ABSTRACT
In 1908 a group of radical working-class students at Ruskin College, increasingly alarmed at the direction in which the college was being guided by its management, launched the Plebs League', a discussion group to argue the case for an independent system of working-class adult education, funded wholly by the labour movement. In some schools CSE syllabuses are being re-drawn to include local working-class autobiographies and local histories. From that year until 1964, when the National Council of Labour Colleges agreed to dissolve itself and enter into the general educational apparatus of the TUC Education Committee, the Labour College movement had been an unstinting provider of Marxist education for the organised working-class movement. The full political implications of this TUC proscription ought now to be openly discussed and challenged. Ken Worpole's article on the political implications of local working-class history is a passionate defence of the development in community-based local history over the past ten years.
