Against the grain: Central to Marcus Solomon’s radical philosophy is the view that children are not empty slates — they are co-creators of knowledge and agents of change. Photo: Kelvin Vollenhoven
On 17 September 2026, I joined an audience of children and adults to celebrate the launch of Forty Years of the Children’s Movement (1983–2023), written by Marcus Solomon and edited by Koni Benson, a professor of history at the University of the Western Cape.
Solomon, a political and community activist, co-founded the South African Children’s Movement in 1980. Its work led to the establishment of the Children’s Resource Centre in Cape Town, which remains an important space that supports the work of the movement and protects children’s rights and their struggles. The fact that children were in the room, celebrating a book about their own movement, was fitting. This is a movement built on the conviction that children are participants in history, not spectators of it.
The book arrives at a time of uncertainty, when the rights and protection of children demand urgent attention. Commentators point to the threats children face:hunger and poor nutrition; violence, including gender-based violence; and unequal access to quality education, health care and safety — all within the broader context of a syndemic. Many of the concerns have long been at the heart of the revolutionary ideas of Solomon and the movement.
His constant refrain, “for children, the future is now”, is also a call for children to be treated with greater care and compassion. South Africa is rich in social movements, yet the children’s movement is seldom visible. This book matters because it brings children and the movement built with them firmly into view.
Across seven chapters, the book traces the movement from its philosophical and ethical foundations, through four decades of growth in its structures, activities and campaigns, to a closing assessment of the movement and reflections on its future.
Solomon’s work draws our attention to several themes and lessons that remain relevant today and that call for urgent action.
First, Solomon sets out the movement’s philosophical and ethical orientation, locating it in South Africa’s historical and contemporary contexts. He reminds us that this orientation is deeply rooted in the struggle for the socio-political and economic transformation of our society, a society in which the physical, emotional and intellectual potential of every child must be nurtured and protected. As socio-economic hardship deepens in working-class communities and affects children in many ways, that commitment needs even more attention now.
Second, Solomon emphasises the idea of the child as the “New Person”: a firm belief that building a new, democratic society depends on supporting children to become healthy, loyal, committed and active participants in it.
Central to his radical philosophy is the view that children are not empty slates — they are co-creators of knowledge and agents of change. This challenges “banking education”, a term coined by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. This model is dominant in our schools, in which teachers hold knowledge and deposit it into children as if they were empty vessels. Throughout his work with the movement, Solomon rejects this model. Children, he argues, are our teachers too, and we should learn from them.
Third, the book shows how the movement’s methods flow from the beliefs.
Its ways of learning and teaching are consistent with how it understands the child. Solomon offers an overview of approaches that reflect the movement’s philosophy: attention to the child’s social environment, the idea of the New Person and human values drawn from a radical tradition of education and learning.
Fourth, Solomon gives a rich account of how the movement, its structures and its activities evolved. Like many movements, it had to adapt to an ever-changing environment. The book captures its growth through an extraordinary range of projects and campaigns: developing children’s leadership, establishing children’s community projects and organising campaigns across the country. The pro-grammes recorded here tackle racism and xenophobia, sexism and gender equality, culture, education with pro-duction (from food gardens to sewing), environmental education, health and well-being, cooperatives and more. The movement also built campaigns on food, climate justice and cross-border solidarity.
Running through all this is a commitment to participatory learning, action and reflection, in which children learn by doing, reflecting and acting together.
This is a seminal text and its value reaches well beyond the history it records. By closing with an assessment of the movement and its future, Solomon invites us to ask what 40 years of organising with children can teach us now, as hunger, violence and an unequal schooling system continue to shape children’s lives and as questions about how children learn and whose voices count re-main unresolved.
The movement’s story also shows that social movements are themselves important sites of learning and that they remain relevant only by reflecting critically on their own practice as they navigate changing local and global conditions. The book is a record of what has been achieved and a challenge to take up what remains to be done.
It will be of real value to several groups of readers. Teachers and school leaders will appreciate the way it connects our beliefs about children with how we engage them in learning and teaching and the practical alternative it offers to banking education. Teacher educators in higher education, from early childhood development through to the senior phase, can draw on it to enrich the curricula that prepare teachers for our schools; it deserves a place on their prescribed reading lists.
Parents, youth workers and community organisers will find a wealth of hard-won, field-tested practices for working alongside children rather than merely on their behalf, recognising them as genuine part-ners in shaping their own lives and communities.
Activists and students of South Africa’s social movements will find a chapter of the history too often left untold. Donors and funders committed to children’s rights should read it as compelling evidence of what four decades of child-led organising can achieve — and as an urgent case for sustained, long-term investment in the movement’s work.
Above all, policymakers must read it — and act on it. Children’s needs cannot be deferred to some better future — every policy, budget and programme that postpones them fails a generation.
As Solomon insists, for children, the future is now.