This article embodies a kind of backward travelling by revisiting the history of workers' education in a mining community as part of our contemporary struggle to reinvigorate notions of the common good and popular education. Its focus is the complexities of working-class history, disparaged in neoliberal condescension and oversimplified in some…

The educational historian Brian Simon is well known for his portrayal of the social and political conflicts surrounding adult working-class education in 19th and early 20th-century England. However, the third and fourth volumes of his classic history of education in Britain, covering the period from 1920 to 1940 and 1940 to 1990 respectively,…

The educational policies of 1860s Britain came into being as a result of the interplay between social, economic and political conditions, and the changing discourses of childhood and education that arose from them. While essentialised conceptualisations of 'the child' had existed since the early Enlightenment period, it was not until the…

The Highlander Nursery School, run by the Highlander Folk School from 1938 to 1953, provided no-cost early care and learning to the white working-class children of Summerfield, Tennessee. While Highlander is best known as a democratic education and movement-building hub that builds adults' capacity to shape labor and racial justice in their…

In the summer of 1978, at Church Teachers' College in Mandeville, Jamaica, a class of advanced students participating in the Jamaica Movement for the Advancement of Literacy (JAMAL) wrote, cast, rehearsed, and performed a play that satirized several major institutions--the family, the church, and the business sector--as well as class and gender…

One of the primary goals of Franco's education policy was to train the working class in the doctrinal principles of the regime. Labour Universities were one of the education institutions created for this purpose; there were three for women (Zaragoza, Cáceres and Huesca). This article focuses on analysing the purposes sought by these…

Access to education for peasants in the history of Brazilian society has always been denied, with the absence of public policies for peasants, as the result of a political and social process of denial of minority groups. The text address the issue of closure of schools in the countryside as a growing social phenomenon that has been expanding in…

This article seeks to introduce a new historical explanation as to why left-wing working-class women engaged in liberal, middle-class organisations during the first wave of feminism. The article specifically deals with middle-class associations and clubs that had educational purposes. Instead of focusing on the larger explanatory scheme of the…

Internationally, boys from working-class backgrounds are often the most likely to disengage from their formal education. Research on the educational experience of working-class boys has focused heavily on their identity barriers, often positioning these young men as either vulnerable or volatile in their formal education. Social theorists have…

This article seeks to understand how adult students perceived education as disseminated by the Workers' Educational Association (WEA). Evidence will be presented from sources not commonly studied, namely WEA student logbooks of tutorial classes. Adult students attending WEA tutorial classes in the 1920s and 1930s recorded their own personal,…

This article sifts the historical and philosophical soil out of which the comprehensive ideal in education has sprung. England's national school system emerged in the nineteenth century imbued with ruling-class assumptions about the education required for each supposed type of child destined to take his or her place in one of the three broad…

When the Australian Association of Adult Education (AAAE) was established in 1960, Australia was locked into a global conflict between capitalism and communism, known as the Cold War. With anticommunism at fever pitch, AAAE's founders who were fighting to retain some influence with Australian universities and with government funding authorities…

"The Oxford Dictionary of English" defines authoritarianism as the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom, as well as a lack of concern for the wishes or opinions of others. In this paper I argue that there are growing signs of a move towards more authoritarian practices and structures…

This paper examines the intergenerational effects of deindustrialisation on the processes and experiences of education at 'Lillydown Primary', a state primary school in a former mining community in the north of England. Complicating Avery Gordon's notion of 'haunting', and drawing on conceptualisations of affect and community 'being-ness', it…

This article -- the first part of a two-part contribution -- considers the current and past state of research on the history of adult education in Britain. Although there has been a broadening of interest among historians of adult education, the field remains to an extent in the shadow of the "Great Tradition" of liberal education…