Nerd Teacher

This Isn't About David Graeber

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:01:04 +0200

I think the best place to start this piece is with a simple declaration: I never knew David Graeber while he was alive. Like most people, I knew of him and, also like many people, had been introduced to a lot of his work around the time that the media kept dragging him in to say something during the Occupy movement.

I can only really credit him with helping me, a person from a rural community who'd never really heard anyone talk about anarchists (other than to insist that any form of unruly behaviour was "anarchy"), understand that there was even a word for people who held views like my own. He didn't do this on a personal level; it just kind of happened since everyone kept referring to him as the Anarchist Anthropologist, and it gave me a starting point to investigate what 'anarchist' even meant.

Somewhat amusingly (at least to myself), I knew of him before Occupy happened. I'm not saying this as a way to show that I was ahead of the trend (that'd be a weird flex), but I do want to say it largely because it's just true, and it came about because I also studied anthropology. As a student, I had come across bits and pieces of his work where it was available, and his name was originally recognisable to me because he had been the doctoral student of another anthropologist who I had taken an interest in because of his work and whispers of his activism: Marshall Sahlins. (Marshall Sahlins was someone I learned of because he, too, really hated Napoleon Chagnon. And with good reason because everyone should've.)

But anyway, this isn't about Graeber. At least, it's not meant to be about him as a person or an individual. It's about how weird it feels to see the way people use him and his work, particularly seeing how easily co-opted his name and work have been by liberals or minimally progressive leftists. It's about how even anarchists seem to use his name and his work as the final destination for their thoughts rather than expanding beyond it and seeing what more exists, either in the history of varying movements or in future possibilities.

Because it's really weird how people use him now that he can't say anything.

The most cohesive beginning of these thoughts started when I kept noticing a similar reply to things I had written. Every single I time I made any kind of post about the tedium in my work as a teacher and how it played into and supported the systems we're living under, there would inevitably be a handful of people making very similar comments. It was always some mixture of asking if I'd read Bullshit Jobs, linking me to the essay that appeared in Strike! Magazine, and then hitting me with one of the quotes from the GoodReads page for the book.

And I do mean every single time. It had become such a common occurrence that a good friend of mine created a Clippy meme for it.

I could not make any comment on any aspect of my job without someone insisting that I read it, as if it were the peak of labour activism and as if I hadn't been espousing the same ideas with or without ever having engaged with the book. It even got to the point where I started finding myself irritated even seeing someone mention David Graeber to me, and that started extending in general to when I saw people bringing him up... everywhere. This wasn't because he was a terrible person (I never knew him) or felt his work was worthless (though it was in large need of a whole range of critiques, some of it is still useful and interesting).

It was because other people were using him almost like a cudgel, as if his singular book (and not even the most interesting one) could save us all. It was like they viewed him as the anarchist messiah, and I found it... disgusting.

Though the essay was published in 2013 and resonated with many people (enough people that even Simon & Schuster thought it best to offer him a deal), the book was published in 2018. Ever since then, it has continued to resonate with people in rapidly de-industrialising countries that have practically shoved all their labour force into more 'white collar' work, whether the job needs to exist or not (this is largely an oversimplification of Graeber's point).

This makes sense, since that was largely what "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" was even about. If the talk he gave at RSA in 2018 is to be believed, it seems that the original article stemmed from observing interactions of people being apologetic for what they do for a living ("not just because they thought it was evil—some of them do—but just because they don't actually do anything"). Noticing a pattern in people's responses to such an anodyne question ("What do you do?"), he wanted to explore it further. This was done through what is effectively a discussion on a bunch of collated anecdotes from people who sent them to him in response to the original essay.

The essay and the book are... fine. It's taken me a long time to get to the point where I can see them for what they are and not the silencer they've become for a lot of people. Clearly they aren't my favourite things, and I doubt they ever will be. For me, part of what I don't like about Bullshit Jobs is that the focus is too narrow, asking the audience to consider if anyone would miss their job and letting that be the starting point for what is considered 'bullshit'. It doesn't really feel like it prompts people to start questioning the way the world works, including jobs they perceive as "necessary." If anything, the essay and the book both feel like very useful pieces of propaganda that support modern unions while still making concessions for the status quo to continue in some way (this is also how a lot of labour organising works, too).

However, I can also see them as having interesting cultural connections and as being a good starting point for people to build upon other ideas or to start seeing their own immediate work environment for what it truly is; it makes it much easier to recognise that, even if you perceive your job as partially meaningful, there is a lot of bullshit inherently involved in it. If you hadn't previously connected the dots between your own personal hell of tedium and what Graeber had pointed out out, it might spark some interesting ideas when read by someone who is better positioned to find something useful in it.

If only that was how most people were to use the book and essay.

To some extent, it feels like Bullshit Jobs isn't working that way, at least not anymore. When they're casually dropped in every thread about a vaguely work-related complaint, it feels more like a method of silencing or sidelining people and their burgeoning ideas, even when it feels like tacit agreement with their complaints. It's as if people are being repeatedly told that their own ideas, frustrations, and opinions don't even matter: "That has already been said! Look, David Graeber commented on it!"

This always annoys me. I find myself constantly staring at these kinds of responses, sarcastically thinking about how I'm so glad that David Graeber said it because now it means I can finally stop thinking about it and pull out random quotes until the end of time. Why bother engaging with my own thoughts? Why bother trying to converse about frustrations? I can just read his book and be done with it, and the world... will go on as normal.

Based on what little I've seen of Graeber and the few pieces that I've read about him, it really makes me wonder. How would he even feel about this? Would he want to be used like this? I can't know for sure, and I wouldn't even know who I should ask if I wanted to find out. But I can say that, as an anarchist myself, I find it difficult to believe that anyone who claimed to be an anarchist would want to be the thought-terminating cliché that many people seem to use Graeber as.

Though, if I'm being honest in my thoughts, it doesn't matter what he would've thought about this because anarchists should know better than to consistently place people upon pedestals. No gods, no masters, no idols... Y'know?

It should be clear by now that I have read Bullshit Jobs. This was something that I originally did while trying to be passively antagonistic toward an abusive school manager. For a whole week, throughout an excessively long professional "development" program where the hosts highlighted all the ways in which they'd never met a child in their adult lives, I sat reading this book and occasionally holding it in front of myself so that the cover would be blatantly obvious. The content was vaguely interesting enough to keep me occupied, and it at least amused my infuriated self that it annoyed the people it was supposed to bother.

My review at the time was that both the essay and the book were... acceptable. Neither text felt particularly revolutionary to me in the ways that many people seemed to find them, but I can appreciate the fact that a lot of people started shifting their perspectives on work after reading either of them. That is, at the very least, a positive influence.

Honestly, I think David Graeber found the ideas he presented fresh and new simply because other people hadn't put it to words in easily-accessible sources (or hadn't been allowed to do so), which I suspect is why other people found his 'new' take on work refreshing and novel. I can't fault either side of the equation for this because that simply was the reality. The mainstream media was full of narratives—both real and fictional—that extolled the virtues of hard work, and everything else was often difficult to find or only passed around in whispered conversations. It was rare to see someone talk about or write, in a very public form, that they believed that many people across Europe and North America believed their jobs (or even just parts of their jobs) to be entirely pointless.

But having spent a lot of my life looking at labour history and existing within spaces that were more often filled with marginalised voices that have traditionally been overlooked and neglected, this sentiment was never uncommon. I heard people talk about how they felt that their job was pointless with distressing regularity, and it often morphed into conversations about how they believed that they were pointless. I cannot count the times where I heard someone say that they simply couldn't figure out what meaning anything had anymore, and it was with excruciatingly regularity that people would relay these very messages along with the bigoted abuses they were enduring in their workplaces.

This isn't to say that even those people viewed their work as entirely pointless. Many people who saw value in their work struggled to not conflate what they were doing with the abuses they experienced, making it hard for them to disentangle the two. On top of that, you also had a number of people who recognised that their work should be wider reaching and more communal rather than being closed off to those who simply couldn't afford it. Many more kept pointing to all the tedious aspects of their work, trying to figure out how they could avoid them in order to do the actually useful parts.

And though Graeber's work did highlight that this pointlessness in our work was something that deeply scarred us psychologically and emotionally, those scars rarely felt like they were ever closely examined. He wasn't wrong, but I remember wishing he had delved deeper into what that meant and looked like beyond knowing that someone wasn't doing anything at all and that it hurt their sense of self. I wanted him to explore different understandings that were based in the many realities we all deal with, looking at these problems through any different lens at all. For example, how much more impactful would this idea have been if we explored it through gender, race, or migrant status?

That was one of the aspects that I found most lacking in those two pieces of Graeber's work: He really seemed to forget to look at things through varying lenses. Maybe this wasn't as obvious in that book because that wasn't the point of either it or the essay, but it always felt very much like there was a consistent failure to understand and recognise how work has often and always looked or felt different depending on geography or based on a person's identity. If anything, it felt like rectifying those omissions would actually have strengthened those ideas.

But then I kept noticing this same attitude elsewhere. In everything that I've read that he's written, those experiences are external and barely glanced at, even when it feels like it would've made his argument better.

For a long time, I thought it was just me who kept noticing that there were glaring holes in Graeber's argument that were, for example, distinctly feminist-shaped. This was especially because of how often his work would be recommended to me, and there was never any caveat about it or anyone expanding beyond it. But when I'd read other books or essays, it often felt like there were sections where he'd been called out by someone during the editing process for ignoring certain topics and then dumped a whole bunch of resources or evidence that probably supported his arguments into the footnotes or citations rather than actually weaving them into the story in which they belonged. His inclusion beyond the status quo, beyond what parts of the world he wanted to discuss, always felt rather... superficial, even if that wasn't his intent.

