ABSTRACT
A British social entrepreneur, Young was influenced by the positive experience he had as a boy at Dartington Hall, the progressive school in Devon, England. He developed ideas about the Open School, viewed as a laboratory for learning, involving pupils, teachers and parents. He became director of research for the British Labour Party aged twenty-nine, and personally wrote Let Us Face the Future, the manifesto which brought the Attlee government to power in 1945. He became internationally famous with the publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) a satirical account of the way that IQ measurements and academic certification had replaced wealth in the reproduction of social inequalities. For Young, equal access to schooling was a basic human right. During this period he was also the founder of the British consumer rights organisation the Consumers’ Association and its magazine Which?. His 1957 study (with Peter Willmott) Family and Kinship in East London linked schooling, income, housing and health in an account of the poor. Even though it was more in the tradition of Booth, Rowntree and Mayhew than of modern social science, it became a standard text within teacher training for many years. Young founded the Advisory Centre for Education in 1960. From small beginnings Young developed and expanded the idea of the Open University and the National Extension College, which institutionalised the idea of distance learning through broadcasting and correspondence. In his later years Young continued to create education organisations linking consumer power and open access.
