Marxism and Education

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.?

—Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party

Karl Marx actually wrote very little that directly addressed the issue of education and the role it plays in society, yet his influence on radical educational thought can be felt palpably to this day. Most likely it’s because what little he did write is pregnant with keen but unelaborated insight. The following workshop was organized around the idea that, as a collective, we have a unique opportunity to breath new life into this potential strain of thought, and investigate how it might inform our radical project as a free school.

In this, the first workshop of our series on radical pedagogy, we are offering an open space for the community (meaning anybody who’s interested and shows up) to come together and share their knowledge and experience in order to increase our collective understanding of the topic at hand. So the following outline is not so much meant to be a strict ‘lesson plan’, but rather a means whereby you can acquaint yourself beforehand to the particular ideas we’ll be focusing on. By no means is it necessary to have done any preliminary reading or to have foreknowledge of the subject! Your open and inquisitive mind is all that is required. Also, feel free to come equipped with your own ideas and particular areas of expertise.

General Info

• When: Sunday 24 February
  • Time: 1 - 5pm
• Where: Centre for Social Innovation. 215 Spadina Avenue, Suite 120. (Spadina between Dundas and Queen)
• Organizers/Presenters: Maggie Flynn and Christian Whittall
• Contact: christian@anarchistu.org

(Rough) Event Schedule

The loose breakdown of the event is::

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

In all of Marx’s voluminous writings, those that directly address education fill less than a page. To begin with, we’re actually going to work only with a handful of sentences, and see what thoughts, feelings and insights they call up. These are the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) #3 and some brief snippets from the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), both relatively early, foundational texts. The historic background of these texts will be briefly outlined in the workshop, but here are some internet resources:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Wikipedia: Theses on Feuerbach

Study Guide for Communist Manifesto

Wikipedia: The Communist Manifesto

Marx/Engels biography

Break

There will be a 30-45m break bisecting the workshop for tea, coffee and schmoozing. Breaks are very important and sometimes can be just as enlightening and productive as that which is being ‘broken’. To this end, we strongly encourage you to make the best of it by bringing something special in the area of food and beverages. Some will be provided, of course: caf/decaf coffee, tea of all sorts and some snacks. We’re also going to see if we can get some non-intrusive music happening.

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

The second half of the workshop will be mostly taken up with the collective investigation of the educational ideas of the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci. He has perhaps done more than any other intellectual in his tradition to expand upon Marx’s brief remarks on education and is therefore extremely relevant to the matter at hand. His text, On Organization of Education and of Culture is found in his collection of Prison Notebooks written while serving a 20 year sentence in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, 1928 until his early death in 1937. This particular text, although bristling with insight and analysis, is written in a difficult, elliptical style:

Gramsci’s writings on education are not always easy to understand. In fact, they are quite confusing at times. They are certainly open to misinterpretation (Allman 1988 , Entwistle 1979). The editors of his Prison Notebooks make the point that his apparent "conservative" eulogy of the old system of education in Italy was really only a device to get round the prison censors (Gramsci 1971 p24). However, this device has had the effect of perplexing more than his captors.

—antonio gramsci, schooling and education

We’re going to grapple with this in the workshop, and see if by working together we can’t extract something of value from this potentially very rich document.

Conclusion

Were still planning on some interesting way to conclude the workshop in order to bridge into what we plan on doing a month thence. Stay tuned!

Further Resources

Karl Marx

Marxism and Education

Karl Marx and Informal Education

Marx and education

Marx and Education in Late Capitalism

Marx, education and possible revolutionary futures: The theories and pedagogy of Peter McLaren

Antonio Gramsci

antonio gramsci, schooling and education

Gramsci and Education