Abstract
In a context characterized by discourses of inactivity and deficiency of so-called ‘vulnerable students’ or ‘disadvantaged students’, Jessica Gerrard’s book is a revitalizing reminder of the possibility for education to be a catalyst for social change instead of one of social reproduction. In her book entitled Radical Childhoods: Schooling and the Struggle for Social Change, Gerrard outlines and compares the history of two well-known community-based schooling initiatives in Britain – the Socialist Sunday Schools (SSS) during1892–1930 and the Black Saturday Schools (BSS) prevalent between 1967 and 1990. The guiding question for this historical enquiry was, more specifically, what drove the first generation of men, women, children and youth to establish these schools. Gerrard demonstrates how men and women, in their roles of parents and community members, resisted a narrow, unequal and unjust perspective of state education that represented, and continues to represent, working class and Black British culture as lacking educational initiative. Through a counter-public discourse, the SSS critiqued the reproduction of the hierarchical and unjust structures of social classes through state schooling, whereas the BSS critiqued racist discourses against Black people’s knowledge by embracing and making their Black culture visible.
Her well-researched study draws upon historical sources of community-based endeavours, such as workbooks, magazines, pamphlets, minutes, campaign leaflets and correspondence. For the SSS, the National Council of British Socialist Sunday Schools (NCBSSS) literature and publications were crucial in informing their history. In turn, for the BSS, oral testimony served to bring forward the memories, understandings and experiences of teachers and students about their BSS. As a whole, Gerrard drew on the history of the SSS and the BSS to demonstrate how these schools crafted a notion of childhood consistent with a social change project with the hope to transform British society through children’s radical education.
Rather than a history of radical childhood, this book focuses on a history of children’s radical education to change unequal and unjust social relationships in British society. These two community-based schools were initiated and maintained by committed parents and community members based on an understanding of childhood as a protected sphere of growth, but also as a public and political concern. Consequently, both the SSS and BSS claimed that children were key political actors for their emancipatory educational project.
Gerrard develops her argument in four parts. Part I contextualizes radical education in the past and the present (Chapter 1) and introduces the theoretical underpinning for the notions of schooling for social change through two fundamental notions – class and emancipatory education (Chapter 2). Gerrard proposes to reinstall the debate about social inequities taking into account the category of class as a response to the current individualistic terminology of disadvantage, marginalization or exclusion. The value of class, she argues, is to bring into the debate the relational nature of unjust and unequal social relationships, and thus the possibility to struggle against the social and cultural dynamics of continuing social inequities. Her understanding of class is of a changing nature and dependent on other social categories such as race and gender, which is very well demonstrated through the book’s chapters. With regard to emancipatory education, she follows Paulo Freire’s use of liberatory education as a framework for the transformation of the self and society for more just and equal social relationships.
Parts II and III cover the history of the SSS and the BSS. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the history of SSS (1892–1930) by tracing their emergence from the radical socialist context at the beginning of the 20th century. The concept of emancipatory education is at stake to examine the connection between the wider socialist political networks and local SSSs. Chapter 5 illustrates the tradition of self-help and community radical education that characterized the BSS movement within an increasing radical Black political context in Britain after Second World War. Parents and teachers reclaimed knowledge and education for their children through the acknowledgement of their Black cultural heritage. Chapter 6 shows how these men and women assumed their authority over curriculum and pedagogy to bring forward their anti-racist project for social justice. Through these chapters, Gerrard intertwined the role of women who actively engaged in both movements and how they, along with some men, questioned and challenged unequal gender relations within a political world still dominated by conventional gender stereotypes. Part IV concludes by highlighting how the SSS and the BSS challenged the discourses of working class and Black culture as lacking educational aspirations as well as the failure of state education to shift patterns of class disadvantage.
Through her book, Gerrard shows us also the multiple challenges that these schools faced to preserve their local autonomy and identity, not only from state education but also from the social movements that supported their creation. For instance, although the SSS received support and inspiration nationally and internationally from the wider socialist movement, teachers aimed to maintain and assert their autonomy from the adult socialist movement by embracing a non-partisan independent stance, which inevitably decreased the support to maintain these schools’ functioning over time. Their insistence on maintaining their autonomy from partisan organizations was related to their notion of childhood as a protected stage of life. However, their idea of childhood was not free of contestation because childhood was also considered at the heart of these two schools as a public and political concern.
This well-written book provides a comprehensive and comparative analysis of the SSS and the BSS for a wider audience interested in schooling and social change. Gerrard’s investigation into the SSS and the BSS offers a foundation for future studies to bring the perspectives of children themselves and how these radical educational initiatives shaped the culture of childhood beyond the SSS’ and the BSS’ classrooms. Incorporating children’s perspectives in historical inquiry continues to be a major challenge since children (as well as women, impoverished people and Indigenous people) have been underrepresented in archival sources, and their perspectives remain overlooked. However, an exploration of children’s perspectives of how the SSS and BSS movements shaped their culture of childhood could offer significant insight into how children themselves understood and contributed to these projects of emancipatory education by their own.