Books by Tom G. Griffiths
Education in/for Socialism: Historical, Current and Future Perspectives, 2018
This book re-examines aspects of historical socialism, and includes case studies of education wit... more This book re-examines aspects of historical socialism, and includes case studies of education within twenty-first century socialist and post-socialist contexts shaped by the trajectories of historical socialism.
Through these case studies, contributions offer insights into key questions: How are education systems and student subjectivities shaped by post-socialist trajectories and current regional politics, economics and resistance movements? How do sedimented socialist discourses and geographies alter and contest the ‘neoliberal child’ and ‘childhood’ in post-socialist education? How have disjunctures between the rhetoric of historical Marxism-Leninism and the practices of educators, students and student political organizations played out under socialism, and what could we learn from that for our present? How much emancipatory potential is there in the theories and practices of (popular) education for combatting injustice in the absence of mass, revolutionary political parties?
Above all, this volume affirms the need to move beyond simplistic accounts of historical socialism and post-socialist transitions. By exploring how socialist trajectories remain influential and have potential in our current contexts, this book contributes to the work of politically engaged educators working to re-imagine and reconstruct education.
For some, socialism is a potent way of achieving economic, political and social transformations i... more For some, socialism is a potent way of achieving economic, political and social transformations in the twenty-first century, while others find the very term socialism outdated. This book engages readers in a discussion about the viability of socialist views on education and identifies the capacity of some socialist ideas to address a range of widely recognized social ills. It argues that these pervasive social problems, which plague so-called 'developed' societies as much as they contribute to the poverty, humiliation and lack of prospects in the rest of the world, fundamentally challenge us to act. In our contemporary world-system, distancing ourselves from the injustices of others is neither viable nor defensible. Rather than waiting for radically new solutions to emerge, this book sees the possibility of transformation in the reconfiguration of existing social logics that comprise our modern societies, including logics of socialism. The book presents case studies that offer a critical examination of education in contemporary socialist contexts, as well as reconsidering examples of education under historical socialism. In charting these alternatives, and retooling past solutions in a nuanced way, it sets out compelling evidence that it is possible to think and act in ways that depart from today's dominant educational paradigm. It offers contemporary policy makers, researchers, and practitioners a cogent demonstration of the contemporary utility of educational ideas and solutions associated with socialism.
Immanuel Wallerstein and István Mészáros are prolific scholars whose analyses of global capitalis... more Immanuel Wallerstein and István Mészáros are prolific scholars whose analyses of global capitalism in crisis offer distinctive insights for research across the social sciences. This book engages readers with their main theses, encouraging their application in analysis of social reality and of its institutions of mass education, which aim to prepare workers for the global economy. Using the theoretical lenses offered by these two scholars, Tom G. Griffiths and Robert Imre develop a timely and provocative critique of mass education for this century, challenging readers to contribute to the construction of radical alternatives.
For over a century, teachers, parents, and school leaders have lamented a loss of 'discipline' in... more For over a century, teachers, parents, and school leaders have lamented a loss of 'discipline' in classrooms. Caught between guidance approaches on the one hand and a call for zero tolerance on the other, current debates rarely venture beyond the terrain of implementation strategies. This book aims to reinvigorate thinking on 'discipline' in education by challenging the notions, foundations, and paradigms that underpin its use in policy and practice. It confronts the understanding of 'discipline' as purely repressive, and raises the possibility of enabling forms and conceptualisations of 'discipline' that challenge tokenistic avenues for students' liberation and enhance students' capacity for agency. This book is an essential resource for university lecturers, preservice and in-service teachers, policymakers, and educational administrators who want to re-think 'discipline' in education in ways that move beyond a concern with managing disorder, to generate alternative understandings that can make a difference in students' lives.
