I enter a dingy pub in South london. Two men sit waiting for me, wilting in air filled with muggy air saturated with beer and sweat. I am about to witness first-hand what happens when an institution enters terminal senility.

I was led to this moment by research into Scottish examinations. From 1888 to around 1960, Scotland set the hardest English literature exam on the planet. The top 10% of students sitting this exam were at parity with the best students around the globe. Labour politicians and radical English teachers looked at this inheritance and thought one thing: clearly this will not do. Between the 1960s and 1990s Scotland rapidly dismantled its traditions of English literature. By 1990 virtually nothing would be left. In my hunt for the origins of this decay I stumbled across an educational association of massive scope and influence: The World Education Fellowship.

The WEF, founded 1921, is one of the world’s oldest educational associations; it is also one of the most influential. Few westerners have gone through primary and secondary school without coming into contact with its ideas. Child-centred learning; project-oriented work; formative, continuous assessment; skills and personal development over academic knowledge; class-led lessons; and inter-subject activities: all of these were championed early by the WEF. Much of its deeper philosophy has seeped into our educational water. We treat school as a place for the ‘whole development of the child’, providing emotional, social, and spiritual lessons as well as academic. We doubt the role of harsh discipline, of rote learning, and strict academic hierarchy. Its most successful experiments are well-known in schoolchild lore - “Did you hear about that school with no rules?” – and act as a sort of Theoretical Utopia for the progressive teacher “well of course Summerhill is the best sort of school, but it’s not possible here...yet.” At its peak, the WEF had thousands of members across the world in a dense network of teachers, educators, teacher-training courses, civil servants, and philanthropists.

Today it has two members in England, and a smattering elsewhere. Few are under the age of forty. Slowly the regional email addresses go dead and calls go unanswered. Its website is deprecated (although can still be found here on internet archive) and there is no longer any way to become a member. In 2019 it was removed as a registered UK charity by the charity commission. Although it retains some ambiguous links to UNESCO, few education academics are aware it exists. Somewhere deep in the University College London lie its files, although they seem to be rarely accessed. It is completely unknown amongst teachers and the wider public.

I felt like an war reporter who stumbled across the ruins of a once thriving city. What happened here?

The answer lies in the WEF's intellectual DNA. The Fellowship, originally known as the New Education Fellowship, was founded by a school-inspector called Beatrice Ensor. Like many progressives in the interwar era, Ensor was a devout follower of Theosophy. This highly syncretic religion is the 19th century ancestor of most new-age ideas, including the A.I. religion/cult/memetic parasite “Spiralism.” It asserts that all spiritual and religious teachings gesture towards the same universal ‘Truth.’ This truth is absolute, ineffable, and the source of all creation. It can only be known via direct intuition and personal reflection. Theosophistic practitioners must create a bridge between the conscious world and the world of matter, thus revealing the falsity of dualism. The harmonising process is a personal journey and can take a variety of forms:

Theosophy is not entirely structureless, however. It posits a universal order of cyclic birth, maturation, senescence, and death, within which humanity is instructed to evolve. Human beings, as an individual part of the wider cosmic intelligence, must move up from mineral, to plant, to animal, to human, all the way up to archangel. Theosophy’s secret doctrine is both strange and appealing:

Like most new-age philosophy (and unlike orthodox Gnosticism) Theosophy asserts that the material world is divine. It draws on a wide range of natural scientific findings and phenomena as evidence of divine evolution. Blavatsky’s modern followers claim she anticipated the relativistic theories of Einstein and Bohm:

Humans, as a special part of this incredible world, must perfect their consciousness and further the emergent self-organisation of the universe. How do we know we are succeeding? The journey to archangel can only be known by the seeker. There are no dogmas in Theosophy: all fixed beliefs must be queried and challenged according to the inner standard of self-truth. It is you and I who are responsible for our own evolution. “In the final analysis the self within us, being divine, must be our highest guru.”

Beatrice Ensor was a life-long convert to Theosophy and believed it offered a suitable answer to the novel challenges of the 20th century. In so choosing, Ensor was following a path taken by countless others. God is dead and society is rapidly transforming – evolving – with new social agglomerations forming in city centres. The Great War then smashes the old order to smithereens and everything is up for grabs. Maria Montessori, a follower of the NEF, is arguing we need to ‘breed the messiah’; Jane Addams proposes we reinvent our feudal morality to match an evolved industrial society; and H.G. Wells proposes a World Government in perfect control of these new volcanic forces. Later, Aldous Huxley will tune out ahead of schedule with mescaline, his brother Julian, committed eugenicist, will propose that the universe teleologically evolves, and Christopher Alexander will assert the cosmic order to good architectural design.

