Radical childhoods: Schooling and the struggle for social change

By Jessica Gerrard

At a time when education appears to be simply reproducing social class relations, Radical childhoods offers a timely consideration of how children’s and young people’s education can confront and challenge social inequality. Presenting detailed analysis of archival material and oral testimony, the book examines the experiences of students and educators in two schooling initiatives that were connected to two of the most significant social movements in Britain: Socialist Sunday Schools (est. 1892) and Black Saturday/Supplementary Schools (est. 1967).

Analysing across time, the author explores the ways in which these two very different schooling movements incorporated large numbers of women, challenged class and race inequality, and attempted to create spaces of ‘emancipatory’ education independent to the state. It argues that despite appearing to be on the ‘margins’ of the public sphere these schools were important, if contested and complex, sites of political struggle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526111746

Jessica Gerrard

Jessica Gerrard is an Associate Professor at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. She is the author of Radical Childhoods and Precarious Enterprise on the Margins.

Book preview

Part I

Radical education, childhood and social change

1

Introduction: radical education, past and present

From broad movements for social change to the quiet routines of everyday life, education has long been at the centre of British working-class culture. Like many others resisting inequality and oppression, diverse working-class communities, in diverse social and cultural contexts, have understood knowledge and education as having transformative potential. From the autodidactic traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to women’s reading circles and Mechanic Institute libraries, working-class men and women have variously claimed the authority to master, critique and create knowledge. As Rose put it in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, the slogan ‘Knowledge is Power’… ‘was embraced passionately by generations of working-class radicals who were denied both’.¹ Reflecting Britain’s colonial history, and the interconnected experiences of racism and class, education has also been variously used in the colonies to resist the practices of imperialism and labour exploitation, and by the many migrant communities in Britain to resist the interlocking practices of racism and social class. It was also through education that women activists across generations asserted their right to knowledge, and their ability to create it. In short, education and the struggle over knowledge are central to the pursuit of social change.

In many ways, these histories can be told through the various adult education initiatives that emerged out of, and spurred on, the struggles for social change that pattern Britain’s social and cultural history. Certainly, Britain’s numerous social movements – socialism, Chartism, Pan-Africanism, the suffragettes, Black Power, feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, and so on – all, in one way or another, drew on informal and formal adult education as a means to inspire commitment to their cause and develop their critiques of unequal social relations. This would be, however, only one piece of the story. For many working-class and migrant men and women, it was children and young people who inspired the need for social change, and correspondingly, for independent community-based education. Demanding changes to, and expansions in, state schooling, and instigating their own educational opportunities, many across Britain’s history have attempted to extend the educational horizons for children and young people.

In one reading it might appear that this history of community control over children’s education easily fits into the wider history of state schooling. The slow march towards comprehensive education in Britain must be understood in light of the myriad public struggles over state-provided education. The many successive rises in the school-leaving age, institution of free school meals, acknowledgement of sexism and racism in educational practices and curricula, and challenges to testing and ability-streaming practices, for example, cannot be understood without consideration of the many interventionist campaigns led by community members, parents and students. And yet a narrow historical focus on the progressive changes to state schooling glosses over the multifaceted and dynamic character of community-based interventions into education. Indeed, such a history might simplistically claim the stories of community-based education for itself: engulfing diverse community claims to knowledge and education within a neat historical arc of institutional ‘progress’ in state schooling. In this approach, the defining historical objects and events are the changes in state education policy and practice prompted by campaign and political pressure. And while these changes are indeed worthy of study, reflection and examination, a sole focus on such events obfuscates a range of other histories of education and social change. Glossed over are the nuanced and distinct differences in the ways in which the state translates, adapts and puts into practice community campaign demands; the difficult – and contested – struggles within communities to raise their demands; and the many attempts of communities to enact their own educational experiences for their children.

