Radical International Adult Education: A Pedagogy of Solidarity

Radical adult education has a long and proud history of internationalism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, labor colleges, plebs leagues, and popular universities provided a foundation from which hundreds of internationally linked and networked socialist and communist political parties and movements emerged, all committed to educating their members and supporters to change the world. To this end, they established study circles and adult schools which trained a great many leaders and activists of the twentieth century's labor, peace, and women's movements in the North, and the national liberation movements of the Global South (Macintyre, 1980; Gettleman, 1993, 2008; Boughton, 2005). A key lesson this worldwide learning movement taught to those who joined it was that the struggle against capitalist globalization (called imperialism within the movement) would only be won through the practice of international solidarity. In this chapter, I invite adult educators from both the North and the South to re-discover and re-ignite this pedagogy of international solidarity, in a coherent socialist challenge to the fundamental contradiction between center and periphery.