ABSTRACT
THE comprehensive and varied scheme of liberal adult education, national in its scope and now embracing, as we have seen, an influential proportion of the working- and middle-class sections of the population, grew out of a demand for workers’ education in association with the universities. This demand was expressed through the W.E.A. which, as its name implies, had as the very reason for its existence the promotion of adult education for ‘workers’, and for that reason the early emphasis was heavily upon those studies which seemed to be most important for the advancement of the aims and interests of the working-class movement of the early twentieth century. The most obvious characteristic of the ‘worker’ at that time was that he worked with his hands, and so the main emphasis was upon the need to provide for the education of manual workers. But that was obviously too narrow a conception of what was meant by ‘workers’, especially since, with the increasing use of automatic machinery, the progress of scientific management and the greater differentiation of occupations, the proportion of non-manual workers in the labour force of the nation as a whole was rapidly growing. It came to be realized too that the large class of clerks, shop assistants and those in similar non-manual occupations were equally in need of higher education, and that if adult education was to be regarded as ‘remedial’, the needs of manual workers were in no sense in a class apart. And so, unconsciously, the emphasis shifted to weekly wage-earners, or to those who had completed their full-time education in the public elementary school or, finally, to those who began their education in the elementary school whatever happened to them afterwards. Adult education, designed originally to meet the needs of the educationally underprivileged, appealed more and more to the intelligent members of all the main sections of the community, except those in the lower grades of labour who, in the remedial sense, needed it most. When the term ‘workers’ came to mean in effect ‘all workers by hand or brain’, it ceased to have significance as the definition of a social class with common aims, and the term ‘workers’ education’, as it relates to the general work of the W.E.A., has become similarly meaningless.
