A: Even in the strangeness of our isolation, you want to discuss something you call anarchist pedagogy? Haven’t we been circling around this topic for some time now? Well, if I understand your expression, it is already underway.

B: Yes, it has been underway for centuries.

A: And yet, here in our isolation, we feel the need to talk it over again. What’s more, if I know you, you will want to narrate a myth of origin …

B: Remember, always, that it is just that, a myth, a story.

A: So maybe I am the one who is inclined to fabulate here. We agree that it is underway, but it begins again, is renewed, in the posing of a new problem. Not merely ridding ourselves of the problems whose names are so familiar …

B: … and just why is it that the names “school, schooling” fit these familiar problems so well? …

A: … rather shifting attention and interest to a new set of, let’s say, “unschoolish” problems.

B: Is this the concern that made me want to talk? From one problem, one frustration to another?

A: Not every problem, not every frustration is identical. There is great virtue, one could even say will power, in selecting one’s greatest problems. You have spoken macroscopically, as if from a great distance. But I will remind you that, here on our island, it is wisest to speak microscopically. Have we not been teasing out the fine grain of a redefinition of freedom, endlessly rediscovered, a shift from opposition to invention (and affirmation)? Though neither of us willed this our isolation, is that research not one of the ways that we have come to accept, even desire, our prolonged stay here?

B: Well, there is your story, finally: from freedom as the remainder of an agon, a struggle, a combat (the operation impure, the fight always on the verge of returning, a mark, a brand on the body of the free) to freedom as self-invention, creativity, undiscovered potential.

A: Now that these first words have passed our mouths, I see the strangeness of this story. We have been speaking with each other for a very long time. Now I want to ask you: invention, creativity, potential—of what? Of the human?

B: Perhaps. I have invoked “schools, schooling” and to many this suggests the idea of the child. Of course, though here on the island we have not seen children for some time, surely we have not been here so long as to forget all that. I think the suggestion is deceptive. I doubt that we will discover some pure freedom here. We have long agreed that is nonsensical. The “unschoolish” freedom in question is something else than what we imagine the human animal is doing in its untrammeled youth.

A: Yes, what we are after is something other than the infantilization of everyone …

B: … including youth. It is a question of knowing just what a myth, a story, a fable is.

A: An adventure of ideas? Not just of images and symbols?

B: We are exploring the island, again …

A: In this adventure of ideas, we might take up your strange couple: a word that says not-something (anarchy) and one that says … yes, someone, a companion (pedagogy).

B: Let us become interested in this unlikely coupling, if only because it is another name for the ever-repeated birth of another people … our silent, invisible companions here?

A: It is pleasant to think of them. It is also pleasant to suppose that every generation will amuse itself by cultivating the prefixes no-, un-, de-, an- as so many prefaces to what I call its compelling new problem, rediscovered, reinvented …

B: Or to what I will still call a frustration, one which is not humiliating and becomes, in time, a fascination. Remember our arrival here, the first few years …

A: What else is there to do, if we agree that it is already underway?

B: More or less everything. But, in this myth, which is a little bit more yours than mine, in these birth stories, these genealogies, we might learn how to be fascinated by a series of recalcitrant minorities …

A: Our companions, now less silent, less invisible: a fringe that invites us to reconsider where we had placed the center of our island, and so to conceive its problem as our own.

B: Yes: for them it is already underway, and, from them, we might learn that the same is true for the rest of us.

CHAPTER 1. Anarchism, the State, and the Role of Education

Justin Mueller

Education has played a particularly important role in the history of anarchist thought and practice, perhaps more so than any other political philosophy aimed at social transformation. This is in part because, for anarchists of all stripes, education has never been simply a means to achieve a new social order. It has been, rather, part of the very practice and prefiguration of the anarchist ideal of creating freer and more critical minds, and more open, cooperative and nonoppressive relationships within society. As a result, understanding the peculiar nature of the role of education for anarchism can help us better understand the relationship between anarchist educational theory and its relatives in the broader circles of “libertarian” or “radical” education. It can also help us underscore the tremendous differences between the anarchist conception of education and that of historical and contemporary statist and capitalist pedagogies. Finally, a greater understanding of the role of education within anarchist theory can help us clarify the means, aims, and ideas of the wider anarchist movement and tradition. First, however, we will briefly look at what is meant by “anarchism” and provide a basic foundation for further discussion of its values and criticisms of the existing state of education.

A Brief Sketch of Anarchism

Anarchism has had a rather bedeviled career, maligned by many, misunderstood by most, and marginalized even by erstwhile theoretical allies. In the popular imagination, it is often seen as simply synonymous with chaos, disorder, or violence; more likely to evoke the image of a smashed Starbucks window than a nuanced philosophy based upon principles of economic and political equality (Starr, 2000). However, the anarchist Emma Goldman defined anarchism in this way:

Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations. (1911a)

Such an idea hardly seems to warrant immediate dismissal. Rather than social disintegration, the normative principles and organizational ideas in anarchist theory advocate social, economic, and political arrangements that affirm a strong valuation of individuals as ends in themselves, a commitment to egalitarian and democratic methods, and a staunch opposition to hierarchical institutional power arrangements that subordinate some individuals to others. Fundamentally, anarchist theory operates under the notion that people can and should determine the direction of their own lives, and that social arrangements should be constructed with this aim in mind.

In answering the simple question, “What is anarchism?” it may help to begin by thinking rather of “anarchisms.” The term “anarchism” really refers to a cluster of ideologies, movements and theories that share a family resemblance to each other, rather than to a largely enclosed and holistic system of thought (Guérin, 1970, p. 4) like Marxism. In this way, the wide variety of often conflicting opinions that fall under the label of “anarchism,” especially regarding along what lines a future society ought to be ordered, should not be viewed as simple internal “contradictions.” Rather they represent an experimental “plurality of possibilities” that may be more or less relevant or useful in a variety of different situations (de Cleyre, 2005, p. 48).

There are common principles, however, that unify anarchists. The word “anarchy” comes from the Greek, “an,” meaning “no” or “without,” and “archos,” meaning “ruler” or “authority.” In this sense, the concept does not mean “chaos” but rather an opposition to hierarchical power relationships, which are the corporeal embodiment of the notion of “opaque” authority (Sylvan, 1993, p. 221). Thus, opposition to the State and capitalism are appropriately features of anarchist theory, but they are incidental byproducts of this primary rejection of hierarchy, of divisions between those who command and those who are compelled to obey (Bookchin, 2005, p. 27). This simple principle of opposition to hierarchy and imposed authority, taken seriously, logically extends to an opposition to all dominating and exploitative social, political, and economic power relationships, including not just capitalism and the State, but patriarchy, racism, sexism, heterosexism, war (and by extension, imperialism), and any number of other manifestations of power disparity as harmful to human development.

Anarchism is not simply a negative critique. Moving beyond the extensive list of things anarchists are opposed to, the anarchist opposition to hierarchy implies a wide variety of positive means of association. Behind any specifically proposed social arrangements, however, are a few general principles, which will be elaborated in the next sections.

Values, Human Nature, and Other Pedagogies

Let the universal culture of schooling aim at an apprenticeship in freedom, and not in submissiveness … The motif, the thrust of the new age is the freedom of the will. Consequently, pedagogy ought to espouse the molding of the free personality as its starting point and objective … That culture, which is genuinely universal in that the humblest rub shoulders with the haughtiest, represents the true equality of all: the equality of free persons. For only freedom is equality. (Stirner, 2005, pp. 19–20)

The above quote by Max Stirner provides an excellent introduction to the anarchist attitude toward education. As Stirner suggests, the role of education in anarchist theory is one of emancipation and cultivation. Its aim is to develop free and critical minds, and in pursuit of this, cultivate the values of liberty, equality, and solidarity (Kropotkin, 1985, p. 128). We must explore what these concepts mean and how they are used for anarchists specifically. Certainly, no pedagogues from other progressive or libertarian schools of thought would deny that they too seek to develop many or all of these traits in some fashion. In order to understand what makes an anarchist approach to education distinct, then, we also need to understand the nuances in anarchist thought regarding the interplay of values, human nature, and development, as well as the relationship between individuals and society.

