This paper reviews material from an intergenerational ethnographic study of class, education, and exclusion in some coal-mining communities in the north of England. The focus is on data showing some young people’s apparent rejection of the education project as a whole. Key intergenerational examples illustrate the process whereby the ‘disaffected’ - once able to become politicised through alternative educational routes now no longer available in these historically insubordinate communities – are now criminalised and pathologised. Developing pervious work by the author, school disaffection is interpreted as ‘refusal’ and theorised as a primary political act. In the absence of the traditional critical routes it is argued that, Freirean notions such as ‘redemptive remembering’ (Maclaren and Tadeau da Silva, 1993) are important in linking refusal to a positive praxis acknowledging local histories and, thus, supporting a new transformatory curriculum processes drawing on what Bloch called a ‘practice of concrete utopia’ (Bloch, 1995, 17) aimed at ‘learning hope’. References Bloch, E. 1995. The principle of hope. Cambridge, MASS: MIT Press McLaren, P and Tadeu de Silva, T. 1993. ‘Decentring Pedagogy - Critical Literacy, resistance and the politics of memory’ in McLaren, P and Leonard, P (Eds.) (1993) Paulo Freire – A critical encounter. Routledge: London