Historical Research

This article seeks to analyse the intentions of anarchists in organizing schools in London and Liverpool between 1890 and 1916. It will also address the various teaching practices and methods of management adopted, and the experience of the children within the schools. Although they formulated many original ideas, the anarchist educators failed to break out of their own milieu and influence a wider community. The experiments in counter‐education, meant to be a starting point for an alternative culture, embraced mostly foreign children who had already been brought up within an anarchist sub‐culture. This was despite the fact that the libertarian schools belonged to a wider tradition of independent, working‐class education that at times was in tune with anarchist thinking.