These are good ideas. I agree that socialists should not seek to abolish schools. The system and curricula need to be reformed, the commodity form must be forcibly removed from the equation (no more numerical grades and inspections used solely to introduce market-like competition between pupils and institutions, etc), the teachers need to be retrained and multiplied, and the bourgeoisie must be kept away.

I think everyone should be dedicated to at least degree-level. But I’m also willing to accept that not everyone will want this (at least in the early stages of socialism).

There can probably be room for lots of different types of education but however it is delivered, it must be led by those concerned. As you say, democratic. There is a limited role for a socialist central government in enforcing socialist education. Otherwise, it should be left to teachers, parents, local authorities, health bodies, academics/researchers, trades unions/workers bodies, and the pupils. By this, I mean, education must be scientific, democratic, and serve the pupil/student and society.

There’s a limit to how much pupils (or students at university) can be involved in curricula design. Education is supposed to be transformative, so those who have yet to go through the process/course are not yet fully ready to judge it’s content. But they should be meaningfully consulted, and can have more say about the general running of the school.

Pupils could even be involved in the practical side of running their school. So cooking lessons age 5–14 prepare students to do a ‘group dissertation’ where they create and deliver a menu in the canteen for everyone else at age 15–16. Same for maintenance of the grounds, admin, etc. It’ll be up to each institution, so long as they are also tight on health and safety.

With better resources, schools can put on a wider variety of classes, too, and students can still have some choice in what they want to study. But everyone should reach age 16–21 with a broad foundational knowledge and skill set, so far as possible, before taking a note focused degree (which can also begin broad and become narrower). In capitalism, there’s an incentive to specialise early and to take courses that will lead to a job – the whole system is distorted because still the best jobs go to the wealthiest children, but the logic of merit prevails.

Under socialism, where specialist training and higher education is available to all, where all are encouraged to participate, and where all young people can forget about whether they need to pay or help with bills (and so leave education as early as possible), everyone can get a general education before heading towards a specific degree (or higher). When these people graduate, they’ll make much better decisions than people who only know their field.

Importantly, this will prepare everyone to participate in political life. It is fundamental that socialist education provide this to everyone (the main reason I argue that all should get a degree, if possible), rather than only providing this to the children of the ruling class. Well, let me put it another way: under a dictatorship of the proletariat, every child will be a child of the ruling class, and they must be as prepared to govern in the same way as all other children of ruling classes have historically been prepared to govern.

Then there’s room for lifelong learning, too. It’s probably unnecessary and counter-productive to force everyone into the same kind of educational structure and pathway. So lifelong learning opportunities must be provided for all. If someone really does just want to leave school at 15/16 and just get on with something they know they were born to do? They should be allowed to and receive the same kind of institutional support that those who stay in education receive. At the same time, this may rely on a bourgeois logic; I don’t see why socialists would divide ‘professional’/‘practical’ from ‘academic’ study, so the person who does ‘leave school at 15/16’ can still receive awork-based education/training and be around their academic peers for part of the week.

Under bourgeois education, there are three tiers of schools. Schools where the ruling class get taught to rule. Schools where the talent from the middle class get taught to prop up the ruling class. And schools where everyone else gets taught to be a disciplined worker. Socialist education must abolish these divisions.

Class sizes must be appropriate. If that’s 40 or 600, fine. But in most classes, it should be capped around 8. Schools must be provided the resources to achieve these numbers.

I’d also say – and this may be controversial around here – that children’s education can be mostly low tech. There’s a place for advanced tech. But it’s better to spend scarce resources on books, teachers, support, and space. We need to not give pupils tablets and laptops, etc, to perform tasks that can be completed on paper just because a tech salesman has convinced the school that tech is more important than the library, and the library gets smaller and smaller because the school now needs to keep replacing it’s tech due to planned obsolescence. But then, this issue is really about taking capitalists out of the environment. Under socialism, tech will last forever and can be repaired, so maybe the library doesn’t need to be affected.

A few things:

Students should be compelled to learn, not from their fear of getting a bad grade and being shamed by those around them, but by love and duty to learn. That can be done by reforms mentioned and other things that are currently being done in China.

As was mentioned, a goal of capitalist education is often to get people out of school and into the workplace as fast as possible. This leads to long school hours and minimization of off days. This is damaging for many people’s mental health, and should be reduced as work hours. Most people are probably not at their best learning potential at the seventh hour or the fifth day of learning. I’m sure some people are fine with learning for long hours, but they can choose to go to those programs on their own.

Another current problem is us having to wake up early and do long commutes. This also hurts students’ mental health. It can be fixed with more localized schooling. Here in the US in some places there are a few decent public schools, but mostly petty bourgeois white kids can get in as they have resources to hire tutors etc to help get in. Similar with private. Then those that are in have to get up early and get across town before the work traffic rush. This can be fixed with equitable local schooling. Everyone should be able to walk or bike to school.