It was in reading one of my favourite obituaries^[1], "The Elvis of Anthropology" by Erica Lagalisse (an ex-partner of his), that I realised it wasn't just me and was something very visible across all of his work:

In the beginning we poured over an early manuscript of An Ethnography of Direct Action (2009), which unfolds partly in my home town Montréal, while his little-known MA thesis soon became a key reference in my own dissertation on anarchist social movements – an antidote to his own. He read very few of the feminist texts I recommended, but often cited them where I told him to.

But what I also recognised in knowing that I wasn't imagining that void of feminism was that many other people were following in those footsteps, whether they knew it or not. I don't think this was done out of malicious intent (and in Graeber's case, the feeling that Lagalisse's essay gives me is that it wasn't), but I can't help noticing how other people have failed to expand beyond the premise and have often used his ideas to constrain further discussion on what could be (and probably should be seen as) bullshit.

While Graeber's work can be interesting, especially for the time it was written and where it was located within the mainstream, why aren't people really expanding beyond it? Why does it always feel like someone is trying to make it the capstone when, if anything, it should've been part of the beginning? Something that could help highlight the cracks in the foundation of the status quo?

I have to wonder if it's because of how easily co-opted his work has been by liberal structures. Afterall, he said it himself—again in that RSA speech—when he said that it felt as if the world was conspiring against anyone who had done or said something that was interesting or unusual. He said that it was almost as if the world would conspire against them to never let them do that again, forcing them to do the same thing, give the same talk, write the same book... for the rest of their lives.

It's hard to say that he was wrong in this sentiment because it feels like even other people will assist in that project of ensuring that you're never allowed to be something other than what they will allow you to be, that they get to determine everything about you once you're dead, and that they will be the ones to decide how to use your name and being once you can no longer say anything. I can't count the number of times where people would openly call him the "founder of the Occupy movement" only to immediately highlight how he didn't want to be known as that. (And it also just ignores how it's not even true.)

People loved pigeon-holing him. They persisted in doing it while he was alive, regardless of how much he pushed back (if he did at all). But now that he's a corpse, it's even easier because he is someone who will forever be unable to stand up for himself.

I don't love that about how people use him, and it's because I don't love that about how people use anyone. If I look at the eponymous organisation, it's all about his legacy. Did he even want a legacy? Would he be happy to know that there are people who dwell upon his work as if it is the most important in the world, forcing everyone else's to circle it? Would he want people to barely push the boundaries of it? It doesn't matter if he did or didn't want that (though I can hope that he didn't) because that is what has happened, and it happens so frequently that it feels stifling.

I also have to wonder if he ever believed in the principles he professed in his earlier years or if those principles changed in his later years. Did the perpetual co-opting during his life soften him to holding more liberal values or was he always there in the first place?^[2] And was that part of what made him so easily co-opted by the mainstream, especially after his death?

With regard to the latter, it wouldn't be the first time this happened to someone people viewed as being radical who entered or engaged with a very liberal institution, like a university or a political party. It's not even a question that fully discredits their work, and it doesn't mean that they were inherently wrong about everything. But it is a question that I think highly contextualises their work, our relationship to it, and what they continue doing in their life (or what others continue doing in their name after their death, even if that's obviously beyond their control).

It also contextualises what many of those people—people professing similar degrees of "radicalism"—do in the wider scheme of things. Many of the people who have casually slapped me with a response about reading Bullshit Jobs are supporters of unions, but that is really as far as most of them go in terms of support for supposedly liberatory politics. They don't see the world beyond the status quo and how unions (useful as they might be) support it rather than going beyond it. Why don't they see the union as the beginning with moving towards an anti-work culture as the goal? What if that perspective, rather than one that supports the continuation of capitalistic systems of constant production, were written into Bullshit Jobs?

Graeber barely wrote about changing things on a fundamental level in his most widely read works (and sometimes skimmed it in those that were less read).^[3] It is partially because he neglected to write those things explicitly—if he believed them at all, that is—that his work has become so easily co-opted by more liberal people and under more liberal schema. Meanwhile, anarchists are far more likely to read this paradigm shift into Graeber's work, especially when he's marketed to us as the "Anarchist Anthropologist." Despite the fact that neither Bullshit Jobs nor the essay include any discussion on a fundamental shift in how the world works, it's already pre-packaged into a lot of our own internalised contexts when we read them.

Perhaps that's what Simon & Schuster recognised when they signed him to write this book. He was already writing for a 'general' audience who could infer their own values on something, so this book would be just edgy enough to sell (and make money for them) but general enough for people to imprint their own understanding of the world onto it with little effort.

After all, according to Erica Lagalisse, even he acknowledged Bullshit Jobs as his "sell-out" work. And maybe we should be doing more to recognise the ways in which other people utilise him and his work to maintain the status quo, driving people to change their perspectives as little as possible and silencing whatever desire they have to question the current structure of the world.

Would he want that to be his legacy? I don't know. I don't care, anyway. I just know that when someone merely invokes David Graeber or slaps someone with a quote of his and leaves it at that, it's nothing more than a tactic to stifle conversation and exploration.

As weird as a statement as this is, it is primarily for how candid it is in comparison to the typical fawning nature of the genre because I deeply respect reflections like this for when people die. While I have critiques of this work, I do still find it interesting and the writing is good. ↩
I'm not the only person who has asked this question. Reviews of his books (even excruciatingly fawning ones) have pondered this very thing because of actions he took in life, statements he made, critiques he refused to engage with, and works he published. ↩
Listening to this episode of If Books Could Kill, you can realise how little Graeber wrote about changing the status quo because of how often Peter and Michael both ignore the possibility of an actual shift in how the world works. I can't entirely fault them on this because they're not going to be reading it with that understanding in mind in the ways that different audiences would've had Graeber's works marketed to them, but that also means most people aren't going to read it that way either. ↩

Threads: 'Grading for Equity' Sucks, Chapter 2

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 10:26:32 +0200

These threads were originally posted on Twitter as live-responses to reading the book Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman. If you haven't read threads for chapter 1, you probably should start there. You can also read threads for...

Thursday, 06 January 2022

I hate this book (Grading for Equity), but I'm going to be live-tweeting my frustrations with it. So here goes Chapter 2. *inhales and screams internally*

There's more detailed information following this, but my biggest issue with this section is that its entire purpose is to conflate feedback with grading.

Grades are not feedback. Feedback provides people with a concrete understanding of how another understands.

When I provide feedback, it usually highlights a few things:
- What I find interesting and engaging with the work a student has created;
- Where I find issues (and prompting my student to respond to it in some way);
- How I'm engaging with their work.

Grades don't do this.

It really frustrates me that a lot of teachers are prone to conflating feedback with grading.

If you're one of those people, please explain to me the difference between each grade level and why we use subjective terms like "sufficient knowledge."

(Note: When I received assignments back, I didn't know what to improve upon when the only information I saw was "8/10." Nor did I ever know which comment written was associated with the two missing points. That's not feedback; that's confusion.)

Oh good, we've already met my favourite "progressive" educator: John Dewey. It really is true that we can't discuss education without mentioning him, and it would be nice if more people would look at his work more critically.

Instead of as some Educator God.

I'm going to look into the source mentioned, but it's interesting that he says "half of white children."

Which half, mate. Because I can venture a guess, since you want to flatten the history.

Fun. It's probably because the source itself flattens that information without actually exploring it (or providing useful sourcing to go back and check their statistics). Good job, 1993 US DOE.

Taking a break to hunt down some of this information to unflatten(?) the information provided and actually get a better history of what US schools (maybe others) looked like in the 19th century.

Here's an interesting article by Jurgen Herbst, though.

It's interesting that an EduCeleb with a fairly popular and liberal US-school podcast is quoted repeatedly in this book. It's almost as if that educator can be used for justification of every point of view because he's completely incoherent in how he talks about schools. 🙃

Sorry, maybe to be more pointed in my vague tweet.

I should've said a popular "education historian" who loves to ignore huge chunks of history in order to make a case for why schools should continue to exist and that they "support democracy."

Anyway, putting the hunt for stats on the backburner but writing it down to come back to after I finish reading Chapter 2.

Author of book is listing things that prompted change in the early 20th century. I'm going to wait to see if he asks questions about them.

I guess I'll be waiting a while for him to question any of this, since we're just regurgitating the "common knowledge" among every person I've ever met who has subjected themselves to a university teaching program.

No comments on why people would increase schools for migrants?

Also, no comments on how schools used the children of migrants to forcefully assimilate migrant communities? And still do? Maybe he'll say it later. (Probably not.)

This is at least a tolerable overview of how intelligence was implemented, but it neglects the development of societies for the "feeble-minded" that were part of schools.

If you want a good article on that, here's Osgood on Indiana.

(Both of the articles I've recommended, btw, were available before this book was written. So it's amusing to me how limited the exploration these liberal white educators who want to reform equity into schools really can be.)

Love how people will mention "Little Albert" today and just be like "it would be prohibited today."

Yes, because it's unethical and child abuse. Just say that. It's not going to detract from your list of "impacts on changes to 20th century schooling."

If this is an attempt to critique the use of schools to "Americanise" a population and to act as a homogenising force, it uh... I don't think it comes across well?

Like, I really am trying to be charitable, but it seems an odd to use "unruly mass of immigrants."

