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Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

During the 1940s and 1950s the U.S. Communist Party upgraded and broadened its adult education schools, abandoning or ideologically modifying the militant pedagogical centers that had sprung up during the 1920s and 1930s in many American cities. In New York the transformation was complicated as two Party schools (the Workers School and the School for Democracy) merged with each other to create in 1943 the Thomas Jefferson School of Social Science. The California Labor School in San Francisco was the West Coast counterpart of the Jefferson School. [2] I shall try to argue later in this paper that these two schools were quite different. At least two dozen other similar schools were created through the country, often replacing the local Workers Schools in the vicinity: among them were the Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago, the Samuel Adams School in Boston, the Tom Paine School in Philadelphia, and many others. Robin Kelley tells us of what had to be the very different clandestine Communist schools in Jim Crow Alabama. [3] Except for the latter, these were open, adult [4] Communist schools, accepting Communist as well as non-Communist students – except for certain specific courses to be discussed below. Some of these schools at their peak enrolled thousands of students each term. The extent of this Communist pedagogical empire may be news to people, since no adequate scholarly investigation has been made of what between 1923 and 1957 was possibly the largest system of adult education in America [5] – until non-Communist colleges discovered the cash cow of continuing education.

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