Under Sunak’s ‘low value’ education diktat E PThompson’s Making of the English Working Class would never have been written
2023 marks the 60th anniversary of one of the landmark books of socialist history E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. It remains in print today.
Under Rishi Sunak’s plans to defund ‘low value’ education including many of the ways that mature and under privileged students find their way into higher education that book would probably have never been written.
From 1948 until 1965 Thompson was an extra-mural lecture at the University of Leeds. He would travel across the West and North Ridings of Yorkshire to teach working class students at evening classes. In the preface to the Making he notes ‘I have learned a great deal from members of my tutorial classes with whom I have discussed many of the themes treated here’.
During the day Thompson would research in archives the material that makes the Making such a rich source as a history book covering the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the 1830s.
It is a salutary thought that under Sunak’s diktat the University Extension classes he taught, and their modern equivalents would not exist and the framework for the Making of the English Working Class likewise would be absent
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