Values

As mentioned previously, the major values espoused by anarchists are liberty, equality, and solidarity. While different schools of anarchist thought may appear to emphasize one over the others (as with arguments between “individualist” and “social” anarchists), these differences are largely superficial, with little changed in substantive values (Guérin, 1970, p. 4). In actuality they are inseparable from and mutually inform each other. Rather than a fixed value-slope or hierarchy, these values form a continuum wherein each idea is meaningfully constituted only in association with the others.

Liberty

While distinctions can be drawn between the concepts of “freedom” and “liberty,” they are essentially interchangeable in anarchist literature, and for the purposes of this essay. The anarchist conception of freedom is fundamental to understanding the entire thrust of anarchist theory. Unfortunately, it is also one of its most frequently misunderstood, caricatured or oversimplified ideas. Freedom must be understood within the context of the anarchist conception of human nature, which we will explore later. For now, it is sufficient to note that anarchists view human nature as malleable, that we have the potential to do better, and that freedom is a necessary condition for the development of one’s potentials. Freedom for anarchists, then, goes beyond the classical liberal notions of autonomous, atomized, presocial free persons, as in the thought of Rousseau or Locke. Such liberal notions prescribe formal liberty and equality before the law, but do not provide substantively for the material security and development of individual faculties and expression (Goldman, 1940). As Daniel Guérin (1970) states, “For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities and talents with which nature has endowed him [sic], and turn them to social account” (p. vii).

For anarchists, freedom is not simply a lack of external fetters or domination. Nor is it, as occasionally and misleadingly imagined by critics, an “absolute” claim for simple license to do whatever one wants, regardless of wider consequences. As Errico Malatesta (1993) explains, “[Anarchism means] freedom for everybody … with the only limit of the equal freedom for others; which does not mean … that we recognize, and wish to respect, the ‘freedom’ to exploit, to oppress, to command, which is oppression and certainly not freedom” (p. 53).

Rather, then, freedom is conceived as part of the development of one’s potential, a prerequisite for a person to “grow to his [sic] full stature” (Goldman, 1979, pp. 72–73). It is something that is cultivated within, rather than separate from, a given social context, and cannot be understood without reference to society. It is not a goal for a hypothetical and archetypal individual Person, but for actual people to pursue alongside and—ideally—in cooperation with others.

Equality

The importance of the notion of “equality” in anarchist thought is intimately related to anarchism’s rejection of social or institutional hierarchy and domination. It is also rooted in a particular understanding of human nature. As with freedom, anarchists support social equality as a necessary condition for individuals to be able to develop their “various faculties” and their potential (Maximoff, 1953, p. 156). Mikhail Bakunin best summarizes this intertwined appreciation for individual freedom and social equality in one of his better-remembered quotes: “Liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality” (ibid., p. 269). However, the anarchist critique of social inequality goes beyond simply decrying the resource deprivation endured by some and the opulence accrued to others under capitalism (or any other hierarchical social or economic order). In anarchist thought, hierarchy brutalizes and warps both those who rule and those who are ruled in a stratified system; the former in being corrupted by their relative power, and the latter by developing servile attitudes and deference to authority (Kropotkin, 1988, p. 83). Although those who are privileged in a stratified society clearly gain many benefits and seek to preserve those benefits, in anarchist theory they too are unable to develop their potential due to the degenerative effects of hierarchical power and privilege. In this way, the anarchist call for social equality is not only a rally--cry for the disenfranchized, but is also rooted in a belief that social equality is an emancipating precondition for all to actualize themselves fully.

Substantively, then, anarchists believe with Alexander Berkman (2003) that

Equality does not mean an equal amount but equal opportunity… Do not make the mistake of identifying equality in liberty with the forced equality of the convict camp. True anarchist equality implies freedom, not quantity. It does not mean that every one must eat, drink, or wear the same things, do the same work, or live in the same manner. Far from it: the very reverse in fact … Individual needs and tastes differ, as appetites differ. It is equal opportunity to satisfy them that constitutes true equality. (p. 164)

As Berkman suggests, while most anarchists advocate some form of cooperative and egalitarian socioeconomic system, this is not rooted in an esthetic valuation of “equality for equality’s sake,” or a conflation of equality with identical goods received. Rather, equality of conditions and opportunity are seen as instrumental and necessary conditions for everyone to be able to fully develop and express their individuality.

Solidarity

In opposition to the Social Darwinist advocates of his time, such as Herbert Spencer, who expounded the virtues of competition and elimination of the “unfit” elements of society (Spencer, 1993), the anarchist and scientist Peter Kropotkin argued in defense of “mutual aid” as a natural and important phenomenon in evolutionary biology and social development. In Mutual Aid, Kropotkin emphasizes that cooperation and fellow-feeling, not just competition and domination, have been a factor in the evolution of many species, including humans (Kropotkin, 1972, p. 28). In this simple observation, Kropotkin sought to dispel the belief that mutual domination, competition, and destruction were somehow inevitable or even virtuous features of our social and political landscape. This challenge is representative of the core appreciation for solidarity in anarchist theory.

Solidarity, fraternity, or mutual aid are, at their simplest, cooperation and free association between individuals in a social context. In the continuum of anarchist values, it plays a vitalizing role by encouraging active empathy and identification with others. It is, at an individual level, a “moral disposition” or “attitude” toward others, wherein others are seen not as competitors to be defeated or as means to an end, but as moral equals to be respected and valued (Suissa, 2010, p. 67). In this way, solidarity functions in anarchist theory as the means of overcoming the traditional liberal dichotomy of individual liberty and social equality. While not an anarchist, Alfie Kohn (1992) expresses this understanding of solidarity well:

When we think about cooperation … we tend to associate the concept with fuzzy-minded idealism…. This may result from confusing cooperation with altruism…. Structural cooperation defies the usual egoism/altruism dichotomy. It sets things up so that by helping you I am helping myself at the same time. Even if my motive initially may have been selfish, our fates now are linked. We sink or swim together. Cooperation is a shrewd and highly successful strategy—a pragmatic choice that gets things done at work and at school even more effectively than competition does…. There is also good evidence that cooperation is more conductive to psychological health and to liking one another. (p. 7)

In advocating solidarity, then, anarchists are not just appealing in a “utopian” fashion to the “natural goodness” of people (Wolff, 1996, p. 34), or saying that we ought to all get along and work together, in denial of potential conflict or disagreement. Rather, the anarchist belief in the value of the principle of solidarity is grounded in the understanding that even with these possibilities of divergence, organizing our relationships and society along lines of cooperation rather than competition is both possible with humans as they currently are and vital to the maintenance of the principle of “equal liberty for all.” If competition overshadows cooperation, then this results in a situation of unnecessary and contrived categorization of “winners” and “losers,” of “internecine strife and struggle,” and consequently an unnecessary infringement upon the ability of each person to freely develop their potential (Goldman, 1979, p. 118).

Anarchists see the implementation of these freely associating cooperative organizational forms as not just immanently possible, but as an extant and ubiquitous means of association in our day-to-day lives, in spite of contradictory norms in governing structures and the economy. Colin Ward (1973) provides a picturesque description of this perspective:

An anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism…. Far from being a speculative vision of a future society, it is a description of a mode of human organization, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society. (p. 18)

Human Nature

As suggested in the previous section, there is a recurring motif in critics of anarchism that suggests anarchists have an unreasonably high or even naïve opinion of human nature, and thus bases its political ideals on the “natural goodness” of people (Wolff, 1996, p. 34). While some anarchists might, it would be a mistake to consider such an understanding of human nature to be representative of the whole, or even most of anarchist thought. On the contrary, anarchist theorists have devoted considerable attention to the question of human nature, and consequently have developed a nuanced understanding of how it should be understood. It is important to understand the complexity of the anarchist conception of human nature, both in order to understand the anarchist objections to capitalism, the state, and hierarchical social authority generally, and because this complexity plays a vital role in distinguishing how anarchists approach education compared to the approaches of other “radical” or “libertarian” educators like A.S. Neill and Paulo Freire.