Finally, we must get rid of the banking model (where teachers are supposed to dump info into students’ brains) and replace it with a dialogical model (as laid out in the pedagogy of the oppressed).

My child is in a montessori school, it’s pretty good, but it relies on small class sizes/abundance of teachers and assistants and whether this is possible under a public system is doubtful - yes we pay for this education, call me a bourgeoisie scumbag if you want but we don’t own a car or have any luxuries other than this and we live in a developing nation where the public education system struggles to provide desks, is devoid of resources and has serious problems with bullying and violence.

There is an element of democracy, with the students holding meetings to make suggestions and vote upon them, teachers guide the process and will listen to the students where possible and give valid reasoning where this isn’t possible.

I think this model is pretty good for many children up to the early teenage years but perhaps there should be some more structured vocational options for older children, if we were to do away with grades perhaps a system of certification of competency in different fields could be available.

One of the classmates of my child was held back a year since they have failed to acquire basic literacy/numeracy skills and so I am somewhat worried about the validity of allowing students to advance at their own pace, this seems to have been a result of poor adaptation to remote learning during the covid restrictions and while I have many criticisms of the education that was given during that period I’m aware that it was something that many institutions had trouble in adapting to.

The work environment has changed much while traditional schooling has struggled to adapt, obviously we need to change many things in education and perhaps one model won’t fit all students.

I had a more traditionally academic schooling and honestly it was very painful and traumatising - homework often seemed pointless and I couldn’t understand why I was being punished for not doing rote tasks when my grades were good. Traditional schooling is said to be designed to produce factory worker automatons and with the rise of robotics it is questionable how valid such a model is.

I think socialism should enforce a culture of education where to “go back to school” is no longer considered an insult. It should become mainstream and even expected that adults re-attend classes to gain a new perspective on the subject, and also to be offered second chances to improve their grades and their opportunities with respect to work. Other than reducing illiteracy in every subject and improving the general level of education, it will reinforce the belief among minors that there are reasons beyond school to attend class and to try and understand the matters that are taught. This will also address the Montessori criticism of the classical school system, namely that it places undue pressure on students and that they cannot learn at their own pace; and it will alleviate the need of current curricula to be repetitive.

Like all things when the workers seize power, I think socialist education needs to be built and we need to accept that we cannot change it overnight to a theoretically idealistic system. It’s likely that this will look different in both process and end-goals in different implementations of socialism across the world based on the needs and other material aspects of society such as culture and approaches. It’s also likely to continue to change and evolve with these needs and cultures.

In my country (Great Britain / UK) I see the following as immediate concerns for a socialist government to begin addressing (in no particular order / simultaneously):

• Better pay for teachers and other educational staff – teachers are woefully underpaid in Britain. This can be addressed very quickly with reallocation of funds, which in turn would presumably become more and more available as the state closes tax loop-holes and seizes assets from capitalists. There are also a multitude of other educational staff such as librarians, people we call “teaching assistants”, and probably a whole bunch of roles I’m unaware of that should also be compensated appropriately.
• Seizing private schools – there are private schools in Britain and they are perceived to have a better quality of education due to more resources acquired from their private funding structure. It’d be a logical step to seize these as assets and return them to public hands. This goes double for places like Eton. Seize it and return it. Remove its ability to support and perpetuate the Capitalist class.
• Reversing academisation – in Britain there has been a great push first under the neoliberal Blairite New Labour regime and now under the (also neoliberal, kinda fascist) Conservative regime to convert schools into “Academies”. This removes them from local authority control and establishes a “funding agreement” directly with the Department of Education. While central government funding is good in concept, the result of this is that local authorities (and therefore local people) have less and less power. There is also the case where “academy trusts”, basically non-profit companies, can be established and run several schools. This effectively privatises the UK mandatory school system, and sets the groundwork for a pay-to-learn system once the government decides the time is right to withdraw funding. Reversing this process alongside rebuilding proper local democratic power and establishing progressive federalism to enable participation in a central government would result in greater local power over education.
• Removing faith schools – There’s a weird thing in Britain where “Catholic Schools” seem to offer better overall quality of education but it comes at the cost of basically having a compromised education in particular topics (Religious studies and sex education are examples) and having to start attending church. I’d need to check this but I think they mostly exist as Academies so they might be dealt with by the above process, but otherwise they’d need to be seized as assets and integrated into the Local Authority education system and brought in line with the rest of the schools on particular topics.
• Improving working conditions in schools – I accept that “working conditions” is a very broad term, but I think that there is a bare minimum starting point which can be arrived at through co-operation and engagement with staff at schools and their unions to understand what needs to be done. Things like training and hiring additional teachers to reduce workload and class sizes and create room for longer breaks. I think this would be a slightly more medium-term process achieved over perhaps half a decade due to the need to encourage people back into the profession or attract people to do it in the first place, after decades of having it attacked by the government.
• Heavily subsidised food for staff and students – mandatory education is a wide-reaching entry point for short-to-medium term responses to problems arising from poverty such as malnutrition. Provision of healthy free or heavily subsidised meals distributed via schools would reach a large number of children. Provision of a three staple meals a day through schools for those who need it would be an obvious first step to take.
• Heavy investment in facilities and provision of equipment – as other comrades have pointed out here, this doesn’t necessarily mean technology wholesale. Things like space, additional classrooms, updating physical infrastrucure, provision of basic education materials to both teachers and students would likely be a good first step.
• Integration of mental health services – the British school system can be incredibly violent and traumatic (alongside other violent and traumatic results of capitalism experienced outside of school). This is a really knotty problem and one that likely has a lot of causes. Bringing in dedicated, specialist, well-paid and well-supported, mental health services for students which intregrate as seamlessy as possible into the school experience may be a good entry point for supporting students with their immediate mental health needs as well as generating body of professionals to begin providing front-line reporting on what students are saying is causing their mental health issues. Findings should of course be integrated as material for making other structural interventions across Britain outside/inside the educational system.

