ABSTRACT
Between the two world wars the influence of idealism on British educational thought and practice dwindled away as rapidly as the influence of the Liberal Party on British political life. (These two changes were not, indeed, unconnected, as we pointed out above.) It is true that some of the idealist reformers-Tawney and Lindsay, for instance-were still very active. The founding of Keele as late as 1949 can be seen as a very late offspring of the movement. Henry Morris’s Cambridgeshire ‘village colleges’ may have had a tenuous connexion with idealist communitarianism: a leading influence on Morris was his old tutor, Hastings Rashdall, whose philosophy was inspired by that of T.H.Green.1 Idealists like William Temple helped to shape the 1944 Education Act. And if we look beyond education to social policy more generally, the Beveridge Report of 1942, which laid the foundation of the post-war welfare state, is also traceable back to the Balliol idealism of the turn of the century.
