When political education gets reduced to skills training, movements lose the structural analysis and political imagination that strategy actually depends on. How can organizers rebuild the conditions for real study?
The last two years have marked a considerable escalation of the authoritarian project that first came into view a decade ago. Attempts to censor the media and control curricula in schools, universities, and museums; the crackdown on immigration; the criminalization of dissent; the curtailment of voting rights and threats to elections; hawkish foreign policies and new wars — these and other developments have placed movements in a state of emergency. The responses on the Left have taken many forms: massive demonstrations, emerging national and regional coalitions, reenergized mutual-aid networks, a new generation of progressive politicians, and more. Alongside these efforts, calls emphasizing the need to educate ourselves and others have also grown stronger. We need to learn from previous movements, better understand authoritarianism, study organizing traditions, master civil resistance techniques, develop resources on racial capitalism, climate change, and other pressing issues, communicate more effectively, and train new generations of organizers. We need, in short, more political education
Current, notable efforts, such as the Center for Political Education and the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, have taken on the mantle of providing organizations with tools to develop critical knowledge and analysis. But the moment also invites a deeper reflection on the term itself. What exactly do we mean when we invoke political education? The democratic backsliding has made the relevance of political education increasingly hard to deny, yet the concept itself is rarely interrogated. What kind of education do contemporary movements seek, and what assumptions are embedded in that conception?
The Two Meanings — and the Narrowing — of Political Education
Social movements have always been sites of critical knowledge production and reproduction. By organizing to confront exploitation, oppression, and domination, movements generate a rich body of practical and theoretical knowledge: tactics and protest-related tools, assessments of existing institutions, collective memories, visions of alternative futures. At many points in history, movements have also embraced education more explicitly as a mission. Rather than treating learning as a by-product of organizing, some built institutions dedicated to cultivating critical consciousness and preparing people for collective action. Workers’ schools in the U.S. in the early 20th century, the Citizenship Schools and Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement, Zapatistas’ Schools for Chiapas, Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, and more — all exemplify a tradition in which education and educating are understood as inseparable from political struggle itself. There is hardly an organizer who denies the importance of these historical experiences or the need for movements to engage in education, or political education.
At a closer look, this long tradition points to two distinct meanings of this term. On the one hand, political education involves cultivating critical consciousness and expanding people’s understanding of the world — i.e., supporting participants in interpreting systems of power and inequality and visualizing their overcoming. On the other hand, political education means preparing people for political engagement by developing the practical capacities required for collective action — i.e., facilitating discussions, canvassing, recruiting participants, managing conflict, planning campaigns, speaking publicly, or engaging in strategy. Though intimately related, these two meanings are not identical. The former is primarily concerned with transforming the way people understand the world and their possibilities within it, while the latter focuses on equipping them to act effectively within movements.
While both have long coexisted, the balance between them has shifted over the decades. Increasingly, political education has come to be understood primarily as organizer training and skill-sharing — a component of movement infrastructure and a form of reproductive labor that sustains day-to-day organizing. Nowadays, a range of organizations approach education primarily as a means for immediate efficacy. The focus lies on organizing skills, messaging frameworks, theory-of-change models that lay out how to “win,” and similar. These are certainly important, but when the second meaning eclipses the first, political education becomes instrumental and bound to short-term outputs. When political education is not acknowledged as a broader exercise of critical inquiry, what gets lost is historical, structural analysis — or understanding the ways economic, social, political, and cultural factors combine and shape the realm of intervention at each moment in history. Political imagination is, thus, contained precisely when crises require its expansion. Put simply, if our diagnosis of the present is thin, our horizon of what is possible or what to do will be thin, too.
