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Marxism and Education

Marxism and Education offers contemporary Marxist analyses of recent and

current education policy, and develops Marxist-based practices of resistance
from a series of national and international perspectives. The first chapters of
the book identify and critique pressure points, impacts of, and developments in
capitalism and education, as these pertain to education policy, teacher education,
and assessment. In the second half of the book, chapter authors develop Marxist
praxis, critical education practices, and resistance against the intensification of
neoliberalism and authoritarian conservatism. With contributions from leading,
globally-recognised Marxist theoreticians, this book addresses the impacts and
developments of neoliberal and authoritarian-conservative education policies
across the UK, US, Greece, Turkey, Poland, and Hungary.

Lotar Rasiński is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lower

Silesia in Wroclaw Poland.

Dave Hill is Visiting Professor at the Social Policy Research Centre at Middlesex
University, England, and at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens,
Greece, and is Emeritus Professor of Education Research at Anglia Ruskin
University, England

Kostas Skordoulis is Professor of Epistemology of Science at the Faculty of

Education, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.
Routledge Studies in Education, Neoliberalism, and Marxism
Series editor:
Dave Hill
Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford and Cambridge, England

9 Female Students and Cultures of Violence in Cities

Edited by Julia Hall

10 Neoliberal Education Reform

Gendered Notions in Global and Local Contexts
By Sarah A. Robert

11 Curriculum Epistemicide
Towards An Itinerant Curriculum Theory
By João M. Paraskeva

12 Alternatives to Privatizing Public Education and Curriculum:

Festschrift in Honor of Dale D. Johnson
Edited by Daniel Ness & Stephen J. Farenga

13 The Neoliberal Agenda and the Student Debt Crisis in U. S.

Higher Education: Voices of Students and Faculty
Edited by Nicholas D. Hartlep, Lucille L. T. Eckrich, and
Brandon O. Hensley

14 Ethnography of a Neoliberal School: Building Cultures of Success

By Garth Stahl

15 Film as a Radical Pedagogical Tool

By Deirdre O’Neill

16 Marxism and Education

International Perspectives on Theory and Action
Edited by Lotar Rasiński, Dave Hill, and Kostas Skordoulis

17 Class Consciousness and Education in Sweden

A Marxist Analysis for Revolutionary Strategy in a Social Democracy
By Alpesh Maisura

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Studies-in-Education-Neoliberalism-and-Marxism/book-series/RSEN
Marxism and Education
International Perspectives on
Theory and Action

Edited by Lotar Rasiński, Dave Hill,

and Kostas Skordoulis
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Lotar Rasiński, Dave Hill, and Kostas Skordoulis to be
identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-815-36900-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-25332-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

Author Biographies vii

1 Introduction 1
DAVE HILL, KOSTAS SKORDOULIS, AND LOTAR RASIŃSKI

2 European Education Policy and Critical Education 9

GEORGE GROLLIOS

3 The Schooling of Teachers in England: Rescuing Pedagogy 20

GAIL EDWARDS

4 Transformation in the Teaching Profession in Turkey: From

Socialist-Idealist Teacher to Exam-Oriented Technician 35
AHMET YILDIZ

5 Education, Secularism, and Secular Education in Turkey 49

UNAL OZMEN

6 Assessing the Effects of the Economic Crisis on Public Education

in Greece 60
THEOPOULA-POLINA CHRYSOCHOU

7 The Endpoint of Expectation From Education, the Starting

Point of Struggle: A Critical Approach to White-Collar
Unemployment 77
AYGULEN KAYAHAN KARAKUL

8 The Position of an Educational Researcher in a Semi-Peripheral

Region: Critical Autoethnography of an Academic Subject in
Hungary 89
GYÖRGY MÉSZÁROS
vi Contents
9 Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy and the Struggle Against
Capital Today 101
PETER MCLAREN AND DEREK R. FORD

10 Considerations on a Marxist Pedagogy of Science 117

KOSTAS SKORDOULIS

11 “A Picture Held Us Captive. . . .” Marx, Wittgenstein and the

“Paradox of Ideology” 133
LOTAR RASIŃSKI

12 Empowerment in Education—A New Logic of Emancipation or

a New Logic of Power? 144
AGNIESZKA DZIEMIANOWICZ-BĄK

13 Marxist Education Against Capitalism in Neoliberal/

Neoconservative Times 160
DAVE HILL

Name Index 183

Subject Index 187
Author Biographies

The Editors

Lotar Rasiński received his doctoral degree in Philosophy in 2002 at the Univer-
sity of Wroclaw, Poland, where he was also awarded his habilitation in 2013. He
is the Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lower Silesia in
Wroclaw, Poland where he is also the Director of the University of Lower Silesia
Academic Press. He held post-doctoral fellowships at the New School for Social
Research in New York and the University of California at Berkeley. For his latest
book, In the Footsteps of Marx and Wittgenstein: Social Criticism without Criti-
cal Theory (2012, in Polish), Rasiński received the prestigious Award of the Prime
Minister of Poland (2014). As the editor of the series, Library of Contemporary
Social Thought at the ULS Academic Press, he has published Polish translations
of renowned authors, such as E. Laclau, M. Nussbaum, P. Sloderdijk, U. Beck,
and G. Deleuze. In his research and numerous publications he focuses on politi-
cal philosophy, theory of discourse, social criticism, and Marxist philosophy.
His books include Discourse and Power. Exploring Political Agonism (2010, in
Polish), Language, Discourse, Society. Linguistic Turn in Social Philosophy (ed.,
2009, in Polish) and Ludwig Wittgenstein—Contexts and Confrontations (eds. with
P. Dehnel, 2011, in Polish).
Dave Hill is Emeritus Professor of Education Research at Anglia Ruskin Univer-
sity, England and Visiting Professor at the Social Policy Research Centre at
Middlesex University, London, and at National and Kapodistrian University of
Athens. He chief edits the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, www.
jceps.com, a free, online, peer-refereed international journal (also available in
print) which has been downloaded more than a million times since he founded
it in 2003. He co-founded the Hillcole Group of Radical Left Educators in Eng-
land and chaired it 1989–2001. He has 25 books published and in-press, and
over a hundred chapters and academic articles. Dave is a Marxist academic and
political and trade union activist. His academic work focuses on issues of neo-
liberalism, neoconservatism, capitalism, class, ‘race’, resistance, and social-
ist/Marxist education/education for equality. Many of his papers are online at
www.ieps.org.uk/publications/online-papers-dave-hill/. He is the Director of
viii Author Biographies
the Institute for Education Policy Studies (www.ieps.org.uk) which publishes
JCEPs and Marxist/radical left books.
As a Marxist political activist, he has fought 13 elections at local, national,
and European levels and been an elected regional trade union leader. In
terms of Direct Action, he has recently been tear-gassed while on Left dem-
onstrations in Ankara and in Athens. He lectures worldwide to academic and
socialist activist/trade union groups and co-organises, with Kostas Skordou-
lis, the annual ICCE conference (International Conference on Critical Edu-
cation). The Sixth (2016) conference was at Middlesex University, London,
in August 2016. The Seventh (2017) conference was 28 June-2 July 2017
at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, website, icce-vii.
weebly.com.
Kostas Skordoulis is Professor of Epistemology of Science at the Faculty of
Education, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. He has
studied Physics at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK and has a Ph.D. in
Quantum Optics from NHRF (Greece). He has worked as a Visiting Researcher
at the Universities of Oxford (UK), Jena (Germany) and Groningen (Nether-
lands) holding Scholarships from DAAD (Germany) and NWO (Netherlands).
He has been the Secretary of the Teaching Commission of the International
Union of History and Philosophy of Science, Member of the Council of the
European Society for History of Science. He is currently an, Effective Member
of the International Academy of History of Science.
He is co-Editor of Almagest: International Journal for the History of Sci-
entific Ideas (Brepols, Belgium) and member of the Editorial Boards of the
journals, Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies (IEPS, UK), Interna-
tional Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences (CG Publishers, USA),
Green Theory and Praxis (ICAS, USA), Advances in Historical Studies (SRP,
USA) and Science & Education (Springer/2001–15). He is also co-editor of the
Newsletter for the History of Science in Southeastern Europe and Editor of the
Journal Kritiki: Critical Science & Education. He has published extensively
on issues of History of Science, Science Education, and Socio-Scientific Issues
with a critical perspective.

The Contributors

Polina Chrysochou is a final-year Doctoral researcher (studentship holder) at

Anglia Ruskin University, UK, an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education
Academy and an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Education. She stud-
ied Physics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and gained a Mas-
ter’s degree in Education from the National and Kapodistrian University of
Athens, Greece, where she has taught as an Academic Tutor and Lab Instruc-
tor. She was a visiting scholar in the Department of Philosophy, University of
Nantes, France in 2012.
 Author Biographies ix
She was Co-Convenor of Critical Education and Justice (CEJ) research semi-
nar series, and is Assistant Editor of the Journal for Critical Education Policy
Studies (JCEPS) and Member of the Editorial Board of International Book Series,
Marxist and Socialist Studies in Education. She is also Member of the Teaching
Commission of the Division of History of Science and Technology of the Inter-
national Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Member of the Hellenic
Society of History, Philosophy and Didactics of Science.
She has been a member of the organising committee of International and
Panhellenic Conferences, presented at various peer-reviewed international
conferences and she has been involved in publishing as single author, co-
author and co-editor (book chapters and papers in peer-reviewed journal and
conference proceedings).
Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bąk has a background in education and philoso-
phy, which she has studied at University of Wrocław, Poland. She works
as a research assistant at Mid-Term Analysis Unit in Educational Research
Institute in Warsaw, where she is responsible for analysing Polish education
policy (especially policy executed by the local municipalities). She also col-
laborates as an expert in the field of education with the Ferdinand Lassalle
Centre of Social Thought in Wrocław and with the Friedrich Ebert Foun-
dation in Warsaw. She is an author and a co-author of several articles and
research reports on social and education related issues. Her research interests
include critical pedagogy and sociology of education, education policy and
organisation, critical discourse analysis. Currently, she is completing her
Ph.D. thesis on radical critique of education in contemporary social thought
at the Department of Social and Political Philosophy of the University
of Wroclaw.
Gail Edwards teaches at Newcastle University, UK. Prior to this, she worked as
a teacher and advisory teacher in UK state schools. Her research interests and
published work focus on the philosophy of the social sciences and research
methodology (especially critical realism); teacher education and pedagogy
(especially critical and Vygotskian perspectives); and the sociology and history
of education (especially critical and Marxist perspectives). She is a member of
the research group Transformative Education for Equity (TrEE) and a member
of the editorial board of Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies (www.
jceps.com).
Derek R. Ford is assistant professor of education studies at DePauw University,
Indiana, USA. His research focuses on the relationship between educational the-
ory, modes of production, and political organization. He has written and edited
six books, including Communist Study (2016) and Education and the Production
of Space (2017). Other publications have appeared in journals such as Cultural
Politics, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, and Critical Education. He is an
organizer with the Answer Coalition, chair of the education department at The
Hampton Institute, and co-coordinator of LiberationSchool.org.
x Author Biographies
George Grollios was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. He studied Pedagogy at the
Department of Primary Education in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki;
he finished his Ph.D. (1995) and, now, he teaches as a Professor in the same
Department. Before (1985–99), he had been a teacher in Greek State Education
for 14 years. He is author and co-author of five books about (a) the European
programmes for education, (b) the scientific activity of Greek teachers, (c) an
adult literacy programme based on Paulo Freire’s pedagogy at the “Ulysses
School for Immigrants” in Thessaloniki, (d) Paulo Freire’s view on the curricu-
lum and (e) Progressive Education and the curriculum. Also, he is author and
co-author of about 60 articles published in Greek and international journals
and edited volumes, mainly on Pedagogy and Curriculum.
Aygülen Kayahan Karakul is an assistant Professor in Izmir Katip Celebi Uni-
versity, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences in Turkey She stud-
ied mathematics in Hacettepe University, gained her Master of Science degree
in Mathematics and she received her doctoral degree in the Education Manage-
ment and Policy programme in 2012 at Ankara University, Turkey. She worked
as a mathematics teacher in the public vocational high schools for three years.
She is assistant editor of International Journal of Educational Policies (www.
ijep.org), which is one of the supporting journals of the annual International
Conferences for Critical Education.
She has various articles and book chapters on the unemployment of edu-
cated labour, the relations between education and employment, resistance cul-
ture of students against neoliberalism, resistance by women workers, critical
approach to the concept of quality in education, financing policies of education
Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies at the College of
Educational Studies, Chapman University. He is Professor Emeritus in Urban
Education at the University of California, Los Angeles (where he taught for
20 years), and Professor Emeritus in Educational Leadership at Miami Univer-
sity of Ohio (where he taught for eight years).
Professor McLaren is known and respected worldwide in the education and
social justice community. As a “philosopher of praxis” and social and political
activist, he is considered one of the primary architects of what has come to
be known as critical pedagogy. An award-winning author and editor, Profes-
sor McLaren has published approximately fifty books and hundreds of profes-
sional publications on education and social justice. His writings have been
translated into over 20 languages. He received his Ph.D. in education from the
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, Canada.
Five of his books—including Life in Schools—have won the Critic’s Choice
Award of the American Educational Studies Association. Life in Schools has
been named by an international panel as one of the 12 most significant writings
by authors in the field of educational theory, policy, and practice.
György Mészáros is associate professor at the Faculty of Education and Psychol-
ogy, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. He has been teaching in
 Author Biographies xi
teacher education since 2004. He has been involved in several researches in
development projects since he defended his Ph.D. in 2009. He does mainly
critical ethnographic research, but his research interests include: critical peda-
gogy, academic subjectivity, teachers’ professional development, critical epis-
temology, autoethnography, participatory ethnographic research, and LGBT
and gender topics. He is the head of the Anthropology of Education Research
Group at his Faculty, and he is a member of the Administrative Council of the
Association for Teacher Education in Europe. Beside his academic duties, he
is involved in queer leftist activism in Hungary.
Ünal Özmen worked as a primary school teacher before serving as a director in the
ministry of education agency responsible for preparing syllabuses, textbooks,
and miscellaneous educational material. He has worked in the Turkish parlia-
ment as a left wing party and parliamentary consultant. He was a member of the
editorial board of the first educational critique magazine (Zilve Teneffus). He is
still acting as the chief editor of the “Elestirel Pedagoji” magazine and has been
a columnist in the nationally published, BirGün newspaper, since 2004.
Ahmet Yıldız is a lecturer in the department of Lifelong Learning and Adult
Education in Faculty of Educational Sciences at Ankara University. He con-
ducts studies in the areas of Social Movements, Non-Governmental Organi-
sations and Education, Adult Literacy, Adult Education Research, Critical
Theory, and Critical Adult Education, Transformation of Teaching Profession,
and Effects of Neoliberalism on Education. He is the editor of the following
books: Yetişkin Eğitimi/Adult Education (Kalkedon Yayınevi, İstanbul, 2009);
Yaşam Boyu Öğrenme/Lifelong Learning (Pegama Yayınevi, Ankara, 2003);
Öğretmenlik Mesleğinin Dönüşümü/Transformation of Teaching Profession
(Kalkedon Yayınevi, İstanbul, 2013). He is the editor of Eleştirel Pedagoji
(Critical Pedagogy) Journal. Also, he is a part of the editorial collective of the
Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies
1 Introduction
Dave Hill, Kostas Skordoulis, and
Lotar Rasiński