Anarchism and Human Nature

Rather than holding an overly positive or benign view of an “essentialist” human nature (May, 1994, p. 63), both classical and contemporary anarchist theorists have widely understood humans to be capable of violence and selfishness, as well as kindness and altruism. Human nature, for most anarchists, is neither tainted by an original sin nor a tabula rasa (blank slate) a la Locke. Rather, it is malleable, and certain aspects of human behavior can become more prominent depending on context. For most anarchists, it is the situations and social structures in which we find ourselves that play a significant role in determining which of these features of our “nature” will be more likely to exhibit. Contrary to the reasoning of Thomas Hobbes and, consequently, most of the modern tradition of Western political philosophy, anarchist theorists have argued that it is precisely because we are capable of both good and ill that we should abolish hierarchical political institutions and social relations. As Peter Kropotkin (1988) complained:

When we hear men saying that Anarchists imagine men much better than they really are, we merely wonder how intelligent people can repeat that nonsense. Do we not say continually that the only means of rendering men less rapacious and egotistic, less ambitious and less slavish at the same time, is to eliminate those conditions which favor the growth of egotism and rapacity, of slavishness and ambition? (p. 83)

Bakunin (1970) too believed that “It is a characteristic of privilege and of every kind of privilege to kill the mind and heart of man … That is a social law which admits no exceptions” (p. 31).

It is how our social relations are ordered, then, that delimits which types of behaviors are likely to thrive. One could imagine that neither Bakunin nor Kropotkin would be very surprised at the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment, wherein subjects adapted their behaviors and attitudes toward each other depending on whether they were cast as “prison guards” or “prisoners” (Zimbardo, 2007). Rather than simply hope for a deep-seated human goodness to overcome dominating and violent behavior, anarchists argue that traits like compassion, independence, and a sense of solidarity must be cultivated through properly facilitating environments. This must take place in wider society (workplace, neighborhoods, etc.) for broader changes to occur, but as Bakunin notes, the “environment that [nourishes] and [raises]” a person, like formal education in youth, is of particular importance in determining subsequent social attitudes and behavior (Maximoff, 1953, p. 153). If a child is to grow to value cooperation and solidarity with others, then she must practice cooperation rather than institutionalized competition with her peers. If a child is to grow to challenge received truths and think for herself as an adult, then she must, while young, learn in a way that encourages her to practice individual inquiry and challenge authority.

A.S. Neill and Summerhill

The original Summerhill school and its founder A.S. Neill are regularly included in accounts of broadly “libertarian” educational experiments and ideas. As one of the longest-running schools (founded in 1921 in the town of Leiston, England, and still running) this should come as no surprise (Neill, 1992, p. 8). The similarities between Summerhill and the anarchist approach to education are quite remarkable. The original intention, according to Neill was that of “[making] the school fit the child—instead of making the child fit the school” (ibid., 9). The fundamental ideals of the school are those of freedom for the child and equality among all members of Summerhill, students and teachers alike. The freedom is that of individual autonomy. Lessons are not compulsory, play is celebrated and self-directed, and creative originality is encouraged. Equality is understood and practiced in a way that every anarchist can understand. At school-wide assembly meetings, everyone gets one vote, students and teachers alike. Teachers are called by their first names or nicknames as the social equals of students and have no real institutional authority over them (Neill, 1977, pp. 4–8). Summerhill is very much, in the words of Neill, a “self-governing community” (Neill, 1992, p. 3).

Structurally, then, Summerhill is very similar to examples and ideals of anarchist educational experiments. Pedagogically and philosophically, however, there are important distinctions. One distinction is that of Neill’s understanding of human nature, which rests on the belief that a child is an innately “good, not an evil being” and that “without adult suggestion of any kind” a child can reach her potential (ibid., 9). While anarchist educators certainly don’t view children as evil, and share the same abhorrence of traditional notions of “discipline” and institutional authority, they have been less enthusiastic about an individualized and abstract notion of “freedom” that does not take into account the situational and dual nature of humanity. While a child may certainly be freer and avoiding harm when protected from the regimentation and violence of traditional state schooling, such “protection from” is insufficient to provide for a positive ideal and an emancipatory social alternative. As Judith Suissa (2010) notes from her contemporary visits to Summerhill, “One has the impression of a lively group of self-confident, happy children, who may, as one imagines, very well grow up to be happy, but completely self-centered individuals … there is little attempt to engage with broader social issues or confront present socio-political reality” (p. 96).

A laissez-faire pedagogy is insufficient, then, for the anarchist approach to education. While an anarchist education does not imply any sort of dogmatic instruction, anarchist educators do view the open encouragement and practice of values, like solidarity, as a virtue. Further, and more distinctively, anarchist educators actively seek to engage with social and political questions, and to open for critique perceived repressive institutions and practices of wider society. True “neutrality” on the part of antiauthoritarian teachers in the face of an unjust and repressive social order is seen by anarchist educators as either impossible or “hypocrisy” (Ferrer, 1909, p. 6).

Desiring neither neutrality nor a dogmatic imposition of teachers’ beliefs upon students, the role of an anarchist educator becomes that of a suggestive iconoclast and interlocutor with dominant social narratives. Going beyond a simple laissez-faire approach to learning, anarchist pedagogical practice, in seeking to encourage particular anarchist values (but not seeking to impose dogma, since this would be contrary to the values themselves) openly challenges the “sacred” institutions of the dominant social order by desanctifying their traditional justifications (Stirner, 2005, p. 19). The act of rendering the hegemonic or the sacred questionable and open to dissection, and extending to students an invitation to this sacrilege represents anarchism’s primary pedagogical distinction. That it is an open invitation—rather than an ideological or dogmatic disciplining of students’ minds, or a passive nonengagement with broader social contexts, roles, problems, and conflicts—allows anarchism to (at least partially) resolve the problematic paradox of attempting to develop free and critical minds without extensive coercion in instruction.

Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator whose work contributed to the development of a radical philosophy of education known as “critical pedagogy.” While partially rooted in the ideas of “democratic education” as expounded by John Dewey (Dewey, 1916), and the theoretical framework of the Frankfurt School (Kanpol, 1999), critical pedagogy essentially began with Freire’s publishing of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Freire’s work laid the foundation for a host of subsequent advocates and expanders of the theory and practice of critical pedagogy (Apple, 1995; Kanpol, 1999; McLaren, 1989; Shapiro, 1990; Shor, 1992). Within Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire explores the relationships between oppressors and oppressed, and the manifestation and reproduction of these relationships within teacher-student power relations. In doing so he criticizes the elitist educational theories operating in traditional educational settings, such as the “banking theory” of education, which treats knowledge as something an authority figure deposits in the minds of pupils who do (and ought to) passively receive. Critical pedagogues argue against such theories, instead positing that students are individuals with their own minds, experiences and dignity, and they must be able to take an active role in their own process of liberation in cooperation with critical teachers (Freire, 1970; McLaren, 1989; Shor, 1992).

Along with emphasizing the dignity of students, and the need for nonoppressive teacher-student relationships, Critical pedagogy argues that critical educators must teach for social justice. For critical pedagogues, all education is necessarily political, and attempts at claiming neutrality or objectivity for education function as a de facto force for conservatism (Freire, 1970; Shor, 1987). The goal of critical pedagogy, then, is to develop an educational practice that can provide the necessary space and nonauthoritarian guidance for people to grow into their humanity, gain a critical analytical eye, and develop a compassionate and empathetic worldview that is capable of challenging the hegemonic order. This approach to education clearly shares much in common with the values of anarchist theorists. There remain, however, notable distinctions between the ideas of Freire and those of anarchist educators.