In addition to containing political imagination, sidelining an expansive view of political education produces a kind of boomerang effect. Narrowing political education to the technical dimensions of organizing ironically undermines the very capacities it seeks to strengthen. Organizing methods are never politically neutral or historically universal. Indeed, their effectiveness relies on the accurate diagnosis of the conditions in which movements operate. Such conditions have changed dramatically over the past two decades. The crisis of legitimacy unleashed in the 2010s generated an extraordinary wave of mobilization, as movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter attest to. But it also coincided with profound transformations of public life: the consolidation of social media as the primary medium of political communication, the intensification of individualization, the commodification of attention, and the fragmentation of the public sphere. These are features of “late-late-stage” capitalism, which has aggressively expanded exploitation and expropriation. Today, protesting carries a markedly different weight compared to the past. The question is no longer simply that of turnout, resources, or more disciplined or savvy campaigns — rather, it is whether the assumptions underlying those practices still correspond to the conditions they seek to transform.
Only an expansive conception of political education creates the space to ask and engage with questions at such a level of inquiry. Without sustained spaces for the study of history, political economy, and related fields, movements risk treating organizing models as formulas and developing ineffective or misguided strategies. For example, the current fight against authoritarianism cannot merely target political institutions, or confine itself to elections, courts, and representative institutions. Much of the scholarship on neoliberalism and the expansion of financialization since the 1970s supports the claim that the contemporary authoritarian turn emerged through market-driven transformations to insulate the economy. In other words, what we are witnessing is not an aberration but an expected outcome of increasing concentration of economic power and the imperative to maintain profits. Therefore, rescuing democracy requires intervention not only in political institutions but also in the institutions that organize economic life: finance, ownership, workplaces, and care. Pro-democracy agendas can only be consequential in the present by connecting the political and economic spheres more explicitly. This example is one among many illustrating that political education, understood as serious structural, historical analysis, enables movements to understand the terrain of the struggle and envision strategies more adequate to the current conjuncture.
Strategies are indeed historically situated responses, and the narrower political education becomes, the harder it is for movements to reassess assumptions and respond creatively to new political scenarios. When political education is reduced to technical training, movements gradually lose the space necessary for sustained study and collective inquiry. With that comes a subtle form of anti-intellectualism. The latter is not an outright rejection of ideas or study — anti-intellectualism here means a tendency to value theory only insofar as it can be immediately translated into “gains” or organizational “best practices.” Scholarship is maybe celebrated rhetorically but often approached instrumentally, as something from which to extract quick lessons or “takes,” not as a means of understanding and acting upon a changing world. Crucially, the effort to maximize organizing effectiveness may undermine itself, as the consequence of this arrangement is self-reinforcing. As analytical capacities diminish, movements become more likely to resort to blueprints or inherited formulas. As these blueprints and inherited formulas become stale or less effective, the demand for immediately actionable knowledge grows even stronger. Reclaiming the broader meaning of political education is, therefore, not a luxury or an academic indulgence; it is a practical condition for strategies up to the complexity of the present.
Why Political Education Narrows
Given the assessment thus far, it is important to emphasize that the narrowing of political education is not a reflection of individual laziness or an inherent hostility to theory. The anti-intellectualism I alluded to is not a moral failure, nor does it suggest that organizers cannot appreciate scholarship. Rather, the narrowing of political education is the outcome of a series of institutional arrangements, and among the most salient forces contributing to this tendency are:
- The non-profitization of movement organizations — The structure of several organizations compartmentalizes and organizes movement work around specialized functions. Consequently, political education is more likely to be conceived as a service to improve strictly organizational competencies rather than as an ongoing process of developing and cultivating critical thinking.
- The professionalization of organizing — Closely related, the same structure increasingly turns organizing into a career with its own competencies, incentives, and evaluation criteria. This professionalization undoubtedly has benefits, but it also encourages the cultivation of marketable skills such as facilitation, communication, fundraising, project management, and others, often disconnected from or at the expense of broader political formation.
- Grantmaking — Movement organizations are frequently subjected to grant cycles that privilege short-term, measurable outcomes. Campaign metrics and other deliverables are easier to quantify than conjunctural assessment, critical reflection, or shifts in political imagination, creating incentives to prioritize what can be counted over the slower, less tangible outcomes of study, inquiry, and debate.
- The decline of internal institutions devoted to learning and intellectual life — Many earlier movements maintained newspapers, journals, political schools, study collectives, and regular reading groups, whereas many contemporary organizations have either lost or never built these internal institutions. Newsletters, occasional workshops, webinars, or other online resources rarely make up for the breadth and depth that sustained spaces of study, inquiry, and debate can provide.