The New Education Fellowship was born in this crucible. Like most progressives today, the NEF asserted our problems were spiritual before they were technical. WWI occurred because our mechanical and technological power outpaced our wisdom and emotional maturity. How do we enlighten the masses? The answer was education. Thus, the NEF was established and founded a broader ‘New Education Movement’ dedicated to educating the ‘whole child’ in such a way that war would become unthinkable. In the inter-war period its philosophy was spiritualistic and fantically opposed to modernity. Ensor believed the innate divinity of the child must be released: they should be led away from materialism towards a rural idyll. To these, we can also add Christian and Freudian strands, both emphasising the liberation of the child from control and oppression. As the 1920s turned to the ‘30s, psychology replaced spirituality as the guiding framework. The articles of the New Era, and the papers at their conferences, show little intellectual coherence. The negative thesis – that restraints on freedom had to be removed – was the easy part. What came next, the positive synthesis, was a mystery.

A series of poets, radicals, teachers, and aristocrats tried to find the answer through practical experimentation. The head of the NEF Scottish Branch, A.S. Neill founded Summerhill, a school famous for having no rules except those agreed by the students. Many other utopic boarding schools were set up and linked together by the NEF network. In Japan, Saneatsu Mushanokōji set up Atarashiki Mura; in India, Rabindranath Tagore set up Santiniketan-Sriniketan; and in Britain there was Dartington Hall. These progressive educational ideas percolated widely, and after WWII had become something close to educational orthodoxy. Piaget’s constructivist theories had enormous influence in Britain, and the strong romantic strain of the NEF’s teaching made its way into reforms into English lessons in the 1960s and ‘70s. Who needs formal lessons when we all possess the truth within us? Who needs teacher-led instruction? Exams, curricula, routines - a load of bunk! All of the old rigours of a rigorous course had to be cleared out.

In this way, the NEF became victim of its own success. By the 1960s most of its recommendations were already well-within the Overton window of educational reform. The more explicit Theosophical elements had been swapped out for woo and fluffy spiritualism, and a greater focus was placed on the trendy concepts of ‘citizenship’, ‘reconstruction’, and ‘international development.’ New members resisted the old emphasis on ‘total freedom of the child’ and the NEF principles were re-written to concede the following:

Their radical experiments had also become irrelevant. Most had already failed by the 1950s: Tagore’s school was nationalised in 1948; Atarashiki Mura;s founder converted to ultranationalism and the community was eventually reduced to a handful of elderly members; and Dartington Hall became a place of ‘vaguely liberal, creative relaxation.’ Summerhill, after A.S. Neill passed away, ceased to be a shining ideal and instead resembled, like the Montessori schools, a luxury good for elite progressives. The 1966 conference revealed the extent of the ideological disintegration: in the words of Christopher Clews, it had become “a mix of pseudo-psychological and mystical views – depth in the human personality, human development in the evolution theory, urbanisation and population growth, nuclear energy in war and peace, and paranormal phenomena, telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition.”

By the 1990s, the rot was almost complete. Many of the international branches of the NEF were closing and the circulation of the New Era was dropping. In an attempt to stay relevant, the NEF had re-branded itself in 1966 as the “World Education Fellowship’, and in the ‘90s pivoted yet again to new brands like ‘global citizenship’ and ‘global democracy.’ Nonetheless, conference attendance continued to fall, membership numbers declined, and most of those remaining were teachers looking to network rather than radical educationalists. In 1995 the Network of Progressive Educators wrapped itself up. Their reason? “We have completed our mission.”

Fast-forward to the present, and the English branch has two remaining members. First, there is the ostensible leader – although the title is meaningless now the organisation is defunct – Professor David Turner. He is a pleasant academic from the University of South Wales who has run out of energy. Like many progressive educational reformers of his generation, Professor Turner came up from relatively humble beginnings through the grammar school system before assisting in its destruction. Most of the driving force in the WEF had come from his partner, Lupita Turner, although she had passed away a few years prior.

