Learning without Limits — A Marxist Assessment: A Response to Mike Cole, with a Reply from Mike Cole

Mike Cole argues in his article ( Policy Futures in Education, 6(4), 2008) that the Learning Without Limits (LWL) paradigm of transformability manifests ‘inherent social democratic politics’, offering merely a reformist rather than a revolutionary outlook. The LWL paradigm is further hamstrung, in his view, by a ‘lack of concern with the emancipatory potential of content in the curriculum’. Patrick Yarker tries to argue that the potential of ‘transformability’ is inherently revolutionary, and that while the relationship between pedagogical form and curriculum content is important (and a more fully-worked-out socialist approach to education would no doubt want to address this issue in some of the ways put forward in Mike Cole's article), the issue of content arises tangentially in a text whose chief aim is to offer the detailed outline of an alternative (and in the author's view oppositional) way of teaching within contemporary (English) schools, based on ‘actually-existing’ transformability practices.