangered species, thanks to the (limited) opening up of secondary and higher education. In 1927 Board of Education inspectors in Yorkshire found that only in the smaller and more isolated towns was it “still possible to meet the old miner who knows his Butler’s Analogy, the labourer who can recite most of Blake’s poems, and who can enforce his points with apt quotations from the Bible.”136 By 1952 children at the same IQ level, regardless of their class background, had an equal chance of entering grammar school, though of course children from affluent families were likely to score higher on intelligence tests.137
Sidney Weighell (b. 1922), general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, enormously appreciated the educational routes that opened up after the Second World War. Where he had to rely on NCLC correspondence courses and study “after work literally by the guttering candle,” his son acquired a doctorate, and his two nephews became, respectively, a metallurgist and an aeronautical engineer. But as he admitted, “With this sort of change, the traditional pool of working-class brains and talent has been siphoned off,” and the intellectual level of NUR leaders had unmistakably declined.138 Pearl Jephcott’s 1945–46 survey of 103 teenage girls was hard put to find a working-class intellectual among that generation. There was the daughter of Methodist trade unionists, a Sunday school teacher who managed the library at her Girls’ Life Brigade Company, who knew Madame Butterfly and the Messiah, who read everything from Wuthering Heights and The Water Babies to Walter de la Mare and Adolf Hitler. But she was literally one in a hundred: the other girls in the survey were devoted to the cinema, indifferent to current events, and positively hostile to “big books.”139
Adult Education: Why This Apathy? was the telling title of a 1953 report by WEA official Ernest Green. By then it was clear that the wartime enthusiasm for culture had worn off. Green discovered that, in a typical town in 1949–50, only one adult in forty-six was taking an evening institute course, and only one in 265 was taking a class in the liberal arts. Each year since 1948 the National Coal Board had offered a hundred university scholarships to miners to train as mining engineers: it never found more than fifty-five takers. A newspaper explained that one could hardly expect young men to give up £12 in wages for an £11 university stipend. “Shades of Jack Lawson, who sold up his home to go to Ruskin College!” snorted a disgusted Green.140
A 1962 Gallup Poll in North Staffordshire found that 83 percent of working-class respondents had never heard of the WEA, and 91 percent did not know what it was. When asked where they would go for information about adult education, nearly half did not know: none mentioned the WEA or a university.141 A 1965–66 survey in Chester and Eccles found that only 5 percent of persons aged fifteen or over, and only 1 percent of semi-skilled and unskilled workers, had ever taken a WEA or university extramural course. Though only 25 percent of all adults were professionals or managers, they accounted for 65 percent of all WEA and extramural students. Put another way, 23 percent of all university and college of education graduates had attended WEA or extra-mural courses, compared with 8 percent of grammar school graduates and only 3 percent of those who had attended secondary modern schools, though secondary modern students accounted for 35 percent of all WEA/extra-mural students.
One encouraging sign was the fact that educational broadcasts on radio and television regularly reached 24 percent of skilled workers, 30 percent of the semi-skilled, and 18 percent of the unskilled.142 That pointed the way toward the Open University, launched in 1969, and reaching more than 200,000 students by the 1990s. Though most of them were not working-class, in the 1970s, 52 percent of the fathers of Open University students were manual workers, and another 28 percent were lower-rung white-collar employees.143 Even in the Thatcher decade, observed Richard Hoggart, adult students were still seeking the best that is known and thought in the world:
They express that need in lovely old-fashioned ways. They speak of wanting to be better educated so as to live a fuller life, so as to be more whole, so as to be able to understand their experience better, and the way their society is going. They want to understand and to criticise, but from a larger and less febrile perspective than they are generally offered; they are Arnoldians before they are anything else. Jude and his sister are not dead nor necessarily at university; they probably have Filofaxes; but they are still looking for larger meanings.144