At this time, I'd like to highlight some of the labour education that was taking place in the early 20th century? Because this guy keeps highlighting the quotes of business and isn't critiquing them. From AJ Muste's "What Price Labor Education?" in a copy of Labor Age from 1928:

There was actually a fairly large push for labour education and schools associated with unions (both in the US and the UK) in the early 1900s.

The Rand School of Social Science was one of these.

And they were targeted by the NY's Lusk Committee.

The AFL (before it became the AFL-CIO) had a lot of people who were pretty pro-business and fairly conservative; many of them had their sights on positions as politicians (or in government agencies). They attacked both the Workers' Education Bureau and Brookwood Labor College.

The reason I bring them up is because this guy? Is acting like there's only one education history and ignoring that people were trying to act against the fact that businesses and their owners were influencing the design of schools.

I find that infuriating.

This is the first time the guy even presents any form of criticism of the grading structure (and its origins). Like, at all. And it's pretty fucking basic and the most obvious.

He, however, neglects to use a word we really need to use: EUGENICS.

Tracking is an inherently eugenicist policy. If you cannot say that, if you refuse to admit that, you have failed to even provide any form of relevant critique of grading. You're just rehashing reform garbage that does nothing to change anything.

Genuine question: Am I right in feeling that "black and brown ethnicity" is a rather... off phrase because it's conflating ethnicity and race?

Anyway, there's a lot of discussion in this section where he's like "vocational or lower tracks." First, this is an assumption that topics learned in "vocational tracks" are inherently less difficult or unimportant.

I have many issues with this.

First: The framing of "vocational vs. academic" is garbage, and he's not even addressing the fact that we do this. He's just privileging "academic" subjects over "vocational" subjects.

Why not create a space for people to do both?

Second: "Less engaging pedagogy" is an interesting way to frame the issue of students being seen as less capable and not ensuring people have access to spaces that are appropriately challenging according to their needs/desires and in ways *they* feel are best for them.

It's also an interesting way to frame the problem of *forcefully* putting students who are determined to "be incapable" in spaces that treat them as if they're barely human. And neglecting their actual needs and interests.

Third: State-supported pedagogies are inherently "less engaging" as a whole.

If individual teachers are able to be engaging and create an environment that encourages genuine learning, that's largely because they are *individually* doing what they can to work against that fact.

Fourth: All of this pairs well with my disgust for the fact that we put in crowbar separations between subjects, obscuring how they're related (and often have to rebuild and sneak into our own classes because the state-supported pedagogies maintain those boundaries).

I'm not surprised he didn't ask this question, but based on the information he presents before this (about how grades were encouraged by those who sought to push industrialisation and further create compliant workers)?

I'd have another question (see next)...

How was grading used to further alienate members of the school from each other?

If I communicate with students, families and other community members (as a teacher)? I'm more capable of building solid connections with the people around me.

Isolation is a narrative he's missing.

As I finish the chapter, he ends it with the unironically asked:

"Is our best thinking about effective teaching and learning thwarted by our century-old grading?"

In further chapters, he'll be arguing for keeping grading. So... yes. It is. Your book proves that.

The one thing I really hate about this book is that it's trying to make a case for grading by presenting a very flat history of grading. It highlights things and then doesn't even bother to write a sentence of commentary on them. See the bell curve mention here:

To be fair, this is a critique I have with a lot of academic texts. Just stating things as fact is absolutely pointless. And heartless. And distant.

If you care about a thing, why do you act as if it "just happened?"

Anyway, finished Chapter 2. Need a break.

Threads: 'Grading for Equity' Sucks, Chapter 1

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 09:53:49 +0200

These threads were originally posted on Twitter as live-responses to reading the book Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman. You can also read threads for chapter 2.

Thread 1: Sunday, 02 January 2022

Petition to ban former principals and administrators of schools from writing hypothetical scenarios as fact and as if they aren't responsible for establishing or changing school-wide policies.

I have read enough PD [professional development] books to see this trend, and it's such garbage.

The same applies to current principals and administrators, honestly.

Stop writing books about system-wide policy that many of you can change or refuse and then blaming teachers for its implementation. It's so disingenuous.

(In all honesty, the sentence could just finish at "stop writing books" because there are already far too many supporting and "reforming" harmful policies we should be questioning. While also blaming teachers for implementing policies they largely didn't ask for.)

Like, I'm not saying this shit isn't true, but this is the most garbage framing in a hypothetical situation about a "poor, clueless principal" who apparently had "no idea" teachers brought implicit bias to the classroom.

(From 'Grading for Equity'.)

Same book, trash framing.

Would love to see mentions of how principals and administrators have *actively encouraged* these behaviours. Because I have been in more places where that's true than these hapless admin.

What I have, as a teacher, run into more frequently has been: - teachers *trying* to find ways to consistently mark students (and often failing because we understand arbitrary systems in subjective ways); - teachers being denied time by admin to collaborate in this manner.

Like, I don't want to support schools because abolish them entirely.

But the impetus of these charter-running dweebs from Harvard (the author, Feldman, is) to attack teachers they directly impact with policies while "promoting equity?" Astounding.

Literally hate this book, and I'm still in the prologue. All of this should've started a "why do we do this?" or "the system is harmful" conversation, but he's decided to write it as "teachers are to blame for these contradictory uses."

Instead of blaming teachers, why not look at the system for treating grading as such? Why not stop to go "If this is what everyone sees grading as 'being used for', what should we do instead?"

But I guess it's easier to start from a place of assumptions that we "need" something.

Thread 2: Monday, 03 January 2022

Just want to also add to this [the previous thread] ban:

Administrators and principals who write these PD books pretending their ideas are great need to stop obscuring their positions, pretending they're teachers.

Especially because they do that to shit on teachers and create further division.

Again, in the long-term, we need to abolish schools and replace them with healthy learning communities.

But in the short-term, we need to throw all of these divisive admin dweebs in a fucking bin so they can stop pretending they're Oh So Wise about everything.

Thread 3: Monday, 03 January 2022

Here's a hint: Maybe it's because grading is a completely useless exercise that doesn't actually do anything of value and could be thrown out tomorrow with no real impact.

Goddamnit, this book sucks.

I'm basically cataloguing my frustration with this book here. I meant to read it as research, but now I just want to throw it out the window.

Someone, quick. What's the definition of 'arbitrary' again?

This dude went to fucking Harvard, was a school admin, opened a charter school... But he can't fucking recognise 'arbitrary' when he sees it.

I hate PD books so much. This is why.

Let me finish this paragraph about how grades "aren't arbitrary."

So... grading is based on a perceived relationship to students. And beliefs about students...

Which, idk, indicates... something is arbitrary?

I'm really stuck at YOU JUST DEFINED ARBITRARY. HOW IS IT NOT ARBITRARY. ALL OF THAT IS ARBITRARY.

Can we please just throw away the Education section of uni press houses until they learn what words mean and actually start critiquing themselves. I just can't.

Just to put up, this is the author of Grading for Equity.

And a fun thing to note is how close Harvard is to a lot of the major problematic elements of the US's charter school movement.

Including researching the one Zuckerberg did in Newark. Funded with his own money.

Anyway, back to reading this obtuse mess of a book that will occasionally ask a useful question but run as fast as possible towards "reform the tradition" instead of "question the system."

This is also a huge issue I have with teaching PD books.

Okay, so the book is trying to be all "sometimes the truth is hard to swallow" and "we all have webs of belief."

Yet he hasn't even tried to consider that grading itself is a problem and something to get rid of. It's so weird. (This passage is followed by Alice in Wonderland.)

Something else I hate about this book is that, when he talks shit about teachers, he likes using "we" to show that "he's one of us" (a teacher).

And then he swaps to "they" when he's talking about what teachers should do.

This is such a common rhetoric among admin, though.

I don't inherently have a problem with the issues he claims he wants to solve with "more equitable grading," but I still maintain that grading is going to perpetuate those systems regardless of how you do it.

And that there are *systemic issues* he's refusing to address.

Grading practices are going to perpetuate injustice, regardless of what we choose to do. It'll perpetuate hegemonic cultural practices, leaving out everyone else.

It'll still rank importance of skills, which are still going to be based largely in whiteness.

It's also still going to perpetuate patriarchy. It's going to continue marginalising people. Even if we do select criteria that are culturally relevant to marginalised peoples? It's still going to largely be the dominant culture *making those choices*.

Grading is Just Bad.

ALSO, it'll still uphold ableism in a lot of ways because non-disabled people often do not see the world in the same way we do.

Like. IT'S SO OBVIOUS, HOW ARE YOU MISSING THIS. (I know how he's missing it. It's rhetorical.)

There are questions to consider at the end of the chapters. This'll be fun.

Answer: They are people who deserve to be included far more than society includes them; they have every right to participate in the development of things that involve them as anyone else.

I think schools demotivate them, and I think it's largely because we silo them into spaces and force them to really only interact with people their own age (along with "approved" adults outside the family).

I think schools alienate them from society, honestly.

I think grading systems force them to pay attention to their grade more than what they could learn, but I also don't pretend that schools are for learning! Because they're most certainly not.

So abolish school!

(Yeah, I shouldn't answer all the questions he asks at the end.)

Grading is a pointless exercise, and I don't think it's worth considering. We should just throw it away.

That was much easier because the rest of the question set is irrelevant if you already disagree with the premise.

Well, I'm putting a pause on this nonsensical book for today. That was Chapter 1. The prologue is linked somewhere earlier in the thread, and I've put together a 'research' page for that's also linked earlier in the thread.

