Research

People to go back to (strikethroughs are people I've already been reading):

Leftist critics of renown include A.S. Neill, John Holt, Paulo Freire, Paul Willis, Herbert Gintis, Ira Shor, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Jacques Rancière and Noam Chomsky, just to name a few.

Phillip Jackson’s arguably tamer Life in Classrooms

John Taylor Gatto, 30-year veteran of public school teaching in New York

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: his ‘reproduction’ theory

Cornelius Castoriadis who combined both Marxist and psychoanalytic concepts in his extensive writings on ‘imaginary institutions’.

Quotes from this article:

Liberals and conservatives alike resemble Benjamin’s angel of history, their attention focused on what they perceive to be the present ‘rubble heap’ of education, colored by a nostalgia for a lost Paradise and by the yearning to ‘awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed’. As they back into the future, they often appear willfully blind to the concrete historical circumstances of those whose lives literally depend on schooling, and to the real obstacles to social justice that the least advantaged persistently face in becoming educated.

The inequities associated with highly variable funding schemes, teacher shortages or neighborhood segregation will not be solved by providing every parent with a voucher or ‘chartering’ urban districts. The claim that ‘privatization’ is the answer to the problems of our educational or political systems makes no historical or ethical sense.

In our view, quality schools should be public in the best sense of the word: free and available to all, everywhere, at the point of entrance; challenging and appealing to the intrinsic motivation to learn in all children; and entailing the cultivation of knowledge, dispositions and competences necessary for preparing young people to engage with the wider world. We therefore make no common cause with those seeking to undermine or replace public institutions or with critics who delight in reviling those whose task it is to teach and administer in public schools.

Indeed, narratives suggesting that the ‘sky is falling’ tend to be, in our view, grounded in fantasies about what public schools, or teaching and learning, are or could be, as much as they are grounded in the historical realities of public schools or the realities of so-called privatization. This contention is not unrelated to the observation that the liberal defense of public schools is most often undertaken by those with economic, social and racial privilege ‘on behalf’ of the variously disadvantaged, who may or may not share the same loyalty to these institutions.

The author of the story describes the academy movement as ‘the razing of state provision throughout the world. In the name of freedom, public assets are being forcibly removed from popular control and handed to unelected oligarchs’. In a related Guardian story, another author suggests that it is the teachers, students and parents that make a school what it is, not the authorities running it. Notable in the British context is the emphasis again on local ‘community’ control as an aspect of democracy, undone by the State and its corporate clients. Schools are depicted as public goods, not private commodities.

Is it not the least bit ironic that these people see individuals placed into ministries (without the permission or consultation of the public they claim to serve) as being "democratically selected?" People will decry corporate oligarchs, but they seem fine with those that were "voted in" (despite the fact that the election they were voted in from did not allow them to choose the best and most knowledgeable person for the Ministry of Education).

The liberal defense of real or imagined public schools, and its real or imagined heritage, is not limited to the Anglo-American context. The specific forms of this defense vary according to the particular histories of state-provided education in different localities, including the different purposes that citizens tend to believe are best or necessarily fulfilled by their public schools. Public schools in France and Japan are meant to instill loyalty to a shared French or Japanese culture, so as to produce citizens respectively loyal to France or Japan; American public schools are meant to provide individual opportunity for social and economic advancement, to be the engine of the fulfillment of the ‘American dream’; schools in most countries – from Singapore to South Africa – are believed to promote democratic citizenship, social cohesion, workers for the labor market and so on. But these defenses also usually partake of a familiar set of general propositions about what constitutes the public sphere generally, and why schools in particular ought to embody certain positive aspects of ‘publicness’. So in what does ‘publicness’ consist as this bears upon education?

Knight-Abowitz maintains that fair participation in shared governance is the first requirement for public schools, something we understand to mean that the issues entailed in decision-making should be accessible to the relevant public, whose informed preferences and opinions about how schools operate also should be taken under advisement. But Knight-Abowitz admits that representative and aggregative participation – the model in the United States of voting for the local school board, for instance – has been largely a failure with respect to engaging broad participation. A small percentage of voters turn out for such elections, and those who represent either majoritarian or special interests dominate school boards.

The structure that takes place in school boards also exists within private schools, so it's particularly interesting that people continually insist that these methods function (which rarely work anywhere and are often losing power, even if they manage to elect "progressive" people to them).

Private schools have "parent committees," and these things do very little because parents are not equipped (in terms of socialisation) to fight against schools... Even if that school is engaging in harmful behaviours that are hurting their own child. The entire structure, public or private, isn't as responsive as it claims to be.

These public institutions are also notoriously unresponsive to the ‘interference’ of the public, like parents. With the consolidation of school districts over the past century, leading to districts encompassing multiple communities and neighborhoods, the distance between school boards and their constituents has grown. Knight-Abowitz recommends a cure of deliberative democracy in which teachers, parents, older students and other community members are encouraged to create parallel governing structures. However attractive this remedy might appear, it would seem to depend, in the end, on fantasies about local communities and citizen organizations, and their possible relationships to totalizing bureaucracies like the public school system.

For the sake of legitimacy, public schools also must respect liberty and pluralism. At a minimum, respecting liberty entails accommodating a certain amount of choice with respect to parental and student preference; respecting pluralism, too, would require that schools be sufficiently diverse both in structure and organization in order to accommodate a range of interests and needs. But Knight-Abowitz admits that public schools do not and have not for the most part respected either. Conflicting demands between majority and minority values almost inevitably disadvantage minority students, despite laws that attempt to ensure freedom of expression and nondiscrimination.