Book Chapters by Tom G. Griffiths
International Encyclopedia of Education, vol. 1, 2023
International Encyclopedia of Education, vol. 7, 2023
In Tröhler, D., Piattoeva, N., & Pinar, W. (Eds). World Yearbook of Education 2022: Education, Schooling and the Global Universalization of Nationalism, 2022
This chapter reviews Cuba’s project of rapid expansion and massification of education in the Cold... more This chapter reviews Cuba’s project of rapid expansion and massification of education in the Cold War context and its relationship to the revolutionary project of national political independence and to efforts to develop an independent Cuban socialism alongside alignments to international socialism and the Soviet Union. Drawing on policy documents, we establish that the educational project was characterized by politicized ambitions to educate ‘new men and women’ loyal to the Cuban State and its socialist vision of the Cuban nation, coupled with human capital ambitions to support rapid national economic development as part of the socialist modernization programme. Cuba’s trajectory within the Cold War dynamics conflated the national independence project with the socialist State, the Party and its vanguard leadership, emphasizing calls for national unity. We conclude by arguing that this worked to limit the space for other dimensions of social and cultural identification, including in particular Afro-Cuban identity, contributing to tensions that persist and are beginning to be acknowledged in post-Cold War conditions.
In Maisuria, Alpesh (Ed). (2022). Encyclopaedia of Marxism and Education, 2022
S. Themelis (Ed). Critical Reflections on the Language of Neoliberalism in Education: Dangerous Words and Discourses of Possibility, 2021
S. Themelis (Ed). Critical Reflections on the Language of Neoliberalism in Education: Dangerous Words and Discourses of Possibility, 2021
T. D. Jules, R. Shields, and M. Thomas (Eds). Handbook of Theory in Comparative and International Education, 2021
The idea of development, and education’s potential to contribute to development, continues to und... more The idea of development, and education’s potential to contribute to development, continues to underpin much comparative and international educational research, and to manifest in educational policy and practice across the world, at multiple levels of scale. Confronted by human induced climate change, and its catastrophic consequences, further exploring and theorising the education-development nexus becomes more important than ever. This chapter reviews the contributions of dependency theory, and world-systems analysis, to this task, including their actual and potential applications to CIE research. This review highlights the capacity of these theoretical perspectives to generate critical, macro- or systemic level accounts of education and development, its potentials and limitations, within the trajectory of the historical capitalist world-economy. This in turn lends support to CIE projects, grounded in such work, that investigate and advocate educational interventions with normative aspirations to construct more just, equal, democratic, peaceful, and ecologically sustainable alternatives.
I. Miethe, and J. Weiss (Eds). Socialist Educational Cooperation and the Global South, 2020
Elementary Education in India: Policy Shifts, Issues and Challenges, 2019
This chapter argues that a neoliberal policy for education gains legitimacy from and in turn rein... more This chapter argues that a neoliberal policy for education gains legitimacy from and in turn reinforces aspects of human capital theory, through its construction of education not as a public and social service, nor as a universal human right, but as a private, good to be acquired by individuals for their personal social and economic benefit. The chapter argues that advocacy for increased public expenditures on education often cites economic returns, which risks supporting the neoliberal logic and policy that we seek to replace. Instead, it calls for critical educators and activists to emphasize and build support for alternative primary purposes of mass education that more firmly support high-quality, public, universal systems with the potential to contribute to wider anti-systemic movements.
Encyclopedia of Teacher Education, 2019
In: Second International Handbook of Urban Education, 2017
This chapter considers the question of urbanization and urban education in Oceania, from a world-... more This chapter considers the question of urbanization and urban education in Oceania, from a world-systems analysis perspective. This is set first in the context of well-established ideas of upward social mobility through education, and how this logic has extended historically to the idea of nations, and even regions, experiencing upward mobility in the world-economy, in part through investments in education. The chapter then reviews a world-systems analysis perspective on the question of urbanization as a global historical trend linked to the relocation of production from core to semi-peripheral and peripheral states within the world-economy. This extends to the long-term move towards fully proletarianised labour associated with growing urbanization, and the nature of the relocated production activity maintaining flows of global surplus to the core. On this basis, we argue that understanding urbanization, and urban education, work and social mobility in the geographical region of Oceania, requires an historical view that locates these processes within the secular trends of the capitalist world-economy. The particular histories of nation-states in Oceania, as former colonies, providers of raw materials and cheap labour to international commodity chains, shifts attention to the world-system and its transformation in understanding regional developments.
In Darder, A., Mayo, P., & Paraskeva, J. (Eds). 2016. International Critical Pedagogy Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 54-62.