As the work of Brian Simon in the 1960s and 1970s reminds us, an ‘acts and facts’ focus only gets us part of the way towards historical understanding.² Ultimately, education is a site of cultural struggle: state schooling can be understood as an embodiment of the contestations and compromises entailed in the dynamic social and political processes underlying the production of education policies. As Simon puts it, ‘the changes brought about in the educational system were ultimately the outcome of battles fought out amid much noise and dust’.³ It is with this ‘noise and dust’ that this book is concerned, though from the perspective of the communities rather than the state. I take inspiration from many others who have also endeavoured to chronicle the uses of education by communities resisting their social position, which might otherwise be obscured by the great histories of official educational reform. I am thinking here of J. F. C. Harrison’s work on working-class adult education and Robert Owen, Bertram Edwards’ work on the ofen forgotten Burston School Strike,⁴ John Shotton’s exploration of the libertarian tradition in education,⁵ and the efforts of Richard Johnson and others in the Birmingham Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s and 1980s to write histories of education that incorporated ‘breaks and reversals, stagnations and advances’.⁶

In addition, I also take inspiration from feminist histories of education, which have refocused the lens of historical scholarship to the work of women educators and reformers: work that has literally defined the provision of education given the vast numbers of women involved in education as teachers, volunteers, campaigners and legislators. As a range of recent scholarship explores, it is often women’s involvement in education that gets left aside in an institutional approach to educational history.⁷ And yet women have stood at the centre of community-based education provision and campaigns for and around state schooling, including significant contribution to children’s and young people’s educational initiatives.⁸ I would add to this and say that the contributions of children and young people in the development and maintenance of community-based education also gets glossed over. Of course, none of this is to say that the relationships between state-based and independent forms of education are not paramount. Undeniably, the histories of the two are inextricably interlinked. Community education might have as its primary focus independent provision, but since the arrival of government-funded and -controlled systems of education it is still in some ways a critical response to, and intervention into, state schooling. The point is, however, that by keeping their activities in the background of a history of state education, we risk blurring and smudging their histories altogether.

For working-class families and students, this glossing over has important contemporary effects. As I write this in 2014, like many successive governments, the current Coalition government in Britain presents schooling as the pathway to ‘empowerment’ for working-class students and families.⁹ And yet current policy paradigms extend and entrench the notion that working-class culture is denuded of independent educational agency. As a plethora of sociological research has revealed, policy documentation and practice regularly starts from the presumption that working-class communities are perpetually disaffected and uninterested in education. In such a policy paradigm, working-class communities are regularly constructed as defiant and troublesome, compared with supposed stable and productive middle-class communities.¹⁰ Intensified further for black and other migrant communities, class differences are encased within a policy discourse of cultural deprivation and deficit.¹¹

Contemporary state policies demand that working-class communities must radically reorienate themselves towards neoliberal middle-class values, attitudes and behaviours in order to be ‘cohesive’, ‘regenerated’, ‘successful’ and ‘empowered’.¹² Within this model, educational disadvantage is viewed as symptomatic of working-class organic cultural forms, which in turn become the target of reform.¹³ For instance, as with New Labour’s Academies, the Coalition’s expansion of the Academy project and introduction of the Free School initiative is couched in terms of community involvement, but in actuality compels particular forms of participation based on competitive practices of market accountability.¹⁴ Building upon New Labour’s policy programme, the Coalition government projects the now common vision of successful individualised life pathways waiting behind the door of the ‘right choice’.¹⁵ In a distinct turn away from structural understandings of inequality, poverty and disadvantage, we are routinely told that educational and social success comes to those who work hard enough: of ‘success against the odds’ for those who demonstrate effective achievement of the education and employment markets.