Richard Kahn poses a unique juxtaposition of the ideas of Freire and those of anarchist educator Ivan Illich. Kahn contrasts what he sees as the “promethean” attitude of Freire with the “epimethean” disposition of Illich. Prometheus represents, as in classic Greek myth, the “forethought” of planning and action. Prometheanism, Kahn argues, celebrates the “human potential for daring political deeds, technological ingenuity, and general rebellion against the powers that be to improve human life,” but also represents the “industrial strivings of modernity” and “the ideology of progress” (Kahn, 2009, pp. 126–27). It is, then, a disposition toward active transformation and construction. Epimetheus, on the other hand, represents the “afterthought” to Prometheus’s forethought. While Greek patriarchs viewed Epimetheus as “dull-witted” and weak, the epimetheanism of Illich offers a different interpretation, with Epimetheus representing a conservation of hope and an appreciation for what is, and a “convivial [relationship] with the world while the progenitor of the new world, Prometheus, remains bound and chained by his own creative deed” (ibid., pp. 127–28). Epimetheus’s “afterthought” can then be interpreted not as a dull passivity, but rather as a disposition of reflection on the potentially harmful limits of transformation and appreciation for mutuality in the present (Kahn, 2010, p. 93). What is important for our understanding of this relationship, though, is that these attitudes need not be exclusive. After all, one cannot have an afterthought if there has not been a forethought.

The exchange between these two dispositions, then, provides a useful, process-oriented frame for understanding the role and method of education and pedagogy in anarchist thought, as does the distinction between Freire and the anarchists, and the ostensibly apolitical pedagogy of Neill. The anarchist approach to education is not accounted for entirely by a rigidly promethean or epimethean perspective, but is rather to be found in the experimental and dialectical tension between the two … much akin to the anarchist conception of a desirable and dynamic challenging and exchange between teachers and students.

Anarchy, the State, and the Classroom

Usually developing in the interstices of dominant school systems, sustained anarchist schools have had an oft-troubled history of opposition and harassment from the powers-that-be. Often seen by states (even when not by the anarchist pedagogues themselves) as direct challenges to their organizational norms, social values, and principles of authority, anarchist schools have faced bureaucratic reaction, censure, and police suppression. We will look at a few examples of anarchist schools, specifically the Modern School of Francisco Ferrer and contemporary anarchist “free” schools and space, to see some of the general principles of anarchist education in practice.

Escuela Moderna

The most prominent example of an overtly anarchist school would most likely be the Escuela Moderna (Modern School) movement that originated in Spain, as developed, operated and expounded by Francisco Ferrer. Ferrer was an anarchist and an educator, whose interest in experimental education grew alongside his disdain for the highly regimented and authoritarian school system of his home country. In the Modern School of Ferrer, children were allowed greater freedom of individual inquiry and spontaneity, time for personal reflection in the school or in the gardens surrounding, and were not treated as lesser beings to be commanded by a dogmatic authority, as in the dominant Catholic schools of Ferrer’s native Spain (Goldman, 1911b). Children, thought Ferrer, ought to be able to develop the potentiality of their whole being, not simply the instrumental, vocational, or acon-textually abstract, and thus were to be allowed to visit factories, museums, gardens, and other community locales in order to learn through practice (Ferrer, 1909, p. 2). Neither were they to be subjected to the nationalist messages of the state, impersonal and pedagogically inappropriate examinations, or the sexual segregation of the wider society. In his classic defense of these (still seemingly) radical practices, Ferrer (1913) declares that:

Having admitted and practiced the coeducation of boys and girls, of rich and poor—having, that is to say, started from the principle of solidarity and equality—we are not prepared to create new inequality. Hence in the Modern School there will be no rewards and no punishments; there will be no examinations to puff up some children with the flattering title of “excellent,” to give others the vulgar title of “good,” and make others unhappy with a consciousness of incapacity and failure. (p. 55)

While eschewing dogma, Ferrer did not believe, like A.S. Neill, in the possibility or desirability of teaching from a stance of political or ethical neutrality. After searching in vain for textbooks he felt were appropriately nonauthoritarian for the school library, he eventually decided to install a printing press and commission works that addressed “the injustices connected with patriotism, the horrors of war, and the iniquity of conquest,” things he viewed as brute facts obscured or hidden by the dogmas of the Catholic Church and the nationalism of the state (Avrich, 1980, p. 23).

Ferrer saw all of this as fitting rightly within the anarchist tradition of prefiguration, the development of a new society “in the shell of the old.” As such, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Spanish authorities reacted against this and closed down the school in 1906. What was a surprise to most, and the cause of an international outcry, was his subsequent execution resulting from bogus charges of “instigating uprising” following mass-protests and general strikes in the wake the Spanish war against Morocco (Goldman, 1911b).

Free schools and free spaces

Informed in many ways by Ferrer, education philosopher Ivan Illich criticized the notion that a formal school is the proper place where education happens, arguing in defense of education as a lifelong process, rather than something that you only go through while young. Taken together, these ideas could suggest a notion of a “school” that is a socially embedded and democratic institution, freely available to all age groups, with a far more interactive and cooperative role between teachers, students and parents in designing curriculum, allocating resources, and expanding education into experiences beyond the traditional schoolhouse and occasional field trip model. Especially important was Illich’s insistence that sites of education remain open to the community, rather than rigidly institutionalized, in order to avoid monopolizations of informational/knowledge channels (Illich, 1971). This notion of open and free education fits well with Paul Goodman’s (1977) belief that “in anarchist theory the world revolution means the process by which the grip of authority is loosed, so that the functions of life can regulate themselves, without top-down direction and coordination” (p. 215).

This notion seems to be demonstrated in the case of some recent Anarchist Free Schools. Allan Antliff provides an inspiring account of a Toronto Anarchist Free School, and its subsequent Internet counterpart Anarchist U. These schools were/are nonprofit, voluntarily operated and open-attendance schools run along anarchist organizational lines. Within them, classes are freely proposed and freely joined by anyone interested on any number of topics. Antliff (2007) describes the different attitude of participants: “Once education was made free and grading and other assorted punitive measures (degree denial) were set aside, people could learn without competing with one another or striving to satisfy authority figures in their midst” (pp. 248–60).

Such successful, open and community-embedded experiments can provide for a cornucopia of educational diversity, and stimulate interests beyond traditional subjects, while ensuring ready, open access to knowledge for those who desire it.

Anarchist schools and educational spaces have thus emphasized the free-flowing nature of learning, and abhorred intellectual regimentation, viewing this as the death-knell of independent thought. This notion of how a school can operate certainly appears radical when compared to the operation of contemporary public schools or universities. Both of the latter are usually managed in a top-down manner with little direct control over the meaningful operations of the institutions by teachers, students or parents, at least in the case of public schools. Academic departments within universities can have some degree of internal self-management, although this does not extend equally to graduate students, adjunct instructors, or other largely contingent university education workers who have little academic freedom or job security (AAUP, 2006).

The State and the Classroom

In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk.—John D. Rockefeller (1906)

The repression and marginalization experienced by many anarchist schools and experiments, among other obstacles, has historically made the operation of truly independent anarchist educational programs difficult. The implementation of anarchist educational and political ideals within the dominant state-run public school systems has had its own set of difficulties. The variety of critiques developed in response to this difficulty are diverse, but they are all rooted in the notion that various forms of state-run school organization, pedagogy, and practices violate the values and methods anarchists believe to be necessary to cultivate free and critical minds, and defend solidaristic and egalitarian social relations.

A principal critique from anarchist educators has been that the authority relations between students and teachers, teachers and administrators, and between schools and the state are part of a formidable hierarchy that seeks to instill and reproduce amenable attitudes toward institutional authorities and deference toward authority as such (Chomsky, 2000, p. 17). Rather than develop educational systems that gravitate around the needs of the individual child, children are molded to the goals and expectations of the state educational system. In a capitalist system, this manifests as publicly funded “apprentice-training for corporations, government” and the reproduction of the educational system itself, as well as “adjusting” students to their problems with authority (Goodman, 1964, p. 18). For Goodman, the bell-ringing, time-accounting, and hierarchical authority and disciplinary system of state schools function as a form of behavioral operant conditioning, developing obedience rather than spontaneity or initiative.

