This article considers how neoliberalism has created a reductionist view of lifelong learning in the UK focused on upskilling workers for the labour market. This critical policy analysis uses Marx's theory of labour-power, as conceptualised by Glenn Rikowski, to examine the Skills and Post-16 Education Act, 2022 and to identify its ideological…

The paper critically discusses the neoliberal politics of knowledge and the soft normative regime that steers and directs the material condition of existence of educational research, starting from the case of Italy. The fundamental aspects, which regard the form, the ends (and indirectly the content) of a research, are to a substantial degree…

In this paper we employ the concept of "Immiseration Capitalism" to indicate a systematic tendency of Capital to heap the "accumulation of misery" on the lives of the producing class while at the same time delivering great wealth to the hands of its own appropriating class. Neoliberalism is described as a specific political…

If the recent revival in academic interest in Lenin's theory has overlooked his few writings on education, this may be because they appear to offer so little. This paper seeks to rectify this oversight. Whilst acknowledging that Lenin's educational offerings are thin, it is proposed that those on the left in the Twenty-First Century might…

Catherine Walsh is senior professor and director of the doctoral programme in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Ecuador. Her present work is focused on the political, epistemic and ethical project of critical interculturality, and on concerns of decoloniality, taking as key the themes of knowledge,…

Set against the backdrop of the contemporary crisis of capitalism and world-historical events, this article examines the advance of globalized imperialism from the perspective of a Marxist-humanist approach to pedagogy known as "revolutionary critical pedagogy" enriched by liberation theology. It is written as an epistolic manifesto to…

In this paper, we evaluate, and highlight the tensions between, radical, critical and Marxist education as they have played out in British education since the Enlightenment. Our argument has several parts. First, like other Marxists, we believe that consciousness is shifted as much through engagement with class struggle as through ideas. We…

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…

In this paper, the author maps three radically different visions of Marxism in educational philosophy. Each "register" contains insights but also contradictions that cannot easily be resolved through internal modifications of the theory or through theoretical synthesis with other registers. The radical function of Marxist pedagogy is to create a…

As critical pedagogy becomes more mainstream on the educational landscape in the United States, it is important to revisit the original tenets of critical pedagogy and explore their current manifestations. Since the beginning of "criticalism" from the theoretical/foundational work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Social Theory,…

In revealing the transformatory moment of learning technology, a holistic and ongoing critique that is related to a range of socio-cultural factors is required. This critique further uncovers the social relations that frame the place of learning technology in bourgeois capitalist work and the development of the knowledge economy. This article…

There was only one Karl Marx, but there have been a multitude of Marxisms. This concise, introductory book by internationally renowned scholar Jean Anyon centers on the ideas of Marx that have been used in education studies as a guide to theory, analysis, research, and practice. "Marx and Education" begins with a brief overview of basic Marxist…

The term "critical literacy" refers to use of the technologies of print and other media of communication to analyze, critique, and transform the norms, rule systems, and practices governing the social fields of everyday life (A. Luke, 2004). Since Freire's (1970) educational projects in Brazil, approaches to critical literacy have been…

The author has attempted over the years to make a case for educators to work within a revolutionary critical pedagogy that examines the economic, cultural, social, and political purposes of education. Acknowledging the fact that education is a necessary but not sufficient weapon in history's arsenal of social revolution, it is clear that educators…

The proponents of critical pedagogy criticize the earlier Neo-Marxist theories of education, arguing that they provide only a "language of critique". By introducing the possibility of human agency and resistance, critical pedagogists attempt to develop not only a pedagogy of critique, but also to build a pedagogy of hope. Fundamentally, the aim of…