The motivation to write this book started from my increasing concern with contemporary ‘culture wars’, as Chapter 1 explained. There were fundamental challenges for community education and development here, challenges to their theoretical underpinnings, challenges to a critical understanding of their histories and challenges to the very basis of their practices. Key theorists were being dismissed as ‘cultural Marxists’. And the histories of community education and development continue to be at risk of distortion by cultural warriors’ refusals to recognise, let alone to engage with, the legacies of slavery and colonialism.

Most importantly, cultural warriors focus on blaming ‘the other’, especially migrants and refugees, along with their ‘woke’ supporters, such as ‘lefty lawyers’ and bleeding-heart liberals. Those who have been characterised as ‘woke’ are supposed to be responsible for the challenges of the day. It is in this way that cultural warriors aim to divert attention from the underlying causes of increasing polarisation, discrimination, poverty and xenophobia, along with increasing threats to the very future of the planet. Cultural warriors’ methods represent the very antithesis of. community-based approaches that start from communities’ own experiences and feelings, taking them as the basis for critical but respectful processes of dialogue while aiming to contribute towards democratic processes of social change for the longer term.

In contrast, cultural warriors focus on stirring feelings of resentment and fear, fanning divisions within and between communities as a result. Far from disappearing, manifestations of such toxic divisions have been continuing, and indeed increasing, as I have been writing this book. For example, the previous UK Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has been strongly criticised for her incendiary statements about migrants and refugees, including her unfounded allegations about their supposed criminality – statements than could, and too often have, encouraged violent mobilisations from the Far Right. There have been community mobilisations, such as in Llanelli in 2023, when a protest camp was set up outside a hotel where asylum seekers were to be housed. This has been described as bringing a deluge of hate to a previously peaceful Welsh town (Chakrabortty, 2023). Such mobilisations provide chilling illustrations of the effects of these divisive strategies, potentially aggravated by more recent statements warning of a hurricane of migrants arriving on British shores.

Reasons for writing this book

Culture warriors have been re-enforcing divisive and discriminatory attitudes and behaviours, posing disturbing threats to social solidarity. And progressive social movements have been facing mounting pushback in recent years, vilified through Far Right cultural warriors’ toxic attacks on the very basis of their claims for social justice, challenges that have been effectively re-enforcing rather than confronting racism, discrimination, exploitation and oppression. These ideological battles raise many questions for community education and development, questions that are particularly acute for those committed to the pursuit of strategies for transformative social change.

Cultural warriors fundamentally question the theoretical underpinnings of transformative approaches. Their perspective on cultures, identities and the development of critical consciousness are at odds with the contributions of key thinkers such as Paulo Freire, whose writings have had so much influence on the development of debates on adult community education and community development for social transformation. It is precisely these types of approaches that are most threatened in the contemporary context.

In addition, cultural warriors’ attitudes towards the colonial past pose major challenges. These need to be explored more broadly and set within the context of debates about decolonisation. The histories of slavery and colonialism have been central to the development of community education. These histories date back to the post-slavery reconstruction period in the United States through to the British government's strategies for decolonisation after the Second World War. Their impact continues to be felt today and so needs to be critically examined and re-evaluated. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has been centrally important here, drawing attention to the continuing legacies of slavery and colonialism in the context of Far Right and White supremacist ideologies in the US and internationally.

There is now a greater awareness of the shameful legacies of the past, with enhanced recognition of the continuing impact of slavery and colonisation in the contemporary context. Conversely, there has also been a significant backlash involving attempts to undermine such criticisms, to trivialise them as ‘woke’ or to deny their significance altogether.

This chapter explores the contested histories of adult community education and development per se, from post-slavery experiences in the US through to post-colonial experiences in Africa and elsewhere. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive review, the chapter's aim is far more modest – to identify common threads that interweave with the themes of cultural wars, the development of critical consciousness and decolonisation, with a particular focus on the threads that have relevance for more recent debates about community education and development in practice.

The previous chapter challenged a number of assumptions about whose knowledge counts and whose knowledge is correspondingly devalued as a result. This chapter explores additional questions about whose interests are actually being served when people's knowledge is enhanced through community education and development projects and programmes. Is the aim to build communities’ resilience to cope with the challenges that face them, promoting self-reliance and individual advancement within the confines of their contemporary situations? Or do the aims go further, to enable them to address the underlying structural causes of their problems? To what extent have community education programmes been designed to safeguard the interests of the status quo? And how far have they been designed and delivered in more challenging ways within the context of strategies for decolonisation?

