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.

In 1924, a wealthy New York philanthropist, Dorothy Straight (née Elmhirst), married a Yorkshire-born agricultural economist, Leonard Elmhirst. The First World War had made both of them question the self-oriented, market-driven doctrine of laissez-faire liberalism that underpinned the Western world. ‘I found that the bottom of life had dropped out,’ Leonard Elmhirst wrote, ‘and that the old beliefs could not stand the test’. Both wanted to dedicate themselves to creating a community apart from mainstream society, where a better mode of holistically integrated, democratic living could be pioneered. In 1925 they bought a run-down estate in South Devon, Dartington Hall, and began a social, cultural and education experiment that they hoped would ‘set the pace’ for Britain and the rest of the world. They devoted the rest of their lives to this project, which became one of the best-known and most influential of the many small-scale interwar utopian experiments.