Yet, unfortunately, without the ‘right’ forms of ‘cultural capital’ in Bourdieu’s terms,¹⁶ there is a dearth of working-class parents and students participating in the very school programmes that target their participation, compared with their middle-class peers.¹⁷ Indeed, while by no means a universal experience, the current choice model has paved the way for middle-class parents and parents with positive experiences of their own schooling to ‘reflexively’ and successfully support their children’s negotiation of the schooling market.¹⁸ Even where schools are given ‘freedom’ to develop community programmes, as is hoped in the Free School initiative and as was instituted in New Labour’s policy initiative of Education Action Zones, working-class parental and student involvement is thwarted by a powerful policy presumption incapability.¹⁹ Unfortunately, much contemporary educational policy and practice therefore glosses over the wider impact of negative generational histories of schooling and experiences of unemployment and underemployment, and can work to pathologise the ways in which many working-class and migrant communities do work to support their children’s education.²⁰ The implementation of a rational future-orientated choice model ignores the ways in which social class, gender, disability and race shapes cultures and identities,²¹ and disregards an understandable ambivalence towards what few future employment opportunities there are for many young people.²² Compounding divisions and exclusions, current educational programmes for the working class ignore the difficult social and cultural positions demanded of working-class students in order to participate,²³ a trend mediated also by experiences of race and racism.²⁴ In addition, it appears that state support for families and mothers is conditional and limited. Gillies, for instance, argues that the policy focus on support for families subjects parents to a range of punitive ‘mutual obligation’ measures for their child’s ‘misbehaviour’, including suggested proposals to cuts to welfare payments, and parental ‘re-training’.²⁵ Thus, she contends, ‘Blurred boundaries between concepts of support and coercion reflect the paternalistic view that authoritarian intervention is for the good of those concerned.’²⁶

Of course, the demand for communities to alter their cultural practices is not new. Central to the nineteenth-century middle-class philanthropic education, for instance, was a ‘moral panic’ surrounding working-class culture.²⁷ Couched in the terminology of ‘universal enlightenment’, many ‘progressive’ educational interventions assumed (and reinforced) the ascendancy of middle-class knowledge and culture over existing forms of working-class agency and culture. In adult education, for example, in the 1820s middle-class reformers formed the industry-driven ‘Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’, in order to define what might be ‘useful knowledge’ on behalf of the working class.²⁸ It is perhaps unsurprising that the radical working-class response was to create the ‘Society for the Diffusion of Really Useful Knowledge’ in an attempt to claim back the right to define what is, and what is not, ‘useful knowledge’.²⁹ Skipping forward to one of the schooling movements explored in this book, similar levels of ‘moral panic’ could be seen throughout the 1960s and 1970s towards African, Caribbean and Asian communities, who also fought to reclaim and redefine their own knowledge, culture and traditions. In response, black parents and students fiercely defended their right to define their own ‘really useful knowledge’.³⁰

This book then, is a critical response to the presentations of working-class culture as lacking educational intent or initiative. Of course, the effect of this presumption is lived and felt differently, mediated by personal and collective biographies of gender, race and class. Nevertheless, the notion the some students and parents are somehow inherently (whether as a result of culture, history or biology) inactive when it comes to education is a notion tied to social class relations. Compounded, and complicated, by histories of colonisation and imperialism and past and present experiences of racism, this presumption of lack now also encircles black British culture. The politics of race and racism undoubtedly create new discourses and practices, but it is nonetheless a judgement of cultural and social distinction imbued by the politics of class distinction.³¹ In this book, then, I aim to problematise the notion that working-class and black culture is somehow inherently inactive or uninterested when it comes to education, provoked to action only when inspired or coerced by (white) middle-class interventions. I do so, however, in the hope of avoiding a romanticised or glamourised history of radical community-based education. It is perhaps too easy to slip into reified representations of counter-cultures, and into simplistic categories of ‘dominant’ and ‘counter-’ in the description of political and social struggles for change. To be sure, the educational initiatives explored here were explicitly radical in intent, overtly challenging the unequal status quo, and campaigning for social, political and economic justice. And yet, among all of the ‘noise and dust’ of these campaigns and initiatives, there is diversity, complexity, contestation and even, at times, ambiguity. It is hard not to overstate the difficulty of establishing movements for change, and, in the case of those movements explored here, translating and applying the major tenets of these movements to children’s and young people’s education.