These questions have already been posed in previous chapters in relation to the contributions of Paulo Freire and others in different contexts. Here, the focus is upon projects and programmes in the post-Civil War context in the US and the post-Second World War context in Britain's African colonies. The final section reflects on potential connections with more recent initiatives to address the challenges of the legacies of Black migration from the South to the cities of the North in the US and Black and Asian migrations to Britain following the Second World War.

Community education and development in the US, post-slavery: from Booker T. Washington to W.E.B. Du Bois and beyond

Slavery was formally ended in the US in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. But early hopes for racial justice were soon dashed. Racial segregation and structural inequalities were re-enforced in the post-Reconstruction Southern states, including re-enforcement via mob violence in the form of lynchings. This situation continued right up to the Civil Rights Movement's challenges to segregation from the mid-20th century onwards.

In the 21st century, educators’ work is arguably more complex and more needed than ever before. The last six decades have witnessed significant changes involving global economic forces, increased competitive production modes, climate change and its ramifications on human and non-human beings. We have felt the impact in education of a pandemic, which seemed to ‘slow us down’, amid a fast-moving and ever-developing technological landscape which had, and continues to have, significant impacts on people’s ways of life. There has been a merging of finance, trade and communication knowledges; societal instability; and a global resurgence in right-wing politics and social movements which are exercised around assumed threats of immigration, ‘race’ and ethnicity and other forms of diversity.

Comparative measures of educational achievement (e.g. PISA, TIMSS, NAPLAN) demonstrate that although Australia is broadly understood to offer quality education, this masks stark and persistent inequalities. Wider disparities are evident between students from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds than in many other OECD countries. These inequities start before children enter schools. Children experiencing economic and social adversity are underrepresented in preschool and overrepresented in population level measures of ‘developmental vulnerability’ prior to school commencement. Young people from Indigenous backgrounds, rural/remote areas, and lower socio-economic backgrounds suffer significant achievement gaps across all measures, and the gap widens as they progress through their education. Some young people are being left behind as their more advantaged peers outpace them, with life-long consequences. Although public discourse encourages us to see educational failure as the fault of individuals, there is wide agreement that these inequities result from policy failures in Australian education.

Educators in Australia have a duty of care to their students, inclusive of both a moral and legal obligation to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the students in their care. Specifically, this duty requires educators to take reasonable measures to protect students from experiencing foreseeable harm; failure to do so may constitute negligence. In the simplest sense, a foundational element of educators’ work is to ensure the schooling environment is a safe one, free from bodily or mental harm. In practice, this may be more complicated than it sounds. Students may reserve verbal abuse and/or physically violent behaviours for when school-based adults are not present, making educators’ intervention more challenging. Further, individual schooling cultures may inadvertently encourage or discourage these forms of harassment through the messages of in/tolerance that educators convey to their students via their un/willingness to engage when particular students identity characteristics are targeted for harassment or victimisation.

This chapter is based on mix-method research, funded by the Australian Research Council, that was undertaken by Associate Professors Tania Ferfolja and Jacqueline Ullman, called ’Gender and Sexuality Diversity in Schools: Parental Experiences and Schooling Responses’. The study sought answers to two key questions. The first was what do Australian parents with a school-aged child who attends a public school want in relation to gender and sexuality diversity-related content in the curriculum? The second question sought to understand the experiences of parents of gender and sexuality diverse (GSD) young people in navigating the public school system with and for their child. Understanding these experiences can help to create safer and more inclusive learning environments, for not only GSD students but all students.

Much of Australia’s superdiversity is apparent in the cultural and linguistic repertoires of children growing up in multilingual families and communities in linguistically diverse highly urbanised and peri‐urban communities. Ideally, this superdiversity should lead to positive views of early multilingualism that inform curriculum and pedagogy which is responsive to children’s multiple linguistic repertoires and cultural practices. This approach would represent a welcome departure from deficit-based views of multilingualism, embedded in a monolingual mindset and English-only pedagogies that informs much of educational policy in Australia. However, in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) there remains a serious lack of investment, curriculum guidelines and pedagogical support in promoting and extending young children’s multilingual potential.

‘Islamophobic discourse’ refers to the systemic and widespread negative attitudes, beliefs and narratives surrounding the Islamic religion and Muslims. In Australia, Islamophobia has been constructed in media and political spheres, and manifests through everyday experiences of discrimination for the Muslim community. Islamophobia is often characterised by the construction of stereotypes and disinformation that operate to promote fear and mistrust towards Muslims and the Islamic religion, and features Muslims as threatening and disloyal. In addition to Islamophobic discourses and the resulting negative attitudes, Islamophobia has become deeply embedded across societal institutions, and the government has addressed ‘terrorism’ as a priority. This includes education and is evident through the de-radicalisation and countering violent extremism (CVE) policies that have been rolled out in some schools.