Introduction

The name of the late Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, appears increasingly in the

cultural media of the English-speaking world. Not unexpectedly, it occurs especially in

the literature of politics, but his work has also been an inspiration for the novel (e.g., John

Fowles’s David Martin) and in the theatre (Trevor Griffiths’s Occupations). Since Gramsci took a theory of education to be integral to political theory, reference to his work

has also begun to appear in the literature of education. In this latter context, the

invocation of Gramsci is usually little more than academic name-dropping with the

occasional promise, as in Karabel and Halsey, for example, that for educationists

‘Gramsci’s concept of ideological hegemony would seem to open up a particularly

promising avenue of thought’ (1977, p.369, note 9; see also ibid., p.vi). Indeed, linked

with the name of Gramsci, the notion that the school is hegemonic threatens to become

one of those slogans which frequently serve as substitutes for detailed consideration of

our educational arrangements. But it is by no means clear that a close examination of

Gramsci’s work would confirm him as authority for the radical rhetoric of much contemporary neo-Marxist educational theory and, especially, for that of those ‘new’

sociologists of education who invoke his name. 1 To be sure, Gramsci’s relevance lies

precisely in his treatment, within the context of his radical political theory, of exactly

those themes which exercise modern radical educationists: the sociology of the

curriculum, the apparent discontinuity between the culture of the school and that of daily

life, problems of language and literacy in education, the role of the state in the provision

of education, the cultivation of elites and the role of intellectuals, the relative functions of

authority and spontaneity in education and the ambiguous relationship of these to

differing political ideologies (especially to Fascism), problems of vocational education,

the place of theory in the curriculum and its relationship to action in the world outside the

school; and, in particular, the consideration of these themes in relation to the education of

the working class. Unfortunately for most of those who call upon his name but who

evidently know little of his work, Gramsci’s conclusions on these matters point in quite

different directions from those of current neo-Marxist educational theory.