Her remedy is a ‘bi-focal’ view of school governance through which competing demands might be negotiated. She suggests that the views of the local majority can sometimes be trumped through consideration of minority values, as well as through consideration of the law. But the ‘rights’ of minorities, in this view, must still be weighed against the preferences of the majority. In any case, the preferences of the majority – buttressed typically by politicians, school boards, school administrators and the national culture itself – always structure the everyday practices of public schooling. Neither ‘integration’ nor ‘value-neutral’ curricula have been sufficient to ensure consistent respect for the nonstandard persons who populate public school buildings: even when schools are almost completely segregated by race/ethnicity/class, the controlling mindset informing educational norms tends to be that of the dominant class, expressed through the structures and administration of schooling, even when the children of that class are permanently absent.

This pairs well, also, with the understanding that even "liberal-minded" or "progressive-minded" educators (or heads of schools) who still retain problematic understandings help perpetuate bigotries within schools.

For example, queermisic beliefs (particularly aimed at trans and non-binary individuals) can still perpetuate in a place that claims to be LGBTQIA+ supportive (because these spaces tend to lean heavily towards liberal understandings of queerness, which focus heavily on the cisgender LG side of things).

Similarly, there are certain bigotries that retain support within spaces that go overlooked by the head of school (or other teachers), especially when students are academically high achieving. This includes students who engage in misogyny, racism, etc but are seen as being "good people" because their grades and supposed effort in a course (two irrelevant factors) support them being "good students."

For Knight-Abowitz, equal opportunity is the third condition for the political legitimacy of public schools. The ideal is perhaps most commonly associated with public education and is meant to denote fair access to a level playing field on which all children, irrespective of ability or social standing, have a fair chance to receive an education sufficient for personal success and social advancement. But if that is the condition of legitimacy, the vast and persistent inequalities of opportunity and outcome in schools across the world might then indicate that public schools are not legitimate public institutions. Knight-Abowitz lays blame for the admittedly pervasive inequality on neoliberal policies that have decreased school funding and redistributive practices generally and on propaganda that maintains that poverty and discrimination are not more powerful than teachers in accounting for achievement. The preferred solution is an increase in tax revenues and higher investments in education, along with a return to active desegregation and anti-poverty government action. But even if one agrees with the critique of neoliberal divestment in public education, and agrees that government might take a more active role in relieving segregation and poverty, there is more than a little wistfulness in forgetting that before there was the ‘new poverty’ of neoliberalism there was an ‘old poverty’ and in most places even deeper, with more overt inequalities.

The fourth pillar of democracy in public schooling would be full attention to political education for democratic life. Knight-Abowitz suggests that this would entail both curricular attention, across disciplines, to the role of citizens in decision-making, and to the creation of ‘democratic schools’ in which students and teachers could actively practice democracy. The active promotion of democratic goals in curricula and pedagogy tends to run up against the problems of respecting liberty and plurality, but from the other direction. Many parents, teachers and students take school to be the place where individual goals of social and economic betterment can be pursued and are not motivated to give their time to ‘political education for democratic life’, which they tend not to see as promoting their own interests. The fantasy here is that ‘citizenship education’ – however valuable we might find it or however much we wish our own children would receive it – is not a central feature of most public schools. In fact, we would maintain that a very different kind of ‘citizenship education’ – one inclining toward materialism and consumerism – is very much part of the everyday life of schools and tends to lead to the very kind of disengagement in public life that those at the top of the field of education routinely lament.

Knight-Abowitz cites the professionalism of teachers as the fifth component for the political legitimacy of public schools, normally involving training and certification necessary for ensuring high quality standards among staff. But professionalism of teachers has an uncertain relationship with those ideal/imaginary aspects of public education that are democracy-promoting. Many teacher educators are ambivalent about promoting professionalism because it conflicts with other beliefs about who teachers are and what they (ought to) do. On the one hand, increased recognition of teachers as professionals seems to legitimate teacher education itself, to constitute an argument for better compensation, to increase the symbolic capital of teachers generally, and probably to increase the learning and development of students. Professionalization of teachers may also compete with the ‘expertise’ of local parents and community values, and potentially erodes the possibilities for democratic community organizing based on shared interests and status. Also, and perhaps more important, it is arguably difficult to sustain the identity between the ‘professional teacher’ (the expert, the technocrat) and the ‘caring teacher’ who acts as a parental surrogate. The demand for professionalism also conflicts with reluctance of citizens of education schools to recognize differences between teachers, to acknowledge the existence of a continuum of ability, motivation and competence among teachers, even among themselves, at the top of the hierarchy of teachers. But if the expertise of teacher educators does not ensure the professionalism of teachers in public schools, then the struggle for status within the Academy, always a losing proposition for the perennially marginalized ‘ed-school’, is further complicated.

I would also point out that there are a significant number of issues that arrived by requiring teacher certification. Some of which include nonsensical requirements within a hierarchy that should already recognise certain skills (e.g., literacy and numeracy tests that are required as part of someone's certification, despite the fact that the requirements to enter the program already infer the claimed "appropriate level" of literacy and numeracy); others include the fact that there is very little legitimate need for most school structures (and that being self-legitimising isn't a good enough reason to keep them), and the overwhelming majority of necessary skills could be handled through mentoring and community-based learning centers that promote and encourage self-directed learning (e.g., libraries in conjunction with print collectives and learning centers).