Welcome to why I try to avoid PD books.

Social Media Posts

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 09:52:53 +0200

As a result of most corporate social media sites floundering, I've decided to put together some of the threads that I wrote that I found most useful to myself.

Online vs. In-Person: A Manufactured Dilemma

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 15:43:50 +0200

On 30 November, I was listening to Novara Media’s stream of Tysky Sour with Michael Walker where, in discussing the UK government’s plans for Christmas, he made a reference to UK schools, saying the following:

“The government wants us to be having a binary debate between people who want to cancel Christmas and people who want to give you Christmas. Or a binary debate between ‘Kids shouldn’t have any education’ and ‘Schools should be open as normal’. And in all of these questions, there is a midway. I mean, school should be open but maybe we should fit them out so that they have greater ventilation than they already have instead of essentially, I think as the government did, mislead people to say they were safer than they were. So, there is just a great deal of honesty lacking from the government’s response. — And also imagination."

This comment has kind of stayed with me for the past few days, jumping out from some corner of my mind. One reason for this is that no one is saying that “kids shouldn’t have any education” because that’s a ludicrous statement, but my assumption is that he meant “kids shouldn’t be in school.”

The other reason is that he’s right that this is a binary debate that simply is not binary. There are so many options if people were willing to be creative and think outside the box, utilising a skill that is ironically “taught in schools” though every curriculum has tried to beat it out of everyone.

Yet, the majority of governments have done nothing to improve this situation beyond criticising teachers for “not doing enough” or claiming that parents “aren’t being responsible enough,” and they’ve definitely found a way to throw everyone under the bus and use the situation to score political points. They’ve squarely refused to look at themselves and what they’ve done to create this environment.

Things didn’t have to be this way.

And these problems are fairly global. These debates are happening in Slovakia where the government can’t make a decision about how to get kids back in school and the Prime Minister can’t even agree with the members of his own coalition, including the Minister of Education. This isn’t surprising, as he seems to have bent to nearly every complaint that has come across his desk from the Church and sports with regards to COVID lockdown measures. Members of the opposition are claiming that “children are being held hostage” and that their education is on the line because of political infighting among the ruling coalition. The Prime Minister has, as a result of being unhappy with the Minister of Education, decided to “create his own plan” and push for the private school his own children attend to open as a “pilot” for it.

The opposition sees this as him playing favourites, continuing to give priority and access to businesses that are close to him. Perhaps that might be where they attack him and his party in the future; he did make anti-corruption the largest part of his platform. But they aren’t wrong: it’s really bad optics.

In the United States, this argument seems to be raging. Despite an increase in COVID-19 cases, the mayor of New York City has apparently scrapped the benchmark that would keep schools closed, claiming that “kids are less vulnerable” (seemingly forgetting that children often live with adults and are taught by adults). Frustratingly, many other institutions were left open as schools closed, including gyms and restaurants. The notoriously rubbish governor of New York state agreed.

Across the United States, the debate looks similar, forcing more and more people into unsafe situations that are only exacerbated by the absurdity that is the United States’ failure to provide adequate and free healthcare for its residents. A lot of people, especially due to an increase in evictions and a failure to provide them with more than $1200 to hold them over for nine months (which not everyone received), feel as if they’ve been left to survive on their own.

The UK is unfortunately stuck with a Prime Minister whose indecision has left many people struggling and frustrated. Their situation looks very similar to the United States. Some schools are closed, others are open. Regardless, the government seems to ignore the fact that schools are high-spread locations for disease. People complain of backtracking and an inadequate online learning environment.

Meanwhile, his government seems to have much more interest in focusing on harming as many people as possible through deportations fueled by racism, trying to push them through in what feels like secret while people are focusing on a range of issues caused by their lack of COVID support.

And these countries aren’t alone in these behaviours. They’re not alone in creating problems for teachers, school staff, students, and families; they’re not alone in having struggling and overburdened school infrastructure that isn’t equipped to meet the needs of the people using it.

This is a global problem that has a lot of solutions, but those solutions do not benefit the people in power or their friends.

They do, however, benefit us all.

The first thing that we need to realise is that our public and state school systems are not adaptable. There is a reason for this: they’re not meant to be adaptable because the primary goal is to perpetuate a system that is largely a form of racist nationalism, ableism, and capitalism. Schools have been developed and organised around most of these concepts since their inception. Though schools are legally required to include students from marginalised communities, they still often leave a lot to be desired. The curriculum is often focused on maintaining hegemonic structures of power; we’ve seen this through the many people who fight to continue excluding LGBTQIA+ topics and people, in the way that textbooks gloss over colonialist and imperialist history, and in the way that schools with poorer students often lack the resources they need to help students “catch up” to what’s expected of them. We see this in how disabled students have to fight for accommodations that should already exist within the school itself, how attendance policies harm all students but directly hurt disabled and chronically ill students who may need more time off, and how there are still schools that completely segregate some disabled students from their non-disabled peers.

And capitalism? Well, the UK has been the most blatant in banning anticapitalism in schools in 2020. However, almost everything is taught through a capitalist lens, and the entire school is structured on a capitalist organisation. There are so many hidden elements of capitalism in the school that people don’t recognise them as being capitalist: competition over grades and placements in universities, not having a clear or consistent grading scale applied across the school, and many of the positive behaviour systems that teachers utilise (sometimes shops, sometimes points, often a competition among peers).

Not to mention the fact that so many of our texts have been written from a capitalist perspective. I taught Business Management in the IB for years, and there was never an option to include information about how business practices could be applied from another economic perspective. Even when discussing co-operatives, there was nothing about how they fit into a socialist society. It was always from the perspective of capitalism. (And if I deviated too much from the prescribed curriculum, my students' marks could’ve been much lower, thus disincentivising me from including additional material in my courses.)

So where do we start with actually changing education? Well, at this point, we should be asking about who education is for and why it’s important.

In reading a few texts about anarchism and pedagogy, the common thread is that education should be for the good of the individual and the community. Everyone has the right to learn and to explore topics and subjects that interest them, and this should be done within a community and with the understanding that the individual is part of the community.

This element is already torn away from the student based on the structure of school. It takes place in a building away from their culture and is separate from ‘the real world’. Kids often recognise this, even if they don’t know how to articulate the point. These are those moments where they’re asking questions like “What’s the point?” or “Why do we need to do this?” And they’re the questions that teachers have been trained to give canned responses about its usefulness, even when they also disagree with it.

And yes, many of us are trained to do that. I remember my own History Education instructor giving us a bunch of responses for kids who asked those exact questions during a lecture. That should’ve told him something about the history curriculum or how it was being taught, but I suppose it went over his head.

But I’m a person who does things very deliberately, so I found those questions helped me plan my classes. The moment a kid hit me with them, I found time to sit with them and discuss it; if a majority of the class had the same question, we took class time to discuss it. Most of the time, we all recognised how the things we were doing could be useful. But the moment that I couldn’t answer why something was useful, I started working with my students to figure out how it could be useful or if we should just scrap it and try something else.

When start the ‘online teaching’ during the first wave of COVID-19, I applied this logic to my classes and worked with my students to figure out how I could accommodate their needs as best as possible could (and without the support of my school director who told all the teachers to “just figure it out”).

It was still really hard, we were all trying to figure out what was best or most useful, but it was largely successful because we were working together. It didn’t always go perfectly and sometimes we had to reorganise and try again, but that’s the point of education: we’re all learning together.

But collaborative and flexible environments aren’t necessarily supported throughout the school, and it really shows in how things are prioritised and structured.

The curriculum and overall policies that are given to schools are often designed by people who aren’t in them; they’re often rigid and seem to require an ever-increasing amount of administrative work for everyone except the people creating those guidelines, even though they’re often pointless or provide little evidence of learning for the teachers to inform their practices.

The most common structure of schools is one that many school reformers have referred to as industrial; students are pushed into subjects regardless of whether or not they feel ready for them. Students get little agency in how they spend their day of learning, being pushed between random subjects whenever bells ring even when they aren’t ready to move on; they’re provided constantly decreasing hours for a range of subjects, and they’re often sitting in classes that are preparing them for upcoming tests. These tests often directly impact the schools or teachers, deciding how many resources they’ll get or how much interference they’ll have from their respective governments. None of this testing, however, actually does anything to help students; it just causes them more anxiety and decreases the amount of time they could be doing anything else.

There is little flexibility about how students can attend school; there is no flexibility of time, enabling students or teachers to practice when they feel most capable and when they’re most awake. Instead, we continually force people to fit into one specific chronotype and refuse to acknowledge that a spectrum of chronotypes exists. We do this so that students “get used” to a normal working day, which is sometimes done to their detriment.

Teachers are often pressed for time because of a growing number of unnecessary administrative responsibilities, finding it difficult to find time to collaborate on developing a curriculum that benefits their students. Teachers are directed by everyone above them about what to do and how to do it, and teachers who don’t fit certain molds or try to instigate for beneficial change often find themselves being targeted by their so-called superiors and pushed out of a career that many love. As students get older, the curriculum is more strict and tests are more important, removing opportunities to explore topics that students might actually engage with. Professional development is generally one person (usually a non-teaching administrator or non-educator from another sector) telling teachers what to do and how best to do it without considering the realities of the classroom; the time given to “collaboration” is superficial, as it’s most often wasted because no one knows what they’ve been asked to do.

