Review: Revolutionary Education, edited by Nino Brown

This PSL publication is a collection of essays linked to political education. It's an uneven read.

Chapters 1-3 are the high notes of the collection. They lean on works by Vygotsky and Freire to present key considerations in education: build onto the base of what people already know, act as a guide as they venture into the unknowns; education is constantly happening, it's not limited to the classroom; education is a dialogue between people with different types or levels of knowledge, not a power hierarchy between those who know and those who do not know; link the topics you are learning to their broader context.

The remaining chapters suffered from being weakly related to the theme (the role journalism plays in education was not the subject of the chapter on journalism; there is an even more unrelated overview of Amilcar Cabral's life in Chapter 5), or a little low in content for a more advanced audience. Chapters 6 and 7, which deal more specifically with what organizing looks like and what mistakes organizers sometimes make, might be useful for getting other PSL members all on the same page, but don't present anything new, and don't present it particularly compellingly.

It's an easy read, however. Little knowledge is assumed. Each chapter is short and divided into short subsections. The language and arguments are straightforward. This book has a place on some reading lists, but not all.