In search for political consciousness: The role of workers' education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Unionists and labour activists often speak about workers' education, but what does the concept really imply and does it actually play a role for political consciousness? This paper is the synthesis of empirical studies from a Global Labour University (GLU) alumni research group on Workers' Education. Its uniqueness are case studies, where workers' education has been very seldom studied. Just to mention a few of the nine in depth field studies: shop steward training in Malawi, labour rights workshops in Indonesia, party education in a train depot in China, organising workshops in a syndicalist union in Canada. Workers' education is a contested educational concept and its definition, aims and methods through history are summarized to help to analyse the kind of education presented in the case studies. The paper also highlights Freire and Gramsci theories on political consciousness and education since they are the two authors who were convinced that workers' education can contribute to see oneself as the subject of history and that it therefore has an impact on political practices. The central part of the paper deals with the different case studies and discusses their findings along the following questions: What is the definition, aim and format of the educational activities presented in the case studies? Can we assess any impact of these activities on the political consciousness of the participants? The challenge to assess something as fluid as consciousness is addressed with criteria categorised in three forms of political consciousness: one labelled as "counter-hegemony to capitalism", a second as "class consciousness" and the third as "eing generally politically active" The case study authors have interviewed workers on their political practices after the education activities they have participated in and classified their findings along these three forms of political consciousness. In many cases a gap between knowledge and practices is noticeable. In a union environment, it is the so called class consciousness that is at best developed. Noteworthy, the studies show that workers themselves asses what they have learnt and why they can't or can practice it.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".