Welsh Journals

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though Lewis is careful and correct to argue that they must be taken together and related to each other at every stage. The liberal tradition of the Workers' Educational Associa- tion and its alliance with the universities, established in the first years of the century, is counterposed to the tradition of 'independent working-class education' as developed on the south Wales coalfields by the Labour College movement. The miners of south Wales were the most devoted supporters of the Labour College, and counter to the trend in most other parts of Britain, they were able to establish the Marxist tradition of workers' education as the dominant force in adult education in the region until the Depression. Lewis is at his best when explaining how and why this occurred, and is especially insightful in his third chapter on the effects of the First World War on workers' educa- tion. There are some excellent pages on the role of Marxism in developing a new consciousness among Central Labour College students in south Wales during the conflict (pp. 125-28), and Lewis explains very effectively how growing anti-capitalism in the coalfields made it difficult for the W.E.A.'s rival ethos of 'civic harmony' to establish a foothold. The W.E.A., an English movement that lacked cultural roots in the region, was unable at this stage to attract to its classes the manual working class and the activist elite drawn from it. Lewis is generally very fair in his treatment of these two traditions, though it is unde- niable that the Plebs and their fellows have the best lines and the most interesting tale to tell. Men like T. I. Mardy Jones and Noah Ablett, who were at the centre of the Labour College movement, would give colour and conviction to any story. But just occasionally Lewis's own sympathies show through. The relationship he seeks to establish between the growing influence of the W.E.A. and the lessening of radicalism in south Wales in the late 1920s (pp. 185-86) is unconvincing, and probably mistakes effects for causes. Industrial failure and unemployment are surely more convincing and more obvious reasons for the decay of independent, Marxist working-class education in south Wales. And throughout the text Lewis is slightly too ready to dismiss the W.E.A. as intrinsically collaborationist. There is a need for a more detailed analysis of the aims and methods of the organization to balance the very interesting discussion of the objectives and outlook of the Labour College movement. Perhaps Lewis should have devoted more space to the moment of division in workers' education in Oxford, and at Ruskin College particularly, in 1908-9. This story has been told before, of course, and Lewis does not neglect it; but a more detailed analysis of the disputes at that time would have given him the opportunity to present the W.E.A. case against a purely class-conscious workers' education. Lewis might also have paid more attention to the workers who came to the classes in both traditions. He gives relatively little space to the subjects they studied, their experi- ence of learning and their yearning for enlightenment. Lewis has written a very effective political-administrative history of adult education, and it would be unfair to criticize the author for failing to write a different book entirely. Yet this account lacks something in its neglect of the 'education' in workers' education. Workers may have come to classes for a training in social emancipation, but they also derived individual benefit from the experience. Indeed, there are grounds for arguing that many devoted worker-scholars in this period, who lacked nothing in class consciousness, were profoundly opposed to materialistic philosophies, and craved education for its spiritual uplift and for its own