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Sixty years after it was first published, five essayists reflect on the legacy, ideas and personal inspiration of The Making of the English Working Class – and plot its place in the present day.

EP Thompson's landmark social history, The Making of the English Working Class, is a book that changed lives. In an academic world where history was primarily concerned with power and political reform, EP Thompson sought to rescue working people from, as he put it, "the enormous condescension of posterity".

It's a book that lies at the root of contemporary social history, of cultural studies, sociology and anthropology, where, in the years after its publication, the idea of agency – the 'making' of the title – came to be a defining touchstone in thinking about culture and society. And it was popular too, even if its easily recognisable blue Pelican covers – and almost 1,000 pages – were possibly more dipped into than read cover to cover.

EP Thompson spent many years as an adult education tutor among industrial communities in the West Riding of Yorkshire. When The Making of the English Working Class was published in 1963 he dedicated it to his students. In this essay, the historian and biographer Geoff Andrews recalls his own experiences of adult education in the 1980s and explores the ways in which these democratic classroom encounters might have provided an opportunity for EP Thompson to learn as well as teach.

Geoff Andrews is a historian and biographer, currently writing a new history of the labour movement.