The experience of adult education: Workers’ Educational Association tutorial class logbooks as sources

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article seeks to understand how adult students perceived education as disseminated by the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). Evidence will be presented from sources not commonly studied, namely WEA student logbooks of tutorial classes. Adult students attending WEA tutorial classes in the 1920s and 1930s recorded their own personal, real-time experiences of education in the logbooks on a weekly basis. The logbooks offer a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the tutorial class, the WEA’s gold standard in education. They show how students perceived the topics being taught, related this to their wider lives, and expressed the immediate impacts that this education was having on them. This paper highlights the value of WEA logbooks, intriguing artefacts in themselves, as underused primary sources in the history of adult education. It will suggest ways using the information contained in the logbooks for future histories of education.