The Rise and Fall of Socialist Education in North America

• In Event: Security, Democracy, and Learning: Exploring the Dialectics of In/Security in Educational Space

Abstract

In the first half of the twentieth century, socialist education centers and “folk schools” flourished in Canada and the United States. These schools, such as the Jefferson School of Social Science in New York City, the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, and the Morris Winchevsky Center in Toronto, Ontario, provided more than training and education for the labor movement. They offered rich and diverse programs of study which encompassed social sciences, humanities, visual and performing arts, and opportunities for experiential learning. Through Cold War era domestic security measures, these schools were systematically closed down because of their civil rights activism, and opposition to the rising “military-intellectual complex” (Robin, 2003) in both Canada and the United States.

This paper examines the rise and fall of these early experiments in North American socialist adult education as a consequence of an on-going historical process of “securitization”, the current manifestation of which can now be seen post-9/11 security measures. Through a Marxist-Feminist theoretical framework, I examine and contrast the pedagogical approaches of the folk school movement and the more explicitly socialist labour colleges. I suggest that the demise of the socialist schools must be seen as a result of both internal philosophical and political struggles over gender and race, as well as the external forces of state repression and increased militarization during the Cold War era.

For contemporary educators interested in critical pedagogy, the history of these schools reveals the earliest North American attempts to create vital sites of adult learning, political debate, and organized dissent. In contrast to much of the recent scholarship on the neoliberal era in education, which focuses on the 1980s and 1990s as a period of “marketization” in education, I argue that we must also study “militarization” as a concurrent force in political, economic and social change.

Author

• Tara Silver, OISE/University of Toronto