Voltairine de Cleyre, an American anarchist and teacher, criticized the school systems at the end of the nineteenth century for their authoritarian operations and the effects they had upon their unfortunate students. She decried how children were forced to sit silently and absolutely still for hours on end, while being “taught” material that had little relevance to their own lives and interests and usually sought to expound the virtues of the dominant political order through the guise of a benign claim to “truth.” The effect of this, she noted, was to put “an iron mold upon the will of youth, destroying all spontaneity and freedom of expression” (de Cleyre, 2005, p. 260). Her most effective description of the absurdity of this system is encapsulated in a poignant, if lengthy (as was her style), metaphor:

Any gardener who should attempt to raise healthy, beautiful, and fruitful plants by outraging all those plants’ instinctive wants and searchings, would meet as his reward—sickly plants, ugly plants, sterile plants, dead plants. He will not do it; he will watch very carefully to see whether they like much sunlight, or considerable shade, whether they thrive on much water or get drowned in it … the plant itself indicate to him when he is doing the right thing … If he finds the plant revolts against his experiments, he will desist at once, and try something else; if he finds it thrives, he will emphasize the particular treatment so long as it seems beneficial. But what he will surely not do, will be to prepare a certain area of ground all just alike, with equal chances of sun and amount of moisture in every part, and then plant everything together without discrimination—mighty close together!—saying beforehand, “If plants don’t want to thrive on this, they ought to want to; and if they are stubborn about it, they must be made to.” (ibid., p. 255)

Anarchist educators would agree, then, with critical pedagogues in the judgment that the implementation of standardized testing regimes, a cornerstone of current policies like No Child Left Behind, renders pedagogical experimentation and potential challenges to this arrangement very difficult, even when a cantankerous or brave educator (anarchist or otherwise) does have the desire. Standardized tests are seen, in Fordist fashion, as imposing uniform performance expectations and methods upon students who have different learning styles, individual needs, and who may be at different places in their personal intellectual development. Further, rather than encouraging a curriculum oriented toward the development of critical analytical skills, or fulfilling personal curiosity, standardized tests encourage a shallow, bulimic approach to learning. This entails the rote consumption and regurgitation of contextually isolated facts and figures on command, with high performance on a test seen as an end in itself, and synonymous with having learned something. On top of it all, standardized tests serve as gatekeepers of educational advancement, threatening failure and halting further learning until “adequacy” is demonstrated (Kohn, 2000).

In the face of this sort of “education,” some radical pedagogues have looked for inspirational educational alternatives in the ancient Athenian educational system and principles of paideia (Morrison, 1995; Fotopoulos, 2005; Shiva, 2005). The value of this system does have limits, given, among other things, the political limitations and prejudices of ancient Athens (Kahn, 2010, p. 38). However, in comparing broadly libertarian educational principles to the broad, civic-minded self-improvement goals of the ancient Athenian educational system of paideia we can find a useful epochal counterpart to relate to the modern state. The correlate “ideal” educational system of the modern state can, then, be understood as a combination of disciplinary market instrumentalism and agoge, the ancient Spartan disciplinary regimen. In the agoge regimen, youth (solely males then) were trained to value loyalty to the State over the self, military discipline, conformity, and competition among peers for the purposes of establishing dominance (Hodkinson, 1996). In creating more space within the modern educational system for alternatives to this disciplinarian and regimented pedagogy, alternatives like paideia or other models of inspiration, could certainly provide a welcome reprieve, and protect pockets of “spheres of free action,” even if they are ephemeral (Ward, 1973, p. 18).

In comparing the structures and functional values of state schools in the United States with previous examples of anarchist schooling, and after elaborating on the values, organizational principles and understanding of human nature within anarchist thought, I hope that the differences in values instilled and desirable types of persons developed are made starkly apparent. Many of the critiques of state school systems offered by anarchist educators are over a century old, yet (unfortunately) sound incredibly contemporary.

Conclusions

Ultimately, I hope to have demonstrated that understanding the relationship between anarchism and education is a worthwhile project. While sharing many commonalities with other radical traditions, I believe that anarchist theory provides an identifiably distinct perspective for understanding and approaching education as a political, prefigurative, and transformative encounter, regardless of one’s politics. I hope to have also demonstrated the importance of education for anarchism as a political theory and emancipatory personal and social project. The implications of this appreciation for education and the importance of early prefigurative value-contestation and construction are two-fold, however. Gustav Landauer best summarized this conceptual problematic in this way: “The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other behavior, by behaving differently” (Ward, 1973, p. 23).

Understanding oppressive institutions as not “things” to be destroyed, but relationships to remake and ideas to replace is a double-edged sword. It is frustrating in that it disperses the sites of critical social contestation against oppressive institutions and ideas to, literally, the minds of every individual (though this does not preclude traditional externalized social struggles for greater equity and liberty). It is encouraging, though, in that it reveals their nonmonolithic and mutable nature. Taking advantage of an anarchist approach to education, then, could, in terms of pedagogy and praxis, open up greater possibilities for imagining and cultivating alternative social relationships in the minds of those who would live them.

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CHAPTER 2. Updating the Anarchist Forecast for Social Justice in Our Compulsory Schools

David Gabbard

Writing for Salon.com in 2007, Gary Kamiya pondered how George W. Bush, in light of his administration’s incessant abuses of power, had managed to avoid impeachment. Bush’s “problems go far beyond Iraq,” Kamiya wrote. “His administration has been dogged by one massive scandal after the other, from the Katrina debacle, to Bush’s approval of illegal wiretapping and torture, to his unparalleled use of ‘signing statements’ to disobey laws that he disagrees with, to the outrageous Gonzales and U.S. attorneys affair” (Kamiya, 2007). So, why hasn’t he been impeached?

For Kamiya, “the main reason is obvious” when viewed from the perspective of realpolitik. The Democrats, with their narrow majority in Congress, did not have the political will to do so. In weighing the potential costs and benefits of such a move, they feared that impeachment could backfire on them. They preferred, it seemed, to give Bush enough rope to hang the Republican Party in the 2008 elections.

Kamiya, however, also identified a deeper and more troubling reason that Bush was not impeached. This reason had less to do with either Bush or the Democratic Party, and more with us—the American people. “Bush’s warmongering,” Kamiya contends,

spoke to something deep in our national psyche. The emotional force behind America’s support for the Iraq war, the molten core of an angry, resentful patriotism, is still too hot for Congress, the media and even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront directly. It’s a national myth. It’s John Wayne. To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness—come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. And we’re not ready to do that. (Kamiya, 2007; emphasis added)

That national core of violent self-righteousness went on full public display the night of May 2, 2011, when President Barack Obama announced on national television that seventy-nine U.S. commandoes had raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden. Dozens of spontaneous celebrations erupted at a number of sites across the nation, including Times Square, a host of university campuses, as well as in front of the White House. Everywhere, the scene was the same. Hundreds, if not thousands, of flag-waving citizens, hyped up on the bloodlust of vengeance whooping and hollering beneath the moon, filled the streets and the night air with chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Had anyone stepped into any of those throngs to question a single element of the official version of the events of September 11, 2001, they’d have been torn to bits. The mob, inebriated on manifest destiny and other ideological elixirs, would tolerate no reflection, no questions, and no challenge to their God-given right to believe whatever the oligarchs had sanctioned them to know. It could have been a Super Bowl, Stanley Cup, NBA title, or World Series celebration. That’s about the depth of understanding that most of our fellow citizens have of world affairs. America is “our team.” And, as George Bush told us, “you’re either with us, or you’re against us.” And that night in May, we scored a victory. It was time to party!

Dare We Ever Grow Up?

If we’d ever find a way to collectively come to terms with our national core of violent self-righteousness, we would have to acknowledge what underlies it. We would have to recognize, as Cornel West argues in Democracy Matters (2004), that

the American democratic experiment is unique in human history not because we are God’s chosen people to lead the world, nor because we are always a force for good in the world, but because of our refusal to acknowledge the deeply racist and imperial roots of our democratic project. We are exceptional because of our denial of the antidemocratic foundation stones of American democracy. No other democratic nation revels so blatantly in such self-deceptive innocence, such self-paralyzing reluctance to confront the night-side of its own history. This sentimental flight from history—or adolescent escape from painful truths about ourselves—means that even as we grow old, grow big, and grow powerful, we have yet to grow up. (p. 41)

And whereas Kamiya simply asserts, “we need therapy,” West offers a more specific prescription, calling for the enactment of a “democratic paideia—the cultivation of an active, informed citizenry—in order to preserve and deepen our democratic experiment,” coupled with “parrhesia—frank and fearless speech—that is the lifeblood of any democracy” (ibid., pp. 41, 209). Such measures are necessary, he contends, if we are to escape “our self-deceptive innocence” and our “self-paralyzing reluctance to confront the night-side of[our] own history.”

