Editorial. Adult and Popular Education

The field of adult education enjoys a long but also contradictory and problematic relationship with postcolonial studies. On the one hand, the radical tradition of adult education in the west has always sought to make alliances with anti-colonial struggles, though very little of this history finds its way today into adult education chronicles. How many adult educators, for example, know of the adult education work of Agnes Smedley and Edgar Snow and others who went to China to join Mao's Long March in the 1930s (Boshier and Yan 2010)? Or of the participation of leading trade union and socialist educators from the west in 'activist schools' for national liberation leaders which the Comintern organised in Moscow and Beijing? (Gettleman 1999)? These early radical adult educators were part of a long socialist tradition of international solidarity, and the political and educational practice of their movement played an important if secondary and supporting role in some of the twentieth century's major victories over imperialism and colonialism.