Fred Clarke’s Ideals of Liberal Democracy: State and Community in Education

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the continuity and changes in Clarke’s ideas about the State and community in education, especially in relation to a rapidly changing political situation in England in the 1930s and 1940s. His ideas evolved in the intellectual context of British idealism. Moreover, in response to the threat to democracy arising from Fascism or Totalitarianism, the distinction between the State and community was a key theme in Clarke’s ideals of liberal democracy. Additionally, this paper also proposes the implications of Clarke’s ideas for future educational development.

Keywords:

• Fred Clarke
• liberal democracy
• state
• community
• education

Acknowledgement

This paper is developed from the author’s PhD thesis, ‘Education for Liberal Democracy: Fred Clarke and Educational Reconstruction in England 1936–1952’. The author would like to acknowledge her own profound debt to her supervisor, Professor Gary McCulloch. His continuing guidance and great support played an indispensable part in the accomplishment of the author’s thesis and the publication of this paper.

Notes

¹ For Quentin Skinner (1978, p. xi), ‘intellectual context’ means ‘the context of earlier writings and inherited assumptions about political society and of more ephemeral contemporary contributions to social and political thought’.

² It is worth noting that, after the Second World War, for promoting the establishment of University Schools of Education, Clarke (1946a, p. 155) revised his idea and argued that ‘the university is the one authority’ that people could turn as the ‘creator’ and ‘maintainer’ of standards of teacher education.