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This chapter considers the place of education in the struggle for social change. Taking inspiration from cultural and feminist historians, Gerrard argues for the need to explore beyond institutional histories of the state in order to understand the role of education in social change. Responding to contemporary policy paradigms that often represent working-class students as ‘failing and disaffected’ (a representation compounded by the politics of race), Gerrard suggests the need to examine the social history of educational agency and initiative. Taking this up, this chapter then introduces the two social histories of radical education that are the focus of this book: the Socialist Sunday School (est. 1892) and Black Saturday/Supplementary School (est. 1967) movements.

Class, for some on the radical left, and especially those in the Communist Party, was not just an economic identity. It was also one earned through conduct, particularly a commitment to political activism, sobriety and self-improvement. This was, of course, a culture that had always enjoyed a limited appeal; during the inter-war period, however, this appeal was restricted further by the rise of mass democracy, which undermined the necessary sense of political exclusion. This chapter charts the social and cultural limits of Communism in Scotland, exploring the Party’s appeal by focusing on the criminal trials of activists charged with sedition, the role played by religion and gender within the Party, and the changing nature of independent working-class education, especially within the labour college movement, during the 1920s and 1930s.

This chapter is a collection of some announcements gleaned from radical Yiddish newspapers. These passages show how working-class men and women created numerous self-education societies in cities around the country during the 1890s. In doing so, they demonstrated the extent to which they had internalized the values of intellectuals who had become—through their involvement in labor organizations, political parties, and the Yiddish press—leaders of the Jewish working class. The first announcement comes from the New Haven Educational Club, which held a banquet to host scientific lectures for the intellectual public. The second comes from the Socialist Pamphlet Fund and Workers' Education Group, which has taken upon itself the task of educating workers through systematic lectures on various elementary branches of science.

This chapter traces the way schooling systems have become increasingly implicated in and infected by a singular neoliberal policy strain culminating in an alarming propulsion of so-called ‘disadvantaged’ young people out school in affluent western countries, effectively resulting in a denial of their access to relevant and equitably funded public education. By listening to the stories of young people who have been ‘shoved’ out of school in order to sustain the neoliberal meritocratic sham, the chapter explores both the conditions that have led to their forced disconnection from schooling, as well as a very different set of conditions which young people ‘speak into existence’ when they are permitted to re-engage with learning in alternative educational settings. The educational policy message of this chapter is that far from being the uneducable pathological ‘basket cases’ the neoliberal policy regime insists on portraying them as, these young people are in fact canny witnesses and agents capable of constructing a very different set of learning conditions—ones that are anathema to the competitive, individualistic, consumer-driven and elitist policy trajectories that have exiled them.