Adam Curle

Charles Thomas William Curle (4 July 1916 – 28 September 2006), better known as Adam Curle, was a British academic, known for his work in social psychology, pedagogy, development studies and peace studies.

Charles Thomas William Curle was born in L'Isle-Adam, Val-d'Oise, France, on 4 July 1916, as the Battle of the Somme raged nearby.

His father was the British author, critic and journalist Richard Curle.

His mother was Cordelia Curle (née Fisher), whose siblings included the historian H. A. L. Fisher, the cricketer and academic Charles Dennis Fisher, the naval officer William Wordsworth Fisher, the banker Edwin Fisher, and Adeline Vaughan Williams, the wife of the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Their other relatives included the historian Frederic William Maitland, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, the author Virginia Woolf and the painter Vanessa Bell.

He was named after three of his mother's brothers, and took the name Adam, after his birthplace, after returning to France in 1919.

He grew up in Wheatfield, Oxfordshire, where he developed an affection for animals and a sensitivity to landscape.

Richard Curle was not a frequent presence in his son's childhood; Adam did not meet his father until he was three years old.

Curle later described how they became closer in Richard's later life, however, "on a man-to-man basis," having "somehow missed the father–son phase".

Curle attributed his pacifism to the influence of his mother, who lost three of her brothers to war and instilled a hatred of war in her son.

Woodhouse argued that Curle's mother was also responsible for the "self-confidence which was to enable him later to make a series of unconventional moves at critical turning points in his life".

His "inclination to kick against convention", however, was identified by Woodhouse as closer to that of Richard Curle.

Curle attended Charterhouse School, where he was unhappy, later recalling having "survived a dreadful conventional schooling ... by playing the flute (mainly Bach), writing poems and reading the mystics".

From 1935 he attended New College, Oxford, at first studying history with the intention of becoming a civil servant, then switching to anthropology.

He continued his studies at Exeter College, Oxford and the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology, and in 1938 travelled to Sápmi and the Sahara Desert on field trips.

Curle served in the British Army for six years during World War II, rising to the rank of Major and becoming a research officer in the Civil Resettlement Units (CRUs).

In this role he was involved in the development of a residential rehabilitation programme which provided counselling, skills training, medical and recreational facilities, and opportunities for social contact, and was tasked with evaluating the effectiveness of the CRUs' work.

In this period he developed an interest in psychology, in particular the integration of psychological and anthropological approaches to society, and the psychological effects of traumatic experiences.

He received a postgraduate degree in anthropology in 1947, having drawn on his experiences with the CRUs in his work.

He began his academic career with a series of journal articles also drawing on those experiences, the first of which was a paper in Human Relations on the experiences of prisoners of war in returning to their communities and the relationship between individual and community.

In 1947 Curle took up a position at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, where he researched rural decay in South West England.

This work led to his appointment, in 1950, as a lecturer in social psychology at the University of Oxford.

While at Oxford in the early 1950s he developed an interest in the connections between social psychology and education policy.

While he remained interested in the social psychiatry approach that Tavistock Institute emphasised, he also came to believe in the necessity of education for individuals' psychological stability and positive relationships with others, and published several articles on education policy.

His work at Oxford led to his appointment in 1952 to the Chair in Education and Psychology at the University of Exeter, where he remained until 1956.

While at Exeter he became involved in a project focused on development in Europe, and his work took on an international dimension.

In 1956 he was invited, via Harvard University, to advise on education policy in Pakistan.

Initially planning to stay in Pakistan for a year, he later decided to remain for two additional years, and resigned from his position at Exeter in order to do so.

From 1956 to 1959 he was an advisor to the Pakistan Planning Board, in which capacity he travelled in Pakistan (including present-day Bangladesh), including in the Hindu Kush.

In addition to education policy, his work in Pakistan concerned health care, housing, labour relations, welfare and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where he worked among the Pashtun and Kho peoples.

He would later frequently refer to his experiences in Pakistan in his lectures and books.

In 1959 Curle was appointed Professor of Education at the University of Ghana.

While in Ghana he became a Quaker, which, like his pacifism, he attributed to his mother's influence.

He also travelled widely in Africa during this time, and advised the Ghanaian government on education and development.

His inaugural lecture, entitled The Role of Education in Developing Societies, was published in 1961.

He resigned from the University in 1961, having reached the conclusion that the institution, which was then predominantly white, was "out of place" in a political context marked by the growth of African nationalism.

That year he travelled to South Africa with the intention of establishing a college for Black Africans, but was arrested.

Curle's works included several books on education, including Educational Strategy for Developing Societies (1963), and a number of books on peace and peacemaking, including Making Peace (1971).

After holding posts at the University of Oxford, University of Exeter, University of Ghana and Harvard University, in 1973 he became the inaugural Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, following the establishment of the University's Department of Peace Studies.

He was also, throughout his career and after his retirement in 1978, active in peacemaking and mediation, and visited Nigeria and Biafra several times as part of a Quaker contingent during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70.