History's schools: Past struggles and present realities

• In Event: Panel Cluster on Social Movements, Unions, and Youth Resistance: Social Movements, Education, and Learning

Proposal

The extent to which organizers and activists in contemporary social movements, political organizations, community and popular struggles engage with earlier movement histories, memories and ideas in the course of their organizing ranges widely. Resource constraints and other competing priorities mean that activists/movements are not always able to focus on preserving their own histories, or how best to pass on and critically engage with them. As Anandi Ramamurthy (2006) notes, such records are destroyed due to multiple reasons including the breakup of organizations, the disillusionment of participants who see the disintegration of their dreams, or through practical circumstances in which records are lost due to practical factors such as moves of offices and residences. In many contexts, state repression has often been a factor in the maintenance or destruction and loss of such materials. Furthermore, organizers and movements are often focused on effecting immediate change rather than preserving records or drawing lessons about/from their activities for the next generation.

The educative role of social movements and social and political activism is often overlooked within adult education and social movement scholarship. Movements are not only significant sites of social and political action but also important – albeit contested and contradictory-terrains of learning and knowledge production. A strand of critical adult education theory (Foley, 1999; Allman, 2001; Holst, 2002, Scandrett, 2012, Carpenter and Mojab, 2012; Boughton, 2013, Choudry, 2014, Youngman, 1986) has sought to theorize adult learning informed by historical materialism by attending to relationships of education and learning, community practice and collective/emancipatory struggles. Yet relatively few have generated the “holistic and materialist analyses of learning in particular sites and struggles” (p.8) that Foley calls for in order to avoid the abstract and culturalist trends he critiques in much radical adult education scholarship.

The importance of spaces for collective action, learning, and reflection are crucial, as is openness to valuing processes of informal and non-formal learning and knowledge produced from within people’s everyday experience. Elsewhere (Choudry and Kapoor, 2010, Choudry, 2015; Vally et al 2013) we have argued that this kind of activist intellectual work requires practices and strategies grounded in critical (including self-critical) historical perspectives as well as emerging ideas born of current struggles. Drawing on our new co-edited international collection, Reflections on knowledge, learning and social movements: History’s schools (Choudry and Vally, 2017), we highlight (a) the ideas, insights and visions produced in the course of people collectively working for social, economic and political change and reflecting on their experiences; (b) the knowledge about systems of power and exploitation developed as people find themselves in confrontation with states and capital (G.W.Smith, 1990); and (c) the existence of rich, often underexplored, archives and publications of earlier generations of movements (Vally, et al., 2013; Ramamurthy, 2013; Sears, 2014).

Authors

• Aziz Choudry, McGill University

• Salim Vally, University of Johannesburg