Antonio Gramsci is arguably Italy’s most cited author in the literature concerning the politics of education.

His contribution to educational thought is immense in that, in order to do justice to his thinking on education, one cannot simply restrict oneself to his concerns about schooling or deal with specific aspects of his thought in isolated fashion. One needs to treat his work as a coherent body of thinking on politics and education, with Hegemony serving as the central concept in his ‘philosophy of praxis,’ every relationship of which is a pedagogical relationship.

Rather than focus on his specific writings on particular sites of educational practice, be they schools, island prison learning centres or workers’ education circles, or, as is common when dealing with other political theorists, glean ideas from his political philosophy and draw out their implications for education, here we consider Gramsci’s overall political project as a broad educational project. Being central to the workings of hegemony, in all its different social relational dimensions, education has to be viewed holistically as its presence can be felt throughout Gramsci’s whole corpus of writing; the quest for a process of ‘intellectual and moral reform’ warrants an educational effort on all fronts.

Peter Mayo is Professor at the University of Malta. He is also a member of the Collegio Docenti for the PhD programme in education at the University of Verona and a former Visiting Professor at UCL’s Institute of Education. He has written extensively on Gramsci and education, including, Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education (Zed Books, 1999), translated in seven languages, Politics of Indignation (Zero Books 2012) and his most recent Hegemony and Education under Neoliberalism. Insights from Gramsci (Routledge, 2015).

Nico Pizzolato is the author of Challenging Global Capitalism: Labor Migration, Radical Struggle and Urban Change in Detroit and Turin (Palgrave, 2013) and of numerous articles that focus on the interplay between race and ethnic relations, working-class self-activity, and political campaigns. He has co-edited Antonio Gramsci: A Pedagogy to Change the World (Springer, 2017). His most recent work is on unfree and precarious labour in Twentieth Century United States. He is Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University and Honorary Research Fellow at the School of History of Queen Mary, University of London.