Community Schooling and the Nature of Power: The Battle for Croxteth Comprehensive School

In 1981, Liverpool Council ordered the closure of Croxteth Comprehensive School because of falling rolls. The local residents protested, and when this failed occupied the school and for a year ran it themselves with the help of volunteer teachers. Phil Carspecken was one of those volunteers, and this book tells the story of that year of community schooling. The period was marked by intense conflict among the members of the militant action committee running the school, and attempts by far Left political organizations to take over the movement. At the same time, traditional teaching methods within the school were gradually modified to reflect the culture and aspirations of the working class community which used it. Carspecken places all these events within a framework of sociological interpretation, developing throughout the book a new theory of "intersubjectivity" and its relation to power, and he concludes with an assessment of the lessons of Croxteth for schooling in other deprived urban communities, not only in the UK but also in the rest of Europe and in the United States.