Everywhere there are enormous challenges in realizing the political legitimacy of public schools, and this is no secret to educational scholars and policy makers. Indeed, these phenomena are documented year after year in dozens of countries and appear in hundreds of publications, popular and academic, and the problems are usually the same that were present at the historical beginnings of public schooling.

This is particularly true if you read a lot of anarchist and socialist literature, as many of the same critiques that existed in the 1920s (for example) still exist today.

The systemic injustices of public schooling are what this professoriate routinely and unapologetically teaches its students about the history and theory of schooling. Nor should it be surprising to said professoriate that increased and more justly distributed funding, better teacher preparation and better teacher pay, progressive curricula and pedagogy, democratic governance, cultural inclusion, free lunch – all of which we would likewise embrace for our own children and those of others – have not generally made state-public schools less unsatisfactory than they are and have always been for a large proportion of the students who attend them.

For the record, better "inclusion" of disabled students has yet to significantly improve outcomes for disabled students. (This is largely because of how difficult the accommodations are to acquire when a student needs them; they also aren't provided for any of the disabled adults who require them.)

It also hasn't made schools safer for a whole host of people, nor has it fully enabled integration of all people into the same spaces (e.g., if the "liberal" or "progressive" people where I live truly cared about all people having equal access to education, Roma and disabled children would not be segregated into different schools... yet, they still are).

Despite what appears to be consensus about the shortcomings of public schools, those who declaim the ‘death of the public school’ appear not to have learned the lessons they themselves have preached and continue to advocate remedies that have been historically ineffective.

First, school systems are notoriously inefficient in distributing financial resources to those most in need of help. Second, extra funding may purchase specialized staff, new buildings, libraries and computer labs but still leave disadvantaged children alienated from learning if other resources are absent. Those resources will include things like strong leadership, positive school climate, appropriate discipline, nurturing teachers, a motivated peer group, involved parents, role modeling, career guidance and consensus on academic goals. Third, unequal resources, usually conceived exclusively as unequal financing, goes to the very fabric of public education, certainly in large countries where local control is paramount. But irrespective of the country or the specific context, it is a truism that local knowledge often is the best kind of knowledge for addressing the needs of local school children. Part and parcel of this favoring local control is to see ‘top-down’ approaches as anathema.

The distribution of funds has been interesting. Again, disability is one of the clearest ways to see how the "increased funding" doesn't necessarily lead to things like increased accessibility or appropriate accommodations. Not all disabled students require the same supports; this money is often provided with caveats explaining how it can be spent, and it often misses the supports that disabled students (and their families) state they need.

It also doesn't provide students who may suspect they have a developmental disability but not have "proof" in the form of a formal diagnosis (which also has a limited scope of recognition, as many children often go undiagnosed).

Inequalities, however, are not necessarily inequities.

The expansion of both the urban charter school movement in the United States and the academy school movement in the United Kingdom has at least in part been motivated by the insight that traditional state-public schools are not effective in leveraging increased resources to the benefit of the disadvantaged students they serve.

This is true. When the charter movement started, there were a number of progressives who saw them as an alternative that would actually function as ways to implement responsive learning environments.

But the whole thing has been co-opted (if not blatantly started by) right-wingers who wish to privatise everything.

Unfortunately, however, good teachers are not in abundance; indeed most countries struggle with a significant teacher shortfall, and even when there are enough teachers to go around, relatively few will be above average. And, typically, it is a truism that schools serving high concentrations of disadvantaged children are more likely to have teachers with less experience and fewer qualifications.

Mostly true, yes. But what exactly is a "good teacher?" And it's worth also recognising that having qualifications does not inherently make you a good teacher.

One way to change this is to offer better teachers strong financial incentives to work in schools with more challenging pupils.

"More challenging pupils" or children whose needs are going unmet within the school they're in?

On the other hand, in many circles to even broach criticisms of public school teachers is tantamount to launching a full-on assault against public education itself. Here, we encounter a myth about who or what the ‘public school teacher’ actually is, namely, an autonomous, student-centered agent. Contrary to this myth, teachers most often serve as agents of the state, and as such are entrusted with carrying out the aims of the state, which include using pre-selected course materials, administering standardized tests, advising for class placement and carrying out disciplinary procedures.

This is a criticism that I wish more people would be willing to broach. Conservatives are willing to engage in it, but they do so as a means to tear down learning institutions (regardless of what they are) that don't sit well with their traditionalist framework.

The left almost unanimously refuses to engage with it (except for anarchists and many socialists), refusing to recognise some of the key truths highlighted here.

Even those, like Darling-Hammond (2006, 2010), who champion teacher education (reform) and enhanced teacher agency, as the main levers to increasing public school success and legitimacy, are acutely aware of the perennial shortcomings of traditional teacher education. But the reforms that Darling-Hammond and others have managed to enact, built on intensive assessment and model of the professional, that is effective teacher tends to perpetuate the notion that teachers are and must be ‘in control’ of their own classes, while simultaneously subjecting teachers subject to the reformers’ hegemonic vision and regulatory schemes. This may signal a return to an underlying message of compliance that has been characteristic of teacher education for the past century, rather than the dawn of new era of ‘agency’.

As someone who often struggles in any school system to work in the ways I see fit (e.g., actually trying to be the socially-constructed "belief" of the teacher -- a caring person who acts as a mentor in student learning), the underlying message of compliance is spot on.

The reason I struggle is not because of how my choices reflect upon the class and classroom management; it's because I am frequently told that my methods are "unorthodox" and "unappreciated."

