Documents from the archive of the London Adult School Union. Photo: Jonathan Lingham.
The London Adult School Union
Jonathan Lingham writes about Friends and an educational movement
As Westminster Meeting prepares for its next ‘Quinquennial’ I am reminded that during the big clear-out that preceded the last major building work a cache of old papers was discovered in one of the basements. This was an assortment of notebooks, ledgers, paying-in books and minutes belonging to the now defunct London Adult School Union (LASU). The LASU governed the work of the various adult school federations across the capital from the mid-nineteenth century right up until the early 1980s.
Before I passed these documents across to the London Metropolitan Archives for safe keeping, I took the opportunity to look through them and learn something of the movement’s history, and its social context.
Although never formally part of the Religious Society of Friends, from the start Quakers played a dominant role in furthering the aims of the adult school movement in Britain. In London there were dozens of such schools. Many were held in Meeting houses after Sunday Meeting for Worship, and often the teachers and organisers were Quakers.
The LASU’s committee meetings were held on Quaker premises (latterly at Westminster) and on Quaker lines, with a period of silent worship before business began. Minutes were diligently written up, in elegant copperplate up until the first world war, before the typewriter started to displace the human hand.
Subcommittees were set up – a men’s committee, a women’s committee, finance, education, the all-important nominations and the summer school. It all points to a well-organised movement run enthusiastically by a relatively small band of volunteers.
What did these adult schools do? Mark Freeman, of the Institute of Education, University College London, has given me permission to draw from a paper he wrote for the journal History of Education in 2010. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the majority of adult scholars were young men, mostly from unskilled or semi-skilled backgrounds, and often with poor literacy and numeracy skills. Adult schools offered a mix of Bible study and practical training in writing and arithmetic.
The unstated hope was that the young people participating might end up joining the Society, but it seems that Quakers’ reluctance to proselytise didn’t bring this about: most of those coming to classes stopped attending within a year.
The archive reveals that the schools continued to operate during world war one. The war itself is barely mentioned in any minutes, though it had an impact on numbers. In 1914 there were 5,800 registered attenders in London. By 1918 this had dropped to 3,750.
Social change
The war brought massive social change. Soldiers had received training in those basic education skills which had been the mainstay of the adult schools. In the years after the war the archive records that the movement responded to changing needs by offering a broader range of activities: a drama group was set up, and arts and crafts, musical appreciation and creative writing were encouraged.
More emphasis was being placed on fellowship instead of Bible study, important for young people migrating to London. More mixed schools were started. Schools might meet on weekday evenings, in addition to their regular meetings on Sundays. Films were shown and talks given by eminent people. In 1933 lessons in Russian were being offered. In early 1937, with a profound sense of foreboding, a talk on air-raid precautions was given.
Reasons for decline
These efforts brought some revival, but overall, membership in London fell by twelve per cent between 1921 and 1934. Mark Freeman takes the view that adult schools failed to keep pace with the growth of other adult education providers such as local councils and working men’s institutes, where teaching came without any religious expectations.
The advent of radio in the 1920s, with the BBC’s stated mandate to ‘inform, educate and entertain’, brought further competition, as did cinema, although there the emphasis was more clearly on entertainment.
This steady decline continued after the second world war despite (or perhaps because of) a revised London Adult School Union constitution aiming to advance ‘the gaining of knowledge, the sharing of experience, the development of personality, the promotion of friendship, and an endeavour to create a Christian social order’.
The expansion of television in the 1950s, and the establishment of the Open University in the 1960s, offered further educational alternatives. Costs were rising too, and funding was getting tight. A letter sent to the National Adult School Union shows irritation at their request for urgent support to meet a looming deficit – the LASU still paid up, however.
Organisers and attenders were getting older. Minutes reveal the struggle to find Friends to help run the schools, or attract good speakers, with one school resorting to the showing of a member’s holiday slides, rather than something more meatily educational.
By the 1970s some were starting to recognise that radical change was needed if the movement was to survive in London. A survey in 1972 generated many criticisms, including of the name (‘Study Groups’ was suggested as an alternative). But no credible new ideas emerged from this.
The North West London Federation of Adult Schools was wound up in early 1974: others would soon follow. The last items in the archive are a minute of the LASU Extension Committee, which records that their meeting of 6 October 1982 had to be abandoned because only two people turned up, and a receipt for £8.50 from the Balham Adult School dated 20 March 1983.
It is always sad to read a record of any institution’s demise. At its peak, in the period immediately before the first world war, the adult schools movement was a real force in the education of disadvantaged young men and women in London.
In reading through the archive, I was struck by the huge amount of energy that a few Friends put into trying to keep the movement alive. With hindsight it is easy to say that it was an impossible task, as the competition from other educational or recreational providers became too great. But that should not stop us celebrating what the adult schools did, nor the part that Quakers played.