Thus, the histories here are not offered as exemplars of practice, or models for intervention. They are not illustrative points for the theory of radical education, or solutions to the contemporary challenges of working-class education.³² They are, rather, investigations into the ways in which men and women, as parents and community members, attempted to resist the narrow, unequal and unjust offerings of education provided by the state through creating independent community-based alternatives. By looking across history – across temporal, cultural and social space – I explore the ambiguities, contestations and disjunctures that feature in any social history. In other words, this is a kind of genealogy of radical education: a tracing of the diverse experiences of classed positions and the resistance of these through children’s and young people’s educational initiatives. In this sense, it is impossible not to acknowledge that the thread of radical education is defined as much by the common purpose to challenge injustice and inequality, as it is by the diverse interpretations and enactments of this purpose.

At the same time however, it is increasingly difficult to pinpoint what we might consider a ‘radical’ education. I explicitly reclaim the language of ‘emancipation’ in response to the slippery terminology of ‘empowerment’ bandied about in policy arenas. Yet what we might understand – conceptually and historically – emancipation in education to be is arguably increasingly unstable. In the 1970s and into the 1980s and 90s Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, and the work of Paulo Freire, appeared to give cultural action, such as education, a firm role in the task of radical social change.³³ Put briefly, Gramsci and Freire suggest that because education has a role in the processes of social reproduction, it has the potential to be a cultural site of contestation. In recent years, however, a range of feminist, post-colonial and post-structural critiques have called into question the assuredness of this relationship, and have highlighted the messy politics of educational paternalism that can sometimes arise in purportedly ‘radical’ initiatives.³⁴ In addition, the changing nature of social class, and the challenge to class analysis wrought by feminism, post-colonialism, anti-racism, queer politics and post-structuralism, means that radical education cannot be neatly or singularly defined. It is hard not to understate the significance, and impact, of these shifting understandings and analyses of inequality and oppression. Writing in 1972, Brian Simon’s edited collection of key thinkers in radical education – The Radical Tradition in Education in Britain – brought together an all-male, all-Anglo European cast of writers (Godwin, Paine, Carlile, Owen, Thompson, Lovett and Morris), many of whom wrote from privileged standpoints in their proclamation of radical working-class education.³⁵ Just over forty years on, it is no longer possible to address the issues of social inequality, class relations and education in such monochrome terms. It is imperative for both historical and contemporary analyses to seriously consider the changing dynamics of social power in exploring the potential role of education in social change.

Black Saturday Schools and Socialist Sunday Schools

In taking up these questions, I explore the history and theory of radical working-class education, and with this the changing social experience of class in Britain. I analyse the meaning of emancipation in education alongside histories of radical community-based working-class children’s education. The histories I offer represent two of the most significant education movements in modern Britain: the Socialist Sunday School (SSS) movement, established in the early 1890s, and the Black Saturday (or Supplementary) School (BSS) movement, established in the late 1960s. Both of these movements were initiated and maintained by concerned community members and parents in response to social inequalities and the deficiencies of state schooling. Within their particular sociocultural contexts, both endeavoured to create alternative educational experiences for children and young people, and both attempted to challenge the classed positions that they found themselves in.

Socialist Sunday Schools emerged at the end of the nineteenth century among the thriving socialist political milieu. Starting with the first school established by a Social Democratic Federation (SDF) member, Mary Gray, at Battersea in 1892, the schools gradually captured the attention, and dedication, of many socialists already involved in education-based campaigning and children’s social activities. The schools co-opted much of the popular and dominant church-based religious cultures of the day, including reworked hymns and socialist songs, ten socialist commandments (later changed to precepts), and a heavy emphasis on the development of a socialist morality or ethic. In addition, they aimed to offset the effects of what they viewed as a narrow and indoctrinating state education system. As a counter-balance, they taught science, literature, socialist interpretations of history and cooperative ethics, and involved students in range of activities to encourage a cooperative and socialist outlook and culture, from needlecraft to rambling, participation in May Day marches, and singing. By 1901 they had their own national monthly magazine, the Young Socialist: A Magazine of Love and Justice. Soon after, following the success of a number of regional unions, the National Council of British SSSs (NCBSSS) was founded in 1909.

