ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the education of radical-democratic hope in projects that were oriented simultaneously towards the critique of the existing social order and the systematic construction of alternative sensibilities, relationships and institutions. It addresses the distinctions between 'education for democracy', democratizing education and educating democracy, and examples of politico-educative projects for resistance, dignity and survival; collective 'social power', individual and collective self-determination and governance; transformation and liberation; counter-hegemonic advantage and revolution. The counter-hegemonic power of 'critical learning through social conflicts' and 'informal learning-in-practice' is explained with reference to Antonio Gramsci's theory that 'every relationship of hegemony is necessarily an educational relationship'. The emergence of more radically democratic theories of education from the same historical circumstances which gave rise to industrial and corporate pedagogies in the USA is a case in point. Anarchist education tends to be a kind of prefigurative cultural and intellectual work in the conditions of a 'pre-revolutionary' society.