Even when students tell me all that they've learned through those methods, even when I build good rapport with students (and families).

Doing anything against the traditional model (or the "appropriately adjusted for modern times" traditional model) leads your colleague-peers to question you.

Each succeeding year’s academic scholarship testifies again to the lack of freedom and plurality, equal opportunity, shared participation, democracy and professionalism – to return to Knight-Abowitz’s list of legitimating factors – endemic to public schooling. One might submit that most scholarly careers in education have centered around documenting these daily features of public school life, where those who have documented the failures of public schools are the most keen to circle the wagons against any perceived threat to the institution of public schooling itself.

There are a couple specific education podcast hosts who I feel fit this description almost perfectly.

For instance, it could be the case that we simply have an instance of the insider-outsider dynamic, where it is perfectly acceptable to complain and criticize one’s own system but not for others to do the same.

Except...

There is something to this insider–outsider explanation, but it is questionable whether the analogies work quite so well in the case of public education. As we have argued, many of the criticisms of the public education system come not from outsiders but rather from those who are badly served by it. Indeed, many of the struggles to find alternatives to what ‘the local public school’ has to offer one’s own child have been launched by the marginalized and poor.

It could also be the case that one’s defense of the public school is motivated by the concern to reform rather than to relinquish it to the arbitrary machinations of the free market.

Except...

On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine the actors in any of these scenarios being opposed to alternatives to the services that they provide, let alone profound structural changes that may bring about an entirely different way of more effectively providing those services.

And a lot of teachers, administrators, and public school proponents are strongly against alternatives, claiming that any attempt to engaging in them is tantamount to destroying democracy.

The dominant model, as reformers willing to look inside as well as outside the system point out, is of course one encompassing legislation and massive investment from state governments, but also politicians, academics, teachers, administrators and social workers (to name but a few). And notice that all of these actors, to one degree or another, are dependent upon this leviathan of a system and hence are keenly (if unconsciously) invested in maintaining the status quo.

Again, our aim here is not to repudiate the idea of a public as this concerns important political ideals, or for that matter, essential features of the education system. Instead, we remind the reader that we are taking issue with the circle-the-wagons defense of ‘public education’ against any and all criticisms. Indeed, the knee jerk defense of ‘the public school’, and the concomitant fondness for what never was, engages in a strange kind of disavowal, a psychological rationalization that indefensibly reconciles what educational research has been saying for nearly 50 years with what needs to happen to begin to correct it. Taking always the ‘idealistic’ view (which again incidentally opposes the history and theory commonly taught in university education departments) in each case motivates liberal advocates of the public school to reject all manner of reform as a threat to ‘the public’. These views together represent a fantastical take on the ‘public sphere’ sharply at variance with more critical understandings. Moreover, to the extent that fanciful notions of this public are rhetorically invoked as cures for what ails us now, in our view these defenses merely exhibit bad faith, and as such approximate Baldwin’s (2010, p. 103) more general observation about modes of domination: ‘We have constructed a history which is a total lie, and have persuaded ourselves that it is true’.

Additionally, we surmised the possibility that in this blindness, there also was a kind of denial about how particularistic, non-inclusive, coercive and unequal public schools are. In other words, how is it that this knowledge of the real is so consistently eclipsed by appeals to an ideal, or an imagined essence?

But the fact is that most contemporary defenders of the public school do not seem so much interested in developing a normative theory of public education – where the distance between the ideal and the real can be explained sociologically, philosophically, economically or through some other disciplinary logic – as they do in simply promoting faith in a kind of transcendental, that is imaginary, institution.

This is something that I experience with so many people working in and around schools.

That is, an institutional actor imagines her world according to how the institution presents itself, historically, rather than according to how the institution actually functions, not to mention its effects on society, on its own agents and on its clients, or students or patients. To place this dynamic, as it relates to the individual, within a properly psychoanalytic framework, we might speak of the subject inclined to see herself in the reflection of the institution, so that in order to avoid narcissistic injury the institution must be imagined in such a way that the subject’s worth is preserved.

This definitely provides a better explanation for the kinds of interactions I've had with other teachers, some of whom acknowledge the issues of schools but then almost immediately dismiss them.

And with respect to the institution itself, representations of the public school as democratic, liberty-enhancing, equitable, participatory, democratic and professional – emanating from the broader field of public education itself – are imaginary inasmuch as they project what defenders of the public would like public schools (and their own academic bastions) to be, rather than what public schools in fact are.

These imaginary institutions are also self-representations, and the sense of the integrity of the self for those within the field of the public school depends on the ‘survival’ of this institution in its imagined form. In everyday terms, people tend to see themselves as mirror images of the institutions and organizations in which they have invested not just their time and energy, but their sense of identity.

And this is also a part of why I divested from the 'identity' of teacher (inasmuch as I could, beyond the requirement to have a 'job title').

Denizens of this educational field – professors and teachers, who of course themselves were once school-attending students – find themselves now in a situation Bourdieu called hysteresis, when dispositions are out of line with the field and with the ‘collective expectations’ of its normality. In situations of crisis or sudden change, especially those seen at the time of too-rapid movements in social space, agents often have difficulty holding together the dispositions associated with different states or stages, and some of them, often those who were best adapted to the previous state of the game, have difficulty in adjusting to the new established order.

Again, there are a few education podcasters who I can see this mirroring, but it's much larger than that.

