WORKERS AND IDLERS
Sm,—May I raise a question which I believe to be of great importance for that post-war period bristling with problems which we shall soon have to face?
The supremely important task of lifting the masses of the people to an intellectual level which will make possible the real working of democracy has been attempted for years by the Workers' Educational Association. Excellent as the work of that body has been in many respects, it cannot be said to have achieved its main object to any appreciable extent. It may be regarded as a lamentable tendency, or merely as something quite inevitable, that often where the W.E.A. has offered real education the " worker " has been conspicuously absent ; and where the "worker " has predominated the education supplied has sometimes become so nar- rowed by the narrow interests—largely economic—of the audience, o: even (contrary to the professed principles of the W.E.A.) so coloured by its political outlook, as to cease to be education at all.
I know of two towns within a few miles of each other: the one; a railway and industrial centre of some size, the majority of whose inhabi- tants might be described as "workers "; the other, a pleasure resort,
fall at present of well-to-do, idle people escaping the dangers of air raids. In the first, the W.E.A. can maintain only one struggling class with an average attendance of six members ; in the second, there are from ten to twelve flourishing classes on every topic, the membership of a single class being over too.
No one has ever suggested, to my knowledge, the formation of an Idlers' Educational Association. But it occurs to me that the idler may be in more dire need of education than the worker, whose very work may become to him a source of culture in the truest sense. The pursuit of education calls, not merely for a certain amount of leisure, but still more for that spacious leisure of the mind which cannot be attained by those whose condition Of life causes them to be constantly obsessed with *heir personal economic problems. There are but few rare souls who can seek sustenance for the mind while they lack sustenance for the body.
Believing that the W.E.A. might have a great future before it and become a real force in the life of the nation, such as it has never yet been, I seek the guidance of others on this question: May it be that the enlightenment of the masses cannot yet be achieved by a direct attack upon them, and that the time has come for the W.E.A. to widei the scope of its work and start a great campaign for adult education as visualised in Sir Richard Livingstone's Future in Education ; abandoning the attempt to create a demand for education where it does not exist, and rather raising its tutorship to a uniformly high level so as to meet the demand wherever it does exist ; while aiming always at hastening the establishment of a social order in which, apt one class only, but all people, shall be at liberty to pursue the good things of the mind and
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