Educational action is a species of praxis in both an Aristotelian sense and a post-Marxian sense: in the first, it involves the morally informed and committed action of the individual practitioners who practise education; in the second, it helps to shape social formations and conditions for collectivities of people. In this paper, it is argued…

Informed by recent Marxist education theory, the author gives a new account of the changes brought about by the 1875 Education Act in South Australia. Many of these changes, although couched in terms of morality and efficiency, represented a direct assault on the lifestyles and culture of the laboring people. (RM)