But this also sounds identical to the kind of responses we've been seeing by so many officials, administrators, teachers, and families in response to schools during COVID. There is no attempt to adapt or change; it's all about maintaining the status quo, so this goes far beyond just the private/charter vs. public debate.

Quotes from this article:

A contradiction emerges: in order to do this we need to activate the techniques they taught us with other ends in view. To read, write, analyze, discuss. But this time not to pass exams, get a job, acquire social status, cultivate the admiration of others. No, here the effort is exquisitely selfish. Not an accumulation of data, but ideas to stimulate other ideas, questions to contrast facts. Roads towards action to be explored. Paths to be forged or meandered along, as we learn to recognise monsters behind their disguise and experiment the best weapons to confront them with, those that enhance our indefatigable quest for freedom.

Quotes from this essay (also here):

Both genres have ancient lineages. Utopia goes back to Plato at least, and from the start it had a relationship to satire, an even more ancient form. Dystopia is very clearly a kind of satire. Archilochus, the first satirist, was said to be able to kill people with his curses. Possibly dystopias hope to kill the societies they depict.

By that definition, dystopias today seem mostly like the metaphorical lens of the science-fictional double action. They exist to express how this moment feels, focusing on fear as a cultural dominant. A realistic portrayal of a future that might really happen isn’t really part of the project—that lens of the science fiction machinery is missing. The Hunger Games trilogy is a good example of this; its depicted future is not plausible, not even logistically possible. That’s not what it’s trying to do. What it does very well is to portray the feeling of the present for young people today, heightened by exaggeration to a kind of dream or nightmare. To the extent this is typical, dystopias can be thought of as a kind of surrealism.

These days I tend to think of dystopias as being fashionable, perhaps lazy, maybe even complacent, because one pleasure of reading them is cozying into the feeling that however bad our present moment is, it’s nowhere near as bad as the ones these poor characters are suffering through. Vicarious thrill of comfort as we witness/imagine/experience the heroic struggles of our afflicted protagonists—rinse and repeat. Is this catharsis? Possibly more like indulgence, and creation of a sense of comparative safety. A kind of late-capitalist, advanced-nation schadenfreude about those unfortunate fictional citizens whose lives have been trashed by our own political inaction. If this is right, dystopia is part of our all-encompassing hopelessness.

Sometimes I feel like this. While I genuinely enjoy dystopian literature, I often come away with the feeling that it's far too often "at least my life isn't this bad." And we're also seeing this now, with regards to the use of dystopian literature as a way to express things that are happening.

The constant use of The Handmaid's Tale is infuriating. First because it's constantly non-disabled cis white women pulling the story to highlight what is being done to them now, having ignored the plight of all others: Black women, Latinas, GRT/Romani/Sinti women, Indigenous women, and so many others have had their bodies legislated in ways that cis white women never have and never considered. Trans and non-binary people have all had their access to relevant healthcare and reproductive needs restricted simply for who they are, while trans women in particular (and even butch cis women) have had their access to restrooms legislated. Disabled people (especially women) have had to deal with being sterilised and being told that they "shouldn't be selfish" and have children.

Every single group has had their body legislated and monitored to some extent, but now non-disabled cishet white women are finally on the receiving end... So they pull this singular tale as a "what has happened now," refusing to engage in the history they've ignored.

But for so long, while it should've acted as a warning, people saw it in the very way Robinson states: "At least my life isn't like that." While I don't blame the book for this, so many people refused to engage with it critically and most certainly turned towards complacency. In some ways, this is is mirrored:

On the other hand, there is a real feeling being expressed in them, a real sense of fear. Some speak of a “crisis of representation” in the world today, having to do with governments—that no one anywhere feels properly represented by their government, no matter which style of government it is. Dystopia is surely one expression of that feeling of detachment and helplessness. Since nothing seems to work now, why not blow things up and start over? This would imply that dystopia is some kind of call for revolutionary change. There may be something to that. At the least dystopia is saying, even if repetitiously and unimaginatively, and perhaps salaciously, Something’s wrong. Things are bad.

It’s important to remember that utopia and dystopia aren’t the only terms here. You need to use the Greimas rectangle and see that utopia has an opposite, dystopia, and also a contrary, the anti-utopia. For every concept there is both a not-concept and an anti-concept. So utopia is the idea that the political order could be run better. Dystopia is the not, being the idea that the political order could get worse. Anti-utopias are the anti, saying that the idea of utopia itself is wrong and bad, and that any attempt to try to make things better is sure to wind up making things worse, creating an intended or unintended totalitarian state, or some other such political disaster. 1984 and Brave New World are frequently cited examples of these positions. In 1984 the government is actively trying to make citizens miserable; in Brave New World, the government was first trying to make its citizens happy, but this backfired. As Jameson points out, it is important to oppose political attacks on the idea of utopia, as these are usually reactionary statements on the behalf of the currently powerful, those who enjoy a poorly-hidden utopia-for-the-few alongside a dystopia-for-the-many. This observation provides the fourth term of the Greimas rectangle, often mysterious, but in this case perfectly clear: one must be anti-anti-utopian.

The reference Greimas rectangle is the following:

Besides, it is realistic: things could be better. The energy flows on this planet, and humanity’s current technological expertise, are together such that it’s physically possible for us to construct a worldwide civilization—meaning a political order—that provides adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, education, and health care for all eight billion humans, while also protecting the livelihood of all the remaining mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, plants, and other life-forms that we share and co-create this biosphere with. Obviously there are complications, but these are just complications. They are not physical limitations we can’t overcome. So, granting the complications and difficulties, the task at hand is to imagine ways forward to that better place.