- Precarity and organizational overload — Contemporary organizers frequently face burnout owing to chronic fundraising pressures, fast-paced campaign cycles, and the expectation of constant responsiveness and results. Some are also exposed to economic insecurity and hold multiple jobs. In such a context, time and energy for sustained study are absent, even among committed organizers who understand its importance.
This shows that contemporary movements do not simply “choose” to instrumentalize political education. In reality, movements often operate under conditions that make such instrumentalization seem necessary or even natural. The scenario is considerably worse with the current crisis in academia. Over the last few decades, universities have further retreated from public scholarship, rewarding specialization over broad purview, hoarding language and prestige, and, with some exceptions, treating movements as objects of study — i.e., data to analyze — rather than collaborators in the production of knowledge. That made it even trickier for organizers to rely on what is made in academia. The latest attacks on universities exacerbate this predicament by further reducing the institutional space for critical thinking and, hence, the type of in-depth analysis that movements could possibly appropriate and build upon.
How to Reclaim Political Education
The observations above reveal an institutional configuration that directly or indirectly disincentivizes sustained study. Therefore, reclaiming political education in its expansive sense cannot entail aspirations or vague calls for “more education.” Put plainly, the problem will not be solved by simply telling organizers to read more books. What we need is to (re)build conditions that make dedication to structural, historical analysis possible to flourish and carry on. Some of the fundamental changes are:
- Time structures that allow proper dedication — Study requires duration since it involves wrestling with complex ideas, returning to questions over time, revising interpretations, and allowing disagreement to unfold. Organizations should, therefore, establish protected time for reading, discussion, and reflection, rather than treating study as a task squeezed in when time permits or after work hours. Without institutionalized time, political education inevitably collapses into briefings or talking points, and study becomes a privilege to which organizers do not all have equal access.
- Pedagogies that do not underestimate their interlocutors — The assumption that non-academic audiences need only simplified content is condescending and downplays their capacities. Countless educational experiences demonstrate that people can meaningfully engage in theoretical arguments when learners are taken seriously and the stakes are clear. The recent proliferation of para-universities, including pioneering institutions such as the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, demonstrates considerable demand for rigorous, intellectually ambitious education beyond traditional universities, challenging the false opposition between accessibility and complexity.
- Organizations willing to embrace non-scalability, temporarily or permanently — Not every valuable educational experience can or should be replicated and scaled. Seminars, reading groups, and recurring study circles often have to accept pauses or slow down. At the same time, they often generate forms of collective reasoning and political judgment that standardized workshops cannot replicate. Some of the most transformative effects of expansive political education emerge precisely because it is slow, relational, and unable to be quantified through metrics of reach or efficiency.
- Funding models that recognize analysis as political work — If political work continues to be evaluated primarily through measurable outputs, organizations will remain incentivized to prioritize training over analysis. Funders committed to movement building should support long-term educational infrastructures, including political schools, research initiatives, writing workshops, and study groups, as integral rather than auxiliary components of organizing.
- Revaluation of studying as a collective organizational practice — Political education should not be understood primarily as individual cultivation or personal growth. Fellowships and leadership programs undoubtedly play a relevant role, but educational initiatives should also address whole organizations. How do they cultivate shared vocabularies and preserve historical memory? Organizations must be capable of acting as well as thinking together, and educational initiatives can support the production of collective analysis of changing conditions as well as the flourishing of internal cultures where reflection is valued alongside mobilization
These changes counteract the institutional tendencies that make study, inquiry, and debate seem like luxuries rather than indispensable forms of political work. Of course, no organization can fully escape the pressures and demands of day-to-day organizing, particularly when the right-wing offensive is multiple and manifold. Fully eliminating these constraints may not even be possible, but minimizing them is. Ultimately, what is at stake is the capacity to craft strategies that move beyond short-term cycles and expand the political imagination necessary to transform the present.
If movements aspire not merely to react to the present but to transform it, they must reclaim political education as one of the central ways to understand and remake the world.