We live in such times! ‘There are decades when nothing happens, there are weeks
when decades happen’.1 We live in such times. The elections and governments
of Trump in the US, Erdogan and the AKP party in Turkey, the successes of the
openly Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece, the Law and Justice Party government led by
Kaczyński in Poland, Orban and the Fidesz party in Hungary, the votes for UKIP in
the UK and for Marine Le Pen in France, the vote for far-right parties in Austria and
the Czech Republic in elections in 2017, and the influence of openly Nazi and Fascist
in Ukraine,—we live in times of savage neoliberalism and its enforcer, conservative
authoritarianism that is xenophobic and racist. We live in these times. And we try to
contest them, for example, in Radical Left conferences, publications, mobilisations,
political parties and groups, social and community organisation and movements.
The current economic, social, and political crisis is manifested more deeply
in education on a global scale. The crisis—part of, and resulting from domi-
nant neoliberal and neoconservative politics that are implemented and promoted
internationally as ‘the only solution’, under the slogan ‘there is no alternative’
(TINA—have substantially redefined the sociopolitical, economic, pedagogic,
and ideological roles of education. Public education is shrinking). It loses its sta-
tus as a social right. It is projected as a mere commodity for sale while it becomes
less democratic, de-theorised, de-critiqued.
Understanding the causes of the crisis, the particular forms it takes in differ-
ent countries and the multiple ways in which it influences education, constitute
important questions for all those who do not limit their perspectives to the horizon
of neoconservative, neoliberal, and technocratic dogmas. Moreover, the critical
education movement has the responsibility to rethink its views and practices in
light of the crisis, and in the light of social, political, and educational resistance
in different countries—the paths that this crisis opens for challenging and over-
throwing capitalist domination worldwide.
One such mobilisation, conference, is the annual International Conference
on Critical Education, the ICCE Conference, held in Athens at the National and
Kapodistrian University of Athens (2011, 2012), the University of Ankara (2013),
the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2014), the University of Lower Silesia
in Wroclaw (2015), Middlesex University in London (2016), and the National
and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2017). It is a forum for scholars, educa-
tors, and social movement, trade union and political activists committed to social
2 Dave Hill, et al
and economic justice. The International Conference on Critical Education (ICCE)
regularly brings together between 250 and 400 participants, provides a vibrant
and egalitarian, non-elitist platform for scholars, educators, activists, students,
and others interested in critical education and in contesting the current neoliberal/
neoconservative/nationalist hegemony, to come together and engage in a free,
democratic, non-sectarian and productive dialogue.
The 5th ICCE: ‘Analyze, Educate, Organize—Critical Education for Social
and Economic Justice’ took place at the University of Lower Silesia in the Polish
city of Wroclaw from June 15–18, 2015. It is from contributions at that confer-
ence that this book has arisen, arising from and developing on and updating ple-
nary papers given at that conference. The updating is important, living as we are
in ‘weeks when decades happen’.
In this book, we bring Marxist theoreticians and activists and their analyses
from the UK, US, Greece, Turkey, Poland, and Hungary.
The volume includes perspectives from the Anglo-Saxon world, from post-Soviet
countries, from the European country most hit by neoliberalism (Greece) and from
Turkey, whose politics and education policy are exemplified by intensive neoliber-
alism accompanied by an Islamicising neo-conservatism—and accompanied, since
the July 2016 coup attempt, by the dismissal of tens of thousands of socialist, com-
munist, Marxist teachers and academics who had nothing to do with the coup, but
were targeted solely because of their Left activism and/or their Kurdish ethnicity. A
number of those dismissed from their posts, their passports withdrawn, many facing
prosecution and imprisonment, are regular participants in the ICCE conferences.
The repressive neoliberal/neoconservative right-wing nationalist anti-minority poli-
cies, ideology, and actions of the Erdogan government in Turkey serve as a warning
to many countries and populations. It is therefore fitting that the book includes a
number of chapters from writers/activists working in the context of Turkey.
Methodologically the chapters of this volume are varied, ranging from empiri-
cal studies, through political and policy analyses, to theoretical papers, and even a
narrative interview. This rich variety of approaches reflects the special interdisci-
plinary character of the network of scholars and practitioners who regularly meet
and work within the community that has formed around the annual International
Conference on Critical Education, and the Journal for Critical Education Policy
Studies. Similarly to the journal and conferences, the authors of papers that you
find here talk across traditional disciplinary boundaries in an effort to find mean-
ingful ways of understanding Marxist thought in the present times. Therefore, in
the first half of the book, chapters 2 through 8, you will find empirical case studies
that take a critical approach to neoconservative and neoliberal trends in differ-
ent parts of Europe (Grollios, Edwards, Yildiz, Özmen, Chrysochou, Karakul,
Mészáros). The second part of the book, chapters 9 through 13, on the other
hand, includes theoretical (and historical) studies that try to find ways of bringing
Marxist and critical theory to inspire the analysis of current educational problems
(McLaren and Ford, Skordoulis, Rasiński, Dziemianowicz-Bąk, Hill).
Because the writers are activists in various arenas such as political parties, trade
unions, social movements, as well as in academia, the media and publications, the
 Introduction 3
unifying theory behind the chapters in the book is Marxist analysis and theories
of resistance. The book represents work by leading Marxist theoreticians, in many
cases, globally recognised. This is indeed a state of the art, up to date/contempo-
rary collection.
It is widely understood in academia nowadays that Marxism is returning as
the most effective theoretical body of ideas providing the most accurate analysis
of the current crisis of the capitalist system, a crisis that is not only economic but
is also cultural, social, political, ecological and in the last analysis, a crisis that
affects all aspects of human life.
The theoretical superiority of Marxism is attributed to the superiority of its
method i.e. to the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism
provides us with a scientific and comprehensive worldview. It is the method on
which Marxism is founded. According to Engels, dialectics was “our best work-
ing tool and our sharpest weapon”. And at the same time, it is a guide for action
and for our activities for the emancipation of the working class and the toiling
masses.
Ernest Mandel, in his The Place of Marxism in History2 (Mandel 1986),
defends the view that Marx transformed the idealist dialectics of Hegel into mate-
rialist dialectics. The basic premises of Materialist Dialectics are as follows:

• Material reality (nature and society) exists independently of the desires, pas-
sions, intentions, and ideas of those who try to interpret it. It is an objective
reality, which thought seeks to explain. Naturally, the processes of cognition,
of mastering knowledge are themselves objective processes, potential objects
of critical scientific examination.
• Thought can never identify totally with objective reality, if only because the
latter is in perpetual transformation and the transformation of reality always
precedes in time the progress of thought. But it can get closer and closer to
it. Reality is therefore intelligible. Thought can progress (though not neces-
sarily in a linear and permanent manner), and this can be verified concretely
and practically, in human history by the consequences (verified predictions,
successful applications) that are the practical results of these advances. The
ultimate criterion of the veracity of thought is therefore practical.
• Thought is effective (scientific) insofar as its explanation of the real processes
is not only coherent to explain what already exists, but can also be used to
predict what does not yet exist, to integrate this prediction into the interpre-
tation of the real process considered as a whole, and to alter and transform
reality in line with a pre-established goal. In the last analysis, knowledge is a
tool of survival for humankind, a means by which this species can change its
place in nature and, thereby, increase its viability.

This general methodology of effective, scientific thought, of thought advancing

through successive approximations towards understanding the whole of reality,
constitutes an enormous step forward compared with the purely analytical method
of fragmentary knowledge.
4 Dave Hill, et al
The method of Marxism requires a critical appropriation of the data produced
by the most advanced academic research combined with a critical analysis of the
emancipation movement of the working class.
Marxism does not believe in innate knowledge. Nor does it behave as the “edu-
cator” of the proletariat, or the “judge” of history. It constantly learns from the
continuously changing reality. It understands that the educators themselves need
to be educated, that only a collective revolutionary praxis, rooted on the one hand
in scientific praxis, and on the other in the real praxis of the proletariat, can pro-
duce this self-education of the revolutionaries and all toiling humanity.
The moment is ripe for such Marxist analyses/proposals, the moment being a
crisis of Capitalism (since 2008) with its accompanying austerity, social disloca-
tion and activism and political polarisation to the Left and the Right.

Contents
In the first half of this volume, writers from England, Greece, Turkey, and Hungary
use Marxist theory to analyse and critique neoliberal and neoconservative educa-
tion in their different countries. The theories they develop and apply, the critique
they make—and resistance proposals they make—while situated within specific
national contexts have a wider significance and resonance, beyond the borders
from within which they write.
It commences with, as Chapter 2 (following this Introduction) European
Education Policy and Critical Education, by George Grollios, who analyses the
main concepts and directions of European education policy. More specifically, he
shows how the historic development of the European Union as an alliance of the
dominant capitalist social classes of its members-states has shaped a neoliberal
European education policy. This policy imposes particular educational goals and
standards on the educational system of each member-state in order to empower
the European Union in the economic and political international competition.
Grollios suggests that educators in Europe need to be aware of the main concepts
and directions of the European education policy if they are serious about build-
ing an international community fostering economic, social, and political change
towards socialism.
Chapter 3, The Schooling of Teachers in England: Rescuing Pedagogy, is
by Gail Edwards. She writes that pedagogy is a progressive force for social trans-
formation and, though European countries have had a strong pedagogic tradition
historically, the English education system has been overwhelmingly concerned
with character formation as part of the reproduction of classed social relations.
Pedagogic advance represents a threat to the social order and has been blocked by
government legislation, particularly during times of capitalist crisis. In this chap-
ter however, Edwards argues that this is not a full explanation and that pedagogic
neglect is further explained by the success of educational movements which pose
as progressive but which are in reality profoundly pessimistic. In the context of
class struggle, they are a conservative force. The analysis is therefore instructive
for critical teacher educators aiming to understand the interplay between ideology,
 Introduction 5
class consciousness, and structural forces. The research presented here relates to
England, the author having worked as a teacher educator in England for many
years. But the analysis has wider relevance.
In Chapter 4, Transformation in the Teaching Profession in Turkey: From
the Idealist Teacher to the Exam-Oriented Technician, Ahmet Yildiz writes that,
as in all other professions, the practices and social status of teaching is shaped
by the social, economic, and political conditions of a given era. As a result, each
era gives rise to its own unique teacher typology. He argues that it is, therefore,
essential to know the historical background of the issue in order to deepen our
understanding of the new teacher type imposed by the neoliberal project, to show
that this new teacher is not normal-natural or universal, and that a different teach-
ing practice is possible. Yildiz considers the changing teacher typology in Turkey
in four traditional political stages.
Yildiz is followed, in Chapter 5, Education, Secularism, and Secular Education
in a Muslim Community, by Ünal Özmen, who examines the policies against
secularism, the basic principle of democracy, developed by the Middle East mon-
archs, who became annoyed at the “Arab Spring” revolts and became annoyed,
especially, at the invasion of Iraq for the purpose of exporting “democracy”. In this
context, Turkey’s participation in this process as a model country and the transfor-
mation of its schools, which play an important role in building a secular society,
are analysed.
The purpose of Chapter 6, Assessing the Effects of the Economic Crisis
on Public Education: A Preliminary Data Analysis from Greece, by Polina
Chrysochou, is to investigate the effects of the economic crisis in Greece on the
working lives and experiences of teacher professional communities. Her chapter
is based on qualitative research, involving 24 semi-structured focus group inter-
views and a total of 24 public primary schools in the Attica region and in the
city of Volos and its suburbs. The interviews with teachers covered themes such
as teaching/learning conditions, school resources, employment issues, household
income, effects on students and teachers’ initiatives, collective activity and cop-
ing strategies in the face of the current neoliberal crisis and its impacts. Based on
interviews with 102 primary teachers of various teaching disciplines, Chrysochou
considers their constant referring to changes in the larger social and political envi-
ronment, such as unemployment, changes in family, poverty, racism, and authori-
tarian government policies, along with their fears and anxieties of the potential
implications of those changes to both the professional/interpersonal relationships
within the school and the nature and purpose of public education. In making a pre-
liminary assessment of the situation, Chrysochou explicates the complex, numer-
ous, and significant impacts, affecting not only teachers, but also students and
parents.
In Chapter 7, The Endpoint of Anticipation from Education and Starting Point
of Struggle: The Unemployment of White-Collar Workers, Aygulen Kayahan
Karakul critically examines important changes in the vocational structure with
advanced capitalism. White-collar workers, that is, educated labour power, are pre-
pared for work in qualified, high-paying jobs that require intellectual effort, with
6 Dave Hill, et al
job security and good working conditions. White-collar, middle-class workers have
gained privileges by using their level of education, along with the developing needs
of capital, during recent decades of capitalism. But with the huge changes in labour
markets under neoliberalism, white-collar workers have lost their privilege and are,
in some cases, started to revolt, seeking new conditions. This chapter illuminates
the changed nature of working conditions for white-collar workers and questions
this new starting point of struggle, acting together with all those oppressed by
capitalism.
Chapter 8 is by György Mészáros and examines The Position of Educational
Researchers in a Semi-Peripheral Region and the Rise of Neoliberal Policies in
the Academia: The Case of Hungary from a historical materialist and dialectical
perspective. The capitalist modes of production and the wider context of global
capitalism determine the position, yet leaving place for agency. Wallerstein’s con-
cept of the world system theory offers a useful framework to identify some speci-
ficities of this position in a semi-peripheral region such as Hungary. The chapter
focuses particularly on the rise of neoliberal policies influencing the position, role,
and life of educational academics. Mészáros claims that neoliberal policy tenden-
cies have entered the academia in Hungary, only recently bringing devastating
consequences. Standardisation, high expectations towards researchers, pressure
followed by the lack of resources, and economic constrains in higher education
have made the situation of academics more and more difficult and exploited. This
chapter is based upon policy and documentary analysis combined with autoeth-
nographic self-reflection.
The second half of the book, addressing Marxist theory regained, critical
education and resistance, brings together scholar activists from the US, UK,
Greece, and Poland. It starts with Chapter 9, by Derek Ford—an interview with
Peter McLaren, the most well-known proponent of that version of critical educa-
tion, the Marxist version, called Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy. Chapter 9 is
Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy and the Struggle against Capital Today: An
Interview with Peter McLaren, interviewed by Derek Ford.
The interview revisits some of the distinguishing features of revolutionary
critical pedagogy, why this approach is politically and ethically necessary given
the current historical juncture, and the need to work out the broad content of what
a social universe outside of value production might look like as we fight to transi-
tion to a socialist alternative to capitalism.
In Chapter 10 by Kostas Skordoulis, Considerations on a Marxist Pedagogy
of Science, Skordoulis writes that existing science education curricula, even those
advocating the social impacts of science, are inadequate to meet the needs and
interests of students faced with the demands, issues, and problems of contem-
porary life under capitalism, especially in an era of crisis. Skordoulis argues that
a much more politicised approach for science education is required, with major
emphasis on social critique, empowerment, and political action.
Skordoulis suggests that Critical Education as an alternative, currently inves-
tigated and developed by a number of radical science educators and critical peda-
gogues, is largely based on Critical Theory and Freire’s Critical Pedagogy and to a
 Introduction 7
lesser extent on Cultural Studies and ‘identity politics’. In this chapter, he studies
the perspectives for a renewed Marxist pedagogy of science interpreted within the
framework of classical Marxism and more specifically in terms of Bernal’s views
developed in the “Social Function of Science” and Zilsel’s theory for “the Social
Origin of Modern Science”. Both scholars under study are considered as initiators
of Marxist history of Science. So, this chapter first and foremost sets out to re-
establish the actuality of Marxist History of Science through its interaction with
the currently established field of Science Studies.
Analysis of the legacies and works of these scholars of the Marxist tradi-
tion shows that intellectual enrichment of and with the modern problematic can
form the basis for a Marxist pedagogy of science that can change society and its
practices.
In Chapter 11 by Lotar Rasiński, ‘A Picture Held Us Captive. . . .’ Marx,
Wittgenstein, and the Paradox of Ideology, Rasiński attempts to rethink and
reformulate Marx’s concept of ideology from the perspective of Wittgenstein’s
critique of language. Rasiński finds the sources of classical formulation of Marx’s
concept of ideology in German Ideology, where Marx makes an analogy between
ideology and camera obscura. Rasiński calls a paradox of ideology a traditional
difficulty related to Marx’s concept of ideology: on the one hand, it denunciates a
falsity (“reversion”) of the picture that we see through ideology, and on the other
hand, it postulates the idea of a pure (“not reversed”) view of reality which can be
seen from the proletariat’s position. He uses Wittgenstein’s concepts of “perspicu-
ous representation” and “aspect change” to demonstrate the possibility of thinking
about the critique of ideology that could be free of Marx’s dogmatic assumptions
concerning the role of a privileged subject and economic reductionism. In the
conclusion Rasiński demonstrates how the critique of ideology can be still useful
for critical education.
In Chapter 12, Empowerment in Education—a New Logic of Emancipation
or a New Logic of Power? Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bąk discusses the idea of
empowerment in education as undoubtedly one of the main interests of critical
and progressive educators. She writes that this is usually presented as promot-
ing emancipation through education, but emancipation that comes rather from
an individual and collective engagement rather than from an external “liberator”
(such as teachers, schools, education, or social system). It puts the emphasis on
the internal, subjective roots of empowerment that distinguishes contemporary
approach to the emancipatory potential of education from pedagogical ideas
of Enlightenment and Modernity (Rousseau, Helvetius, Kant, Schiller), which
tended to see emancipation as something that needs to be provided by someone
already in power. In the chapter Dziemianowicz-Bąk discusses the category of
empowerment as it is seen and used in the field of critical pedagogy and philoso-
phy of education (e.g. Paulo Freire, Jacques Rancière). Then, in order to critically
analyse this category, she refers to the Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian perspec-
tive: she discusses the post-Foucauldian concept of educationalization (Dapaepe,
Smeyers, Simon) seen as a manifestation of governmentality (Foucault, Dean,
Miller, Rose)—the form of power that can be identified with the neoliberal
8 Dave Hill, et al
technology of governing through freedom. Educationalization, according to her,
describes the tendency to extend the pedagogical ideas, categories, and methods
to the non-educational aspects of life, such as economy, politics, civil society, cul-
ture, or even personal life. Through the processes of educationalization, originally
non-pedagogical problems are being redefined and become educational issues. In
the chapter, Dziemianowicz-Bąk indicates how the concept of educationalization
may be used to present the idea of empowerment as a concept of power rather than
of emancipation.
The volume concludes in Chapter 13 with Dave Hill’s Critical Education Policy
Proposals, and Proposals for critical Marxist education, Developing a Schooling
System for Equality: Marxist Education in Neoliberal and Neoconservative
Times. Hill calls for activism within micro-, meso-, and macro-level social and
political arenas. The focus, however, of this chapter is on activity within formal
education institutions, calling for teachers and education workers (and others) to
be “Critical Educators,” Resistors, Marxist activists, within and outside official
education. The article asks questions such as ‘What is specifically Marxist’ about
proposals regarding Pedagogy, Curriculum, the Organisation of Students, and the
Control of Education. The chapter seeks to locate such proposals within Marxist
theory and practice.
This book is valuable. At a time of economic crisis, when education is under
siege by neoliberal capitalism, (neo-) conservatism, and aggressive national-
ism, when teachers and academics are being proletarianised, youth criminalised,
schools and universities turned into marketised commodities, and when different
forms of nationalist and religious fundamentalism are growing, critical education,
as a theory and as a movement, is gaining in relevance. International communi-
ties of activist critical educators, such as those writers taking part in this book,
together with others outside the formal education apparatuses, work to build resis-
tance to these processes and are engaged in fostering social change leading to a
more just, equal, and fair society. This book is part of that struggle.