One of the things I appreciate the most are people who refuse to be anti-utopian. We need more people to recognise that utopia is possible; it's possible for things to get better. We cannot give in to the hopelessness.

Immediately many people will object that this is too hard, too implausible, contradictory to human nature, politically impossible, uneconomical, and so on. Yeah yeah. Here we see the shift from cruel optimism to stupid pessimism, or call it fashionable pessimism, or simply cynicism. It’s very easy to object to the utopian turn by invoking some poorly-defined but seemingly omnipresent reality principle. Well-off people do this all the time.

Quotes from this piece:

Use every exhibition invitation with a budget to print something. Use the whole budget to print something. Make something in a large enough print run so that you have something to give away and surplus that you can sell. Your publication can be a folded sheet of paper, a booklet, a newspaper, a poster, a book, or anything in between.

Don’t aim to just break even. Aim to make a profit so you can keep making more publications and pay for your life. Publishing will probably never be your sole income but don’t lose money on purpose. Make things that are priced fairly and look like they justify what they cost to buy. The fact that you didn’t find a more affordable way to print something is not an excuse to sell something that feels cheap and shitty for a ridiculous sum of money. Good cheap printing is easier to find than ever before. Do your homework.

Free printing is good printing. If you have access to free printing, use it. Free printing is like free food at art openings and conference receptions. It is one of those pleasures in life that never gets old. Come up with an idea that is based around the aesthetics of whatever free printing you have access to and make the publication that way. Eat the cheese and bread. Drink the wine. Make the copies at work.

I’m against competition. Try to avoid competing with other artists for resources. If you don’t truly need the money, don’t ask for it. Artists should have a section on their CV where they list grants they could have easily gotten but didn’t apply for because they are privileged enough that they don’t need the money as much as someone else.

Collaborate with people and pay them with publications (if they are
cool with that) that they can sell on their own. Sometimes this ends
up being better pay and more useful than an honorarium, and it helps
justify a larger print run. But see what they need—don’t assume.
Barter with other publishers and sell each other’s work and let each
other keep the money. This helps with distribution. Sometimes it’s
easier to sell their work than it is to sell your own. Help others
expand the audience for their publications.

Above all, know that publishing is a life journey and not a get rich quick scheme, or even a make very much money scheme. Enjoy the experience of meeting and working with others, trade your publications with other publishers and build up an amazing library of small press, hard to find artist books. Get vaccinated and travel and sleep on each other’s couches. Be generous with your time, knowledge, resources, and work. Tell Jeff Bezos to fuck off by never selling anything you make through Amazon. Find the bookstores that you love and work with them forever. It’s nicer to have deeper relationships with fewer bookstores than surface level interactions with dozens of shops run by people you don’t know.

Quotes from this article:

Pursuing alternative means for access to learning spaces becomes fundamental when we understand copyright as a form of capitalist gatekeeping, one that – along with frequently increased tuition fees, skyrocketing rental prices, and, demands for certified linguistic skills – contributes to entrenching elitist class divides based almost purely on one’s capacity to pay. For anarchists and all those engaged in intersectional and class struggle, it’s no longer the old ad hominem of ‘educate to liberate’, but, in many cases, we’re waging a war to gain access to the very knowledge, methods, and tactics others spent decades researching. We must ‘liberate to educate’. So how, exactly, might we go about it?

This also reminds me of the arguments I've seen between using contemporary YA and classic literature in classes. People have put forth the desire that publishing houses selling YA are promoting the use of it to "make money" (which is probably true, as we can see that organisations like We Need Diverse Books are partnering with Scholastic) and that classics are "available for free or are very cheap to procure."

Which is sort of but not quite true. Schools will still purchase new copies of classics (which are still the same price as other contemporary YA). I think that there are publishers with ulterior motives who do use these spaces.

It's much the same way that JSTOR and the like will try to market themselves to universities (and even high schools), as it's "cheaper" than getting each article.

At the time of writing, Swartz’s Manifesto is offered in twenty-six languages demonstrating the reach work can have when texts are not confined into anglicised and privately controlled forms.

Inevitably, any concessions made from their 40% profit margins will be conveyed as a wonderful effort on the part of these publishers to make research ‘accessible’; in precisely the same way that banks are currently portraying themselves as providing the solution to homeless folk having been unable to open bank accounts without a fixed address without acknowledging that they imposed this condition in the first place.

Quotes from this article:

“Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten,” B. F. Skinner put it. In other words, the function of education is not to enable the learner to acquire specific skills or knowledge so much as to inculcate certain habits and ways of thinking. In a hyper-capitalist society, in which educational institutions chiefly serve to rank and categorize job applicants, the role of schools is not just to prepare us for the working world, but to resign us to it, reducing our ability to imagine any other form of learning.

(Introduction written in 2021.)

To speak of deschooling is to speak in favor of doing—engaging in self-directed, purposeful, meaningful activity—and against education—in the sense of learning directed from above, cut off from every other sphere of life and carried on under pressure of bribe and threat, greed and fear.

I'm going to be one of those people who is a bit nitpicky, but I think the common push from anarchists against using the word "education" (or using it to mean "institutionalised learning") is actually a problem for us in the grand scheme of things.

The first reason is that, colloquially, 'education' has come to embody what it means 'to learn'. If we discuss being "against education," people are reading it as "against learning." This automatically tunes out a lot of people who would want to join with us, to explore these topics with us, to understand them. (Side note: While some fields use a more limited definition of 'education', fields like anthropology generally do not; they use it to discuss systems of learning, which are incredibly varied.)