Once the above is achieved, I think we’d have a traditional education system but one which is not experiencing a constant crisis and is at least actually attempting to provide an education to students. Further things to consider at this stage:

• Remove imperialist and colonialist apologism and framings from education plans – self explanatory and arguably should be an immediate concern listed above. I’ve put it here because I believe that the British public as-is would be skeptical about government interference in schools and would need to see the proof of the good work above before being ready for this. It may simply be that this needs to be dismantled a bit more slowly, rather than having sweeping changes to the curriculum. Learning about the horrors of the British colonial and imperialist projects. Reframing “heroes” such as Churchill by revealing the truth of his actions and values. Etc etc.
• Democratisation of the workplace – I have less of an idea how this would work in schools or even what would be the most appropriate; but roles such as Heads of Department and Head Teachers (Principals) should either be re-thought entirely if necessary or at least distributed democratically through practices of workplace democracy or via participation of citizens in Local Authority democratic processes.
• Integration of Youth Workers as support staff – I’ve spent a lot of time around Youth Work charities in Britain and they successfully deal with a lot of children and young people who are excluded from education or otherwise don’t participate or are “lost causes”. Basically “the naughty kids”. There are different approaches to Youth Work in Britain and I have my favourites, but what I’m getting at here is that things in British education like bullying or “disruptive children” must be approached holistically or from various angles. Youth Workers are inherently trained to deal with the young people who suffer from and in-turn perpetuate these conditions in schools. There’s a lot of relationship rebuilding to be done on this front in Britain as Youth Workers don’t trust schools (for good reason) and schools currently don’t take Youth Workers seriously (at least not for the most part). Allowing a way for Youth Workers to interface or integrate into the education system will provide knowledge exchange as well as immediate relief for acute problems in certain circumstances.
• Outreach and integration to home-schoolers – given the utter state of British public education at the moment I can understand why many choose not to send their child to school but it does come with its own problems. Outreach should be done to these people to rebuild their trust in the education system as part of and during any reforms with the initial goal of removing these barriers and reintegrating the young people to the education system.

Other things I cannot suggest on specifically or have only had simple notions about:

• Rebuild pedagogical approaches – I am not a trained teacher but I’ve taken a light interest in pedagogy so please correct any misunderstandings I have. I’m usually drawn to Freire’s Critical Pedagogy as an entry point for how to reframe education. I think this would be a longer-term effort but one that pays dividends in achieving a better way of growing and sharing human knowledge.
• Teaching Dialectic and Historical Materialism – theory and practice. Teaching students how to do this type of thinking to come up with their own analyses and to critically examine the analyses of others can only be a good thing.
• Lifetime access to education – No idea with this would look like in practice or the specific needs of people at the moment. I’d like to see the ability for people to have the option for continuously accessing new material about things they’ve either learned previously during mandatory education or topics that are new to them. As well as being emotionally, mentally, and spiritually fulfilling for a human’s desire to learn and grow; this system would need to encompass the capacity to retrain workers from sectors of the economy which are either automated into needing minimum worker oversight or are replaced entirely (ie fossil fuels dying away).
• Reframing the “School -> College -> University” pipeline – British Higher Education is also broken, which I think is outside of the scope of this thread. In British schools Colleges (also known as 6th forms) cover education from the ages of 16 to 18 (give or take the age of someone resitting a year) and while experiences may vary, my experience and that of my peers was certainly “this is a stepping stone to University which is basically your passport to middle-classdom”. The only alternatives presented are vocational courses. I’m not sure what the experience of those on vocational courses is, but there was a dismissive attitude about them when I was at 6th form. Higher education is valuable but this attitude needs sorting out and there needs to be a variety of pathways in and out of the schooling system to the workplace and Higher Education so it’s not presented as a binary and fate-deciding final choice. I think this touches more on what other comrades have suggested around lifetime education and going back to school.