Logics of Socialist Education: Engaging with Crisis, Insecurity and Uncertainty, 2013
Logics of Socialist Education: Engaging with Crisis, Insecurity and Uncertainty, 2013
in James Bennett, Nancy Cushing & Erik Eklund (Eds). 2015. Radical Newcastle. Sydney: NewSouth Books
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Books by Tom G. Griffiths
Through these case studies, contributions offer insights into key questions: How are education systems and student subjectivities shaped by post-socialist trajectories and current regional politics, economics and resistance movements? How do sedimented socialist discourses and geographies alter and contest the ‘neoliberal child’ and ‘childhood’ in post-socialist education? How have disjunctures between the rhetoric of historical Marxism-Leninism and the practices of educators, students and student political organizations played out under socialism, and what could we learn from that for our present? How much emancipatory potential is there in the theories and practices of (popular) education for combatting injustice in the absence of mass, revolutionary political parties?
Above all, this volume affirms the need to move beyond simplistic accounts of historical socialism and post-socialist transitions. By exploring how socialist trajectories remain influential and have potential in our current contexts, this book contributes to the work of politically engaged educators working to re-imagine and reconstruct education.
Book Chapters by Tom G. Griffiths
Through these case studies, contributions offer insights into key questions: How are education systems and student subjectivities shaped by post-socialist trajectories and current regional politics, economics and resistance movements? How do sedimented socialist discourses and geographies alter and contest the ‘neoliberal child’ and ‘childhood’ in post-socialist education? How have disjunctures between the rhetoric of historical Marxism-Leninism and the practices of educators, students and student political organizations played out under socialism, and what could we learn from that for our present? How much emancipatory potential is there in the theories and practices of (popular) education for combatting injustice in the absence of mass, revolutionary political parties?
Above all, this volume affirms the need to move beyond simplistic accounts of historical socialism and post-socialist transitions. By exploring how socialist trajectories remain influential and have potential in our current contexts, this book contributes to the work of politically engaged educators working to re-imagine and reconstruct education.
‘background conditions’ of the operation
and legitimation of capitalist society, the
current conjuncture gives reforms like
the Sustainable Development Goals and
Education for Sustainable Development
(SDGs and ESD) a more radical character.
These reforms provide resources to re-
purpose mass schooling in ways that can
educate populations about the need for
radical, global and systemic change.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper provides an introductory essay regarding the contributions and critics associated with Spivak’s work.
Findings – In addition, the contents lay out brief descriptions of the articles included in the collection.
Originality/value – The notion of revisiting “Can the subaltern speak?” provides authors with innovative and provocative ideas to guide their submissions.
Keywords - Qualitative research, Postcolonial, Spivak, Subaltern
Design/methodology/approach – The authors draw on interviews with key members of the magazine’s editorial collective, and a review of RED’s contents, to identify the major political ambitions as manifest in RED in historical context. The authors contextualise this radical education project in the post-1968 world context of social and political upheaval, rejecting the Cold War options of either Soviet style Communist or US-based capitalist pathways.
Findings – In this context RED generated powerful critiques of dominant educational policy in multiple areas. The critique was part of a project to promote a socialist understanding of mass education, and to promote the transformation of Australian society towards socialism. The authors argue that the debates and struggles within RED in this period, seeking to define and advance a socialist educational project, reflected a broad and consistent critique of progressive educational reforms, rooted in its radical political foundations.
Originality/value – This paper provides an historical review of a 30-year radical education publishing initiative in Australia, about which no accounts have been published. It connects directly with contemporary educational issues, and offers insights for interviews with those directly involved in the historical project.
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Palabras clave: reformas curriculares, educación bolivariana, análisis sistema-mundo.
Abstract
This paper reviews some of the major global tendencies in curricular reforms to establish the world-system level context in which the contemporary process in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is located. Drawing on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis, we then argue for the need to re-think / un-think dominant conceptions of universal knowledge. That is, we argue for a national curriculum project that overcomes the historical separation between science and the humanities and holds, as a foundational principle, the search for the truth and the good. The paper concludes by acknowledging the importance of a world-systems perspective in order to better understand and intervene in curricular debate"