100pp, 2010
published by AND publishing
design by Ruth Ewan and AND

PRODUCED BY artist Ruth Ewan and published by AND Publishing, Don’t Be a Robot brings together one hundred drawings by young people. The drawings are imitations of a cartoon by political cartographer and artist J.F. Horrabin, first published in the magazine of The Plebs’ League in the 1920s.

In 1908 a group of working class students at Ruskin College, Oxford went on strike, claiming that they ‘found the specious lies of the professors in contrast to their workaday experiences; how impossible to them seemed the mutual understanding between employer and employee there advocated’. This student group became The Plebs League, an organization which attempted to create a new progressive educational system, free from capitalist and imperialist ideology, funded exclusively by workers’ organisations including, the South Wales Miners’ Federation and the National Union of Railwaymen. Issue 1 of The Plebs (which ran in various guises from 1908—1970) set out their agenda, the crux of which was ‘to permeate the Labour Movement in all its ramifications with the desire for human liberation’.

The collection of drawings reproduced within these pages act as homage to the work of Horrabin, a compendium of cover versions, whilst also illustrating the bind in learning itself—is there such a thing as a neutral education process?

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