Developments in Britain and Ireland

In Britain, it can be argued that the first adult educators were the missionaries who came from Ireland or from continental Europe. The church became and remained for many centuries, 'the greatest educational force in the country' (Kelly 1970: 1).The clergy had a duty to teach. This they did through preaching, talking with people as they went about their lives, and through more specialized means such as schooling. However, it is with the beginnings of religious non-conformity and the work of people such as John Wycliffe that we see a major shift. Rather than look to the priests around matters of faith, Wycliffe believed that we must look directly to the Bible. For this to happen people - all 'classes of people', not just the rich or privileged, had to learn to read. From the late 1370s, 'Poor Preachers' started to spread the gospel around Britain.

At the same time we can see a range of activities and people adding to the education of people within daily life. Examples include miracle and morality plays, wandering bards and minstrels and the training involved in membership of the guilds (Bards were important animators of learning in Wales). Significantly, by the middle of the fifteenth century we can find the beginnings of parish libraries. These grew, with the introduction of the printing press (by William Caxton in 1476), and so did the numbers of roving Puritan preachers who were now able to refer directly to their own bible.

In the seventeenth century we see the further development of academies and charity schools, and of libraries. With a growing interest in science and in secular and rational thought, mutual improvement societies, debating societies and coffee houses emerged as places for exploration and discussion. These came into their own in the eighteenth century. We can also find calls for secular adult education and open debate such as that of the Leveller, Gerrard Winstanley (1652) in his Law of Freedom in a Platform, or The True Magistracy Restored (published by Penguin in 1973 - see pp. 361-5).

By the early 1700s there was a further development in the nature of religious adult education. Of great importance was the growth of the Welsh Circulating Schools (which moved from place to place and were attended by adults and children), and the development of church societies and Sunday Schools.

Welsh Circulating Schools in the 1750s

At these Circulating Schools, so anxious were the people to learn their own ancient language, that persons of all ages attended, from six years of age to above seventy. In several places, indeed, the older people formed about two-thirds of the number in attendance. Persons above sixty, attended every day; and often lamented, nay even wept, that they had not leaned forty or fifty years sooner. Not unfrequently the children actually taught their parents; and sometimes the parents and children of one family resorted to the same Circulating School during its short continuance in a district; while various individuals, who from great age, were obliged to wear spectacles, seized the opportunity, and learned to read the Scriptures in Welsh, at that advanced period of life.

Extract from paper included in Thomas Pole (1816) A History of the Origin and Progress of Adult Schools, Bristol: C. Mc Dowall, page 5.

Schools such as these were part of a range of activities ranging from informal discussion and street preaching through to benefit clubs.

In England two of the best known figures in promoting local education were sisters Hannah and Martha More. In the 1790s undertook summer campaigns in Mendip villages to establish Sunday schools, day and evening schools, benefit clubs, distribute bibles - and undertake various other good works so that the lower classes may be formed 'to habits of industry and virtue'. Hannah had been worried by the arguments of Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man and sought to reconcile the poor to their fate.