Henry Morris

A PROPHET IN THE WILDERNESS

Seventh of eight children, he left school at 14, found work in the depths of recession with a local authority so impoverished that he himself paid to have his committee Memorandum printed.

Henry Morris [1889-1962] was an educational giant, a chief education officer who envisaged in Cambridgeshire “a rural civilization that will have chronic vigour.” That vigour would sustain a network of community colleges and be nourished by them. Their handsome buildings would themselves be “silent teachers.”

A home for every kind of community activity, from Scouts to Women’s Institute, from chess to football, from public library to British Legion, Morris’s Village Colleges amounted he thought to “raising the school leaving age to ninety.”

Others followed his lead: counties like Leicestershire, Cumbria and Devon grew their own colleges, cities like Coventry and Sheffield  strove to create a matching urban civilization with “chronic vigour.”

This movement owed nothing to central direction, everything to local enterprise and heroic vision. Morris thought education should be entrusted to “philosophers, artists, scientists, prophets and scholars,” operating in freedom.

Now the Government seems to have taken on board the need to foster social capital and social networks, the need for communities to have a heart, perhaps it may step away from micro-management and leave room for visionaries like Morris to flourish once again.