Educators committed to a pedagogy of social justice would eagerly answer West’s call for fearless speech in service of what they hold to be one of the most important missions of America’s schools: “the cultivation of an active, informed citizenry.” Tragically, however, no one knows the sting of America’s “violent self-righteousness” better than those same educators. Long before Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, the official network of violent self-righteousness, launched the national demonization campaign against University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill for disrupting the official narrative of September 11, the Monroe County Community Schools Corporation in Bloomington, Indiana, declined to renew the contract of Deborah Mayer, an elementary school teacher. Mayer’s transgression occurred while discussing the December 13, 2002, issue Time for Kids, a children’s version of Time magazine that was a regular part of the curriculum. That issue contained a story covering a peace march in Washington D.C. protesting the pending U.S. invasion of Iraq, which led a student to ask Mayer if she “would ever be in a peace march.” Mayer informed the class that whenever she drove past marchers holding up signs asking motorists to “Honk For Peace” that she honked. She also told the children that she thought people “should seek peaceful solutions before going to war.” The class then discussed a conflict resolution program at their own school, and they dropped the subject. Shortly afterwards, however, a Bush-supporting parent brought a complaint against Mayer before the school principal, and the district later refused to renew her contract (Egelko, 2007).

Judge Sarah Evans Barker ruled against Mayer in her wrongful termination suit, arguing that “teachers, including Ms. Mayer, do not have a right under the First Amendment to express their opinions during the instructional period” (Global Research, 2006). Later, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, famed neoliberal jurist and Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook upheld Barker’s ruling. “Expression,” Easterbrook wrote, “is a teacher’s stock in trade, the commodity she sells to her employer in exchange for a salary” (Egelko, 2007, emphasis added). Though she plans a further appeal, Mayer holds little optimism that the Supreme Court will take her case. If the decision stands, particularly in light of the neoliberal logic found in Easterbrook’s ruling, we can abandon all but the slimmest of hopes that schools will ever become sites for pursuing social justice. In that case, perhaps the time has arrived for us to take the anarchist critique of education more seriously and recognize the futility of pushing for democratic educational reforms. Maybe we should begin considering the possibility that we might best pursue social justice, not by reforming schools but by resisting state-controlled systems of compulsory schooling altogether.

The Anarchist Critique

When he published What Is Property? in 1840, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon became the first person to call himself an anarchist (Proudhon, 2003). He was not, however, the first person to call for the abolition of the state. For this reason, scholarship traces the anarchist tradition back to William Godwin. Credited with developing the first comprehensive anarchist critique of government schools in his Inquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793, Godwin viewed freedom of thought as fundamental to political liberty (Godwin, 1796). As Joel Spring (1994) explains, Godwin believed that “since people constantly improve their reasoning power and their understanding of nature, their understanding of the best form of government is constantly changing” (p. 42). While he recognized that education was crucial toward the development of individuals’ powers of rational thought that would guide them in self-government, Spring (1983) notes, Godwin also “considered national systems of education one of the foremost dangers to freedom and liberty” (p. 68). “Before we put so powerful a machine (education) under the direction of so ambiguous an agent (government),” Godwin warned, “it behooves us to consider well what it is we do. Government will not fail to employ it, to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions” (Spring, 1994, p. 42).

Indeed, Godwin’s warning gives us good reason to question whether government-controlled schools can ever function as sites where students cultivate their powers of reasoning in the service of social justice. Furthermore, Godwin also provokes us to consider the extent to which schools, as instruments of state power, have contributed more to what Kamiya identifies as our “our national core of violent self-righteousness” than they have to cultivating the “active, informed citizenry” called for by Cornel West.

Echoing Godwin’s concerns and armed with two hundred years of historical hindsight, contemporary anarchist scholar Noam Chomsky (2003) describes “the basic institutional role and function of the schools” as providing “an ideological service: there’s a real selection for obedience and conformity” (pp. 27–28). In Chomsky’s analysis, compulsory, government schooling brings children at a very early age into an indoctrination system “that works against independent thought in favor of obedience” with the goal of keeping people “from asking questions that matter about important issues that directly affect them and others” (Chomsky & Macedo, 2000, p. 24). In Deborah Mayer’s case, of course, the important issue was the pending invasion of Iraq. Keep in mind that a student initiated the conversation concerning Mayer’s participation in peace marches. Therefore, the decision of the school board and courts’ rulings on that decision sent a clear message to students as well as teachers: “We don’t discuss ‘questions that matter’ about issues that might interest you.” That message, of course, underscores Chomsky’s thesis that schools function to discourage independent inquiry and promote obedience and conformity.

Emma Goldman made similar observations early in the twentieth century. “What, then, is the school of today?” she asked. “It is for the child what the prison is for the convict and the barracks for the soldier—a place where everything is being used to break the will of the child, and then to pound, knead, and shape it into a being utterly foreign to itself…. It is but part of a system which can maintain itself only through absolute discipline and uniformity” (Goldman, 2007).

Goldman’s description of schools receives considerable support in the more heavily analytic writings of Michel Foucault. In books such as Madness and Civilization (1988) and Discipline and Punish (1995), Foucault points out for us a very peculiar historical oddity. Systems of government-sponsored compulsory schooling did, in fact, begin to emerge at the same point in history as the modern prison, and each was modeled on the Army barracks. Compulsory schooling of the masses has always had less to do with education and more to do with discipline. By “discipline,” Foucault refers to a form of treatment that

increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes those same forces (in terms of political obedience). In short, it disassociates powers from the body; on the one hand it turns it into an “aptitude,” a “capacity,” which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjugation. If economic exploitation separates the force of and the product of labor, let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination. (ibid, p. 141)

Moreover, compulsory schooling functions to discipline individuals in a manner that increases the productive power that their bodies offer to the economic system while simultaneously diminishing their power to resist economic exploitation and the political system that initiates that exploitation by compelling students to attend school in the first place.

The writings of Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and recognized “father of American psychiatry,” are particularly illuminative of how the early advocates of compulsory schooling viewed the importance of diminishing individuals’ powers of resistance by building up their emotional attachments to the state. Rush wrote his “Thoughts upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic” in 1786—just seven years before Godwin wrote his Inquiry Concerning Political Justice. Rush declared “the principle of patriotism stands in need of the reinforcement of prejudice, and it is well known that our strongest prejudices in favor of our country are formed in the first one and twenty years of our lives….Our schools of learning,” he argued, “by producing one general and uniform system of education, will render the mass of the people more homogeneous and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government” (Rush, 1786). The quotes below come from the same document:

In order more effectually to secure to our youth the advantages of a religious education, it is necessary to impose upon them the doctrines and discipline of a particular church. Man is naturally an ungovernable animal, and observations on particular societies and countries will teach us that when we add the restraints of ecclesiastical to those of domestic and civil government, we produce in him the highest degrees of order and virtue….

Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it….

In the education of youth, let the authority of our masters be as absolute as possible. The government of schools like the government of private families should be arbitrary, that it may not be severe. By this mode of education, we prepare our youth for the subordination of laws and thereby qualify them for becoming good citizens of the republic. I am satisfied that the most useful citizens have been formed from those youth who have never known or felt their own wills till they were one and twenty years of age, and I have often thought that society owes a great deal of its order and happiness to the deficiencies of parental government being supplied by those habits of obedience and subordination which are contracted at schools….

From the observations that have been made it is plain that I consider it as possible to convert men into republican machines. This must be done if we expect them to perform their parts properly in the great machine of the government of the state. (ibid.)

