In this chapter, evidence from past social movements highlights oracy education’s role in empowering marginalized communities in 19th-century Britain. Critics argue that oracy education diverts attention from socio-economic issues, exerting coercive control over the powerless. However, grassroots oracy within movements like Chartism and Suffragettes challenges these notions. The struggle for articulacy, I show, underpinned the struggle for the vote. These examples underscore grassroots oracy’s historical significance and potential implications for contemporary policy debates.

Modernity started with Darwin and probably reached its philosophical peak with Einstein. The appearance of modernity is associated with the rise of science as a dominant source of philosophical authority, and worldwide recognition of the rights of citizens, particularly women (the vote, birth control, etc.). For the first time, the orientation of philosophy was towards the future rather than the past, and ancient sources of knowledge, authority, and wisdom, were challenged. Some countries (e.g. Turkey under Ataturk) abandoned their past almost overnight. However, this is also the period of time when there were multiple challenges to the modern world view (based on democracy, the rights of citizens, and science). Religious reactionaries explicitly rejected modernity, whether it be in the form of creationist challenges to Darwinism or suppression of the burgeoning rights of women by the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions. Also, democracy as a model for government was challenged by fascism in the middle of the twentieth century, culminating in the mid-century wars of modernity: the Spanish Civil War and World War II. This chapter reviews the example of modern China, where the current government accepts some parts of traditional Western modernity while rejecting others.