Second, there is a Botswanan man called Dr. James Ogunleye. It is difficult to describe James because of all the various plates he has spinning. His credentials are so impressive they need to be listed in full for you to understand:

His website ‘Qumatrix’ describes itself as follows: “We are at the forefront of quantum computing and quantum mechanics, focusing on research and development projects that address quantum algorithm research, quantum simulations on HPC, quantum high energy physics, quantum mechanics, quantum math, as well as classical and quantum AI.”

I met James and David in the dingy pub early this year. It was one of the most uncomfortable and surreal meetings of my life. My attempts to extract some kind of philosophy or strategy from either of them was futile. They had nothing. David Turner was tired and unable to understand the 1987 Thatcherite changes to the British education system. He had no positive vision of education (being ‘irreligious’, and the WEF failing to agree on a positive model of human flourishing), and was therefore reduced to suggesting we need ‘debate’, ‘projects-based lessons’, and ‘principles’ (guiding not governing – never governing). Much of his thought was expressed in terms of anecdotes, such as a Japanese school in which a child was sad because she always regarded as a difficult child.

Progressives like David live in the past. Their great victory was the 1960s, in which the 11 plus exam was abolished and the old strictures of discipline, curriculum, and hierarchy were smashed. The enemy of this era was the conservative reactionary, encapsulated by the terrible ‘Black Books’ from the 1970s. The progressives’ great, inexplicable defeat was in 1980s at the hands of the individualistic and commodified Thatcherite vision. Progressives have never worked out how to counter this program. David, lamenting how teachers now ‘teach to contract’, admitted the commoditised version of education was more individualistic, more child-centred. Without a specific positive vision of human flourishing, who is to say that children and their parents shopping around in schools is bad? The existence of a cultural canon – which must be taught regardless of what the market says – was destroyed by the left in the ‘60s and then abandoned in the ‘80s. I pressed him on these points, but he had little to say. “We can’t turn back the clock” “We must go forward somewhere.” My memory of him, perhaps exaggerated, was of unfocused eyes and the desperate hope that his words would make people smile and nod.

James Ogunleye was simultaneously more and less specific than David. In terms of substantive ideas he had zilch, nothing, an empty head. But he had strategies and plans. He had come along because I had offered to resurrect the WEF website and this was a threat. In response, he claimed the website would be up ‘next week, Monday’ (after being down for two years). Months later, it is still not working. Chatting with him longer revealed some disturbing views. Although David Turner had little knowledge of this, James Ogunleye is a fanatical conservative, a firm Trump supporter and, somewhat bizarrely, a committed Zionist. His most recent article, on drones, claimed ‘the quiet eyes and brave hands that helped open Iran’s skies to precision, surprise, and Israeli resolve.’ He liked the WEF because ‘it has world in the title.’ It could be used to network with UNESCO and maybe as a brand for his wider educational projects. If you now google ‘WEF’ you find a sub-entry in his janky KIE website. This century-old organisation has become an event in his wider conference.

The impression I got from James was of an academically incompetent but startegically competent operator. His world was one of opportunities rather than ideas, and social prestige markers rather than institution-building. My partner, an education academic, knows colleagues who interact and network with James. This man is not a fringe figure. He is someone who has worked out how to arbitrage his Third World Status in Western institutions. They don’t give a damn what he says. They just want him in the room. To him, the “World Educational Fellowship” is just another shiny label to brand himself with, no different from “Quantum-Tech” or “Professional Qualifications.” In his confused world, even writing for Israel Times is just another cushy number to add to his pile of vague African and British degrees.

What happened to the WEF? It succumbed to its own defective ideological DNA. 20th century progressive ideas necessarily incorporate resistance and rebellion. Once their principles go mainstream, and there is no more ‘man’ to rebel against, they become irrelevant. Someone like David Turner is basically a vector for these ideas. They enter society and blow up various institutions. They then corrode away, having cut away the knowledge and frameworks for cultural reproduction. There is nothing the educational progressive would like more than a return to traditional cultural conservatism: they could then smash it to pieces again. In the 21st century, fragmentation, plurality, the ‘individualism’ and ‘positivity’ of neoliberalism have left them confused. The vector’s contents have been delivered. The package lies discarded, waiting to decay away.