The second is because it is a useful term to co-opt for our own uses (see above for partial explanation). Education can and does happen everywhere, just as we say of learning. Learning is systematic, even it isn't institutionalised.

Using 'school' to highlight institutionalisation of learning is far more useful.

It doesn't surprise me that most of the people who engage in talking about going 'beyond education' or 'being against education' are those who haven't worked in or alongside people in compulsory schooling. This isn't to say that those who have a foot in compulsory schooling are better, but we are more engaged with how people understand education and learning. This is often neglected and to our own detriment.

And yes, all of this out of a simple word choice.

Your average music student thinks of music as a thing to learn, not a thing to do. Yet despite academies and conservatories, methodologies and method books, pedagogies and pedagogues and millions of rapped knuckles, the proper active verb in relation to the word music is still “to play.” You play music. You can also make music. Playing and making are the essential elements of being a musician. Yet instead of playing and making, the student practices compositions or works on assignments. If you practice, the implication is that you aren’t really doing it. You are always in preparation for when you’re really going to do it. Well, when are you really going to do it? At a lesson for your teacher? For an adjudicator in an exam or a judge in a competition? For parents or friends? Once you’ve really done it and your parent, teacher, or judge lets you know whether you’ve succeeded in making music or not, will you ever want to do it again?

Sentiment holds, but I take issue with the framing of skills. People do learn music, even if not done in a formal setting; they can learn the theory by first applying it (they may even find out about it and realise how it connects to their own practice). They learn skills related to it, even if they're not explicit.

To associate "learning" with "teacher-student oriented schooling" is a detriment to us all, and so I take issue with this idea. Can people learn from experts? Of course. Can they direct themselves to figuring out what works? Obviously, they should.

It's also ludicrous to associate "practice" in this way, too. We all need to practice skills of all sorts, for ourselves and for others. Does it need to be in a classroom setting? No, and ideally it wouldn't be (or at least not all the time).

Even if I'm speaking Slovak when at a gathering, I'm still practicing it. Practice and play can work in tandem.

Modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819, with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver: obedient soldiers to the army, obedient workers to the mines, well-subordinated civil servants to the government, well-subordinated clerks to industry, and citizens who thought alike about major issues. Thirty-three years after the fateful invention of the centralized learning institution, the US adopted the Prussian style of schooling as its own.

Compulsory education is still meeting our superpower society’s need to train citizens for subservience. In addition, education now prepares people for careers in various industries that Fichte couldn’t have imagined in his time. The biggest surprise of all is that education has itself become an industry. In a progressively mechanized world, in which self-checkout at the grocery store and e-ticket computer check-in at the airport are replacing the jobs that once kept citizens busily integrated into society, what can be done with all the surplus workers except to postpone endlessly their entry into the workforce?

It is said that today’s high school graduates can be sure that, if they are to have jobs at all, they will perform tasks we cannot even imagine yet. In the limbo between the known and the unknown, there is education. Teachers and administrators can always be employed when other jobs are scarce, and those taught to believe they won’t be ready to live life until they’ve been properly prepared form a ready mass of consumers. Would-be employees spend progressively more and more time competing with one another for an upper hand, an extra point, a longer list of credentials. This is an effective way to divert attention from the impending doom of unemployment and a ready explanation for why people some never get the dream jobs they thought awaited them—they just didn’t study enough.

Genuinely wish they would've highlighted more about the expectations that teachers must be preparing students for "jobs of the future." The kinds of discussion that teachers often hear about what they should be doing is beyond amazing, considering much of it is as if they are supposed to guess what jobs will exist in 10-20 years.

This has definitely come out more ever since before the DotCom bust happened, which was when teachers were lambasted in the media for "failing to prepare students for the future." ... As if we all are given some sort of crystal ball to know what to do. (Which, even if that were a thing, it's entirely absurd.)

Once upon a time, only the rich and powerful sent their children to school.

Kind of. This misses the mark because the rich and powerful didn't need to, and their children often received less schooling than those of the middling clerical and mercantile classes. People who had money but not status and thus used schools to acquire status through prestigious placements or professional titles.

The rich and powerful, the aristocracy, were often more able to secure positions for their less educated sons through nepotism.

In today’s credit-based economy, in which everyone is expected to be middle class and most must live beyond their means to maintain this illusion, the education industry has made a killing with a new form of protection racket. In order to be equipped for employment of all but the worst kinds, people must pay thousands or tens of thousands or even more to go to schools that teach few of the skills the job market actually requires. This traps them in debt for decades, forcing them to go on to sell themselves wherever the economy will have them. It’s a highly sophisticated form of indentured servitude. Is there really no more “educational”—let alone worthwhile—way to spend that much money? And would so many students, fresh out of college and desperate to live freely for once, immediately seek employment if they didn’t have such crippling debts to pay off?

From the perspective of the government, this old-fashioned institution is unreliable and unsurveillable. Schools and daycare systems, in complementary compulsory and voluntary models, ensure that children absorb certain values.

This runs counter to how conservatives often view the family, which is actually more surveillable than many people recognise. (After all, one only need to look at how some children under authoritarian dictatorships reported their own families to the government, even if by accident.)

A better connection here is that schooling makes surveillance of the family easier. It also has used children as a way to transmit the acceptable values to their families, though that is far more obvious with migrant families.

In pop culture, these homeschooling and non-schooling families are represented as hippies, religious fundamentalists, or extremist freaks.

