The University of San Francisco USF Scholarship: a digital repository @ Gleeson Library | Geschke Center Rhetoric and Language Faculty Publications and Rhetoric and Language Research 2015 Communists and the Classroom: Radicals in U.S. Education, 1930-1960 Jonathan Hunt University of San Francisco,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.usfca.edu/rl_fac Part of the Education Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, and the Political History Commons Recommended Citation Hunt, J. (2015). Communists and the Classroom: Radicals in U.S. Education, 1930-1960. Composition Studies, 43(2), 22-42. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Rhetoric and Language at USF Scholarship: a digital repository @ Gleeson Library | Geschke Center. It has been accepted for inclusion in Rhetoric and Language Faculty Publications and Research by an authorized administrator of USF Scholarship: a digital repository @ Gleeson Library | Geschke Center. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Articles Communists and the Classroom: Radicals in U.S. Education, 1930–1960 Jonathan Hunt Concern about Communists in education was a central preoccupation in the U.S. through the middle decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on post-secondary and adult education and on fields related to composition and rhetoric, this essay offers an overview of the surprisingly diverse con- texts in which Communist educators worked. Some who taught in Com- munist-sponsored “separatist” institutions pioneered the kinds of radical pedagogical theories now most often attributed to Paulo Freire. Communist educators who taught in “mainstream” institutions, however, less often saw their pedagogy as a mode of political action; their activism was deployed mainly in civic life rather than the classroom.