Co-operation, Leadership and Learning: Fred Hall and the Co-operative College before 1939

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, the consumer co-operative movement in Britain was a major social force with a membership of three million at the outbreak of the First World War. The gradual emergence of the Co-operative College after 1919 represented an attempt to provide higher education as well as structure for the wide array of educational activities that were organised by the movement. An analysis of the College during the interwar years provides fascinating insights into the possibilities and contradictions of educational leadership within a democratic working class movement. In a setting where power was widely diffused, convincing individual co-operative societies and their members to support central educational efforts proved problematic. Leaders such as Fred Hall asserted an unwavering faith in co-operative educational schemes. He built networks, formulated a vision for the College and propagated it throughout the movement. However, as co-operative education expanded and became more of an alternative in its own right, it was simultaneously marginalised not only in relation to the developing mainstream education system but also within the worker’s movement. In part, this reflected the unique nature of co-operative education, which traversed liberal and vocational conceptions of knowledge while engaging with the notion of education for social change. These dilemmas of democratic leadership help us to understand the issues affecting alternative educational initiatives.