Marxism, literature, reading and the arts: ‘Education for Revolution’

Abstract

This article examines how British radical organisations perceived children, their education, their publications and their role in the movement. It particularly looks at the effect of the Russian revolutions in 1917 on thinking about children in Britain. It challenges the general cold war perception that revolutionaries, and particularly communists, were rigid and proscriptive in thinking about the education of the young. At the centre of the argument is an understanding of the truly revolutionary concept of the empowerment of the child.