Noah Webster, known as “the schoolmaster of America,” could not have agreed more. “Good republicans,” Webster wrote, “are formed by a singular machinery in the body politic, which takes the child as soon as he can speak, checks his natural independence and passions, makes him subordinate to superior age, to the laws of the state, to town and parochial institutions” (Spring, 2005, pp. 48–49). Webster’s real significance as a force in shaping the direction of American education and culture rests with his creation of a series of books that were the major school texts in nineteenth-century America, selling over a million and a half copies by 1801 and seventy-five million copies by 1875. As Webster’s biographer, Harry Warfel, characterized them, “this series of unified textbooks effectually shaped the destiny of American education for a century. Imitators sprang up by the dozens, and each echoed the Websterian nationalism. The word ‘American’ became indispensable in all textbook titles; all vied in patriotic eloquence” (ibid., p 48)

We are able to trace, then, the roots of Kamiya’s “national core of violent self-righteousness” right back to the very beginnings of America’s experiment with compulsory schooling. “Our schools,” wrote a veteran schoolteacher in 1910, “have failed because they rest on compulsion and constraint…. It is deemed possible and important that all should be interested in the same things, in the same sequence, and at the same time…. Under the circumstances (of 1910) teachers are mere tools, automatons who perpetuate a machine that turns out automatons” (Goldman, 2007).

Under the conditions of 2011, over a hundred years later, how little has changed. With Emma Goldman, we should recognize that under the enduring conditions of government-sponsored, compulsory schooling, “the child becomes stunted, that its mind is dulled, and that its very being is warped, thus making it unfit to take its place in the social struggle as an independent factor. Indeed, there is nothing so hated so much in the world today as independent factors in whatever line” (ibid.).

The Permissible Purposes of Compulsory Schooling

I vividly recall the day my son Jackson came home from school when he was just in the first grade, complaining of a sore chin. “I get done with my work before everybody else,” he told me. “And when I ask the teacher what to do next, she tells me to just sit there and put my head on my desk.” Evidently, the weight of his head on his chin resting on his folded arms atop his desk caused the soreness. Then came the question I knew would one day come, “Why do I have to go to school, Dad?”

What was I to tell him, given all I know about the truth to that question? Of course, there are actually multiple truths that could be told in response to that question, and none of them, told honestly, are very gratifying. At the most basic level, kids have to go to school because the government says they must—an often forgotten, overlooked, or regularly ignored fact that ought to make each of us nervous about the enterprise of compulsory schooling from the start. It certainly explains why so many kids wind up hating school. Many, if not most of them aren’t there because they want to be, but because they have to be. According to the Alliance for Excellent Education, seven thousand kids drop out of school every day (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2011). Who knows how many more tune out because they don’t see any relevance in the curriculum?

Of course, I wasn’t going to tell my own kid to drop out of first grade, but it’s hard not to empathize with kids who make that decision at some point in their school career. At the same time, it’s hard not to find sympathy for them, because we know what the consequences are for refusing the advertised beneficence of compulsory schooling. Or, at least, we used to.

One of the first lessons in most Foundations of American Education courses like the one I teach entails sharing Thomas Jefferson’s belief that America should become a meritocratic society rather than an aristocratic society. In an aristocracy, one’s position in a society stratified along economic and political lines was determined by one’s birth. Economic and political power remained concentrated in the hands of just a few families and was passed on from generation to generation. The growth of the market and the rise of the new merchant class in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would challenge the aristocratic traditions of European feudalism. Eventually, that challenge would fuel the rhetoric of quasi-democratic revolutions such as ours in 1776.

For Jefferson, a system of public schools would help ensure that one’s position in the new American society, which had, of course, remained highly stratified, both politically and economically, would be based on merit rather than birthright. So, if you went to school, worked hard, and demonstrated sufficient talent and ability, you could aspire to and achieve whatever position in society you wanted, or at least a position high enough to guarantee yourself and your family some measure of economic security.

These ideas helped form the basis of what we’ve come to know as the American Dream Ideology. Horace Mann would later borrow from Jefferson in formulating his arguments in favor a creating a tax-supported system of compulsory schools in the state of Massachusetts. To strengthen the persuasiveness of his rhetoric, Mann “framed” his proposal, not as government-mandated schools, but as “Common Schools.” They would be “common” in three important ways. They would impart a “common” political philosophy to weaken political strife at a time when America’s working classes were at deep odds with the ownership classes. They would also impart a common religious (Christian) doctrine to ameliorate the ongoing conflict among the various Christian sects at the time. Finally, and most importantly for our purposes here, Mann presented his system of schools as being “common” in the sense that children from all walks of life would attend the same schools and, therefore, have the same opportunity to demonstrate their talents and abilities and justify their future position in America’s stratified social order. In theory, this meant that children from wealthy families who “failed” at school would end up as poor adults, while poor children who excelled at school would end up as wealthy adults. According to Mann’s promise, and in keeping with Jefferson meritocratic vision, common schools would function as a great social equalizer.

That promise has yet to be fulfilled, because it’s always been a false promise. Children of the most elite classes have, with rare exception, never attended public schools. So, those schools have never been truly “common.” The state of Massachusetts alone is home to forty private boarding schools such as Groton, where the price of tuition for “boarders” is $48,895 and $37,020 for “day students.” Interestingly, when we research the dates when those schools were founded, we find that most of them were established toward the end of the nineteenth century, just when larger numbers of children from lower-class families began being pushed into the public schools created in accordance with Mann’s vision.

Comparably, here in North Carolina, where Jim Crow laws once segregated children into black schools and white schools, we have numerous so-called “Christian academies.” When we research the dates of their founding, we find they were created in the early 1970s, shortly after the 1964 Civil Rights Act put teeth into the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and ushered in a period of government mandated desegregation.

Elite and privileged groups have always had the financial and political means to pass their advantages on to their children. So, it becomes very hard to take someone like Bill Gates seriously when, in his teacher recruitment commercial for Teach.gov, he says, “My success came from how lucky I was to have some great teachers.” Maybe so, but shouldn’t he at least preface that with an acknowledgment that he was also “lucky” to have a father wealthy enough to pay $25,000 a year for his tuition at the Lakeside School, whose course catalog easily rivals most small private liberal arts colleges? For example, the history and social study curriculum at Lakeside’s “Upper School” (high school) includes required courses in Modern World History, 1200–1870, Contemporary World History, 1870 to the Present, and United States History with electives in

• The Ancient Mediterranean World

• The Cold War

• After the Cold War, The World at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

• Introduction to Philosophy

• Introduction to World Religions

• The Holocaust and Genocide Studies

• Leadership for the Modern Era

• Comparative Government and Politics

• Freedom, Crime, and the Law

• Africa Today

• Global Village

• Music of the African Diaspora

• Natives and Strangers: American Immigration

• Microeconomics

• Developing Economies

• Issues in the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa

• Race Matters: A (Fairly) Contemporary Intellectual History of African America, and

• Gender Studies

How many of us who attended public schools had those opportunities available to us? Perhaps more people would demand such a curriculum, but few of us have any awareness of the existence of places like Lakeside or Groton, let alone any knowledge of their curricula.

Nevertheless, if only because employers, primarily since the 1950s, began requiring educational credentials from their job candidates, the meritocratic argument for schooling did develop some measure of legitimacy over the years. Looking at Table 1 below, we find a very significant difference (18.6 percent) between the unemployment rates in 2008 for college graduates and high school graduates, and a nearly identical (17.9 percent) difference between those who earn a high school diploma and those who do not.

Level of Educational Attainment	Unemployment Rate Among 16–24-Year-Old Out-of-School Youth in 2008
College Graduates	13.3%
1–3 Years of College	21.2%
H.S. Graduate	31.9%
H.S. Dropouts	54.0%

Since the 1950s, then, most Americans learned to take the rules of the game for granted. If you work hard in school and graduate, you’ll be able to find a job and establish some economic security for yourself. But that myth is quickly coming unraveled. In the words of a New Jersey man who lost his job in 2010, “I did everything right, I played by the rules, I got skills, I excelled in my job, all to no avail … I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he continued. “All the years of both parties talking about free trade agreements and how we will retrain America was just a bunch of BS; it was easy to say all that when times were good” (Delaney, 2011). As Arthur Delaney has so accurately pointed out, Barack Obama made these changes to what we used to take for granted as the “rules of the game” official, or at least publically acknowledgeable, in his 2011 State of the Union address:

Many people watching tonight can probably remember a time when finding a good job meant showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown. You didn’t always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors. If you worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life, with a decent paycheck and good benefits and the occasional promotion. Maybe you’d even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company.

