Engaging citizens: the Kent miners and workers’ education for the common good

This article embodies a kind of backward travelling by revisiting the history of workers’ education in a mining community as part of our contemporary struggle to reinvigorate notions of the common good and popular education. Its focus is the complexities of working-class history, disparaged in neoliberal condescension and oversimplified in some progressive thought: a history of contention and struggle, yet rich in experiment in dialogical, democratic and cooperative learning.