ARTICLE
30 June 2026

Class, Education and Social Change: A Study of Brian Simon’s Historiography of Education

Bowen Guan1 ,  Hao Luo2
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1 Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, School of Marxism, Nanjing 211106, Jiangsu, China
2 Southwest University, Faculty of Education, Chongqing 400715, China
CAS 2026 , 2(3), 21–27; https://doi.org/10.26689/CAS.v2i3.16125
© 2026 by the Author(s). Licensee: Bio-Byword Scientific Publishing Pty Ltd, Australia. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Brian Simon was one of the most influential British educational historians of the twentieth century, and he developed a new type of research in British educational history based on a Marxist school of thought. From 1780 to 1990, in his Studies in the History of Education, he systematically examined the institutional development of British education and used the theme of class struggle to show the dialectical relationship between schooling and broader changes in society. Simon's educational historiography has been systematically studied in the three areas of its formation conditions, basic features and research methods; this paper seeks to reveal the internal relations among class, education and social change in his ideas. Simon’s system of historical writing offers a new path for the research of educational history and may provide some inspiration for tackling problems of educational equity and reform at present.

Keywords
Brian Simon
Marxism
Studies in the history of education
Historiography of education
References

[1]  McCulloch G, 2019, The Struggle for the History of Education. Routledge, London.

[2]   McCulloch G, Canales AF, Ku HY, 2023, Brian Simon and the Struggle for Education. UCL Press.

[3]   McCulloch G, 2010, A People’s History of Education: Brian Simon, the British Communist Party and Studies in the History of Education, 1780–1870. History of Education: Journal of the History of Education Society, 39(4): 437–457.

[4]   Simon B, 1985, Does Education Matter? Lawrence and Wishart.

[5]   Samuel R, 1981, People’s History and Socialist Theory (1st ed.). Routledge, London.

[6]   Simon B, 1960, Studies in the History of Education, 1780–1870. Lawrence & Wishart, New York.

[7]   Simon B, 1965, Education and the Labor Movement. Lawrence & Wishart, New York.

[8]   Simon B, 1974, The Politics of Educational Reform, 1920–1940. Lawrence & Wishart, New York.

[9]   Wu C, 2012, British Historiography of Education: Founding and Transformation. China Social Sciences Press, Beijing.

[10] Smon B, 1998, A Life in Education. Lawrence & Wishart, New York.

 

Conflict of interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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