Education for Whom? Toward A Peoples' Pedagogy of Liberation

This essay advances a Maoist philosophy of education as both a critique of dominant pedagogical paradigms and a revolutionary alternative grounded in class struggle. In the context of a global crisis in education—marked by mass teacher strikes, student suicide epidemics, AI automation, and the commodification of the learning process— liberal and Soviet models alike prove inadequate. Liberal education mystifies structural inequality through the language of meritocracy and inclusion, while Soviet pedagogy, despite its emancipatory aims, often reproduced the very hierarchies it sought to dismantle, through bureaucratic centralization. In contrast, Maoist pedagogy centers the mass-line: a recursive process of social investigation, synthesis, and return, that grounds knowledge in the lived experiences of the oppressed masses.