All of this impacts the entire school system. It creates segregated departments of people who rarely collaborate, maintaining segregated subjects. It creates hostility between the departments, as some are viewed as inherently more important than the others (currently, the arts are among the first to be on the chopping block with humanities somewhere behind them). We divert resources to some classes and extracurriculars more than we do others, communicating what’s considered most important while leaving others to struggle and beg.

We segregate our “better” students from our “worse” or “difficult” students through a variety of means, including separating them based on language fluency (when it’s not inherently necessary), placing disabled children in euphemistically named “special needs” classrooms (when it’s not inherently necessary), and creating “gifted and talented” programs that often set up some students to view themselves as ‘better’ than their peers. Some students are placed in “special education” classes because of systemic racism, such as how many schools often place Roma children in ‘special needs’ schools or classes in Slovakia, and xenophobia across the planet often decreases access for multilingual children who aren’t receiving the services they need just because they can’t access them linguistically.

Meanwhile, a lot of families feel like they don’t even have a voice simply because of how the school is organised, which really stems from the fact that many schools just don’t have people from the communities they’re teaching in. This is something that’s been perpetuated by groups like Teach for America sending predominantly white participants into “inner city” or “urban” schools, especially because many of these people are not prepared to teach in any school and do not stay, creating a constantly unstable environment for the students in these schools as teachers rotate in and out. These teachers also bring preconceived notions of what things are “important” and how things “should” be done, without having a connection to the values of the community they live in.

This often causes more ‘policing’ of students from marginalised communities in schools. They’re targeted with more negative attention and punishment from their teachers, often receiving more detentions and suspensions. And while I initially used the word ‘policing’ figuratively, many schools with more students of colour (especially Black students) actually have police officers in them, adding to their anxiety and frustration in schools and providing the police more opportunities to terrorise communities of colour.

Everything governments and schools do make it harder to build a genuine community, and they perpetuate systemic problems, even when schools claim they’re designed to be the “heart” of the community.

They just aren’t.

And all of this is something that needs to be addressed, but we also need to be addressing how systemic oppression of marginalised people and capitalism impact our ability to make severely necessary changes to our schools.

There are a lot of possible solutions and places to start. Some of these things have already been implemented with some success in a variety of anarchist and socialist schools of the past; others exist within organisations like Waldorf schools, which has a pedagogy that focuses on developing students in a “holistic manner,” including equal focus on artistic, intellectual, and practical skills.

Recreating schools as community centers would force them to be more accountable to the community; it also helps them build connections to the people who are already there, making residents feel like they belong and both impact and are impacted by those around them. These ‘new schools’ should include things that benefit the community: recreation centers, entertainment spaces, community gardens, food, health clinics, and libraries.

Providing more flexible schedules is possible, especially when we take into consideration that there are options that currently take place outside of school hours. These options could take more priority in order to fully develop them and help incorporate multiple skills in them. Among the many choices we could develop, this could include properly developed online courses, a variety of sports programs that are fully supported, flexible apprenticeships and internships to learn practical life skills, participating in organising and mutual aid, and working with a mentor who guides them through research of personal projects.

We could even remove the specialisation of subjects for all students in the age range of primary schools in order to facilitate a form of learning that shows they are all connected.

All of this should help foster education as a lifetime goal and not just something you do until you graduate from school or university. Adults could come back to both learn and teach so that they’re not afraid to change fields should they want to.

Other solutions require that we look at expected outcomes. In this area, there are so many questions that we need to ask ourselves: Do we really need people to specialise in fields and skills? If someone wants to specialise in a field or skill, how can we enable them to do so? Which fields and skills do we actually need certifications and examinations for?

Related to this, we need to start thinking about levels of credentials and where credentials are received. These questions are more systemic and point towards our racism and xenophobia: What is the actual difference between a degree that’s obtained in the United States and the same degree from Pakistan? If there are skills missing from either location, why couldn’t that person continue learning until they have them instead of denying their abilities and knowledge outright? We should appreciate the skills and knowledge that people bring to our communities rather than ostracising someone because they’re “foreign” and “different.

Instead of setting an individual to needlessly compete with their peers, the goals of education should be for the individual to rely on their peers because they can learn from them. With few exceptions, all assignments and projects should encourage collaboration between others; students do not have to work explicitly with each other and can work on projects on their own, but they do need to learn how to interact with each other.

None of this would deny students who need more structure, either. The staff working in these schools could work with families of disabled and neurodivergent students who require more time and structure in their courses, trying to figure out where more support is needed and where students feel most comfortable being more independent or less structured.

The most important element of this is that the schools should have a horizontal structure where teachers and students work together. School directors, managers, and principals should become a thing of the past; the decisions in a school should be handled by the people who are most likely to be impacted by them. While there may be a need for a centralised person for the purpose of communication, this role could be a rotating responsibility; this would provide the teachers with the experience of communicating with the community, build camaraderie and understanding between the teachers, and also help decrease the likelihood that any one person should ‘take over’.

These ideas are just a jumping off point, and none of them are perfect; it does show, though, that we could create truly amazing schools that are genuinely part of our communities and provide us with what we actually need if we’d just think outside the box and be willing to make mistakes that we could learn from.

Instead, our governments have wasted so much time and continue doing so even as I write this.

All of the plans that we needed for COVID are plans that we should’ve had in place for decades to accommodate for disabled students and those who suffered from a medical emergency; they should’ve been there to help poor students and those who have to travel long distances. We had so much time during the summer to make the improvements we desperately needed anyway and to consider the options, but the politicians preferred to pay lip service by simultaneously applauding teachers for “doing so much” to keep schools going while shaming them for “not doing enough.” They made claims that we should “improve schooling,” but they never made any attempts to make any actual changes to what we were doing.

What they really meant is that they’d rather harm us, as Wisconsin’s Assembly Republicans showed this week by trying to penalise schools that needed to close due to COVID.

What they really meant is that they’d give us a few meagre dollars or euros to fix problems that should’ve been addressed years ago, as Slovakia did when it gave a combined total of €6 million to all schools so they could update their technology infrastructure, as if that would solve all the problems they were having. Suspiciously, they made no moves to improve national infrastructure and insure that all students had access to free, stable internet or computers. (But they did provide a very small printing allowance so schools could make packets for those kids.)

And it’s because they don’t actually care about schools, and the education that the majority of people receive is not something they really care about. What many of our governments care about is maintaining borders and oppressive systems; they care about maintaining hierarchies where they’re on the top and continually benefit while everyone around them struggles to survive because the politicians don’t really participate in the communities they rule over.

But our teachers and students don’t deserve that. They deserve support to be as successful as possible, and they deserve to be safe from potential dangers; they deserve to work with communities full of creative people who come together to develop genuinely innovative ideas that bring people together, ripping the irrelevant policies and unnecessary administrative tasks from their structures.

It's just worth remembering: what we have now didn't have to be like this. Our governments manufactured this problem, and they will do as little as they can (if that) to help us.

We can make what we need, but it will require a lot of organising and working together. It will require trial and error, as we learn what works best for our communities.

But it is possible, and we can do it.

The Power of Having Diverse Anarchisms: Building Alternatives Outside Neoliberal Globalisation

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 10:55:03 +0100

Note: This essay was written in collaboration with Sonia Muñoz Llort.

Introduction
A Little Bit of Context
Reasoning: Persistent Frustrations
Organisation Within Our Movements: Building Mutual Care, Accountability, and Collective Responsibility
Collaboration in Diversity: The Strength of Heterogeneity
Resisting the Triple Supremacy of Globalised Capitalism: IGOs, Corporations, and International Alliances
Conclusion

It should go without saying, but it appears that nearly every individual and collective we encounter is struggling with self-organisation and mutual support. Almost every conversation that we have across those we connect with highlights the same few problems. We hear complaints of groups that prefer to focus on 'building numbers' even as they engage in supporting and defending abusers and bigots within their ranks, further pushing people out. We hear complaints of exclusionary behaviours with groups or organisers completely ignoring almost any degree of accessibility and often refusing to do what it takes to maintain a healthy environment. We still see people trying to create hierarchies of inclusion which, they claim, is a result of "not having enough resources" to do everything and having to focus on only the "most important" actions.

This isn't to say that everyone is struggling in precisely the same ways because there is quite a bit of nuance and context in our varying regionalities, but there certainly seems to be an immense amount of overlap. Because of this, we frequently notice how burnt out people seem to be and how excruciatingly tired everyone is whenever we talk to them. It's also genuinely difficult to not notice in our own experiences how many people seem to think that they don't have responsibility to the others around them, especially when most of the complaints that people have seem to be very similar and are treated as nothing more than someone being a broken record when they keep pointing out problems that have gone unaddressed.

We don't understand this attitude. If there are any problems, why is there such a desire to sweep them under the rug or ignore them until something else changes for the better?

We say this now because, as we’ve been listening to so many others and engaging with or reflecting upon our own collectives and groups, we have noticed another common theme: Many people have genuinely lost faith in those around them, and they frequently feel that those individuals and groups who claim to support them would actually never do so when the need arises.

It also seems that many are also tired because of the lack of community and are constantly feeling as if there is nowhere they truly belong to. Not only have they had to struggle to find somewhere to which they can belong, they have found that the few organisations and collectives they could find are not equipped or are entirely unwilling to support them and everyone else. This can be seen in the sudden dissolution of many of the online communities that sprang up during COVID lockdowns, falling apart almost as quickly as they were built. Very little was done to ensure that we maintained these connections after everything went “back to normal,” especially with regards to those who have been unable to be physically present for whatever reason. Perhaps—though this is said with a glimmer of hope for a better explanation for our dissipating organisational and community spaces—most of the people who had once collaborated with others online are now busy engaging in local offline movements. Maybe, we hope, the collectives are doing more to build and support their local communities.