In similar fashion, Black Saturday or Supplementary Schools emerged within an increasingly defiant wider black politic. Bringing together African, Caribbean, and in some cases Asian, activists, the black political scene of 1960s and 1970s Britain had education – and children and young people’s education – as one of its primary enterprises. Starting in the mid- and late 1960s as a range of informal gatherings and educational opportunities for children and youth, by 1968 BSSs were spotted across black English communities. Drawing on histories of self-education and resistance to colonialism, BSSs endeavoured to foster positive, and politically aware, black identities alongside academic and educational success. Responding to the failures of the British education system, and the implicit and explicit experiences of institutional racism in schools, BSSs combined the teaching of black history and politics with ‘the basics’.

In many ways, these movements represent two distinct independent community-based education initiatives. They emerged out of two very different social and historical contexts, and responded to vastly different experiences of inequality, including immense variances in the politics and experiences of race and class. It is also important to recognise other concurrent historical differences. These movements span very different socio-historical periods of gender relations, and the roles that women took in public life. In addition, these movements responded to very different state schooling systems, and shifting public understandings surrounding the right to universal education. SSSs emerged within the messy contestations surrounding the institution of a publicly funded schooling system, and at a time when only one generation of working-class children had had the common collective experience of an elementary education, following the 1870 Education Act. Some seventy years later, BSSs emerged within the contentious debates surrounding the expansion of comprehensive education, and in the context of significant increases in migration to England. At the same time however, they are also both part of a wider genealogy of community-based education spurred on, and inspired by, vigorous critiques of social inequalities. Writing in one of the first dedicated examinations of the BSS movement in 1981, Stone suggests:

The development of Saturday schools within the West Indian community mirrors in many respects the Socialist Sunday school movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which offered to working-class children the means to foster a self-image based, not on therapy or charity, but on hard work, disciplined study and the will to succeed. Just as the Socialist Sunday schools were mainly organised and run by working-class people for working-class children, so also in the West Indian Saturday Schools we find ordinary working-class people, who, as part-time teachers, are ‘demystifying’ the teaching and learning process as part of the response to a social structure and its institutions which discriminate against them and their children.³⁶

In exploring the histories of these movements, I focus on their inception and period of initial growth: for SSSs, 1892–1930, and for BSSs, 1967/68–1990. By concentrating on these time periods, I investigate what drove the first generations of men, women, children and young people to establish these schools, and how they laid the foundations for their respective movements. Of course, it is hard to talk wholly in the past tense in relation to the BSS movement. BSSs continue to feature across Britain, and continue to be an important site of black education, community, pride and politics, and as such any history of the schools is invariably connected to a movement still in process. However, this is very much a historical enquiry, and one that does not purport to describe the contemporary experiences of BSS teachers and students. Moreover, what I write here is just one contribution to the understanding of these two important histories. The diversity and breadth of both of these movements means that there is still considerable scope for further historical exploration, including, for example, the slow decline of SSSs into the 1940s and 1950s until their eventual folding in the 1970s and the continued function of BSSs into the present day. Indeed, it is surprising that these movements remain so under-represented in social, political and educational histories of Britain, particularly given their connection to two of the most significant social movements in British contemporary history: turn-of-the-century socialism and mid to late twentieth-century black politics.

