The victories that followed the American civil war and the 1960s civil rights era are once again under attack, echoing earlier efforts to roll back equality and redefine democracy, says JOE SIMS
LIKE everything else in a class-divided society, education is a battleground. Earlier answers in this series have argued that what is taught, how and to whom, is a function of the economic system that education has developed to serve.
Over a century-and-a-half ago, Marx and Engels declared: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, ie the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”
Communists, they stated: “Have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”
A teaching delegation to Cuba offered IAN DUCKETT a powerful glimpse into a schooling system defined by care, creativity and the legacy of the island’s remarkable 1961 literacy campaign
In part II of a serialisation of his new book, JOHN McINALLY explores how witch-hunting drives took hold in the Civil Service as the cold war emerged in the wake of WWII
The creative imagination is a weapon against barbarism, writes KENNY COYLE, who is a keynote speaker at the Manifesto Press conference, Art in the Age of Degenerative Capitalism, tomorrow at the Marx Memorial Library & Workers School in London