Because when we consider online spaces, nearly every space that we had created fell apart and moved back to focusing on offline spaces and activities, leaving many of the most vulnerable in even more lonely, alienated, and precarious positions. We've been left struggling to find remnants of the communities that we had before the pandemic started, but we've also been left to watch our online communities gradually deteriorate in favour of things that feel “more real” because many of us have never truly shifted our understanding that online spaces are not a replacement for the offline but are, in fact, part of the same realities and should support one another. So we still have to wonder if they are doing what they can to meet the needs of everyone, rather than merely offering empty platitudes and half-assed excuses.

It's difficult to really know. We can only really speak to our own experiences in the spaces we inhabit, looking at the ways in which they have seen dwindling participation because of their unwillingness to ensure the safety of the people they claim to support. We have seen people proudly proclaim that they are part of a specific collective and tout their position within it, knowing full well that they have done very little within it—or have, in some cases, supported causes antithetical to their collective's goals—and are only using the name to try and bolster themselves and their reputation among others.

They desire to build their own version of some kind of ‘anarchist’ credentials, adding every interaction to their activist resumé.

We also feel like the spaces that have been available to us are entirely atomised and frequently alienated, both from the place around us and larger movements. Sometimes it’s because others refuse to engage with certain ideas because some element of them would upset the status quo that they enjoy. For us, this has been most clear with regards to marginalised anarchisms, especially anarcha-feminism and queer and trans anarchisms. It has also been brutally obvious every single time we mention anything to do with the abolition of the school and academia or when we state clearly that we should support and encourage youth liberation. We have seen the co-opting of non-white anarchisms (by people who refuse to reflect upon their own whiteness) and non-Western anarchisms (by people who think it's logically coherent to support certain imperialist states over another).

The many anarchisms of marginalised people are continually used as tools and weapons by those who, though they deny it, maintain support for the very hierarchies that we seek to dismantle. Clearly, there are problems that we desperately need to address.

To top all of that off, we see groups that are practically paralysed out of fear in this high-surveillance world where we are being targeted by the increasingly fascist and authoritarian governments thriving around us. All too often, people use that fear to excuse continuous inaction (even with regards to the simplest of activities) and to continually silence those interested in doing what they can. This has been particularly easy to observe in interactions between citizens and immigrants, where the former often complain about the lack of participation of the latter while doing very little to help ensure that their safety won't end in their deportation.

While today it feels as if there is a constant cry about how we "can't do that," it's hard to not remember the many times where there have always been people trying to find every loophole they possibly could in order to do whatever was possible. It feels like we've become too complacent and have forgotten that every little bit helps.

It's undeniable that, for many people born after the 1970s, it has become increasingly easier to internalise and normalise a range of neoliberal values. For successive decades, we have seen the normalisation of beliefs that have supported hyper-individualisation, continued privatisation of the public sphere, the enabling of corporations to control vast swathes of the planet and social life, stagnating and decreasing incomes, and governments providing as much support for corporations and the wealthy which they then 'pay for' with cuts to whatever public spending remains. Though these beliefs have been around in some form for decades or centuries, the propaganda that they spread to support these ideas has become far more accessible to current generations and has permeated even some of our most "radical" movements. In some cases, it's even built into and hidden within some of the most accessible media: books (especially non-fiction and textbooks), podcasts, television series, and movies.

It’s also necessary for us to recognise that most of the revolutionary movements that occurred throughout history have been violently erased, co-opted, whitewashed, and made equivalent to authoritarianism in the name of silencing and derailing any possible future movements. While we have ample evidence of this throughout history, we have all seen it happening to varying degrees in real-time. For those of us participating in or supporting the movements against the Palestinian genocide, we saw a number of people with media platforms try to equate the (mostly mild) actions of student protesters to the Nazis. For those of us working within abolition movements, we have watched as the movement to abolish prisons has morphed into some bizarre version of pretending to defund them while giving them more money than they could ever want. This happens all too often, and way too many people are content to let it pass with little—if any—challenge.

After all, we have been living in a world of brutal extraction, where those who operate the system's machinery seek to take or destroy everything they possibly can from everyone and everything on this planet. This includes our movements and whatever we can do to make the world better.

The pandemic has also been a divisive point with many ignoring it for the sake of 'normalcy', and it has been a constant source of frustration for many due to the hyper-individualisation surrounding our responses to it. Along with the poor responses, both in terms of society and individual, it has also made it far easier to alienate us from each other. Though lockdowns were helpful to halt the spread of disease, nothing had been done during them to ensure that communities were supported as a whole. We saw little done that would later mitigate any future epidemics and pandemics, let alone any action that would help decrease the spread of any other diseases. The buildings that we exist within were left without updates to their ventilation systems that would help everyone, and nothing was done to improve air quality anywhere (at minimum). Tools that people need to ensure the safety and health of themselves and others, like masks, were not always made easily accessible or even cost-effective.

Now that we’re post-lockdown (but definitely not post-COVID), it's even more evident than before that nothing will ever be done by those who have the most resources to do anything at all to ensure that everyone can healthily participate in “normal” society. In fact, what we're seeing is that many governments (particularly those within the United States) are trying to make it illegal for people to wear masks in response to recent protests and are happily supporting eugenicist policies that further alienate and segregate disabled and immunocompromised people (while also working toward disabling more people).

For many of us, we're still struggling to find each other. Gathering again to self-organise is most certainly not the only issue here because it seems that even our own movements, collectives, and anarcho-syndicalist unions have suffered from disintegration prior to 2019. These things were already happening, and much of it was because so many issues were wilfully left unaddressed and were seen as unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Those who purport to be upholding the core values of anarchism, such as anti-capitalism and the desire for the liberation of all, have been enabling the dilution of these values in a myriad of ways. This has disrupted the possible collectivisation of our activities and has ignored the fights against all forms of oppression within our own circles.

Honestly, there are many things in which we can analyse to understand the situations in which we find ourselves in 2024, and we would encourage everyone to be brave enough to analyse them by returning to our historical roots (though, we also believe that we should not dwell purely upon those). In order to learn from our mistakes, we need to be self-critical of our own inconsistencies. We often see how proud we are to speak of and celebrate historical events such as the antifascist struggle during the Spanish Civil War, but then it’s absurdly clear how we lack the courage to face why Mujeres Libres started due to the misogyny and internal oppression of the comrades in the CNT against women. Furthermore, there are very few who celebrate Mujeres Libres who even want to learn from the problematic views that they have held against sex workers and trans people. Why is it that we refuse to look at the negatives within our movements? Why do we only want to focus on the positives?

We should be able to reflect upon the many and varied moments of anarchist (and anarchist-adjacent) history in order to acknowledge how our own romanticisation and idolisation of our movements’ histories and supposed 'key' figures negatively impacts us today. We would like to acknowledge the efforts of every person fighting for anarchist ideals and especially those who have changed themselves and their realities in order to live according to the practices of mutual aid, liberation and freedom for all, and creating communities outside the state-capitalist machinery. Instead, we find that people will either glorify these long-living organisations despite the harm they engage in or tell people to be shut up and wait until we've "won" to criticise them.

Using our previous example, if any part of the CNT is happy to engage in transphobia and work with the police because their own people are speaking against them, as it happened with the Barcelona branch of the CNT in 2023, why should we remain silent? What movement are we disrupting by criticising them for their lack of principles and their failure to understand what liberation truly means? The truth might hurt right now, but it's beyond time to acknowledge when our own infrastructure is being used to spread harm.

This brings us back to our current historical situation. We have deep worries and fears about how to move forward, and these are intimately tied to our daily lives and realities. With this text, we would like to share some thoughts in order to try to understand what we are resisting and, at the same time, perhaps put forward some possibilities for action and resistance. Currently, we want to focus on three different topics that are interrelated, which spring from a critical vision of our movements that have so often been based on white European experiences. These include how we organise our movements, how diversity exists within them, and how our fight against the state has expanded greatly to include local and global corporations.

Organisation Within Our Movements: Building Mutual Care, Accountability, and Collective Responsibility

Humans are, in both delightful and infuriating ways, contradictory beings. We’re imperfect and sometimes strange, but we still maintain the capacity to reflect upon our actions, adjust our behaviours, and learn in many of the same ways that other animal species learn because we are a species of animal. Still, it seems as if some people enjoy wielding power over others, refusing to even examine their own flaws and toxic attitudes. They willingly neglect trying to recognise aspects of ourselves that stand as obstacles to the very principles we claim to hold so dear.

In short, they refuse to learn.

This is not a new revelation, either. It has been something that many of our movements have struggled with, as people sought ways to climb to the top of the hierarchy (even when there wasn't supposed to be one). This was pointed out many times and across so many movements, including by Assata Shakur who highlighted the exact phenomenon in her own autobiography when she was discussing the Black Panther Party and some of the many organisational challenges that they faced (which were often ignored by leadership, despite being recognised by most people). Her words then still ring true today, and they are applicable to so many organisations and collectives: “Constructive criticism and self-criticism are extremely important for any revolutionary organisation. Without them, people tend to drown in their mistakes, not learn from them.”

So let us take some time to be self-critical and reflective.

