Renewing workers’ education focuses on educational forms created by workers for workers. It extends beyond trade unions to include the range of educational initiatives aimed at the working class more generally, including working class women, casual and informal sector workers, migrant workers, and workers’ political parties.
This book contributes to filling the gap in the South African literature on workers’ education and documents the more recent history of workers’ education as well as current practices and perspectives, including some international experiences. It explores conceptual tools that may assist in reflecting on and theorising the practice of workers’ education and analyses current challenges. This essential book also seeks to inform future policy and practices on workers’ education and is key for those who wish to reinvigorate and contribute to building an alternative future for workers’ education.
Product information
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Introduction
Linda Cooper and Sheri Hamilton
PART 1: Learning from history to understand the present and envision the future
Chapter 1: Union education as ‘structuring a process of appropriation by workers of their own history’
Dinga Sikwebu
Chapter 2: Organising, mass mobilisation and worker education: Experiences with political
worker education in South Africa and Namibia
Kessie Moodley and Herbert Jauch
Chapter 3: For our children tomorrow: Workers making, learning and teaching about history
Jonathan Grossman
PART 2: Institutionalising workers’ education: Democratising or domesticating?
Chapter 4: The formalisation and institutionalisation of workers’ education in South Africa:
Prospects, questions and anxieties
Mphutlane wa Bofelo
Chapter 5: Is there still space for women’s only programmes?
Grischelda Hartman
Chapter 6: Ploughing back workers’ education: A critical review of an education programme
for trade union women
Vanessa Pillay
Chapter 7: The Nigerian Labour Congress: Towards systematised trade union education for
social transformation in Nigeria
Baba Aye and Valentine Udeh
PART 3: Educating workers on the local and global periphery
Chapter 8: Workers’ education and informal workers
Chris Bonner
Chapter 9: Learning and leadership in organising temporary agency workers in Canada
Aziz Choudry, Mostafa Henaway and Eric Shragge
Chapter 10: Workers’ education in the context of precariousness:
Thinking outside of the union box
Mondli Hlatshwayo,
Chapter 11: Plays as education: Producing useful knowledge for / with precarious workers
Astrid von Kotze
PART 4: Rethinking workers’ education: A conceptual toolbox
Chapter 12: Rebuilding workers’ education on Marxist foundations: Reclaiming ideas of
working-class struggle and socialism
Sheri Hamilton
Chapter 13: Anarcho-syndicalism and union education in South Africa: A critical evaluation of
the tradition of the Congress of South African Trade Unions
Mandy Moussouris and Lucien van der Walt
Chapter 14: Workers’ education and working-class hegemony: Distilling lessons from the past
in order to rebuild the future
Linda Cooper
List of contributors
Index
