26th April 2024 – A crisis in the human spirit: Spirituality and reimagining the world.

This event was a launch of Sharon Clancy’s book: Sir George Trevelyan, Residential Adult Education and the New Age: ‘To Open the Immortal Eye’. It considered the development of British post-Second World War short-term residential adult education, through the lens of the Shropshire Adult Education College (SAEC – 1948-1976) and the tenure of Sir George Trevelyan as its first warden. Trevelyan is acknowledged as the godfather of new-age spiritualism in the UK and is credited with the development of eclectic and esoteric learning opportunities in arts, traditional crafts, culture and ecology. Embodying the spirit of a new national drive for optimism and enterprise in the post-war period, Trevelyan, and his contemporaries at other colleges, took risks and innovated in new pedagogical approaches to adult education, capturing the imagination of hundreds of students.

Some have argued that such spaces were stifled by an increasingly restrictive policy framework and financial and political strictures, particularly in the 1970s with the ‘Winter of Discontent‘. On the other hand, Trevelyan himself became increasingly focused on his own interests. His ‘beliefs and values were the result of a genuine and heartfelt conviction that he had a duty to help people “wake” and to turn away from a materialism which he understood as damaging the planet and the people who inhabit it’ (p.232). However, ‘over time the spiritual and esoteric appeared to totally eclipse ideas, processes and practices associated with democratic and emancipatory education and Trevelyan arguably oversaw the gradual decline of a social purpose curriculum which was originally open access, and which targeted local people, to one which privileged closed, spiritual and esoteric courses for those who lived far afield, were affluent and sometimes titled’ (Cilla Ross).

The seminar considered the ideological drivers and tensions behind this unique form of education – its inception, evolution and virtual demise – and sought to learn from its complex history to inform education in the future. It explored, in particular, the ongoing tensions between class, power, learning and the democratising intention. It featured presentations from Dr Sharon Clancy, giving an overview of her research and the evolution of the book, Dr Barrie Trinder, FSA, historian and writer on industrial archaeology, who was the Area Tutor/Co-ordinator at the SAEC in the 1960s, Dr Cilla Ross who has recently written a review of Clancy’s book, Professor Tom Woodin, Professor Emeritus Linden West and Professor Emeritus John Holford, who was Sharon’s PhD supervisor.