Education for Change - Left Perspectives

Can education and the teaching of literacy change society? Gramsci and Freire believed that that it could. Giroux believes that forms of critical pedagogy can make a difference to students' consciousness and so seed a 'revolutionary ferment' within society - that people can begin to reflect upon their own lot and that of others and realise the need for the transformation of society.

Researching my book 'Literacy on the Left' has led me to read about pre and post-revolutionary Russia and how the leaders of that transformation of society saw the role of education. Was schooling and education part of the way forward for change for leaders like Lenin and Trotsky (pictured) in their building for the revolution?

Here is historian Sheila Fitzpatrick (1979)

As a revolutionary opponent of the Tsarist regime, Lenin invariably chose the course of political activism rather than that of gradual enlightenment of the people. He showed comparatively little interest in the efforts of Social-Democrat intellectuals to educate the workers in the 1890s and expressed contempt for the liberal enlighteners of the Committee on Illiteracy who were prepared to settle for gradual change within the existing political framework. (p.8)

This to me indicates Lenin's belief that 'events' were worth more than theory and a commitment to a materialist conception of history as contended by Marx.

Fitzpatrick goes on in her book to describe that after the revolution, Lenin was insistent that education was crucial and fought against what he called 'Communist conceit' that resented that workers had things to learn from the bourgeoisie. Lenin believed that people with education were more cultured than people without it. Workers and Communists who pretended that 'bourgeois' culture was inferior to 'proletarian' were simply confusing the issue: the basic cultural task of the Soviet state was to raise the educational level of the masses, and the basic task for communists was to raise their own cultural level by learning the skills of the bourgeoisie' (p9)

So Lenin saw education and culture as autonomous. When I discuss left approaches to literacy and education in the book, there is a clear distinction to made between more post-modern approaches which sees knowledge and culture as ideological and the views of Marxists like Lenin who took the culture and learning in the hands of the ruling class as being a reflection of the developments of humanity and knowledge - now to be shared with all.