Schools of war

In his classic The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Friedrich Engels argued that workers engaged in industrial action gained knowledge of economic processes, tactical awareness in struggles and grasped the value of solidarity in the face of employers’ assaults on pay and working conditions. These struggles constituted “schools of war”; significant learning experiences for workers, argued Engels. Yet schools of war can take other forms, such as struggles against the capitalisation of education; educational institutions becoming sites of capital accumulation and preparation for capitalist work. In this sense, education has become a battleground as its privatisation, commodification, marketisation, commercialisation and monetisation have gathered pace in many countries since the second half of the twentieth century. This article argues that there are two main fronts in the war over the penetration of education by capital in contemporary society: the business takeover of education, as educational institutions become value- and profit-making sites; and the reduction of education to labour-power production. It explores these two fronts of war in terms of education policies in England and Brazil and argues for the establishment of forms of education beyond capitalist states and capital’s commodity forms.