Notes
1 Quotation attributed to Lenin (1918), derived from ‘The Chief Task of Our Day’. Online
at www.marxists.org/archive/len . . . 918/mar/11.htm
2 Mandel, E. (1986). The Place of Marxism in History. New York: Humanities Press.
2 European Education Policy and
Critical Education
George Grollios

1957–73: European Educational Policy During the

“Thirty Glorious Years”
In the postwar era, the state’s intervention in socioeconomic life had been
accepted by the developed capitalist nations of the West. In some countries, such
as the US, this political idea was understood as a means for the construction of
powerful economic and social structures. In other countries, like Sweden, the
same idea was related to the creation of a mixed economy, a meta-capitalist soci-
ety or even a non-Marxist socialist state. For thirty years after World War II, the
idea of progress through state’s intervention, which could improve choices and
freedom for individuals and communities, formed the basis of a broad consensus
between the dominant and the dominated social classes of the West. The state was
considered the most appropriate vehicle for the promotion of welfare. Citizens’
individual interests and particular needs could be achieved within a ‘progress for
all’ paradigm, prescribing policies that would protect the weak from the power-
ful elites. After the defeat of Nazism and Fascism in the 1940s, the powerful state
that intervened in the economy represented the principal agent through which the
hopes for a better and more just life would be embodied. Rapid economic devel-
opment would become the critical response to these challenges enabling the pos-
sibility of financing a programme of social welfare. Apparently, the concept of
welfare state was used in order to express the attempt of economic development
through state intervention. The institutions that provided social services were
viewed as the best means for social welfare and the nation-state was supposed
to work for the progress of the society as a whole. Progress in this respect was
strongly associated with an active role of the state in the economy and with
appropriate interventions on the part of managerial experts, which would pro-
mote justice and effectiveness.
Regarding the European educational policy, in order to understand this period,
we must keep in mind the difference between education and training because the
European Economic Community, based on the Treaty of Rome, could implement
only policies concerning training. The central question for European integration
was its economic integration. Training was only a supplement to this kind of inte-
gration. Nevertheless, some features of European economic integration caused
10 George Grollios
problems concerning education. For example, the free movement of workers in
the European Economic Community addressed the problems of their education
and their children’s. The European Economic Community responded using a
policy of “small steps.” These steps were mainly taken by the European Court of
Law, which decided that the construction of a common economic policy meant
other policy sectors could be used to enforce economic integration. Educational
policy was one of these fields. In other words, the decisions of the European Court
of Law slowly but steadily legitimised the need for a European educational policy
from 1957 to 1976 (Stamelos and Vasilopoulos, 2004).
There are several factors behind this slow progress, both economic and politi-
cal. The first main factor is that European integration was taking place during the
Cold War. The European countries that signed the Treaty of Rome were under
the NATO umbrella, and they were not strong enough to challenge the military
and political hegemony of the US in enforcing their political unity. The second
main factor is that their economies were growing much stronger during the ‘thirty
glorious years’ (1945–75) after World War II. The slow progress of the European
Economic Community’s educational policy reflected the contradiction between
these two factors. However, the economic crisis of the 1970s forced the domi-
nant capitalist social classes of the European countries to confront and solve this
contradiction.

1973–92: From the Economic Crisis to the Maastricht Treaty

The rise of the New Right that had been developed in the 1970s as a reaction to
the ‘waste of public wealth’ was impressive. The new dominant political direction
expressed the return to the basic Western bourgeois political values:

• Naturalisation of market forces against the bureaucratic madness of state’s

expansion and economic intervention,
• Moral superiority of personal choice against the tyranny of collectivity in the
formation of decisions,
• Need for a powerful state in the name of law and order against the weakness
that had been produced by the welfare state’s conception of justice.

During the thirty glorious years of highly rated economic development, political
scientists were examining the concepts of welfare, social security, state’s respon-
sibility, full employment, equal opportunities, social mobility through education,
bureaucratic structures, technocracy, meritocracy, political stability, and consen-
sus building. In the 1970s, the economic crisis became the central issue that had
to be examined and interpreted.
Regarding education, neoliberals and neoconservatives in the 1980s pro-
moted strong cuts in education’s funding, the revival of disciplinarian thought
and practice that had been challenged in the 1960s, and a closer relation of
education with corporations’ needs. In the US, schools were accused of being
places of illiteracy, in which moral values were in decline. According to the
 European Education Policy 11
neoliberal-neoconservative discourse, the critical issue was the alignment of
education with changes in the labour market. For this reason, priority was given
to the 3 R’s and to other areas of knowledge, like logistics, business manage-
ment, and computer science. After the second Reagan presidential election,
the schools’ close connection to businesses’ needs was combined with a strong
emphasis on conceiving schools as places of cultural production. This strong
emphasis referred to the development of a national curriculum and the promotion
of the language, the knowledge, and the values that were essential in Western civ-
ilization. The neoliberals’ and neoconservatives’ central aim was to fight against
(a) the so called ‘cultural crisis’, which was supposedly caused by cultural rela-
tivism that did not recognise the superiority of Western tradition’s texts over
other texts, (b) the use of students’ experience in the process of teaching, and
(c) the idea that unequal relations between social classes, genders, and races play
an important role in the formation of dominant culture. They claimed that stu-
dents’ progress is a personal matter and everyone who cannot succeed in school
was solely and entirely responsible for his own failure. Personal responsibility
became the ultimate explanation for every social problem, such as unemploy-
ment, poverty, divorce, youth pregnancy, and the like. Neoliberals and neocon-
servatives suggested schools’ accountability and the provision of vouchers so
that parents would freely buy educational services. Families were conceived
as the alternative power against the bureaucratic function of state education. In
Great Britain, the neoliberal and neoconservative reconstruction of education
was implemented through (a) the empowerment of parents’ participation in the
processes of consuming educational services, (b) the deprivation of local author-
ities’ control over schools, (c) the enforcement of schools’ competition in the
educational services market, and (d) the imposition of a national curriculum with
detailed and pre-specified standards. Generally speaking, the analyses of educa-
tional policy in the US, Great Britain, and other countries highlight a dramatic
shift of educational aims from an emphasis to equality and children’s access to
public education to a priority towards ‘educational quality’ and choice in the
1980s. Neoliberal and neoconservative restructuring of education was penetrated
by the belief that every change which is founded on market’s functions is the
key for the improvement of education’s effectiveness. Moreover, the neoliberal
and neoconservative restructuring took advantage of the critique against pro-
gressive education, which due to the rationale of initiating education based on
children’s interests, was accused of being responsible for the decline in students’
performance. The movement of ‘effective schools’ that dominated the educa-
tional studies during the second half of 1970s used the aforementioned critique.
A central characteristic of the ‘effective schools’ movement was its focus on
researching ‘internal’ schools’ processes, like school culture, teachers’ effective-
ness, and schools’ management. The attack against progressive education and
the dominance of the ‘effective schools’ movement were important ideological
aspects of the neoliberal and neoconservative restructuring of education in the
1980s. The founding of educational aims on market’s functions was necessar-
ily supported by the marginalisation of any dialogue concerned with the social
12 George Grollios
character of education. This kind of dialogue was promoted by some perceptions
of progressive education and inevitably by theories that interpreted education
through the concept of reproduction (Grollios, 1999).
The primary cause of the 1973 economic crisis was the decline in the average
rate of profit. Neoliberal-neoconservative restructuring may then be understood
primarily as the answer of powerful sectors of capital to the crisis of the 1970s,
an expression of their need to respond to the fall in the average rate of profit by
expanding in every sector. In the early 1980s, the European Community entered
into a process of corrosion so intense that for many years it could not provide
solutions to budgetary problems and issues in its agricultural policy. The crisis
was sharper than in the US and Japan, resulting in the loss of competitiveness.
From 1973 to 1983 the average annual growth rate of the US’s GDP was 1.9 per-
cent, which exceeded that of the nine-member European Community (1.7 percent),
while at the same time Japan had reached 3.7 percent. The number of employees
decreased in Europe by an average of 0.1 percent annually, while it increased by
0.9 percent in Japan and 1.5 percent in the US. In the same decade, the European
Community’s competitiveness in such crucial economic sectors as electric and
electronic equipment, automobile industry, industrial equipment, and informatics
had been reduced. The European Community faced the dilemma of ‘progress or
dissolution’ (Busch, 1992; Roussis, 2012; Sakellaropoulos, 2004).
The alliance of the dominant social classes that formed the nucleus of the
European Economic Community had to make crucial decisions. One was the
strengthening of European integration through the establishment of the first pro-
gramme of action in the education sector. This program included collaboration in
tertiary education, collection of statistical data, improvement of contact between
educational institutions, and expansion of foreign language learning (Stamelos
and Vasilopoulos, 2004).
A year after the European Act of 1986 gave European integration a powerful
push, the first generation of European programmes was announced. The imple-
mentation of these programmes had a strong importance mainly in the ideologi-
cal level during the next decade, when it would be obvious that they promoted
ideas like “the only knowledge that deserves to be taught is useful knowledge”,
“the criterion for the validity of knowledge is the market” and “schools’ aim is
the transmission of skills that are required for corporations’ profitability.” In the
context of these programmes, teachers and students search for sponsors, they
advertise them, and schools are converted to simulations of corporations (Goulas,
2007; Grollios, 1999). The ideology of Europeanism legitimised a political solu-
tion that was the ‘vision of 1992’: the vision of a strong capitalist Europe, which
was meant to be competitive as the third pole in the world against the US and
Soviet Union.
Moreover, some decisions of the European Court of Law regarding tertiary
education ruptured the academic tradition of European universities, linking them
to the impermanent needs of the labour market and strongly emphasising their
economic effectiveness. A European guideline produced in 1989 was another cru-
cial point establishing a mechanism among the 12member-states for recognising
diplomas pertaining to professional activities (Stamelos and Vasilopoulos, 2004).
 European Education Policy 13
1992 and After: European Union and Education
Under the Maastricht Treaty, education was distinguished from training and offi-
cially recognised as one of the European Union’s policy sectors. Moreover, the
European Commission obtained the right to intervene in the members-states’
compulsory education. The signing of the Maastricht Treaty was intensely cel-
ebrated, but it was also the starting point for the accumulation of problems and
contradictions.
The adoption of the Treaty was subject to fierce political debate in Denmark
and France, where it was confirmed by a narrow majority. The referenda on
admitting Sweden and Finland to the European Union also won by narrow majori-
ties, while in Norway a negative vote prevailed. The lack of effective European
institutions of legitimisation was seen as a major cause for the vicious cycle of
reproduction of social and economic problems. In terms of foreign policy, the
motto for political intervention by the European Union in the international sys-
tem was that it is an economic giant, a stuttering diplomat, and a political dwarf.
The complete ineffectiveness of its policy in the war in Iraq and the civil war in
Yugoslavia sharply contrasted with the affirmation of the US’s global political and
military domination.
At that very juncture, education was a key issue in the European Union. The
White Paper of the European Commission that encapsulated the EU education
policy in the 1990s argued that the society of the future would be one that
invested in intelligence; a society where people would teach and learn, where
everyone could build on his own skills; a knowledge society. The ‘three major
trends of our time’—globalisation, acceleration of the scientific and technical
revolution, and the advent of the information society—increased opportuni-
ties for access to information and knowledge, modifying the necessary skills
and labour systems. However, at the same time they increased uncertainty for
all citizens while creating intolerable exclusion for some. The White Paper
urged that education and learning should (a) focus on a broad knowledge base
and emphasise flexibility, (b) connect schools and businesses, (c) combat
social exclusion, (d) develop proficiency in at least two foreign languages,
and (e) treat capital investment and investment in training equally (European
Commission, 1995).
Scepticism about forecasting future developments has now overshadowed the
triumphal tone of the statements that emerged when the Maastricht Treaty was
being signed. Of course, the scepticism on the part of the European Commission
did not question the neoliberal guidelines. The three major trends appeared to
be politically neutral, and social consequences were inevitable. Europe, like the
rest of the world, would have to learn to live with them. What was required was
a policy mix that would minimise social cohesion and maximise socioeconomic
adequacy for the relentless international competition. The central goal was for the
European Union to take the lead over its competitors globally.
The main guidelines of European educational policy that were founded on
the Maastricht Treaty and the White Paper of the European Commission were
(a) enforcing students’ mobility and cooperation between educational institutions,
14 George Grollios
(b) connecting educational institutions with the labour market, (c) forming struc-
tures of accession and re-accession to the labour market and (d) finding ways to
compare members-states’ educational systems and push them to a convergence
process. On the basis of these guidelines, in 2000 the European Union created a
list of sixteen quality indicators meant to judge the quality of compulsory educa-
tion. Indicators fall into four areas: (a) achievement (in mathematics, reading,
science, foreign languages, learning to learn, ICT, and civics), (b) success and
transition (dropout rates, completion of upper secondary education, participation
rates in tertiary education), (c) monitoring of school education (parental participa-
tion, evaluation, and steering of school education) and (d) resources and structures
(educational spending per student, education and training of teachers, participa-
tion rates in pre-primary education, number of students per computer). The report
on the quality indicators states that they were generated by a representative body
of experts, presumably on education evaluation. This suggests ‘technical’ rather
than political criteria, but little if any explanation of why these indicators and not
others were selected is provided (Dale, 2003).
The European Council in Lisbon established the ‘open method of coordina-
tion’ to control national educational planning. This method included definition of
directional lines, combined with timetables for implementing educational goals;
definition of indicators (qualitative and quantitative) and benchmarks that take
the best international standards into consideration; specification of European
directional lines by member-states; and recurrent examination, evaluation, and
re-examination (Zmas, 2007).
Soon the aforementioned 16indicators were replaced by five qualitative indica-
tors that had to be reached by 2010: (a) an increase of 90 percent in graduation
rates from compulsory education of a generation of students, (b) an increase of
up to 15 percent of students graduating in mathematics, science, and technology,
(c) an increase of up to 85 percent in graduation rates from the upper sector of com-
pulsory education, (d) a decrease to 20 percent in 15-year-olds’ failure in reading
and writing, and (e) an increase of up to 12.5 percent of adults who attend lifelong
learning programmes (European Council, 2003).
In tertiary education, 15 members-states of the European Union and 14 other
European countries, aiming to strengthen the competitiveness of European uni-
versities’ diplomas in the international market, agreed on the Bologna Process,
which established the 3–5–8 scheme (3 years for a bachelor’s degree, 2 more
years for a master’s and 3 more for a Ph.D.). The European Commission published
Rethinking Education: Investing in Skills for Better Socio-economic Outcomes. In
this text, the Commission argues that in the context of the current economic crisis,
a massive increase in international supply of highly skilled workers signals the
end of the era of competition between Europe and countries offering low-skilled
jobs. Efforts need to concentrate on developing transversal skills, particularly
entrepreneurial skills, while the demand for skills related to science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics is still high. But the first step is that basic skills be
achieved by all, while language learning is important for jobs and needs particular
attention (Stamelos and Vasilopoulos, 2004).
 European Education Policy 15
As we have elsewhere claimed,