Historically, most types of anarchism have shared some common principles that have backed our revolutionary intent to (re)build new communities outside of capitalism and the state. Time after time, many of us have had to endure experiences with manarchists, anarcho-extractionists^[1], enwhitened individuals, and those who defend and support violent and abusive individuals while claiming to stand “in solidarity” with us. Not only are these people enabled to share space with us, but they are often some of the most protected people within our organisations and are allowed to remain while their victims are frequently kicked out, removed, pushed to leave of their "own volition," and purged. Their defenders and collaborators will waste our time and energy excusing the bigoted or violent actions, making various claims that amount to how the organisation or collective will break down should that person suffer any kind of consequences.

However, those of us who have witnessed these kinds of situations know that the organisation will break down, even if it continues to exist. Disappointing though it may be, having experienced this multiple times is precisely why some of us understand that we haven't seen advancement in collective liberation in the last few decades. It doesn't seem to matter how much "progress" we make, since it often feels like we're right back at square one and fighting many of the same fights. It's as if some people have been holding down the brakes, trying their best to hold all of us back by excluding us, attacking us in different violent ways, and trying to maintain control over our shared spaces and our communication channels.

We can't create free communities while we still face these internal oppressions. We can't build together when we have to face and resist internal attacks from people who are supposed to stand in solidarity with us. We have to begin to acknowledge and determinedly work to become conscious of how we behave, ensuring that we do not concede our principles along the way.

We cannot continue, particularly within anarchist spaces, to have the same struggles that we've seen throughout history over and over again. None of us can afford to continue many of these fights because our lives are on the line.

And yet we have to because those who claim to stand with us simply won't acknowledge the harms they perpetuate.

If we simply look at the concepts of freedom and oppression, we know there are a lot of people who claim to be fighting for freedom and often say that they want everyone to be liberated. However, many of them are also constantly limiting the ability of others to be free and creating obstacles to universal liberation. This isn't, as we have seen many claim, a result of the fact that freedom has natural ethical boundaries that we must recognise whenever people we interact with tell us that we're either nearing or overstepping them. If anything, it's largely as a result of people refusing to recognise the ways in which they are both the oppressed and the oppressor. Much of this largely stems from the fact that there are many who utilise their oppression to overlook or excuse the ways in which they engage in oppressing others, even those who they ostensibly claim to support.

We also want to take a moment to focus on the value of collective responsibility, which is equally crucial. It is one thing to recognise our own individual responsibility to each other and the natural world around us, but we often neglect to recognise our collective responsibility. It is imperative for us to remind ourselves of the necessity of collective responsibility so that we can truly ensure the liberation of everyone. This is not a new thought, as it's possible to simply look back in history to see many others echoing this sentiment. One such person was Nestor Makhno who once stated that “[a]narchism’s outward form is a free, non-governed society, which offers freedom, equality and solidarity for its members. Its foundations are to be found in a [person]’s sense of mutual responsibility, which has remained unchanged in all places and times. This sense of responsibility is capable of securing freedom and social justice for all [people] by its own unaided efforts. It is also the foundation of true communism."^[2]

As such, it is necessary for us to face the ways in which we have all internalised patriarchal patterns, whiteness, the normalisation of hierarchies, and much more. Unfortunately, even among anarchists, some individuals who have internalised those values along with that of hyper-individuality tend to scream at the top of their lungs that they have the right to be free and to do or say whatever it is that they want. This is something that is particularly true among us white anarchists. So frequently, we ignore the oppressions of other people and completely neglect the ways in which we continue to perpetuate harms against others. But this can be expanded to many people as a whole: It's necessary for all of us to recognise the ways in which we continue to support the oppression of others, even though we are likely oppressed ourselves. We all need to be far more willing than we currently are to (un)learn these constricting systems, and many more of us need to recognise the varying ways in which we benefit from colonialism, imperialism, and genocide. If we refuse to learn, we cannot effectively combat them while meeting the needs of those who continue to be harmed by these structures and systems.

To put it shortly after so many words, many of us are going to need to be willing to give up certain privileges because keeping them is doing no one any good. It is necessary for us to remember that, in order to build collective freedom—one without exceptions, without violence, and without oppression—we must take individual accountability for our own oppressive actions against others and consciously put forth effort to change ourselves and unlearn the values many of us were raised with or around. But, at the same time, we also need to take collective responsibility in working towards pushing everyone around us to unlearn those harmful structures and to question what it is that we're doing.

Unlearning the values of a patriarchal society to fight the internal oppressions that separate us—homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, racism and whiteness, misogyny, casteism, ageism, and many more—is an individual responsibility that needs to be supported by collective responsibility.

The final core value that we want to look at in this section is mutual aid. Mutual aid is highly necessary and anybody who identifies as an anarchist or has related values will argue about the importance of this practice to rebuild alternatives outside of capitalism. Still, mutual aid can quickly become utilitarian if there is an emotional vacuum to it. Many of us have experienced being involved in spaces that were built upon mutual aid only to struggle with the creation of meaningful interpersonal connections with people in the same spaces. This is because, without mutual care and support, mutual aid is nothing more than a simple tool, and it requires connection with practical action to build our spaces. Through mutual care and support, we take care of each other at emotional levels, collectivising the care tasks that capitalism has largely encouraged us to overlook. We know that capitalist societies are maintained through the reproductive care and emotional labour that is largely pushed upon feminine people, and perhaps this emotional value is something that many manarchists avoid due to their internalised patriarchal patterns.

This is far from being news to anyone who has been paying attention, particularly if we focus on the example of the ways in which patriarchal values have gone largely unchallenged in anarchist spaces since the supposed inception of the concept. A lot of anarchists of all genders are not aware of their own biases and, as a result, are not keen to work on changing themselves. It is time to take a closer look in the mirror and rid ourselves of shitty internalised authoritarian and bigoted attitudes.

This point goes hand in hand with the next.

Collaboration in Diversity: The Strength of Heterogeneity

We need each other. That much is clear in these times where so many governments are ripping off the masks that hid their true level of fascistic ideology from most people. Already at the beginning of the 20th century, several comrades–such as Malatesta, Volin, and De Cleyre–tried to prefigure and practice united fronts, gathering different anarchist positions together. This, of course, was intended to happen with organic structures, but the common goals were still to form one united front against state oppression. This can be useful and even necessary sometimes, but we all know how difficult it can be to do, especially when we have so much work to do as described in the first point.

In the last decade, we have learned to seek affinity with people regardless of their precise labels, but we still want to ensure that we have clear common ethical goals. It is undeniable that we need to have clear anarchist principles that should be updated and expanded to take into account what is happening in this particular period of history, but that is why we have been inclined to talk about many different anarchisms rather than a specific and singular form of anarchism. Understanding and embracing our own practical diversity has to come with defense of this same diversity. We strongly believe that many types of anarchism are necessary and that one person can embody an anarchism that is both built by and supports the many in our daily practices and political struggles. There is no reasonable need to push ourselves into a homogenous and static anarchist unity, both within and outside of ourselves.

By choice, we ought to seek heterogeneous collaborations between anarchisms because we see the differences between them as capable of providing strength.

However, it is worth recognising that some manarchists and other patriarchal anarchists blame identity politics and even anti-colonial activists in wanting to destroy our movements, which mirrors the patriarchal and nationalist movements that exist around us already. It is still a problem that some people cannot and will not manage to understand that we experience different types of oppressions in our daily lives and actively refuse to recognise the oppressions that others may experience that differ from their own, even though we may supposedly share many ethical and political principles.

This is one of many reasons why we find it difficult, and even a bit unnecessary, to try to unify all types of anarchist perspectives and theoretical approaches. Instead, we should work much harder to find out what commonalities we share and how we can work to further those projects.

We also find that this helps to build more horizontal collaborative processes between anarchisms. As many of us have experienced and as can be seen in historical movements, we have had some hierarchies separating our anarchisms, tending to value some as being "more real" or "more valuable" than others. For instance, we have encountered those who tend to work within anarcho-communist or anarcho-syndicalist practices while openly discarding anarcha-feminists, Black anarchists, or trans anarcha-feminists as "just" being focused on certain groups of people.

The truth is that many existing anarchist movements exist because they were never allowed in the first 'traditional' anarchist spaces. As a result, we self-organised our own spaces to finally have the space to breathe. This just proves that our collectives are composed by flawed human beings and, at the same time, that we are not completely immune against our own internalised bigotries. Accepting the reality that some of us feel safe building our own realities with those who share similar experiences, it shows that it is fair to embrace our diversity and find ways to gather around our common political goals.

Even more, looking for affinities should not be based only in our theoretical similarities but mostly in our practices. There are a lot of people and collectives that don't define themselves as anarchist, but their practices are common and close to our own. Many anarchists are careful and even against the idea, which is because historical evidence highlights the many ways in which left unity has always been used against us to our own detriment (and even death). The affinity that we seek between us and other groups has to be organic and based in practice, regardless of how long it may last. Hopefully that work can make a lasting impact in changing some of our realities, one step at a time.

This brings us to a natural conversation about international solidarity, which is (or at least should be) part of our movements and one of our historical principles. There have been discussions of people seeking a different term, as 'international' implies the maintenance of borders, but whatever term you choose to use for the solidarity we should have for people across the globe, the ideas behind it are necessary in our heavily globalised world and the inherent globe-spanning connections in technologies like the internet. It is unlikely that we will find perfect, or any, answers from the classical bearded bunch considering just how much has changed from their time to ours.