Though true, this is because religious fundamentalists and extremists have overwhelmed most reporting about homeschooling and have influenced the majority of laws for it.

Also, homeschooling families are less often portrayed as hippies.

For the sake of deschooling, we should work to rid our minds of the prejudices that would have us view those who drop out of educational treatment as “failures” or “delinquents,” strays who must be caught and brought back into the fold. When we hear these things about school dropouts, we hear them from the point of view of the dogcatchers. Instead, we could view dropouts as refuseniks, conscientious objectors to a stifling and dehumanizing process. Many students whose caretakers defined them as dropouts have since redefined themselves as successful escapees from a useless educational career.

By the time they leave school, they have been attacked in both soul and body. Understandably, many refuse further “care” after suffering through intensive remedial programs that imply that they are unable to succeed within the system or to make it into society at large by any route approved of by their teachers. In schools that teach them nothing about themselves, they have been forced to learn to fake everything. Many have come to see school as a worldwide soul-shredder that junks the majority and hardens an elite to govern the others.

Most teachers are generous, intelligent, creative people. Some are very talented or knowledgeable in their fields and would be great mentors or friends outside the constraints of school. Many have given up chances to make lots of money because they believe in teaching even though it pays poorly. Especially if they are men, they sometimes endure years of being hassled by their families—“why don’t you find a real career?” Many teachers are terrific people. But the role they are forced to play in school keeps them from behaving as real people in their interactions with certain other real people, that is to say, students. Their talent and energy is drained by the task of constantly telling people what to do. As instructors, these good people scrape their sides against concrete barriers as they take the bureaucratic twists and turns any school requires them to. This is the nature of the fundamental restraints of institutional schooling.

Yes and no. I continually find many people who do not fit this mold becoming teachers; I find a lot of adults who think the worst of kids, who refuse to give them the space to be themselves. I find a lot of people who genuinely believe that punishing children for mistakes is the best way to help them learn.

So I disagree that there are a lot of "generous" people working as teachers.

But the role of teacher is covered in restraints. "Do not befriend your students" being one of the biggest and most conflicting. "You are not their equal" following closely behind it. Both of these are so incredibly wrong.

Let us not discriminate against the uncertified. If we must assess competence for a given task, let us assess it as directly as we can, and not conflate competence with the length of time spent sitting in educational institutions. Those of us who have spent a lot of time in those institutions can do our part to deflate the value of educational currency by refusing to boast of our own “official” educational credentials. Strike these from your self-image; demand that others judge you by your actual talents and accomplishments, the way you would judge others.

Let us frequent libraries, cooperatives, museums, theaters, and other voluntary, less coercive community institutions. Where they are inaccessible, let us work to make them accessible. Let us create more spaces in our communities where the young, the old, and those in between can get together to pursue un-programmed activities of all sorts. Let us end the policy of shunting young and old into separate institutions “for their own good.”

Let us spit on exploitative labor of all kinds, not just child labor. For the first several hundred thousand years of human existence, young people meaningfully participated in many aspects of securing the collective survival of their communities. It is age discrimination that mandates that young people must be taught about the world before they are allowed to learn from it by participating in it.

Silent and sustained attention is constantly interrupted by programmed noises. Specialized school subjects and the school bells dividing them into regular fifty-minute intervals interrupt the thoughts of any individual attempting to think critically inside the school.

We all have observed ongoing conservative culture wars over “family values.” These “values,” of course, are about kids: precious, obedient, little spittin’ images of upstanding agreeable citizens. People wary of change often fear that the young, the heart of the nuclear family, represent a potentially disruptive force.

This suspicion is well-founded. Young people—as anyone who takes them seriously can attest—often demonstrate an ability to draw attention to the political dimensions underlying everyday life: to the dubious pretenses by which authorities, often including parental authorities, establish themselves. Without censure, with the room to be confidently inquisitive and direct, young ones can discern the fundamentals of social relations by unearthing the root—that is, radical—details that betray the reality of those relations, reminding us of the hidden roots of power on which authority rests. Spying that loose edge, they may just pry it back to ask: Why? Why do my sneakers say “Made in Pakistan”? Why are the sidewalks in this part of town crumbling? Why are we supposed to go to school?

If we agree that children are good at learning, let our attitude and dealings with young people bear that out. Let us resist the temptation to become educators, to rub the noses of the young in our greater experience by unthinkingly adopting the roles of teacher, helper, instructor. Let us trust people to figure things out for themselves unless they ask for our help. As it turns out, they will ask frequently. People whose curiosity has not been deadened by education are bubbling with questions. The toxicity inherent in education is precisely that so much of the teaching that goes on is unwelcome.

Furthermore, in support of not only young people but all people, we would do well to nurture more accessible everyday places where knowledge and tools are not locked up in institutions or hoarded as closely guarded secrets. It’s easy enough to offer, without imposition, to share our skills with others. Take on an apprentice. Hang a shingle outside your home describing what you do. Let your friends and neighbors know that you can make such an offer to any serious and committed person.

If you do not wish to institutionalize your mind and heart within the limitations of school, consider also questioning classic love relationships, transportation norms, and other things people take for granted. Accompany your second look at schools with a second look at all things, all the time. Let us not cede the responsibilities we have to one another to institutions.

But should you be interested in receiving such an education, beware. Like Frodo and the ring, to put an institutional tool in your hand temporarily, even if with the goal in mind of destroying its power, is to risk falling victim to its allure and misguiding principles.