In the context of the current economic crisis, the process of European inte-
gration has become a process of building a union of states under the lead-
ership of Germany. By imposing the same goals to every member state, the
Maastricht Treaty failed to lead to supranational convergence. By erecting
into a doctrine disinflationary policy and falling interest rates, alongside
the reduction of deficits and public debt, economic and monetary unifica-
tion implies a nominal, not a real, convergence of economies, given that
the exchange rate stability in countries with different economic structures
and varying competitiveness leads to real exchange rate variance. For the
less internationally competitive sections of capital, the price for sustain-
ing the unity of capital at the European level was austerity with no end in
sight. Germany is currently not seeking to strengthen the cohesion of the
European Union, but to boost its own economy, slipping into a variation
of old nationalism. Essentially, Germany’s ruling class uses the crisis as a
vehicle to rearrange the Union’s geometry, and promote more decisively the
notion of a multi-speed Europe (it should be remarked that crisis manage-
ment mechanisms—the EMSF and the EFSF—do not work like the other
European Union institutions based on the formal equality of all Member
States, but under the rule of those who qualify for the highest credit rating).
EU institutions confirm largely prejudged decisions made by the Franco-
German axis, in which the primary role is played by Germany, which sys-
tematically imposes the basic principles of neoliberal orthodoxy. It seeks
to ensure that the other Member States comply with its own economic and
political choices, promoting the controlled credit rating downgrade of the
deficit countries of the European periphery and threatening them with the
spectrum of insolvency. Thereby, it presses hard on other EU countries to
follow the path forged by its own ruling class, namely, to radically reduce
wages and pensions, increase retirement age, degrade education, and
advance educational programs of skills acquisition. Alongside the process
of transformation of the relations between EU countries as outlined above,
democracy in their interior is increasingly waning. This is a general trend
affecting the majority of Western European and North American countries
during the period of neoliberal-neoconservative restructuring. Key fea-
tures of this trend, accentuated by the current crisis, include (i) a dramatic
reduction of civic participation in both central political processes—party
and parliamentary—and those involving the exercise of collective rights
(protest marches, strikes); (ii) the exercise of politics by technocrats, com-
munication specialists and managers; (iii) the weakening of the working
class as an agent of social transformation leading to loss of rights and
gains; (iv) the acceptance of neoliberalism as a one-way street by all the
government parties; (v) the loss of the credibility of politics and its conver-
sion into a managerial task; (vi) the substitution of civic commitment to
social justice for identity movements and non-governmental organizations;
16 George Grollios
and (vii) the degradation of the concept of ‘general interest’ and the
spread of corruption.
(Kotzias, 2012, 2013; Negreponti-Delivani, 2011; Belandis, 2014
as cited in Grollios, Liambas and Pavlidis, 2015, pp. v–vii)

The Character of European Educational Policy and

Marxist Critical Educators
Based on the above review, we can understand that the fundamental purpose of
European education policy is to promote the interests of Europe’s dominant capi-
talist social classes, which require a dynamic employee able to meet the harsh
demands of global economic competition. The discourse of European texts on
education is characterised by a strong promotion of specific objectives inextrica-
bly connected to the economy, precisely because the European educational pol-
icy serves the aforementioned fundamental purpose. Education turns into a field
of skills acquisition with the concurrent loss of its key characteristics as a field of
apprehending the natural and social world on the basis of scientific knowledge.
European educational policy promotes the formation of educational systems
within which two main areas could be identified: general education and training.
The kind of general education is determined by training. General education is not
an education that harmoniously combines the acquisition of knowledge, values,
and skills connected with the sciences that study societies and their culture, on
one hand, with the knowledge, values, and skills associated with the sciences
that study the natural world, on the other. It is subservient to the needs of training
and therefore is bound to emphasise the knowledge, values, and skills associated
with the sciences that study the natural world. The priority given by the European
Commission to physics, technology, engineering, and mathematics springs from
this very submission, resulting in the downgrading of humanistic education and
the fields of study that serve it.
This priority is directly linked to the dominance of neoliberal doctrines that
promote the direct subordination of education to the needs of businesses, resulting
in the shrinking of public education; competition between educational institu-
tions; the priority of efficiency versus equality; the emphasis on accountability
and the processes of control; the imposition of flexible types of labour on teach-
ers; and the apotheosis of individualistic perspectives whereby everyone is solely
responsible for his/her success or failure.
These neoliberal doctrines are reproduced by various bodies that dictate
European educational policy (mainly the European Committee and the European
Council). Each member-state participates in accordance with its economic and
political power; in turn, it transfers and implements these doctrines. This pro-
cess does not signal the end of national educational policies, since all member-
states agree to the selection of a common educational policy. Rather, it means the
enforcement of neoliberal educational policies as the only possible policies in the
context of tough international competition. These policies are in fact reshaped
 European Education Policy 17
to adjust to the existing sociopolitical balance of power for each member-state
(Sakellaropoulos, 2004).
European educational policy uses popular buzzwords to impose its neoliberal
agenda. The main component of this agenda is the emphasis on the economic
value of education. Training, assessed and renewable skills, lifelong learning,
employability, standards, certification of quality, innovation, productivity, com-
petitiveness, effectiveness, entrepreneurship, accountability, regulation, and effi-
ciency have been established as pivotal contemporary educational terms strongly
related to the emphasis on the economic value of education.
Moreover, this process includes comparing evaluations, timetables, indicators
of progress and benchmarks in the context of an “open method of coordination.”
Nowadays, the above do not operate exclusively as tools to describe educational real-
ity. They construct a field of, and they are used for the classification and the restruc-
turing of European educational systems in the direction of strict neoliberal lines.
The proposed ‘Euro-university model’ abandons the historical model of
European universities of the past, promoting structures that adapt to the labour
market’s needs. Such corporatisation of the university is leading to the degrada-
tion of systematic basic research and teaching (Mavroudeas, 2005).
The university’s corporatisation, combined with a strong increase in student
population, gives prominence to a great danger: the formation of two networks.
One is ‘centres of excellence’; the other is a massive network of institutions char-
acterised by uncertain quality. This network will produce a great majority of the
‘employable’ who can’t resist the deregulation of the labour market and will not
fight for democratic and social rights. Moreover, the ECTS system, the Diploma
Supplement, and the expansion of transnational educational programmes, which
use a franchising system and e-learning education, give prominence to another
danger connected with the aforementioned: the deregulation of public academic
systems by means of students who will accumulate large numbers of ECTS unre-
lated to their field of study (Stamelos and Vasilopoulos, 2004).
European educational policy contributes to the transformation of universities
into a quasi-market, giving great importance to applied research and knowledge.
Voices that denounce the marginalisation of humanistic education in European
universities are topical because the search for truth has been replaced by sus-
penseful efforts for the production and diffusion of useful knowledge and infor-
mation (Zmas, 2007).
Under these conditions, the creation and promotion of a project of Marxist criti-
cal educators for education that will challenge European educational policy becomes
critical throughout the European Union. Such a project must address the purpose
and structure of education, proclaiming the necessity of public preschool education
and of a single, public, free, compulsory school for all children up to age 18.
Of course, such a claim is linked with an entirely different set of goals from
those promoted in the European education policy: the all-around cognitive, emo-
tional, and physical development of children; the development of students’ critical
consciousness in the sense of understanding the natural and social world; their
conscious work towards sociopolitical transformation.
18 George Grollios
The single, public, free, compulsory school for all children up to age 18 dulls
the antithesis between humanitarian and technical education that is connected
with the capitalist division of labour and, of course, signifies the abolition of pri-
vate education. It is a school of a new, high quality of teaching, a centre of popular
culture, and a centre of pedagogical research and reflection.
Unlike European educational policy, the single, public, free, compulsory school
for all children up to age 18 does not give priority to the acquisition of skills,
downgrading such fields of study as history, literature, philosophy, sociology, fine
arts, and music. It connects humanistic education with basic scientific knowledge
of the main areas of production. This horizon of knowledge, values, and skills is
approached through teaching founded on themes that are meaningful for students
and schools’ communities.
Marxist critical educators should speak clearly in favour of the single, public,
free, compulsory school for all children up to age 18 that is aligned with a social-
ist society, a school that combines humanistic and polytechnic education. This
school will be structured by relations of comradeship and solidarity. It cannot be
confined solely to transmitting knowledge of the fundamental fields of the sci-
ences of nature and technology. In other words, the content of education is struc-
tured around students’ basic concepts, ideas, and practices, offering possibilities
for discussing crucial matters in a concrete social, political, and cultural context.
Of course, the planning of this kind of curriculum cannot be a responsibility of
experts, but rather a collective democratic process joined mainly by teachers and
students. Moreover, the single, public, free, compulsory school for all children up
to age 18 systematically uses students’ collective work and democratic dialogue,
in contrast with the traditional approach of merely transmitting knowledge that
leads to teachers’ verbalism and students’ passivity.
The European Union’s education policy stands in opposition to the great
importance of education for the emancipation of humanity, which can be revealed
only as a result of the abolition of capitalist and class relations of production. In
other words, this policy is diametrically antithetical to an education for people’s
fundamental development that is closely associated with the abolition of existing
property relations that reproduce workers’ alienation, and with the process, means
and results of their labour. The European Union’s education policy is hostile to
a change that requires a radical upgrade of workers’ education as a deliberate,
methodically organised, systematic and progressive process of acquiring and
producing knowledge, capacity-building, and cultivating substantive aspects of
personality.
Therefore, Marxist critical educators must systematically critique European
education policy to open a new road of radical social, political, and educational
transformation in the framework of a socialist strategy and a corresponding transi-
tion programme. European educational policy does not have a “progressive” char-
acter because is not a nationalistic policy or because it uses one kind of rhetoric
against racism, as some left supporters of European integration contend. These
contentions are constructing a false dichotomy between the European Union and
its member-states, veiling the fact that the Union favours the dominant capitalist
 European Education Policy 19
social classes and promotes certain reactionary neoliberal policies. Marxist criti-
cal educators must know that the dominant social classes of Europe use educa-
tional policy as a weapon against any radical and critical approach on education.
This knowledge is a basic parameter of their efforts to build an international com-
munity fostering economic, social, and political change towards socialism.

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[The left and power: The ‘democratic way’ to socialism]. Athens: Topos.
Busch, H. (1992). I Evropi meta to 1992. [Europe after 1992]. Athens: Kritiki.
Dale, R. (2003). The work of international organizations making national education
systems part of the solution rather than part of the problem. In H. Athanasiades and
A. Patramanis (eds.), Teachers and European Integration. Athens: Educational Institute
INE GSEE, pp. 86–118.
European Commission. (1995). White Paper on Education and Training—Teaching and
Learning—Towards the Learning Society. COM (95) Final, 29 November 1995.
European Council. (2003). Council Conclusions of 5 May 2003 on Reference Levels of
European Average Performance in Education and Training (Benchmarks) 2003/C
134/02.
Goulas, V. (2007). Evropaiki Ekpedeftiki Politiki. I Agora os Pedagogos [European Educa-
tional Policy. Market as Pedagogue]. Athens: Atrapos.
Grollios, G. (1999). Ideologia, Pedagogikikikai Ekpedeftiki Politiki. Logos kaipraxi ton
Evropaikon Programmatongia tin Ekpedefsi [Ideology, Pedagogy and Educational
Policy. Discourse and Practice of European Educational Programs]. Athens: Gutenberg.
Grollios, G., Liambas, A., and Pavlidis, P. (2015). Introduction. In G. Grollios, A. Liambas,
and P. Pavlidis (eds.), Proceedings of the IV International Conference on Critical Edu-
cation “Critical Education in the Era of Crisis”, pp. i–xvi. Accessed online10/14/15 at
www.eled.auth.gr/.
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[The Politics of Salvation against the Troika: A Crisis of Sovereignty and Democracy].
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talismo [Three Ages of University. The University in Capitalism]. Athens: Ellinika
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[The Whole Truth about Debt and Deficits and how to be Saved]. Thessaloniki: Ianos.
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Policy]. Athens: Metaichmio.
3 The Schooling of Teachers
in England
Rescuing Pedagogy
Gail Edwards

Introduction: Pedagogy in England

During his long and distinguished career, the English educationist Brian Simon
stressed the importance of pedagogically skilled teachers for educational and
social progress (Simon, 1974, 1981, 1985). Simon linked pedagogy not just to stu-
dents’ cognitive development but to social transformation and historical change.
His analysis built on earlier arguments against mechanical materialism (which
supposes that people are mere products of their environment) and against ideal-
ism (which supposes that social and personal transformation originates in ideas)
to distinguish pedagogy as a much broader concept than teaching. People, Simon
insisted, do not develop as the result of a didactic or voluntarist process but rather
through goal-directed social labour. What distinguishes human beings from other
species is the capacity to learn from conscious reflection upon their world and
their impact upon it:

Insofar as man transforms his external world, and by changing it changes

himself, the whole historical process must be accounted essentially educative.
(Simon, 1985, p. 23)

