The Labour Party and Education for Socialism

Abstract

No socialist since Robert Owen has had any excuse for being unaware of the relationship between educational reform and social and political change, and a perception of this relationship was a feature of nineteenth century socialism and liberalism. The attention which the educational principles and policies of socialist, labour, and radical movements in Europe have recently received has thus been well deserved. The socialists have however come off better than those organisations which have been designated as merely “labour”, and two valuable contributions to the literature dealing with Great Britain – Professor Simon's Education and the Labour Movement, 1870–1920, and Dr Reid's article on the Socialist Sunday Schools – are concerned with the programmes and beliefs of left wing socialist bodies, rather than with those of the ideologically more diffuse but politically more important Labour Party. Both these contributions may perhaps profitably be placed in a new perspective by an examination of the attitudes adopted within the Labour Party and within its industrial half-brother the Trades Union Congress, to the problems raised by the content and character, as opposed to the structure and organisation, of the education available to the working class.