Interestingly, unlike their British counterparts, the US SSS movement has received much more scholarly attention, especially in the work of such historians as Kenneth Teitelbaum and Florence Tager.³⁷ Current knowledge of the British SSSs has in large part been thanks to Fred Reid and Brian Simon’s accounts of the movement in the 1960s,³⁸ and more recently to their appearance in a range of histories that focus on women’s involvement in turn-of-the-century socialism.³⁹ To be sure, Reid’s examination of predominant SSS personalities, the religiosity of the SSS instruction (and the internal dissent to this), and the movement’s response to the First World War, offers a rich and useful history. Unfortunately, however, in the absence of further dedicated historical exploration, the schools have often been thought to be perfect emblems of ‘idealistic’ socialism, as adhering to the fanciful and naïve notion that socialism will come through ‘the cultivation of proper ethical behaviour in the child’.⁴⁰ Building upon, but without replicating Fred Reid’s chronicle, David Fisher’s recent accounts of SSS lessons in Scotland,⁴¹ and the important work on SSSs as part of women’s socialist politics, I present a more contextualised account of the SSS movement; one that takes into consideration its relationship to the socialist milieu from which it arose and to which it aimed to contribute.

Since their inception, BSSs have become the subject of a number of investigations. In large part, BSSs are featured in contemporaneous sociologies and ethnographies of black education from the 1970s until the present day.⁴² Such scholarship has explored the diversity of the BSS movement, the difficult task that BSS teachers faced in establishing independent education initiatives, and the powerful effects of reclaiming educational authority and knowledge for teachers and students. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the work of Diane Reay and Heidi Mirza deepened these analyses by their exploration of the ways in which BSSs constituted spaces of educational authority for women teachers in particular.⁴³ In addition, Brian Alleyne’s Radicals against Race provides an important historical account of the North London activist group connected to the radical black publishing house and book store New Beacon Books, including their involvement in the BSS movement.⁴⁴ Extending upon this collection of scholarship, I explore the movement, its diversity, and its interconnection with the complex politics of 1960s, 1970s and 1980s Black Power and class struggle.

Fortunately, both of these movements included men and women who dedicatedly collected, stored and then donated to public archives and libraries, material from the schools. Much of this constitutes the primary archive material upon which this history is based. The importance of this should not be understated: too often, historical enquiry of community-based ventures is hindered by the lack of archival evidence. For both of the movements this includes school workbooks, magazines, pamphlets, meeting minutes, campaign leaflets and correspondence. For the SSS movement the continued existence of the NCBSSS undoubtedly aided in establishing institutional cultures of saving and filing away documents. A range of formal NCBSSS literature and publications certainly bolsters the material available on the movement, including the monthly SSS magazine Young Socialist: A Magazine of Love and Justice (YS), various teachers’ manuals, songbooks and curriculum guides.⁴⁵ Surviving minute-books of individual schools also provide valuable insight into the day-to-day SSS experience – and, of course, an insight into what was deemed important to document. In addition, unique testimony of the SSS experience is found in a range of historical recollections, oral histories, autobiographies and biographies from the period under examination. This includes correspondence to the NCBSSS in the 1950s from ex-SSS teachers and students following a call for reflections and recollections on the early days of the schools, and the short biographies of teachers and students and reports on schools’ activities provided in the YS, published alongside their photos. Despite the lapse in time, such material assisted to bring to life the SSS movement and the earnest activities of its students and teachers. In particular, the oral history testimonies of suffragettes who attended SSSs as children, recorded by the historian Brian Harrison in the 1970s, provided lively personal perspectives on the movement.⁴⁶

For the BSS movement, complementing the campaign and schooling material held at a number of different archival institutions,⁴⁷ I also drew upon oral testimony. My research on the BSS movement led me to visit a number of BSSs, and speak to – and interview – many existing, and past, BSS teachers and students, who provided crucial insight into the memories, understandings and experiences of the schools. For this book, I have included the testimony of twenty-two men and women involved in the BSS movement, selected for their involvement in, and reflections upon, BSSs throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. I am indebted to all of the men and women who took time to meet with me to share their thoughts – often time eked out from their busy teaching schedules in existing BSSs. Invariably, this personal contact with teachers in the schools meant the dynamics of the historical exploration was different from that of