Though many people across the world and in different spaces have been gathering information and building resistance platforms, we know that the increase of international border control systems, high tech surveillance, the digitisation of monetary systems that are strongly married to voracious financial chains, the prevalence of corporation-friendly systems, the persistent erasure of our right to privacy, and the continued harassment of all activists in different geographies makes international solidarity slightly more difficult than it was barely 100 years ago. Despite this harsh and undeniable reality, and seeking this mutual support in burning borders and nations, international solidarity is still alive by its own right.

But it requires a lot of support and a lot of work, ensuring that we are supporting people in building liberation while also maintaining criticisms and suspicion of any system seeking control. We can support people in their fights for liberation while reflecting upon their successes and failures, and we can flat out deny our support to hierarchical institutions and systems that seek to replace the old.

Resisting the Triple Supremacy of Globalised Capitalism: IGOs, Corporations, and International Alliances

Often, we find ourselves wondering what most of the 'famous' theorists would say if they got the chance to live now. Could they ever imagine how capitalists would manage to reconstruct, morph, and mutate another level of power within intergovernmental organisations that have taken control within our corporation-states?

Historically, when anarchists have fought against systems of oppression, it would be nation-states, institutionalised religions, or the industry of warfare. This hasn't necessarily changed, but it has expanded. Since the beginning of the 20th century and as a result of the World Wars and the birth of neoliberalism, the political overview has dramatically changed before our eyes, becoming akin to a hydra. The many heads of this hydra have made it increasingly complicated to put the responsibility for what is happening in concrete people and institutions, making it more difficult to point the finger at those responsible for continuous genocides and the raging ecocide that we are enduring.

Even when we know who to blame, they obscure their responsibility by shifting the responsibility. These systems protect them by through being oppressive, repressing protests, and doing as little as possible to respond to the concerns of the people most impacted. They silence all dissent. Our early anarchist analysis of these systems and pushes to dismantle, resist, and abolish them have become extremely tenuous. We've managed to name and outline the terms 'globalisation' and 'neoliberalism', helping us to see some of the problems; however, the way that the system defends against all attacks and denies its responsibility for spreading harm has made it far more difficult for us to fight it.

Intergovernmental organisations were constructed to gather certain types of power and are provided privileges and immunities that are intended to ensure their independent and effective function from corporation-states and other local political powers. They are specified in the treaties that give rise to global organisations, such as the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations and the Agreement on the Privileges and Immunities of the International Criminal Court. These are normally supplemented by further multinational agreements and national regulations, like the International Organizations Immunities Act in the United States. The intergovernmental organisations have a life of their own, completely detached from democratic processes that they claim to uphold; they are also immune from the jurisdiction of certain national courts. Certain privileges and immunities are also specified in documents like the Vienna Convention on the Representation of States in their Relations with International Organizations of a Universal Character of 1975.

In practice, this means that our historical fights against the free market and the nation-states now should include these intergovernmental organisations. The vast problem here is, of course, that the states support themselves through deliberately malfunctioning parliamentarianism, and these other intergovernmental organisations are free to operate on their own terms and choose who is involved in them and who leads them. For the ordinary person, this is a level of power that we cannot reach but still has a huge impact in our own lives.

Earlier anarchists were trying to spread education about the failures of parliamentarianism, spreading lessons about why we shouldn't participate within it. Today, we're now dealing with international organisations that have a global range of power, are allowed to act independently and often with little scrutiny, and are closely tied to financial powers. The United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, NATO, the European Union, the World Economic Forum, or the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or even BRICS have different roles in these networks of power that create yet another level of oppressive powers with a common goal: the maintenance of neoliberalism grounded in free market prioritisation. We know perfectly well how lobbyism works in those circles and how they often move national politicians, wealthy people, or other actors willing to be of use to them into key positions where they can continue operating in ways to ensure ecocides and all forms of genocide can carry on without any interruption.

These systems also support a neocolonial form that has continued to develop, supporting continued oppression through debt. In this way, it is relevant to acknowledge that people living in colonised countries are the ones who are more strongly suffering under the pressure of these intergovernmental organisations and corporation-states. The World Bank is not shy about showing how many millions of dollars are being stolen and how they've been given the blessings to do so by international treaties and conventions, moving resources primarily to privileged Western countries from those that have remained under their thumbs despite supposed "independence" movements that claimed to allow them to “leave” the clutches of colonial powers.

For ordinary people, which is the overwhelming majority of people on this planet, these layers of organisational power are anonymous beasts that impact our lives. In addition to understanding the alliances among intergovernmental organisations and international debt, another consequence of this is that the cost of living has increased along with rent, food, transport, and other costs while our ability to survive in this economy has decreased critically since the 1970s. A quick search on the internet can show anyone how neoliberalism has been stifling us for the last 50 years while killing the planet. The problem is that these changes have been chugging along for at least three generations, and the impact of neoliberal values in people's lives is blatantly obvious. We have people all over the world who do not understand these systems and the levels of organisational oppression that we face, and they often actively work in support of these agencies and structures even when those very systems harm them. At the same time, we are all fighting for survival to different degrees, but we have mostly individualised it (as many people will utilised the theory of "survival of the fittest" to support their decisions) rather than looking at how we should support each other.

It is undeniable that the resistance in many territories is very much alive, but we have a major question that's always in the back of our head: What are anarchists from colonising territories doing to educate, agitate, and keep creating mutual aid and international solidarity? Our possibilities are dramatically narrowed because, on top of these different levels of international oppression, we are facing a 'rise' (or unmasking) of fascism. Historically, we know that when people experience insecurity and scarcity, some tend to fall into authoritarian solutions.

How can we fight now when this authoritarian oppression has a strong PR team that pinkwashes their bloody activities, selling us multi-level globalised oppression as the natural organisational neoliberal way of living? How can we fight when the ongoing enclosure of lands is being carried on by faceless multinational corporations while some of us drown in financial debt to survive?

It is just the plain reality which gets us back to the impetus for where this text started.

As we can understand from these easy, flawed, and incomplete analyses, as much as we can rely on our past theorists, movements, and individuals to learn from their wisdom and their mistakes, we really need to gather in all of our diversities to face the present emergency situations from our own local communities and territories. If we are going to stop and change the current ecocide, dismantling capitalism and all of its oppressive systems. We can start with the ones in our heads and hearts, so we can reconstruct our collective paths to freedom and collectivistion of our communities once and for all.

Collaborations

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 10:42:07 +0100

The essays posted here have been written in explicit collaboration with other people.

Research Notes #1: Paul Robin and the Prévost Orphanage in Cempuis

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 15:39:06 +0100

The first episode of Nerd Teachers' Experimental Education series focused on Paul Robin and the Prévost Orphanage in Cempuis, discussing its history and much of the adjacent history that was taking place during its time. This episode discusses integral education, coeducation, and both laïcité and secular education. There are some lessons that we can learn from this historical experiment, including that it's possible to make our education the way it should always have been: more interdisciplinary.

Suggested Resources

Alice Wong with Eliza Hull and Heather Watkins (2019) - Disability Visibility, Episode 56: Parenting
Kara Ayers (2020) - Disabled Parenting in an Ableist World
Sterilization and Social Justice Lab

Episode Sources

Paul Robin (1869): De l'enseignement intégral (in La Philosophie positive)
Paul Robin (1893): Fêtes pédagogiques à l'Orphelinat Prévost
Government of Paris (1894): Journal officiel (10 November 1894)
L'Univers (17 November 1894): Et après / L'affaire de Cempuis
Joseph Odelin as Valsenard in La Libre Parole (1894): Encore: L'école de Cempuis, pg. 1-2 - 29 March
In La Libre Parole (1894): Les Anarchistes: En Province, pg. 3 - 9 January
Joseph Odelin as Valsenard in La Libre Parole (1894): Encore: L'école de Cempuis, pg. 1 - 30 March
Joseph Odelin as Valsenard in La Libre Parole (1894): Encore: L'école de Cempuis, pg. 1 - 31 March
Government of Paris (1895): Bulletin municipal officiel (1 June)
Gabriel Giroud (1900): Cempuis: éducation intégrale - coéducation des sexes
Henry Paulin (1911): La co-éducation - ses causes, ses effets, son avenir
Angus McLaren (1981): Revolution and Education in Late Nineteenth Century France: The Early Career of Paul Robin
Linda L. Clark (1981): The Primary Education of French Girls: Pedagogical Prescriptions and Social Realities, 1880-1940
Angus McLaren (1983): Sexuality and Social Order: The Debate over Fertility of Women and Workers in France, 1770-1920
Alain Drouard (1992): Aux origines de l'eugénisme en France: le néo-malthusianisme
Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère (2003): Un précurseur de la mixité : Paul Robin et la coéducation des sexes
T. Jeremy Gunn (2004): Religious Freedom and Laïcité: A Comparison of the United States and France
Michel Violet (2010): L'éducation intégrale
FNLP (2011): Paul Robin (1837-1912) Pédagogue, franc-maçon, libre penseur, militant révolutionnaire, libertaire et néo-malthusien
Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère (2012): Cempuis. Un idéal d’éducation libertaire
Federico Ferretti (2013): Géographie, éducation libertaire et établissement de l'ecole publique entre le 19e et le 20e siècle: quelques repères pour une recherche
Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère (2014): Éducation, subversion des genres et révolution sociale: l’éducation des garçons et des filles selon Paul Robin
Federico Ferretti (2016): The spatiality of geography teaching and cultures of alternative education: the 'intuitive geographies' of the anarchist school in Cempuis (1880-1894)
Murat Akan (2017): Diversité: Challenging or constituting laïcité?
Pol Defosse: Paul Robin (1837-1912) : Une vie engagée