Social Radicalism and Liberal Education by Lindsay Paterson

Author:Lindsay Paterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Liberal education, socialism, relativism, politics, best culture, social radicalism, public policy, learning
ISBN: 9781845408541
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2015
Published: 2015-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

4. Liberal Education and Mass Society

Two post-war socialist intellectuals had something of the same stature in debate about education as Tawney, Laski and Cole, and reached somewhat the same kind of audience: Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart. They belong to the same intellectual tradition as these predecessors, and indeed were shaped in significant respects by reaction to the same cultural milieu - the ideas of Leavis and of Arnold, and the ethical socialism deriving ultimately from T.H. Green. Their writing, starting in the 1950s, was infused with post-war idealism which then merged into the beginning of the utopian radicalism of the 1960s, and was grounded - as had been Tawney’s, Laski’s and Cole’s - in the experience of teaching classes of adult education. In the words of Collini (1999: 255), ‘the enabling circumstances owed much to the conjunction of the idealism of post-war adult education and the optimism of the early New Left.’ Yet their development can provide a general introduction to the eventual demise of that tradition on the left, and indeed the contrasting ways in which these two men responded to the social change and changing character of politics in the half century after 1945 are an indication of the tradition’s fracturing. That they had - as we shall see in later chapters - an influence on left-wing thought about education as great as their inter-war forebears is reason enough to examine their ideas. That they also - again like these earlier thinkers - were significant far beyond the left is a mark of the vitality which socialist thought continued to draw, in the 1950s, from the wider intellectual culture.

Raymond Williams

Williams is often described as a literary critic or a social historian (Smith, 2009), both of which he was, but the tradition to which he belonged - the one that we have been analysing here - interpreted both of these ways of thinking about society as being centrally concerned with education, with deciding who was to be taught what. He was born in 1921, near Abergavenny on the border between Wales and England. After graduating from Cambridge University, he worked as an adult-education tutor in Oxford University’s extra-mural department. In 1961 he became a lecturer in English at Cambridge, and was appointed professor of drama there in 1974. He published widely - books, chapters, newspaper reviewing, contributions to broadcasting. In the words of Smith (2009): ‘the whole corpus... established him, in his own lifetime, as a major socialist thinker.’ He was, Collini (1999: 219) noted, a ‘general intellectual of the Left’.

His first book, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1952), created his reputation as a literary critic drawing on Leavis but on the left of that movement, proposing that cultural understanding is dependent upon the opportunities with which audiences are provided (Smith, 2009). His next two books developed the analyses of cultural and social change with which he became identified: Culture and Society (1958) was an examination of the social basis of those ideas which Arnold and his successors

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