In the aftermath of the First World War, the Elmhirsts saw reforming education as a key to a more harmonious future – a view that that was widely shared. Their vision of an ideal education system was one that promoted learners’ freedom and holistic fulfilment, that was integrated with its rural surroundings and that extended from the cradle to the grave. This chapter looks at Dorothy and Leonard’s efforts to realise this vision, setting them within the context of the flourishing interwar progressive education movement and of wider efforts to promote rural reform, life-long learning and international harmony. Ideologically plastic, unfettered by economic necessity and well-connected, Dartington was the only progressive educational scheme begun in interwar Britain as part of a larger social experiment. It offers a singular demonstration of the cross-fertilisation of progressive education with other holistically-minded programmes that sought to re-think the laissez-faire liberal philosophy of the previous century.

This chapter looks at the projects that the Elmhirsts instigated on their estate to promote agricultural and industrial revival and democratic participation. It positions Dartington amid the many interwar rural reform ventures with which it cross-pollinated, from the New Deal in America and Sriniketan in India to Rolf Gardiner’s Springhead and government smallholding schemes in Britain. Dorothy and Leonard’s philosophy of rural regeneration – attempting to combine ‘microscopic’ support for community life with the ‘macroscopic’ approach that was international in its outlook – prefigured and helped shape the phenomenon central to the later twentieth century. The sociologist Roland Robertson calls this ‘glocalisation’: a process by which local community is reconfigured, and even strengthened, by global forces. The gradual migration of the Elmhirsts’ vision of Dartington – from a self-governing, holistically integrated collective to an outpost of centralised social planning – dovetailed effectively into plans for national reconstruction during and after the Second World War.