Simon’s conclusions derived from his extensive historical research. He noted that
pedagogy has been associated with personal and social improvement since ancient
times. However, it was the linking of it to science and reason as part of Europe’s
modernising Enlightenment ambitions which radically changed how pedagogy
was conceived (Simon, 1974). This occurred partly as a result of a new reflexiv-
ity which, as Callinicos (2007) notes, emerged from the deliberations of seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century citizens as they made sense of a radical rupture
with their feudal past during the transition to capitalism. The shift from rule by a
medieval oligarchy to a modern democracy, along with rapid industrial and urban
expansion, produced new kinds of social unrest and imperialist wars. As empiri-
cal knowledge about non-European societies expanded greatly, there arose an
entirely novel critique of ‘human nature’ and ‘society’. It dawned that society can
take radically different forms in different times and places. This was a new self-
awareness: human beings make themselves. Humanity has the capacity to improve
 The Schooling of Teachers in England 21
itself and the world. A new consciousness of the capacity for transcendence—
the human ability to stand back from and critique tradition, dogmatism, ignorance
and superstition—was born.
Modern pedagogy developed out of this new reflexivity. The post-Renaissance
period of knowledge growth in Europe saw important advances in the human sci-
ences with the publication of John Amos Comenius’s book The Great Didactic
(1633/1967) which laid out principles for teaching based on rudimentary psy-
chology. By the nineteenth century, Johann Friedrich Herbart was working on
his Science of Education (1908) and Alexander Bain had written Education as
a Science (1877). These texts began to sketch an outline of human cognition to
inform pedagogy, a scholarship which later spread beyond Europe and which
Simon (1981) traces through Froebel, Pestalozzi, Dewey, and Vygotsky. The
work of Soviet psychologist Vygotsky in particular has transformed pedagogic
understanding. He argued that humans develop through reflection upon labour,
mediated via socially-distributed tools (Vygotsky, 1978, 1987). Labour continu-
ally transforms the environment, cultural tools, and human consciousness. It is
fundamentally educative (Duarte, 2006) and recalls Marx’s aphorism that teach-
ing and learning is revolutionary, dialectical labour within which the ‘educator
must be educated’ (Marx, 1845/2002).
However in English policy and practice, pedagogic scholarship has been super-
fluous to devotion to the system. During the nineteenth century, teachers in English
monitorial schools were uninfluenced by pedagogic developments in Germany,
France, Holland, and Switzerland (Rich, 1972). It was the system that mattered,
not “the education of the teachers of the people” (Rich, 1972, p. 1). School teach-
ers were restricted to a civilising role and teaching the ‘3 Rs’ (Partington, 1999).
Senior pupils taught juniors, overseen by a supervisory teacher (who themselves
lacked an education). And, even today, when the term pedagogy has become more
common, it is as if it is synonymous with teaching styles matched to diverse edu-
cational ideologies (see for example, Partington, 1999). The assumption is a lib-
eral one, namely that pedagogy is a personal or pragmatic choice amongst many
‘pedagogies’ rather than a human science.
Simon (1974, 1999) explained how this state of affairs has come about. The
historical record shows how medieval universities and fee-paying public schools
were designed to train functionaries of the church and operate as finishing schools
for the landed gentry. In the nineteenth century, following widespread secular-
isation and the introduction of a national education system, this reproductive
function continued as a consequence of a class alliance between the aristocracy
and the new capitalist bourgeoisie. Elite, fee-paying schools such as Winchester,
Westminster, and Eton reproduced the British ruling class—statesmen, civil ser-
vants, military leaders, executive directors, bishops, and judges. These schools
developed the character traits required of leaders of an imperialist country
(MacDonald Fraser, 1977). The other type of institution—the state school—
focused upon character formation, but of a kind policy-makers thought suited to
the labouring class. The state’s response to capitalist industrialisation initiated
the creation of schools which were never designed for pedagogy; rather, they
22 Gail Edwards
were designed to teach the basics required for wage labour and to gentle the
masses (Best, 1973; Chitty, 2004; Perkins, 1969). Though records from early
nineteenth-century pupil-teacher centres, School Boards, and teacher training
colleges show interest in pedagogical scholarship, it is evident that legislation
has, for the most part, blocked theoretical advance. Indeed, during the neoliberal
period leading up to the current economic crisis, English education policy docu-
ments rarely mention theory as policy makers reassert the logic of profit through
legislation designed to enforce centralised control whilst at the same time expos-
ing schools to commercial culture and market rationality (Hill, 2007; Wilmott,
2002). Schooling in England has always been—and still is—primarily concerned
with reproducing class relations, rather than personal or social transformation
(Matthews, 1980).
This is not to offer a determinist account of history. In what follows, I argue
that such long-standing pedagogic neglect also required the assistance of popular
teacher education movements. In this chapter, I examine three of the most influ-
ential movements—efficiency, learner-centred, and post-structuralist—and situ-
ate them in their social, intellectual, and economic milieu. I suggest that they are
incompatible with pedagogic advance because they are, at political root, liberal
or sceptical responses to capitalism’s contradictions. They either express the idea
that human progress involves reform of capitalism (rather than its overthrow), or
are entirely sceptical towards Enlightenment ambitions. I suggest that they are
(to borrow a phrase from Callinicos, 2007, p. 218) “historically specific expres-
sions of class interests” which harbour fatalistic views of human capability. They
are, in other words, better understood as part of schooling, rather than educating,
teachers. Resistance—and the rescue of pedagogy—is possible but requires better
understanding of these movements and the transformative alternative. Although
I devote the analysis below to England (the context I know best), I believe the
argument has wider relevance.

The Schooling of Teachers

As we have seen, modern pedagogy grew out of enlightened Western societies
seeking validation in science and knowledge rather than traditional authority.
However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, rather than build-
ing upon previous pedagogic developments, the positivist scientific management
movement, a business ‘efficiency’ outlook inspired by Frederick Winslow Taylor,
had migrated from the factory to the English state-school classroom (Ross, 2010).

The Efficiency Movement: Regulation Displaces Pedagogy

The efficiency movement applied methods which were assumed to mimic the
natural sciences to teaching effectiveness. Closely associated with industrial mass
production, the movement rejected the ‘learning-on-the-job’ pupil-teacher model
of training, and proposed instead that teachers should be trained in empirically-
established standardised techniques. Rather than theorising or illuminating
 The Schooling of Teachers in England 23
pedagogy, patterns were identified in the relationship between teaching inputs
and achievement outputs, in order to produce statistical, law-like formalisations
(Hyland, 1994). The assumption was that discrete behaviours and their products
could be measured and techniques disseminated. Pedagogy was irrelevant. Schön
(1983) referred to the outlook as ‘technical rationality’ since it assumed a separation
of knowing and doing whereby researchers in universities codified professional
knowledge and technicians (the teachers) applied it. The endurance of the move-
ment is partly explained by the concurrent popularity of structural-functionalism,
a sociological framework rooted in assumptions of scientific detachment and a
denial of human agency. The movement has assumed different forms and includes
the competency movement of the 1970s and the standards movement imposed
by government legislation from the 1990s onwards. Whilst the most recent
manifestation lays less claim to scientifically established laws, a crude empiri-
cism nonetheless prevails, repackaged for a ‘knowledge-economy’ whereby the
exteriorisation and formalisation of practical knowledge is claimed to contrib-
ute to workplace organisational knowledge (see De Vos, Lobet-Maris, Rousseau
and Wallemacq, 2002).
To understand the efficiency movement’s success we have to understand the
contexts in which it has flourished. The functionalist vision of society wherein
workers and employers are assumed to have convergent, rather than antagonis-
tic, interests originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when
the industrial class was worried by increasing social unrest. Nation-states were
having to expand their regulation of production, industrial labour, and social wel-
fare (De Vos et al, 2002). Intellectual legitimacy came from French sociologist
Emile Durkheim who insisted that unrestrained economic individualism could not
ensure a stable social order. ‘Anomie’, the absence of moral boundaries (rather
than capitalism’s contradictions) was leading to social breakdown and the health
of capitalist society (when in crisis) must be restored through state regulation. The
efficiency movement’s political response to social crisis is to assume the solution
lies in reform, rather than overthrow, of the system.
Waves of educational reform in England and the UK have effectively displaced
pedagogic critique and theoretical advance. This is because the efficiency move-
ment’s reformist roots contradict its espoused commitment to personal liberty. In
asserting that teachers and students undergoing education do not shape the world
but rather are regulated by external forces (social laws or government policies),
it is pessimistic about pedagogy as a motor of progressive change. Indeed, part
of the attractiveness of technicism is the sanctuary of ‘impartial’ territory; pro-
fessionally vulnerable teachers can deliver and assess state-mandated curricula
without having to bear moral responsibility for the consequences. However, com-
pliance involves a high level of detachment from material contradictions and risks
student and teacher alienation, particularly where curricula suppress critique of
the structural disadvantages faced by some communities. There may be a claim to
neutrality but in reality the efficiency movement supports a politics which rejects
participatory democracy whereby workers are involved in the governance of soci-
ety. At best, it assumes a narrow, representative variant of democracy. Indeed,
24 Gail Edwards
it was this democratic deficit which provoked an alternative teacher education
movement in the middle of the twentieth century, to which I now turn.

The Learner-Centred Movement: Individualism Displaces Pedagogy

The inspiration for the developmental, learner-centred model of teacher education
was a broader philosophical trend in European thought taking hold at the start of
the twentieth century. A widespread backlash against positivism expressed anti-
authoritarian scepticism towards the notion of disinterested science as the means
for Western societies to validate themselves. Wilhelm Dilthey (1883/1976), the
German social philosopher, insisted that the natural and human sciences are dis-
tinct and that the human sciences should be hermeneutical or interpretive, a posi-
tion subsequently adopted by several German social scientists, notably Weber
(1922/1978) and Husserl (1936/1970). It was argued that only a totalitarian polity
could result from the misapplication of the methods of natural science to social
questions. The argument was that human cognition is culturally situated and never
impartial.
This ‘interpretive turn’ influenced teacher educators in England. Steps towards
an all-graduate teaching profession began in England in the 1950s as restructur-
ing saw universities take the dominant role in teacher training (Partington, 1999).
Critics of (then influential) educationalist R. S. Peters (1969)offered interpretivist
epistemological arguments antithetical to the dominant theory-to-practice model
of teacher education (Young, 1971). Some found philosophical legitimacy in
pragmatism, a revised form of empiricism popular in the US. Pragmatism under-
stands truth as rooted in the consequences of action (Novack, 1975) and in the US,
pragmatism inspired what Schön (1983) called the ‘reflective practitioner’ model
of professional development. Its influence in England is visible in the ‘teacher-as-
researcher’ movement, developed in the 1960s by Stenhouse (1975).
However, this interpretive turn shifted focus away from pedagogy towards
the learner. Constructivist psychology introduced the idea of the teacher, not as
pedagogue, but as facilitator of student-initiated enquiries. Moreover, facilitators
needed a learner-centred teacher education which foregrounds what Clandinin
and Connelly (1988) call teachers’ ‘meaning-making’. Teachers, it was claimed,
learn through action research which starts with a practitioner-initiated problem
prompting an individual’s reflection in and upon their practice. Influenced in
part by Lewin (1948), the assumption was that change occurs gradually through
problem-solving. This reversed the efficiency movement’s top-down authoritari-
anism by reconceptualising theory as personal, as emerging bottom-up, out of a
teacher’s practice and values. Though the term pedagogy underwent a revival,
particularly after the publication of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970),
its usage was reframed within interpretivist assumptions. In place of a human sci-
ence, there were many ‘personal pedagogies’.
This appropriation has only undermined pedagogy. Although it can appear
liberating to emphasise the personal nature of knowing, the idea of personal
pedagogy substitutes an aim to understand the mind-independent world with
 The Schooling of Teachers in England 25
the less ambitious aim of understanding personal experience as it (apparently)
emerges from the consequences of one’s actions. Even though Dewey (1957),
the philosophical inspiration for reflective practice, tried to rescue objectivity by
equating it to social agreement or ‘warranted assertability’, pedagogy has been
displaced by a concern with ‘what works’ in the experience of teachers. This
denial of the possibility of discovering autonomous biological, social, or psy-
chological processes which might place ontological limits on how teaching and
learning is understood and practised, has left teachers to act in accord with their
socialisation. Transcendence—the capacity to critique existing interpretations of
classroom events and move beyond one’s cultural situatedness—is assumed to be
impossible. Ultimately this has undermined a progressive agenda by sanctioning
stasis; it has rejected the possibility of a mind knowing the world beyond itself
and thereby denied itself any foundation for critique.
Understanding the learner-centred movement’s popularity requires an exami-
nation of the social democratic context within which it flourished. After World
War II in England, there was renewed hope that capitalism’s volatility could be
managed through Keynesian-inspired welfare reform. The ontological flight from
theory was part of a broader liberal impulse to reconcile plural values in a society
keen to heal the wounds of war. The economic boom which came out of the mass
destruction of capital during postwar renewal made it seem possible. Schön’s
(1983) reflective practitioner model endorsed reform through local negotiations—
through individuals intersubjectively constructing, not just the means, but also the
ends of education. The focus on cultural solutions located the origin of human
disempowerment in modernity’s instrumental rationality—in culture—rather than
capitalist structural relations.
The problem with culturalism, as Sayer (2000) notes, is that meanings run up
against structural reality. A constructivist ontology provides no foundation upon
which to disagree. Relativism creates a political vacuum, soon filled by structural
imperatives. A case in point, as Blake, Smeyers, Smith, and Standish (2000) note, is
the contradictory demand for ‘personalised practice’ in a capitalist education system
tethered to non-negotiable, normative test scores. The criteria by which inequality
is reproduced are defined in advance. This structural reality has practical as well as
intellectual consequences for teachers and, within the restricted framework of rep-
resentative (parliamentary) democracy, it is something over which they exert little
political influence. Moreover, in the neoliberal period, we find the rhetoric of per-
sonal freedom being used to label people as failures as the rhetoric of meritocracy
places fault for low educational outcomes with individuals rather than the system.
It is these criticisms which led to another teacher education movement in
England which, from the 1990s, argued that teacher learning results less from
personal reflection and more from a plurality of competing discourses.

The Poststructuralist Movement: Scepticism Displaces Pedagogy

Poststructuralism refers to an academic, interdisciplinary movement originat-
ing in 1960s France which rejects a representational role for language. The term
26 Gail Edwards
postmodernism refers to a wider cultural movement of which poststructuralism is
part. Poststructuralists take the interpretivist insight that human consciousness is
culturally situated very seriously. They conclude that rational negotiation between
culturally diverse groups is impossible and that knowledge disputes are settled
through the exercise of power. The poststructuralist teacher education movement
has therefore recommended equipping teachers with the rhetorical capacity to
defend their practice (Parker, 1997; Moore, 2004). Their argument is that moder-
nity’s pretensions of transcendence is foolish because the modern world—like
the epochs preceding it—is riven with inescapable conflict. Knowledge embodies
a Nietzschean ‘will to power’ and Enlightenment notions of knowledge liberat-
ing humanity are mistaken because there is not one Truth but rather many truths
(Sarup, 1988).
Poststructuralists have critiqued reflective teacher education (see Brown and
Jones, 2001; Parker, 1997; Moore, 2004). They object that reflective practice implic-
itly assumes unmediated access to empirical data as a catalyst for cognitive recon-
struction. Poststructuralists deny that beliefs arise from the consequences of action
because, they reason, persons have no unmediated access to those consequences.
There is no ground for pedagogical knowledge. The explanation for change must lie
elsewhere. Teachers cannot stand aside from their consciousness to compare their
beliefs with reality and thus it must be beliefs (not experience) which change beliefs.
The division between the knower and the extra-discursive world to be known is
collapsed into ‘discourse’ and the rupture of pedagogic stasis is assumed to occur
in clashes within and between circulating discourses. Indeed, in asking upon what
ground we should accept the poststructuralist truth claim that ‘there is no Truth’, we
must assume there is none. The movement is, in other words, a form of epistemologi-
cal scepticism. And, since that scepticism is founded upon assertion, it is also a form
of dogmatism.
However, in order to understand its appeal, we must examine the political and
intellectual backdrop to poststructuralism’s rise to academic respectability in the
1990s. English teacher education policy at that time was becoming increasingly
prescriptive. The poststructuralist movement appeared liberating; it encouraged
‘pedagogic eclecticism’ and ‘bricolage’. In contrast, the scientific notion of peda-
gogy appeared symptomatic of a ‘totalising’ impulse or positivist hubris. Teacher
educators were encouraged to celebrate plurality rather than seek closure in expert
practice. The mood was anti-theoretical and relativist. The pedagogic question
seemed to be the educational equivalent of the philosopher Richard Rorty’s objec-
tion to the use of universal criteria to judge whether any society is better aligned
with human nature than any other. Whilst liberals seek solutions in a pragmatic rec-
onciliation with capitalism, poststructuralist illiberals object there are no context-
independent standards available allowing persons to judge the merit of different
‘truths’ and it is only the rhetorical power of discourse which provokes belief
change, rather than correspondence to the way the world is.
The historical record shows that this relativist mood has ancient roots. Far from
being novel, as Lyotard (1984) suggests, it is a recurring pessimistic response to
political upheaval which can be traced back to the Sophists of antiquity. Callinicos
 The Schooling of Teachers in England 27
(2007) argues that its twentieth-century expression is a form of widespread politi-
cal disillusionment in response to the collapse of so-called ‘communist’ states
in 1989 and the perceived emergence of capitalism’s triumph, expressed by
Fukuyama (1989) as the ‘end of history’. The view is that, whilst Enlightenment
science had promised emancipation for humanity, its instrumental rationalism has
instead produced world wars, ‘metanarratives’, and totalitarianism.
The problem is that this sanctions political and educational conservatism.
Celebrating difference renounces the possibility of contesting oppressive educa-
tion practices. Even critical perspectives seem in danger of collapsing into defeat-
ism. Kincheloe and Steinberg (1997, p. 24), for example, remind us that “critical
pedagogy is the term used to describe what emerges when critical theory encoun-
ters education.” But, as Callinicos (2007) points out, critical theory emerged
from the postwar defeatism of the Frankfurt School. It expressed disenchantment
with Enlightenment science and human rationality, and encouraged cultural over
structural analysis. Structural analysis gives due priority to the opposing interests
of the capitalist and labouring class whereas cultural analysis is more conserva-
tive and ultimately hostile towards the possibility of transcendence. The latter
views teaching as a practical activity learned through apprenticeship and aimed at
acculturating students into ‘inherited cultural traditions’ codified in academic dis-
ciplines. The educationist Oakeshott (1962, p. 6) is perhaps the most well-known
English proponent of this position; he condemned as rationalists those who are
“fortified by a belief in a ‘reason’ common to all mankind.” Pedagogic scep-
tics like Oakeshott agree with Marx’s assertion that social practices are acquired
unconsciously but from this conclude that there is no vantage point for critique.
Human knowing is framework-dependent and there can be no view from nowhere.
Indeed, Oakeshott’s criticism of socialist education was premised on his assertion
that abstract ideals cannot guide society since these derive from concrete activity.
The mistake which poststructuralists and conservatives like Oakeshott make
however is in overlooking the possibility of critique being an immanent process.
In other words, they forget that capitalist society is internally divided along class
lines, producing a struggle which generates conflicting experience and conscious-
ness from which critique can and does emerge. Oakeshott’s conservative politi-
cal philosophy by contrast, like that of the Radical Right, emphasises tradition
and distrust of theoretically informed expertise (see Hill, 1989 for a critique
of the Right). Though modern political conservatism accepts some aspects of
Enlightenment thinking, its roots lie in the English Restoration which supported
feudal notions of class rule by birth right. Hence, even though postmodern eclecti-
cism can seem like resistance against experts’ overbearing authority, ‘meta nar-
ratives’ and state prescription, it is a type of rebellion available only to those
positioned structurally so as to be sheltered from the worst material effects of
capitalist crisis. Privileged teachers in English independent fee-paying schools,
for example, require no professional qualification and historically, as Partington
(1999, p. 23) notes, “The more prestigious the school, the more likely was it
that the new teacher was directly recruited after a first degree from Oxford or
Cambridge”.
28 Gail Edwards
Beyond Schooling: Teacher Education and the
Advance of Pedagogy
My argument has been that the undermining of pedagogy in England has been
assisted by popular teacher education movements. These have not taken us beyond
epistemological incoherencies rooted in empiricism and rationalism. Politically,
these align with liberal and sceptical responses to capitalism’s economic and
political contradictions. In this section, I draw upon the scholarship of political
theorist Karl Marx, who offered an alternative exit from the epistemological and
economic crisis through a reformulation of reason and progress along dialecti-
cal lines. Indeed, it was Marx’s fundamental insight that, though the natural and
human sciences have allowed us to acquire knowledge, we have misunderstood
the process by which they do so. As we shall see, if we take a dialectical view,
modern pedagogy is not neutral or ahistorical but rather one expression of the
normative principles continuing the Enlightenment project.
As Suchting’s (1986) scholarship shows, Marx saw that existing answers
to the epistemological question fell into difficulty when trying to identify
the ground upon which human beings establish knowledge. Marx noted that
human perception is unreliable, which crude empiricists merely deny and
which rationalists use as justification for concluding that knowing is grounded
in reason rather than mind-independent reality. The problem for empiricism is
that there is no way to explain how a person can perceive unmediated reality
so that they can compare this state of affairs with their own beliefs. (We have
seen how the efficiency movement cannot answer critics who point to the dis-
torting influence of human bias.)The problem with rationalism, on the other
hand, is that there is no way to assert that anything is incorrect by virtue of the
way the world is. (We have seen how teacher education grounded in discourse
lacks an ontological foundation.) Indeed, Marx thought that rationalism (and
idealist philosophy) mistakes human enquiry for mere ‘scholasticism’. He
noted how a priori projects accept closure about what exists in advance of
practical action and fail precisely because they imply a desire “to know before
we know” which is “just as absurd as the wise resolution of that Scholastic
to learn to swim before he ventured into the water” (Hegel, cited in Suchting,
1986, p. 106).
Marx’s solution was to understand the knowing-subject and the world-to-be-
known (the object) as dialectically and mutually constituted in activity:

