Dialectic Dismembered

Abstract

‘Smash the dictatorship of the head! ’. It was 1969 and the Schools Action Union had targeted the selective school Dulwich College in south London. The Union had decided to go and find out whether the College’s open day really was an ‘open day’. With active members from the Young Communist League, along with a variety of Maoists and anarchists, the Schools Action Union was a short-lived and increasingly sectarian revolutionary group of students. Its central aim was the dismantling of what it saw as the school Head’s sovereign power and a democratization of school control among teachers and pupils. Associated demands were freedom of speech, the outlawing of corporal punishment, abolition of school uniforms, co-education in universal comprehensive schools and more pay for teachers.⁶⁷⁸