ABSTRACT
British anarchist writing was a valuable if rather neglected baby, one with some distinguished forebears, but it was thrown out with the American deschooling bathwater. The anarchists, never mainstream, had been writing critically about education in the 1960s, but were too often lurking in the sidelines of educational debate during the 1970s. The new fashionable anarchy flies in the face of human nature, for it holds that children and students will work from natural inclination rather than the desire for reward. Read never loses sight of the individual learner in the anarchist fusion of individual and community. In so doing he attempted to revive the anarchist tradition of highlighting its pertinence to contemporary radical dilemmas regarding the exercise of individual conscience, war, nationhood, the growth of the state and the commitments of the socialist tradition. Colin Ward highlighted the anarchist tradition as relevant to contemporary concerns and an appropriate approach to modern politics.