Humankind’s primary relation to the world is an active one, specifically the

relation involved in labour. In transforming the world through labour, two
things happen simultaneously. Firstly the object of labour is changed, in
accordance with certain human aims, into a new sort of object—a ‘human-
ised’ object. But, secondly, the subject of labour, the labourer, develops new
sensory capacities adequate to the reception of the new objective character-
istics thus brought forth.
(Suchting, 1986, pp. 12–13)
 The Schooling of Teachers in England 29
The transformative properties of labour mean that we cannot characterise Marx’s
work as a ‘totalising metanarrative’. Marx understood scientific enquiry as an
immanent process whereby method develops in conjunction with empirical
results (Suchting, 1986). His insight did not emerge from a ‘view from nowhere’
but rather was triggered by scientific findings. Over the last two centuries there
has been increasing evidence for a dialectic of nature (for example, in evolution-
ary biology, in cosmology, and in complexity theory—see Matthews, 1980).
We can therefore understand pedagogy as a form of dialectical, transformative
labour. Whilst we can agree with social constructionists that persons are born
into social activity not of their own making and from which their consciousness
derives, pedagogy is not merely reproductive. Human consciousness emerges out
of labour, as a reflection, not of, but upon reality. This is because the socially
constructed world acts back, calling forth new responses from the teacher and
learner. Pedagogy therefore involves the continual assessment of norms and nor-
mative concepts and it is in this (rather than the pragmatist) sense that teachers
are researchers.
Pedagogy therefore does not equate to simple laws. Whilst theory certainly
corresponds to reality, correspondence should not be confused with representa-
tion. Correspondence is a matter of theoretical success in activity and is not mere
mirroring as assumed by traditional epistemologies. If I lift a box and say that it
is a heavy, heaviness does not refer to a property visible or inherent in the box.
Heaviness exists as a relation between the box and myself as I deal with it in activ-
ity. Vygotsky’s (1987) pedagogic concept of the ‘zone of proximal development’
(ZPD) similarly refers to the relation between a learner’s actual level of develop-
ment and that achievable with intervention. Concepts like ‘weight’ or ‘ZPD’ do
not mirror objects but are helpful theoretical abstractions. Similarly, classroom
interactions, educational policies, and employment contracts are relations and
forces shaping (but not wholly determining) human judgement and experience in
its practical relation to the world.
Since these forces and relations are not directly observable, we should be wary
of educational movements based entirely upon empirical data. In navigating our
relations with the world, we use data as clues to underlying reality. Patterns in our
experience must be explained by reference to potential explanatory mechanisms,
expressed as theoretical models (as in weight explaining our visible struggle in
lifting a box!). The critical realist Bhaskar (1978) identifies three interacting lev-
els of reality: the empirical domain (phenomena available to human perception),
the actual domain (events available to perception but not necessarily perceived
at any particular moment), and the real domain (causative forces underlying
the empirical). Objects in the real domain may provoke empirically observed
conflicts which intrude so as to bring into question existing theory about how
the world works. Theoretical abstractions refer to real entities as they intrude
in human activity—that is, to forces and objects which lie behind the empiri-
cally observable patterns they explain (Greenwood, 1994). Theoretical error is
noted when empirical phenomena intrude in ways not explainable in terms of an
existing theoretical model. Theorising helps teachers explain and transform their
30 Gail Edwards
pedagogy by analysing relations, processes, and tendencies, the actualisation of
which is a contingent not determined matter (Matthews, 1980). A teacher may
notice, for example, that a particular psychological theory cannot explain certain
events perceived by her in the classroom. New theoretical research projects may
then emerge aimed at developing better tools of explanation for these phenomena.
Theory is thus necessary to the education of teachers and is neither a prescriptive
nor an arbitrary tool.
Therefore, although pedagogy is goal-directed labour it is dialectically related
to scientific labour. Whilst utility always enters in to the selection of problems
which science pursues, science’s search for new theory begins only when rela-
tions within or between activities based in human needs yield troubling con-
tradictions (Suchting, 1986). This is why, contrary to what is suggested by the
reflective practice movement, teaching strategies are not adequate merely because
they appear to satisfy instrumental needs. A teacher must be satisfied that their
theory of, for example, consciousness, knowledge, society, or education is valid.
Teachers’ ‘common sense’ knowledge brought from their own schooling (what
Vygotsky would call ‘spontaneous’ concepts) must be brought up against science.
For Vygotsky, understanding the world depends upon critical consciousness, which
depends upon relating common-sense concepts to scientific concepts. Critical con-
sciousness is “an act of consciousness whose object is the activity of consciousness
itself” (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 190). To be educated means to transcend—to be able to
think not just with but also about cultural thought-objects and their conditioning
effects. The systematised nature of abstract thought allows critical consciousness
to develop by helping the learner analyse the supra-empirical relations between
their consciousness and their society. Theory is thus never tested against uninter-
preted reality but rather against the everyday spontaneous concepts grounded in
concrete activity. Where contradictions occur, thinking can be transformed and
new relations recognised. This includes relations between oneself and the world
which introduce new potentials for acting differently—that is, for transformation.
Indeed, Marx’s view of rationality was influenced by Hegel’s insight that such con-
flict is not “a kind of abnormality” but rather is “the root of all movement and life”
(Hegel, cited in Callinicos, 2007, p. 41). This explains documented tensions stu-
dent teachers feel when negotiating the theory-practice dialectic between univer-
sity and school (see Fang, 1996). Pedagogically skilled teachers are critical; they
stand back from what they are doing and compare it with other ways of achieving
the same end and may even consider new ends to pursue.
Of course, the direction of change is not determined. The world of relations,
tendencies, and processes includes human agency but this does not guarantee
agency absolute primacy. The work of critical realist Wilmott (2002) demonstrates
this well. Though economic, social, and theoretical systems are constructed by
agents, these systems nonetheless, once created, have ontological autonomy from
those agents; they constitute forces which are distinct from, and irreducible to, the
human agency which created them. Agency and structure are separable domains
out of phase with each other over time. Structure pre-exists the actions of the
agents who reproduce or transform it but the structure also post-dates the agents’
 The Schooling of Teachers in England 31
actions which constructed it. How a particular teacher responds depends on the
state of their pedagogic knowledge at the time but also upon extra-individual obli-
gations attached to the structural role they occupy as a teacher. Structural forces do
not determine pedagogic action, but they do frame it. External forces are exerted
upon teachers regardless of their awareness of them. Failure to meet structural
obligations carries penalties independent of their interpretation. Teachers can be
required by national policy to accelerate pupils’ test achievements to the detriment
of pedagogy (Wilmott, 2002). Failure to do so may incur penalties such as with-
drawal of material resources (through job loss, pay cut, or demotion for example).
The rescue of pedagogy is therefore no apolitical undertaking. Capitalist societ-
ies are distinguished by relations of production which give rise to particular social
and legal structures organised around class. Relations to productive forces are
antagonistic between those who must sell their labour and those who have control
over the means of production, leading to conflict, particularly at times of economic
crisis. Different structural locations lead to contestation over the purpose of school-
ing. A pedagogy which is transformative, and which raises critical and revolution-
ary consciousness, will incite resistance from those who have vested interest in
existing social relations. The case of England illustrates this well. Pedagogy has
been a casualty of competing class interests as capitalist profit has clashed with the
labouring classes’ search for enlightenment and a new social order (Simon, 1974).

Conclusion
In this chapter I have argued firstly, that we should be clear that pedagogy, like
any modern science, is not neutral but rather embodies Enlightenment values and
principles rooted in a transformative agenda. Secondly, I have suggested that it
is important to understand the political backdrop to pedagogic neglect expressed
in efficiency, learner-centred, and poststructuralist teacher education. Politically,
these are expressions of liberal or sceptical responses to capitalism’s contradic-
tions which either assumes that human emancipation can be achieved through the
reform of capitalism rather than its overthrow, or that the scientific ambitions of
the Enlightenment have been discredited. I have suggested therefore, that they are
conservative and backward ideas for teacher education. Thirdly, I have aimed to
show that a reassertion of pedagogy as dialectical, situated historically in the class
relations peculiar to capitalism, can continue the transformative expectations cap-
tured in the Enlightenment agenda.
The dialectical lesson for teacher educators is that, just as students teach their
teachers, teachers teach their teacher educators. Theory may be a guide for action
but teacher educators must also learn from the class struggle of which their stu-
dent teachers (and their pupils and communities) are part. Teacher educators can-
not impose pedagogic or theoretical agendas any more than political leaders can
usher in socialism on behalf of the working class. Of course, this is not to say
that concrete struggles alone advance teacher understanding. Many teachers have
conflicting and uneven consciousness, particularly in England where the concept
of pedagogy has atrophied to the point where it is now synonymous with tips for
32 Gail Edwards
delivering prescribed content and testing for retention. In such a context, the con-
nection between theory and practice is severed and teachers require support to
theorise out of their experience by appropriating theoretical tools to their objective
class interests. There are opportunities for teacher educators to link theory gener-
ated out of past struggles to teachers’ current experience of, for example, industrial
disputes and the dehumanisation and commodification of students in their care.
Teachers need support to connect their work to the concrete political and economic
struggles in which their students are embedded so they can be responsive to the
dialectical interplay between their students’ consciousness and wider structural,
cultural, and economic forces. Vygotsky distinguished between the ‘spontaneous’
awakening of class antagonisms and self-conscious action informed by systematic
generalising about the social order. It is through this process that teachers and stu-
dents learn about their objective interests and at the same time learn how to struggle
together against structural injustice. Thus, the development of pedagogy depends
upon teachers’ sociological, political, and educational understanding, as well as the
degree to which teachers recognise their own class interests, as they assess the pos-
sibilities immanent in their own labour as they work with communities. Moreover,
the rescue of pedagogy is neither predictable nor capricious. The possibilities must
depend in each situation where capital and labour intersects, occurring not just in
classrooms but in events in the wider political sphere.
Pedagogy’s transformative agenda is becoming ever more urgent. The neo-
liberal period is unprecedented in terms of the extent to which educational val-
ues have been displaced. Much discourse now reduces education in schools and
universities to a matter, not of social transformation, but of creating wealth. The
question of whether the pursuit of profit is an end in itself or the means to living
well is rarely discussed. Certainly, economic elites see little need for such discus-
sion in their ‘edubusiness’ agenda, and—as their policies stoke resistance—it is
left to critical educators to advance pedagogy through activism, research, and
critical teacher education.

