Communist Propaganda at School is based on an analysis of reading primers from the Soviet bloc and recreates the world as presented to the youngest schoolchildren who started their education between 1949 and 1989 across the nine Eastern European countries. The author argues that those first textbooks, from their first to last pages, were heavily laden with communist propaganda, and that they share similar concepts, techniques and even contents, even if some national specificities can be observed. This volume reconstructs the image of the world presented to schoolchildren in the first books they were required to read in their school life, and argues that the image was charged with communist propaganda. The book is based on the analysis of over sixty reading primers from nine countries of the Soviet bloc: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia from the period. Written with simplicity and straightforwardness, this book will be a valuable resource, not only to international academics dealing with the issues of propaganda, censorship, education, childhood and everyday life under communism in Eastern and Central Europe, but can also academics dealing with education under communism or with the content of primary education. It also brings educational experiences of the Soviet bloc to international researchers, in particular to researchers of education under totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.

In the second edition of this groundbreaking work, Derek R. Ford contends that radical politics needs educational theory, posing a series of educational questions pertinent to revolutionary movements: How can pedagogy bridge the gap between what is and what can be, while respecting the gap and its uncertainty and contingency? How can pedagogy accommodate ambiguity while remaining faithful to the communist project? In answering these questions, Ford develops a dynamic pedagogical constellation that radically opens up what education is and what it can mean for revolutionary struggle. In charting this constellation, Ford takes the reader on a journey that traverses disciplinary boundaries, innovatively reading theorists as diverse as Lenin, Agamben, Marx, Lyotard, Althusser, and Butler. Demonstrating how learning underpins capitalism and democracy, Ford articulates a theory of communist study as an alternative and oppositional logic that, perhaps paradoxically, demands the revolutionary reclamation of testing. Poetic, performative, and provocative, Communist Study is oriented toward what Ford calls “the sublime feeling of being-in-common,” which, as he insists, is always a commonness against.

Shortly after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, Hannah Arendt quipped that "only in America could a crisis in education actually become a factor in politics." The Cold War battle for the American school - dramatized but not initiated by Sputnik - proved Arendt correct. The schools served as a battleground in the ideological conflicts of the 1950s. Beginning with the genealogy of progressive education, and ending with the formation of New Left and New Right thought, Education and the Cold War offers a fresh perspective on the postwar transformation in U.S. political culture by way of an examination of the educational history of that era.

The New York City Teachers Union shares a deep history with the American left, having participated in some of its most explosive battles. Established in 1916, the union maintained an early, unofficial partnership with the American Communist Party, winning key union positions and advocating a number of Party goals. Clarence Taylor recounts this pivotal relationship and the backlash it created, as the union threw its support behind controversial policies and rights movements. Taylor's research reaffirms the party's close ties with the union—yet it also makes clear that the organization was anything but a puppet of Communist power. Reds at the Blackboard showcases the rise of a unique type of unionism that would later dominate the organizational efforts behind civil rights, academic freedom, and the empowerment of blacks and Latinos. Through its affiliation with the Communist Party, the union pioneered what would later become social movement unionism, solidifying ties with labor groups, black and Latino parents, and civil rights organizations to acquire greater school and community resources. It also militantly fought to improve working conditions for teachers while championing broader social concerns. For the first time, Taylor reveals the union's early growth and the somewhat illegal attempts by the Board of Education to eradicate the group. He describes how the infamous Red Squad and other undercover agents worked with the board to bring down the union and how the union and its opponents wrestled with charges of anti-Semitism.

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin (1875-1946) was one of the founders and outstanding leaders of the Communist Party and of the Soviet state, and a loyal disciple and colleague of Lenin and Stalin. Of peasant origin, he was active in revolutionary affairs from his youth. He became the first chairman of the central executive committee of the USSR, or titular head of state (1919-46), and was a member (1925-46) of the politburo.