Remembering the future

There was a period, from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, when a section of Western educationists, wider than was usual, paid at least some attention to radical discourse and the requirements of struggling for alternatives to capitalist education. This period of ' radicalism' passed quickly as, Delacroix-like, 'socialists' for the season retreated into more congenial intellectual frameworks and academic rituals. Within educational theory the many facets of the paradigm of relative autonomy were launched and socialism as an educational vision of the future began to fade. And the fading has continued. This roughly, is the current situation so far as socialist thinking in education is concerned. In this essay I want to express my own assessment of this retreat from socialism, and I want to reflect on the socialist significance of remembering the future - in Milan Kundera's (1983: 3) words, \"man's struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting\".