References
Bain, A. (1877). Education as a science I. Popular Science Monthly, 10(February
1877), pp. 418–428. Accessed online 15 May 2015 at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/
Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_10/February_1877/Education_as_a_Science_I
Best, G. (1973). Mid-Victorian Britain 1851–1875. London: Fontana Press.
Bhaskar, R. (1978). A Realist Theory of Science. Brighton: Harvester Press.
Blake, N., Smeyers, P., Smith, R., and Standish, P. (2000). Education in an Age of Nihilism.
London: Routledge Falmer.
Brown, T. and Jones, L. (2001). Action Research and Postmodernism. Buckingham: Open
University Press.
Callinicos, A. (2007). Social Theory: A Historical Introduction, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Chitty, C. (2004). Education Policy in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Clandinin, D. J. and Connelly, F. M. (1988). Studying teachers’ knowledge of classrooms:
Collaborative research, ethics and the negotiation of narrative. The Journal of Educa-
tional Thought, 22(2A), pp. 269–282.
Another random document with
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 “Your friendship with Gerry Hull will prove invaluable in France! Do
nothing to jeopardize it! You have done with him, well! But you are in
too much danger here; go East tonight; wait there.”
The woman went away. How much did she know about what had
passed with Gerry Hull, Ruth wondered. She had seen, probably,
that Ruth was with him again in the conservatory after his speech
and that they had stayed there a long time together. She had done
with him, well! She smiled woefully to herself; at least it seemed to
have aided her that the Germans thought so.
It would have puzzled her more, certainly, if she had known that
after the time when Gerry Hull and she forgot to whisper and forgot,
indeed, everyone but themselves, the woman had heard almost
every word which was said; and that the woman’s opinion of the girl
who was playing the part of Cynthia Gail was that she was a very
clever one to know enough and dare enough to take single and
violent opposition to Gerry Hull. For the Germans, in preparation for
this war, had made a most elaborate and detailed study of
psychology of individuals and of nations. That study of nations has
not shown conspicuously successful results; but their determination
of factors which are supposed to influence individuals is said to have
fared far better.
Their instructions to a woman—or a girl—who is commanded to
make an impression upon a man inform that a girl in dealing with a
weak character progresses most certainly and fastest by agreeing
and complying; but when one has to do with a man of strong
character, opposition and challenge to him bring the surest result.
Of course that is not an exclusively German discovery; and to act
in accordance with it, one is not obliged to be truly a German spy
and to know it from the tutorings of a German psychologist. Indeed,
one does not have to know it at all; one need merely be a young girl,
thoughtful and honest, as well as impulsive and of quick but deep
passions, who admires and cares so very much for a young man
who has talked serious things with her, that she cannot just say yes
to his yes and no to his no, but must try at once to work out the
difference between them.
Not to know it is hard on that girl, particularly when she is setting
out upon an adventure which at once cuts her off from everyone
whom she has known.
Ruth had no companion at all. She had to write to her own mother
in Onarga, of course; and, after buying with cash an order for two
thousand dollars, she sent it to her mother with a letter saying that
she was assigned to a most wonderful work which was taking her
abroad. She was not yet free to discuss the details; but her mother
must trust her and know that she was doing a right and wise thing;
and her mother must say nothing about it to anyone at all. It might
keep her away for two years or more; so the people who were
paying her expenses had forwarded her this money for home. Ruth
wished her mother to send for her clothes and her trunk from the
boarding house; Ruth would not need them. And if any inquiry came
for Ruth from Hilton Brothers or elsewhere, Ruth had gone East to
take a position. There was no use writing her at the old addresses;
she would send an address later.
She knew her mother; and she knew that her mother was sure
enough of her so that she would do as asked and not worry too
much.
So upon that same afternoon, Ruth packed up Cynthia Gail’s
things; and she wrote to Cynthia Gail’s parents and to Second
Lieutenant George Byrne at Camp Grant, signing the name below
the writing as Cynthia Gail had signed it upon her passport.
That passport was ceasing to be a mere possession and was
soon to be put to use; so Ruth practiced long in signing the name.
The description of Cynthia Gail as checked on the passport was
almost faultless for herself; height, five feet six and a half inches;
weight, 118 pounds; face, oval; eyes, blue; hair, yellow; and so with
all the rest. The photograph of Cynthia Gail was pasted upon the
passport and upon it was stamped the seal of the United States, as
well as a red-ink stamping which went over the edge of the
photograph upon the paper of the passport. It was very possible,
Ruth thought, that the German girl for whom this passport was
intended would have removed that picture of Cynthia Gail and
substituted one of herself; to do that required an emboss seal of the
United States, besides the rubber stamp of the red ink. Ruth did not
doubt that the Germans possessed replicas of these and also the
skill to forge the substitution. But she possessed neither.
 Moreover, the photograph of Cynthia Gail seemed to Ruth even
more like herself than it had at first. The difference was really more
in expression than in the features themselves; and Ruth, consciously
or unconsciously, had become more like that girl in the picture. She
had, also, the identical dress in which the picture was taken. She
determined to wear that when she presented the passport and risk
the outcome. Her advantage so far had been that no one had
particular reason to suspect her; she had fitted herself into the
relations already arranged to take Cynthia Gail to France and they
seemed capable, of their own momentum, to carry her on.
Hubert Lennon “looked by” again later in the afternoon and she
asked him to tell his aunt that she was going away. He was much
concerned and insistent upon doing what he could to aid her.
“Do you know when you’ll be sailing?” he asked.
“I hope next week,” she said.
“Could you possibly go on the Ribot?”
“Why on the Ribot?”
“Gerry Hull’s just got word that he’s to join again on the other
side,” Hubert said, “so he’ll be going back next week on the Ribot, he
thinks.”
Ruth checked just in time a “Yes, I know.”
“I’m going to try to get across with him,” Hubert added. Ruth felt
liking again for this young man who always put his friend before
himself.
“That’s good. I hope surely I can get on the Ribot.”
“Aunt Emilie knows people in New York who’ll help arrange it for
you, if I ask ’em. You’ll let me?”
“Please!” Ruth accepted eagerly. She wanted exceedingly to know
one other thing; but she delayed asking and then made the query as
casual as she could.
“Lady Agnes stays in Chicago a while?”
Hubert colored as this question ended for him his pretense with
himself that she wanted to be on the Ribot because of him.
“No; she’s going when Gerry goes. She plans to be on the Ribot
too. They always intended to return at the same time.”
“Of course,” Ruth said. What wild fancies she followed!
 Hubert went off; but returned to take her to the train. He brought
with him letters from his aunt—credentials of Ruth as Cynthia Gail to
powerful people who did not know Cynthia Gail, and who were asked
to further her desires in every way.
Thus, at the end of seven days, Ruth Alden sailed for the first time
away from her native land upon the Ribot for Bordeaux to become—
in the reports of the American authorities who approved and passed
her on—a worker in the devastated districts of France; to become, in
whatever report the agents of Hohenzollernism in America made to
their superiors, a dependable and resourceful spy for Germany; to
become—in the resolution she swore to herself and to the soul of
Cynthia Gail and the prayers she prayed—an emissary for her cause
and her country into the land of the enemy who would know no
mercy to such as herself.
 CHAPTER VI
“WE’RE FIGHTING”
There is a thrill upon awaking on your first morning on board a
ship at sea which all the German U-boats under the ocean can
scarcely increase. You may imagine all you please what it may be;
and it will amaze you with something more. Ruth Alden had
imagined; and her first forenoon on shipboard was filled with
surprises.
She had gone aboard from the New York quay at nine the evening
before, as she had been warned to do; she had looked into her cabin
—a small, square white compartment with two bunks, upper and
lower, an unupholstered seat, a washbowl with a looking glass
beside the porthole and with a sort of built-in bureau with four
drawers, above which was posted conspicuously the rules to be
observed in emergencies. These were printed in French and English
and were illustrated by drawings of exactly how to adjust the life-
preservers to be found under all berths. Someone, whose
handbaggage bore the initials “M. W.” and who evidently was to
share the cabin with her, had been in before her and gone out. Ruth
saw that the steward disposed her cabin baggage beside M. W.’s;
she shut herself in a moment after the steward had gone, touching
the pillow of her bunk, reading the rules again, trying the water-taps.
She stood with shut eyes, breathing deliciously the strange,
scrubbed, salty smells of a deep-water boat; she opened the door
and went out to the deck with the darkness of the Hudson on one
hand; upon the other, the myriad-lighted majesty of New York.
She was standing there at the rail gazing up at the marvelous city
when Hubert Lennon found her. He merely wanted to make sure she
was aboard. Gerry Hull and Captain Lescault—he was the French
officer who had spoken at Mrs. Corliss’—and an English captain,
Forraker, of the same party, were aboard now; Lady Agnes and the
Englishwomen with whom she traveled also were aboard, Hubert
said.
He was glad to find that Cynthia was all right; but he said that a
nasty sea was running outside; the Ribot might go out at any time.
Hubert thought Cynthia had better go to bed and get all the sleep
she could.
Ruth went below, not with any idea of sleeping, but to avoid
meeting Gerry Hull just yet. That she was aboard the Ribot under
orders did not undo the fact that she was here for the conscious
purpose of furthering her acquaintance with him. He must guess
that, she thought—he from whom she had heard nothing at all since
that afternoon at Mrs. Corliss’.
Ruth was ready for bed when someone put a key in the cabin
door, but knocked before turning it, and a girl’s pleasant voice
inquired, “All right to come in?”
“All right,” Ruth said, covering up in bed.
A dark-haired, dark-eyed girl of twenty-six or seven entered. “I’m
Milicent Wetherell,” she introduced herself. “I’m from St. Louis; I’m
going to Paris for work in a vestiaire.”
Ruth sat up and put out her hand; she liked this girl on sight. “I’m
Ru——Cynthia Gail of Decatur, Illinois,” she caught herself swiftly. It
was the first time in the eight days that she had been Cynthia that
she had made even so much of a slip; but Milicent Wetherell did not
notice it.
Milicent went to bed and turned out the light. The boat did not
move; and after indefinite hours of lying still in the dark, Ruth
dropped to sleep. When she awoke it was daylight; the ship was
swaying, falling, rising; the tremor of engines shook it. They were at
sea.
The waves were higher than any Ruth had encountered before,
but they were slower and smoother too—not nearly so jumpy and
choppy as the Lake Michigan surf in a strong wind. The big steamer
rose and rolled to them far more steadily than the vessels upon
which Ruth had voyaged on holidays on the lake. Milicent Wetherell,
in the lower berth, lay miserably awake with no desire whatever to
get up; but Ruth let the stewardess lead her to the bath; she dressed
and found the way to the dining-saloon. She was supplied, along
with a number designating her “abandon ship” place in starboard
lifeboat No. 7, a numeral for a seat at a table.
At this hour of half after nine, there were perhaps fifty men at
breakfast and just five other women or girls; four men were seated at
the table to which Ruth was led—Captain Forraker one of them. He
arose as she approached. Possibly he remembered her, Ruth
thought, from an introduction at Mrs. Corliss’; much more probably
Hubert Lennon—who undoubtedly had had her placed at this table—
had reminded Captain Forraker about her. His three table-
companions arose and Captain Forraker presented them to her; they
were all English—two young officers and one older man, in rank a
colonel, who had been about some ordnance inspection work in
America. Ruth sat down; they sat down and resumed their talk; and
Ruth got the first of her morning amazements. She was in a foreign
land, already; she was not just on the way there, though still in sight
of Long Island. She was now in Europe, with Europeans thinking and
talking, not as guests of America, but as Europeans at home again.
Ruth had been brought up, as a good American, to believe her
country the greatest in the world; and, implicitly, she believed it. She
recognized that sons and daughters of other nations likewise were
reared to believe their native land the best and their people the
noblest; but she never had been able to quite believe that they really
could think so. They must make an exception, down deep in their
consciousness, for America, she was sure; however loyal they might
be to their own institutions and to their own fellows, they must admire
more highly the American ideals of freedom and democracy, and
they must consider that the people who lived by and for those ideals
were potentially, at least, the greatest.
It was a momentous experience, therefore, to hear her country
discussed—not in an unfriendly way or even with prejudice, but by
open-minded foreigners trying to inform one another of the facts
about America as they had found them; America was a huge but
quite untried quantity; its institutions and ideals seemed to them
interesting, but on the whole not nearly so good as their own;
certainly there was no suggestion of their endowing Americans with
superior battle abilities, therefore. The nation—that nation founded
more than a hundred and forty years ago which was to Ruth the
basis of all being—was to them simply an experiment of which no
one could yet tell the outcome.
They did not say that, of course; they said nothing at all to which
she could take the slightest exception. They simply brought to her
the brevity and unconclusiveness of a century of independent
existence in the perspective of a thousand; their national thought
started not with 1776 but with the Conquest or, even earlier, when
the Roman legions abandoned Britain and King Arthur reigned.
When they spoke of their homes, as they did once, and Ruth
found opportunity to inquire of one of them how long he had had his
home in Sussex, he told her:
“The present house goes back to 1582.”
It rather made her gasp. No wonder that a man of a family which
had occupied the “present” house since before the Pilgrims sailed,
looked upon America as an unproved venture.
“They’re in it to the end now, I consider,” this man commented
later to his companion when they returned to the discussion of
America and the war.
“Quite so, probably,” the other said. “The South went to absolute
exhaustion in their Civil War.”
“Absolutely,” the Sussex man agreed. “North probably would have
too, if necessary.”
They were estimating American will and endurance, not by pretty
faiths and protestations, but by what Americans, in their short history,
had actually shown.
“But this is foreign war, of course;” the colonel qualified the
judgment dubiously.
The man whose “present” house went back to 1582 nodded
thoughtfully.
Ruth received all this eagerly; it could not in the least shake her
own confidence in her people; but it gave her better comprehension
of the ideas which Gerry Hull had gained from his association with
Europeans. And this morning, when she was certain to meet him,
she wished—oh she wished to an incredible degree—to understand
him more fully than before. She learned from a remark of Captain
Forraker’s that Gerry Hull and Lady Agnes had breakfasted early
and had gone out on deck. Ruth had intended to go on deck after
breakfast; but now she changed her mind. She went to the saloon;
and hardly was she there, when Gerry Hull and Lady Agnes came in
from the cold.
They were laughing together at something which had happened
without. Ruth saw them before either of them noticed her; and her
heart halted in the excitement of expectancy during the instant Gerry
Hull’s glance went about the saloon. He saw her; nodded to her and
looked at once to Lady Agnes, who immediately advanced to Ruth,
greeting her cordially and with perfect recollection of having talked
with her at Mrs. Corliss’. Upon this French ship bound for Europe,
the English girl was at home as the Englishmen at the breakfast
table had been; she felt herself, in a sense, a hostess of Ruth.
“You’ve been about the ship yet, Miss Gail?” Gerry Hull asked.
“Only a little last night,” Ruth said.
“Come out on deck then,” he invited her. “Done for just now,
Agnes?” he asked.
“Just now,” Agnes said. “But I know you’re not. Go on!” she bid,
smiling at him as his eyes came to hers.
Ruth saw it as she started away to her cabin for her coat. There
had been some concern—not much, but some—in Agnes Ertyle’s
look that first time she discovered Gerry Hull and Ruth together;
there was no suggestion of concern now.
“Hub’s sick, poor chap,” Gerry told Ruth when she came out and
they set off side by side up the promenade deck against the cold,
winter wind. “He wanted me to tell you that’s why he couldn’t look
you up this morning.”
Had Hub—her loyal, self-derogatory Hub—therefore arranged
with his friend to give her this attention, Ruth wondered. Not that
Gerry Hull offered himself perfunctorily; he was altogether too well
bred for that. He held out his hand to her as the wind threatened to
sweep her from her feet; she locked arms with him and together they
struggled forward to the bow where a spray shield protected them
and they turned to each other and rested.
 “Pretty good out here, isn’t it?” he asked, drawing deep breaths of
the cold, salt air, his dark cheeks glowing.
“Glorious!” Ruth cried. “I never——” she checked herself quickly,
almost forgetting.
“Crossed in winter before?”
“No.”
“Neither’ve I—in real winter weather; except when coming home
this last time.”
Ruth glanced up at him and caught his eyes pondering her. He
had meant merely to be courteous to her when meeting her on
shipboard; but too much had passed between them, in their brief,
tempestuous first meeting. He was feeling that as well as she! The
gage which she had thrown before him was not to be ignored.
However certainly he may have thought that he would be merely
polite to this girl who had—he deemed—insulted his comrades and
himself, however determinedly he had planned to chat with her about
wind and weather, he wanted to really talk with her now! And
however firmly Ruth had decided to avoid any word which could
possibly offend him, still she found herself replying:
“Then you think of Chicago as your home?”
“Of course; why not?”
She turned her back more squarely to the wind and gazed down
the length of the deck, hesitating.
“I might as well own up, Miss Gail,” he said to her suddenly. “I’m
still mad.”
“At me?”
“At you. For a while I was so mad that I didn’t want to see you or
think of you,” he admitted with the frankness which had enabled him
to ask her, directly, how she happened to be at Mrs. Corliss’. “But
that didn’t seem to do me any good. So I called up your hotel——”
“You did? When?”
“After you were gone—about two days after. They had no address
for you and Hub had none. I asked him.”
Ruth trembled with joyous excitement.
“I wanted to tell you better what I meant,” he went on. “And to find
out more from you.”
 “About?”
“What we’d been arguing. I told you that day I’d never had a
chance to talk over affairs with an American like you; and I hadn’t
