Background/Context: Traditional adult education in Spain treated the learner as a mere object that could be shaped by the educator. Although current practices of the democratic adult education movement in Spain reveals a completely opposite standpoint on adult education, there has been little analysis of the several influences converging and…

This essay examines one of the most intractable pedagogical problems of the Marxian revolutionary tradition: who will educate the educator and how ought the learning process to proceed. The solutions of Marx, Lenin and Habermas are critically examined towards the clarification of the emancipatory learning process. This learning process has three…

The current de-democratization process in which the world now apparently finds itself ". . .represents the longest continuous period of deterioration in the nearly 40-year history of Freedom House's annual assessment of the state of political and civil liberties in every country of the world". As Gilley (2010: 161) observes, ". . .the hottest…

Citizenship education, defined as learning to live together, requires agreement on certain common principles. One central purpose of a state education system is the transmission of common normative standards such as the human rights and fundamental freedoms that underpin liberal democratic societies. The paper identifies the conceptual roots of…

This article looks through the lens of the gendered politics of historical writing at the main forms and direction of scholarship on gender in "History of Education" since its publication. It discusses how social, women's, feminist and gender history has been treated in the journal and how developing approaches around the body, space,…

In the 1960s, evaluation thrived in the sunshine of political support for our work. We also experienced the dark side of the force of politics: efforts to introduce partisan biases favorable to special interests. In response to politics as contamination, at least two families of stances developed: populist and public interest. The populist stances…

In the elections of 2006 and 2008, progressive and liberal groups in the United States broke through key bulwarks of the Right to capture some of the highest hills on the political landscape. Although progressives and liberals now control key positions, the Right still holds wide swaths of terrain and still exercises considerable power in shaping…

The article is based on activist research working in an anti-deportation social movement, and on sixteen interviews with both experienced and less experienced activists between 2009 and 2011. The anti deportation social movement made up of a range of organisations, is identified as a left social movement situated in an historic producer…

In the first decade of the 21st century, efforts to create alternatives to neoliberalism emerged in many parts of Latin America. Social movements across the region took to the streets, occupied abandoned factories, and started to create new democratic spaces, solidarity networks, and social economy initiatives. In one country after another,…

By definition and purpose, education is the development of human capital towards meeting the individual and social needs of learners and their societies. This transdisciplinary collaboration parallels the underpinning principle of Lave and Wenger's Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Lave & Wenger, 1990) to South Africa's post-colonial…

National Socialism, the German type of fascism, is analysed in this article with respect to the question of its ideological foundations, the ideology of the "Volk" community, and its consequences for a relevant type of social practice, "Volk" welfare. Under National Socialism the form of state social work intervention was…

In British adult education Marxism has been a persistent if marginalised current that has consistently informed its more radical movements and practitioners. This article firstly introduces some contested Marxist perspectives on adult education, particularly around the issues of ideology and incorporation into bourgeois society. Secondly, it…

In investigating the place of consumption in education it is necessary to question both critical theory's language of manipulation and neo-liberalism's language of rational action as ways of explaining the significance of consumption in people's lives and where it has assumed a central status in the contemporary social order. This paper argues…