ABSTRACT
Published under the auspices of the Italian Communist Party after the war more than a decade after Antonio Gramsci’s death in 1937, the celebrated Quaderni has not yet been fully translated into English. Gramsci’s works seemed to vindicate the anti-Stalinist tenor of Khrushchev’s main report to the congress and also, more to the point, suggested a departure from the prevailing Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy that had reigned for forty years. Gramsci’s discussion is directed not only to the existing educational system but to what an educational system must provide under conditions where the key institutions of the economy and civil society are under popular control. Gramsci devotes considerable attention to education, among other institutions, because even in the wake of fascism, schools are primary sites for achieving mass consent for social rule. Gramsci-inspired writers on schools in advanced capitalism have, with some notable exceptions, taken education to mean schooling. Gramsci’s concept of education is, however, only secondarily directed to schooling.