later.
“You see,” he explained after a moment of thought, “it seemed to
me that the other people I met at home—or most of them, anyway—
went into the war as a sort of social event. I don’t mean that they
made light of it; they didn’t. They were heart and soul in the cause;
and a good many of them did a lot of real work. But they didn’t react
to any—original ideas, as far as I could make out. They imported
their opinions and sympathies. And the ones who were hottest to
have America in the war weren’t the people who’d been most of their
lives in America; but the ones who’d been in England or France. I
told you that day that what they said was just what I’d been hearing
on the other side.”
In spite of the canvas shield, it was very cold where they were
standing. Gerry moved a bit as he talked; and Ruth stepped with
him, letting him lead her to a door which he opened, to discover a
little writing room or card room which happened to be deserted just
then. He motioned to her to precede him; and when she sat down
upon one of the upholstered chairs fixed before a table, he took the
place opposite, tossing his cap away and loosening his coat. She
unbuttoned her coat and pulled off her heavy gloves. She had made
no reply, and he seemed to expect none, but to be satisfied with her
waiting.
“I suppose you’re thinking that’s the way I got my opinions too,” he
said. “But it’s not quite true. I wasn’t trying to be English or French or
foreign in any way. I was proud—not ashamed—to be American.
Why, at school in England they used to have a regular game to get
me started bragging about America and Chicago and our West. I
liked the people over there; but I liked our people better. Grandfather
—well, he seemed to me about the greatest sort of man possible;
and his friends and father’s friends who used to come to look me up
at Harrow once in a while—some of ’em were pretty raw and
uncouth, but I liked to show ’em off! I did. They’d all done something
themselves; and most of ’em were still doing things—big things—and
putting in eight or ten hours a day in their offices. They weren’t
gentlemen at all in the sense that my friends at Harrow knew English
gentlemen; but I said they were the real thing. America—my country
—was made up of men who really did things!
“Then the war came and showed us up! I tell you, Miss Gail, I
couldn’t believe it at first. It seemed to me that the news couldn’t be
getting across to America; or that lies only were reaching you. Then
the American newspapers came to France and everyone could see
that we knew and stayed out!”
“Last week,” Ruth said, “and yesterday; and before I met you this
morning, I knew how to tell you what I tried to that day at Mrs.
Corliss’. I’ve thought more about that, I’m sure, than anything else
recently; but now—” she gazed across the little table at him and
shook her head—“it’s no use. It’s not anything one can argue, I
guess. It’s just faith and feeling—faith in our own people, Lieutenant
Hull!”
She saw, as he watched her, that she was disappointing him and
that he had been hoping that, somehow, she could resolve the
doubts of his own people which possessed him; she saw—as she
had observed at Mrs. Corliss’—that his eyes lingered upon her face,
upon her hands, as though he liked her; but her stubbornness in
upholding those people whom she would not even try to explain,
offended him again. He glanced out the port above her.
“We’re picking up a cruiser escort,” he said suddenly. “Let’s go out
and look her over.”
So they were on deck in the cold and wind again. And during the
rest of that day, and upon the following days, almost every hour
brought her into some sort of association with him on the decks, in
the lounge, or in the writing rooms, during the morning; luncheon at
the same table. Then the afternoon, as the morning, would be made
up of hours when she would be sitting in the warm, bright saloon with
her French war-study book before her and she would be carefully
rehearsing “Masque respirateur—respirator; lunettes—goggles;
nauge de gaz—gas fumes ...” when she would hear his quick,
impulsive step or his clear, pleasant voice speaking to someone and
Ruth would get combat animé and combat décousu hopelessly
mixed. She would go out to walk the deck again with Hubert—who
was apologetically up and about when the seas were smoother—or
with Captain Lescault or Captain Forraker or with “1582” (as she
called to herself the Sussex officer and once came near calling him
that aloud), when she would come around the corner of a cabin and
almost run into Agnes Ertyle and Gerry Hull going about the deck in
the other direction; or she would pass them, seated close together
and with Lady Agnes all bundled up in steamer rugs, and Ruth would
see them suddenly stop talking when she and her escort came
close, and they would look away at the sea as though they had been
just looking at the water all the time.
He would sit down beside Ruth, too; and he would take her
around and around the deck, tramping glowing, spray-splattered
miles with him. They talked a lot; but now they never really said
anything to each other. And it seemed to Ruth that each throb of
those ceaseless engines, which thrust them ever nearer and nearer
to France, made what she felt and believed more outrageous to him.
One afternoon, when the wireless happened to be tuned to catch
the wavelength of messages sweeping over the seas from some
powerful sending station in Germany, they picked up the enemy’s
boasts for the day; and among them was the announcement that the
famous American “ace,” sergeant pilot Paul Crosby, had been shot
down and killed by a German flyer on the Lorraine front. It chanced
that Gerry Hull and Agnes Ertyle were in the main saloon near where
Ruth also was when some busybody, who had heard this news,
brought it to Gerry Hull and asked him if he had known Paul Crosby.
Ruth knew that Gerry Hull and Paul Crosby had joined the French
flying forces together; they had flown in the same escadrille for more
than a year. She did not turn about, as others were doing, to watch
Gerry Hull when he got this news; but she could not help hearing his
simple and quiet reply, which brought tears to her eyes as no sob or
protestation of grief could; and she could not help seeing him as he
passed before her on his way out alone to the deck.
She dreamed that night about being torpedoed; in the dream, the
boat was the Ribot; and upon the vessel there were—as almost
always there are in dreams—a perfectly impossible company.
Besides those who actually were on board, there were Sam Hilton
and Lieutenant George Byrne and “Aunt Emilie” and Aunt Cynthia
Gifford Grange and the woman in gray and a great many others—so
many, indeed, that there were not boats enough on the Ribot to take
off all the company as the ship sank. So Gerry Hull, after putting
Lady Agnes in a boat and kissing her good-bye, himself stepped
back to go down with the ship; and so, when all the boats were gone,
he found Ruth beside him; for she had known that he would not try to
save himself and she had hidden to stay with him. His arms were
about her as the water rose to them and—she awoke.
Their U-boat really came; but with results disconcertingly different.
January, 1918—if you can remember clearly back to days so strange
and distant—was a month when America was sending across men
by tens rather than by hundreds of thousands and convoying them
very, very carefully; there were not so many destroyers as soon
there were; the U-boats had not yet raided far out into the Atlantic—
so fast and well-armed ships like the Ribot, which were not
transports, were allowed to proceed a certain part of the way across
unconvoyed, keeping merely to certain “lanes” on courses
prescribed by wireless.
The Ribot, Ruth knew, was on one of these lanes and soon would
be “picked up” by the destroyers and shepherded by them into a
convoy for passage through the zone of greatest danger. In fact,
Ruth and Milicent Wetherell, who also had awakened early upon this
particular morning, were looking out of their port over a gray and
misty sea to discover whether they might have been picked up
during the night and now were in a convoy. But they saw no sign of
any other vessel, though the mist, which was patchy and floating low,
let them look a mile or more away. There was no smoke in sight—
nothing but gray clouds and the frayed fog and the sea swelling oilily
up and slipping down against the side of the ship.
Then, about a hundred yards away from the side and rather far
forward, a spout of spray squirted suddenly straight up into the air. It
showered over toward the ship and splashed down.
“That’s a shot,” Ruth said, “at us.”
“Where’s the U-boat?” Milicent asked her; and they both pressed
closer to the port to look out. They had heard no sound of the gun, or
they did not distinguish it from the noises of the ship. Ruth was
shaking with excitement; she could feel Milicent shaking too. Another
spout of spray, still forward but a good deal closer, spurted up; and
this time they heard—or thought they heard—the sound of the gun
which had fired that shell at them. The roar of their own guns—one
forward and one aft—buffeted them violently.
“We’re fighting!” Ruth cried.
“Can you see anything?” Milicent demanded.
“Not a thing. Let’s get dressed!”
Gongs were beating throughout the ship; and the guns on deck
were going, “Twumm! twumm! twumm!” Ruth could hear, in the
intervals, the voices of stewards calling to passengers in the
companionways between the cabins. A tremendous shock, stifling
and deafening, hurled Ruth against the bunk; hurled Milicent upon
her. They clung together, coughing and gasping for breath.
“Hit us!” Ruth said; she might have shouted; she might have
whispered; she did not know which.
“That’s just powder fumes; not gas,” Milicent made herself
understood.
“No; not nauge de gaz,” Ruth agreed. They were hearing each
other quite normally; and they laughed at each other—at the French
lesson phrase, rather. They had learned the phrases together, drilled
each other and taken the lessons so seriously; and the lessons
seemed so silly now.
“They must have hurt someone,” Ruth said. For the first time she
consciously thought of Gerry Hull; probably subconsciously she had
been thinking of him all the time. “He wasn’t hit,” she was saying to
herself confidently now. “That shell struck us forward; his cabin’s aft
and on the other side; so he couldn’t have been hurt—unless he’d
come to this side to get Lady Agnes.”
Another shell exploded in the ship—aft somewhere and lower. It
didn’t knock Ruth down or stifle her with fumes as the other had.
Someone was beating at her door and she opened it—Milicent and
she had got into their clothes. Ruth saw Hubert Lennon in the
passage.
“You’re safe!” he cried out to her with mighty relief. He had pulled
trousers and coat over his pajamas; he had shoes, unlaced, upon his
bare feet. He was without his glasses and his nearsighted eyes
blinked big and blankly; he had on a life-jacket, of the sort under all
berths; but he bore in his hands a complete life-suit with big boots
into which one stepped and which had a bag top to go up about the
neck.
“Put this on!” he thrust it at Ruth.
“We’re not sinking,” she replied. “Oh, thank you; thank you—but
we aren’t torpedoed—not yet. They’re just firing and we’re fighting—”
indeed she was shouting to be heard after the noise of their guns
—“we must have people hurt.”
“We’ve a lot—a lot hurt,” Hubert said.
Other shells were striking the ship; and Ruth went by him into a
passage confused with smoke and stumbly from things strewn under
her feet; a cabin door hung open and beyond the door, the side of
the ship gaped suddenly to the sea. The sides of the gap were
jagged and split and splintered wood; a ripped mattress, bedding, a
man’s coat and shirt, a woman’s clothing lay strewn all about; the
bedding smouldered and from under it a hand projected—a man’s
hand. It clasped and opened convulsively; Ruth stopped and
grasped the hand; it caught hers very tight and, still holding and held
by it, Ruth with her other hand cleared the bedding from off the
man’s face. She recognized him at once; he was an oldish, gentle
but fearless little man—an American who had been a missionary in
Turkey; he and his wife, who had worked with him, had been to
America to raise money for Armenian relief and had been on their
way back together to their perilous post.
“Mattie?” the little man was asking anxiously of Ruth as he looked
up at her. “Mattie?”
Mattie, Ruth knew, must have been his wife; and she turned back
the bedding beyond him.
“She’s gone,” Ruth told him, mercifully thrusting him back as he
tried to turn about. “She’s gone where you are going.”
The little missionary’s eyes closed. “The order for all moneys is in
my pocket. Luke VI, 27,” his lips murmured. “Luke VI, 27 and 35.”
The hand which again was holding Ruth’s and which had been so
strong the instant before, was quiet now. “The sixth chapter of the
gospel according to St. Luke and the twenty-seventh verse,” the little
man’s voice murmured, “But I say unto you which hear, Love your
enemies.”
Ruth covered his face decently with the sheet; and, rising, she
grasped the jagged edges of the hole blown by the German shell in
the side of the ship; and she stared out it. A mile and a half away;
two miles or more perhaps—she could not tell—but at any rate just
where the fringe of the mist stopped sight, she saw a long, low
shape scudding over the swell of the sea; puffs of haze of a different
quality hung over it, cleared and hung again. Ruth understood that
these were the gases from guns firing—the guns which had sent that
shell which had slain in their beds the little Armenian missionary and
his wife, the guns which were sending the shells now bursting
aboard the Ribot further below and more astern. Ruth gazed at the
U-boat aghast with fury—fury and loathing beyond any feeling which
she could have imagined. She had supposed she had known full
loathing when she learned of the first deeds done in Termonde and
Louvain; then she had thought, when the Germans sank the
Lusitania, that it was utterly impossible for her to detest fellow-men
more than those responsible. But now she knew that any passion
previously stirred within her was only the weak and vacuous reaction
to a tale which was told. She had viewed her first dead slain by a
fellow-man; and amazing, all overwhelming instincts—an urge to kill,
kill in return, kill in punishment, kill in revenge—possessed her. She
had not meant to kill before. She had thought of saving life—saving
the Belgians from more barbarities, saving the lives of those at sea;
she had thought of her task ahead, and of the risks she was to run,
as saving the lives of American and British and French soldiers. For
the first time she thought of herself as an instrument to kill—kill
Germans, many, many Germans; all that she could.
Someone had come into the wreck of that cabin behind her now.
A steward, probably; or perhaps Hubert Lennon, who had found her
again. She did not turn but continued to stare at the U-boat, her
hands clinging to the jagged hole made by its shell. A man’s hand
caught her shoulder and a voice spoke to her—Gerry Hull’s voice.
“Come with me,” he was saying to her. “You cannot stay here;
come to a safer place.”
 “A safer place!” she repeated to him. “How can we help to kill
them on that boat?” she cried to him.
He was undoing her fingers, by main strength, from their clutch at
the jagged iron of the shell hole. He was very calm and quiet and
strong; and he was controlling her as though she were a child.
“They’re four thousand yards off,” he said to her. “That one there
and another on the other side. It’s just begun to fire.”
Some of the shells which had been striking, Ruth realized now,
had burst on the other side of the Ribot.
“Yes,” she said.
“We’ve signaled we’re attacked,” he told her. He had both her
hands free; and he bound her arms to her body with his arms.
“We’ve an answer, and destroyers are coming. But they can’t get up
before an hour or two; so we’ve a long fight on. You must come
below.”
He was half carrying her, ignominiously; and it came to Ruth that,
before seeking her, he had gone to Agnes Ertyle; but she had not
delayed him because she was used to being under fire, used to
seeing those slain by fellow-men; used to knowing what she could
and could not do.
“I’ll go where—I should,” Ruth promised, looking up at him; and he
released her.
He pointed her toward a companionway where steps had led
downward a few minutes before; but now they were broken and
smoke at that moment was beginning to pour up. He turned and led
her off to the right; but a shell struck before them there and hurled
them back with the shock of its detonation. It skewed around a sheet
of steel which had been a partition wall between two cabins; it blew
down doors and strewed débris of all sorts down upon them. Another
shell, striking aft, choked and closed escape in the other direction.
Gerry Hull threw himself against the sheet of thin steel which the
shell so swiftly and easily had spread over the passage; but all his
strength could not budge it. He turned back to Ruth and looked her
over.
“All right?” he asked her.
“You are too?”
 He turned from her and gazed through the side of the ship.
“They’ve got our range pretty well, I should say. They’re still firing
both their guns, and we don’t seem to be hitting much.”
He tried again to bend back the sheet of steel which penned them
in the passage, but with effort as vain as before.
“I guess we stay here for a while,” he said when he desisted. “If
we don’t get help and it looks like we’re going to sink, we can always
dive through there into the sea.”
A shell smashed in below and a few rods forward and burst with
terrific detonation.
“Huns seem to like this part of the ship,” he said when the shock
was past.
“That started something burning just below,” Ruth said.
Throughout the ship again, between the concussion of the striking
shells and the firing of the Ribot’s guns, alarm gongs were going.
A woman screamed; men’s shouts came in answer. The rush of
the Ribot through the water, which had been swift and steady since
the start of the fight, suddenly swerved and the ship veered off to the
right.
“What’s that?” Ruth said.
“We may be zigzagging to dodge torpedoes,” Gerry Hull said. “Or
it may be that our helm is shot away and we can’t steer; or we may
be changing course to charge a sub in close.”
A detonation closer than any before quite stunned Ruth for
seconds or minutes or longer—she did not know. Only when she
came to herself slowly, she was alone behind the sheet of steel.
Gerry Hull was gone.
 CHAPTER VII
“ONE OF OUR OWN!”
The deck floor just beyond her, where he had been, was gone; or
rather—as she saw now through the smoke—it slanted steeply down
like a chute into a chasm of indefinite depth from which the heavy,
stifling smoke was pouring. A draft sucked the smoke out of the
shattered side of the ship over the sea and gave Ruth cleaner air to
breathe for seconds at a time. Gerry Hull must have been hurled into
that chasm when that last detonation blew away the floor; or else he
must have flung himself into the sea.
Ruth called his name, shouting first into the smoke column and
then, creeping down to the shell hole in the side, she thrust her head
out and gazed at the sea. Wreckage from the upper deck—wooden
chairs, bits of canvas—swept backwards; she saw no one
swimming. The splash of the waves dashed upon her, the ship was
rushing onward, but not so swiftly as before, and with a distinct
change in the thrust of the engines and with a strange sensation of
strain on the ship. Only one engine was going, Ruth decided—the
port engine; it was being forced faster and faster to do the work of
both and the rudder was pulled against the swerve of the port screw
to keep the vessel from swinging in a circle.
The guns on deck were firing steadily, it seemed; but the German
submarine, which Ruth could see and which had begun to drop
behind when the Ribot was racing with both engines, was drawing
up abreast again with both its big rifles firing. But the Ribot’s guns, if
they had not yet hit that U-boat, at least had driven her away; for,
though she came up abreast, the German kept farther off than
before; and while Ruth watched, she heard a sudden, wild cheer
from the deck; French shells had gone home somewhere on that U-
boat or upon the other which Ruth could not see.
Smoke continued to sweep by Ruth, engulfing her for long
moments, but the fire was far enough below not to immediately