That world has changed. And for many, the change has been painful. I’ve seen it in the shuttered windows of once booming factories, and the vacant storefronts on once busy Main Streets. I’ve heard it in the frustrations of Americans who’ve seen their paychecks dwindle or their jobs disappear—proud men and women who feel like the rules have been changed in the middle of the game.

They’re right. The rules have changed. In a single generation, revolutions in technology have transformed the way we live, work and do business. Steel mills that once needed 1,000 workers can now do the same work with 100. Today, just about any company can set up shop, hire workers, and sell their products wherever there’s an Internet connection.

Lest we be duped into renewing any faith in the “change” we were told we could “believe in,” Obama has pledged to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that he would pursue even more free trade agreements—this time with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. With the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) having eliminated nearly eight hundred thousand U.S. jobs since 1991, it ought to strike us as highly unlikely that these pending new agreements will do anything but dim the economic prospects of America’s youth, making it even harder for parents to point to a future economic payoff to motivate their children to stay in school.

According to an April 2011 report from the Economic Policy Institute, “the unemployment rate for workers aged sixteen to twenty-four was 18.4%—the worst on record in the sixty years that this data has been tracked” (Shierholz & Edwards, 2011). Even under the best of economic times, I couldn’t honestly tell either of my sons that doing well in school and going on to earn a four-year degree would guarantee that they’d be able to find a job in their chosen fields. In today’s economy, however, a four-year degree is even less certain to secure employment, as the unemployment rate for college grads in 2010 reached nearly 10 percent. With 85 percent of college graduates reporting that they are moving back home with mom and dad, we can expect that number for 2011 to climb even higher.

At least I can tell them that a college degree still improves their chances, because the unemployment rate among those with only a high school diploma or GED now stands at 22.5 percent. For dropouts, of course, the unemployment rates are even worse at 32.9 percent. For those closer to his age (those between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four), the figures and are far worse. According to a study conducted by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University (2009), the jobless rate in 2008 for those with a four-year degree or higher was 13.3 percent, while it was 21.2 percent for those with one to three years of postsecondary education, 31.9 percent for high school graduates, and 54 percent for young high school dropouts. As reflected in the table below, the fewer number of years of schooling that one completes strongly correlates to both your risk of unemployment as well as your risk of incarceration.

	Unemployment Rate Among 16–24-Year-Old Out-of-School Youth in 2008	Incarceration Rate Among 16–24-Year-Old Out-of-School Youth 2006–2007
College Graduates	13.3%	0.1%
1–3 Years of College	21.2%	0.7%
H.S. Graduate	31.9%	1.0%
H.S. Dropouts	54%	6.3%

At its core, the problem is this: the continued existence of compulsory schooling perpetuates the myth that people’s success or failure hinges on their performance in school. In turn, this allows the state to blame schools for the larger problems in the economy that result in shrinking opportunities for people to find work. And this multitiered game of victim blaming drives the endless calls for school reform. The truth is that schools will never be reformed as long as they are made compulsory by the state. As documented by the Advancement Project (2010), in the the thirty years since the state launched its massive A Nation At Risk report and propaganda campaign that blamed schools for the alleged inability of U.S.-based corporations to compete in the global economy, the only meaningful changes we’ve witnessed in schools have been the implementation of high-stakes testing/accountability and zero-tolerance policies. Neither of those policies have changed the nature of compulsory schooling, but have only served to intensify its effects; namely, disciplining docile bodies to accept boring and monotonous work as an inevitable part of life while subjecting those who refuse to recognize the beneficence of this therapy to remedial discipline in prison.

The United States, which has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners (Liptak, 2008). Figures range from between 1.6 million and 2.3 million Americans living behind bars. As the market economy continues its collapse, we should expect to see these numbers escalate, as globalization and domestic neoliberal policies continue to create a larger surplus population of people whom the market cannot absorb. State policy makers certainly do. As the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (2011) points out in a report titled Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate:

Over the last two decades, as the criminal justice system came to assume a larger proportion of state discretionary dollars nationwide, state spending on prisons grew at six times the rate of state spending on higher education. In 2009, as the nation plummeted into the deepest recession in 30 years, funding for K-12 and higher education declined; however, in that same year, 33 states spent a larger proportion of their discretionary dollars on prisons than they had the year before.

Corporations and Wall Street investment firms also recognize and seek to capitalize on this same trend. The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States. Even the federal government and its defense contractors exploit the situation.

The anarchist critique of compulsory schooling leaves us little room for hope that our schools will ever be different. We are naïve to think that just because we are socialized to call them “public schools” that those schools are meant to serve the public. To the contrary, public schools exist to target the public. In keeping with the anarchist critique of the state, we need to recognize compulsory schooling as a technology of power, an instrument of statecraft, and the first line of domestic defense for the security state. Like the state itself, compulsory schooling serves the elite interests of our capitalist oligarchy over the public interests of the majority of citizens. Until state power is wrested from that oligarchy, we can’t reasonably expect schools to function any differently. Indeed, current trends lead us to greater pessimism, not optimism, over the fate of schools, as the neoliberal assaults on schools and teachers’ unions seek to remove the control of schools from the contested ground of the state and place them under the direct control of private corporations. Sooner or later, people will have to recognize that compulsory schools are part of the problem. Eliminating them is part of the solution.

References

Advancement Project (2010). Test, punish, and push out: How “zero tolerance” and high-stakes testing funnel youth into the school-to-prison pipeline. Retrieved from http://www.advancementproject.org/digital-library/publications/test-punish-and-push-out-how-zero-tolerance-and-high-stakes-testing-fu (accessed June 9, 2011).

Alliance for Excellent Education (2011, June 9). About the crisis. Retrieved from http://www.all4ed.org/about_the_crisis.

Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University (2009). Joblessness and jailing for high school dropouts and the high cost for taxpayers. Retrieved from http://www.northeastern.edu/clms/wp-content/uploads/ The_Consequences_of_Dropping_Out_of_High_School.pdf (accessed June 9, 2011).

Chomsky, N. (2003). The function of schools: Subtler and cruder methods of control. In K.J. Saltman & D.A. Gabbard (Eds.), Education as enforcement: The militarization and corporatization of schools. New York: Routledge.

Chomsky, N. & Macedo, D. (2000). Beyond a domesticating education: A dialogue. In D. Macedo (Ed.), Chomsky on miseducation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Litttlefield.

Delaney, A. (2011, May 23). “I played by the rules”—“The rules have changed,” HuffingtonPost. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/23/long-term-unemployment_n_864873.html (accessed June 9, 2011).

Egelko, B. (2007, May 14). “Honk for peace” case tests limits on free speech. San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/05/14/MNG9PPQGVV1.DTL (accessed June 17, 2007).

Emptywheel (2011, March 8). They won’t even create jobs in the military-industrial complex anymore. Retrieved from http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/03/08/they-wont-even-create-jobs-in-the-military-industrial-complex-anymore/(accessed June 9, 2011).

Foucault, M. (1988). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. New York: Vintage.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage.

Global Research (2006, October 20), Judge rules teachers have no free speech rights in class. Center for Research on Globalization. Retrieved from www.globalresearch.ca eId=3551][http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20061020&article eId=3551]](accessed June 17, 2007).

Godwin, W. (1796). An inquiry concerning politicaljustice. Charlottesville, VA: Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. Retrieved from http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/GodJust.html (accessed June 17, 2007).

Goldman, E. (2007, June 17). The social importance of the modern school. Emma Goldman Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Retrieved from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/ anarchist_archives/goldman/socimportms.html.

Kamiya, G. (2007, May 22). Why Bush hasn’t been impeached. Salon.com. Retrieved from http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/05/22/impeachment/(accessed June 17, 2007).

Liptak, A. (2008, April 23). U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/ 2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html (accessed June 9, 2011).

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (2011, April 7). Misplaced priorities: Over incarcerate, under educate. Retrieved from http://www.naacp.org/pages/misplaced-priorities (accessed June 9, 2011).

Proudhon, P.-J. (2003). What is property; or, An inquiry into the principle of right and of government. Oshawa, Ontario: Mondo Politico. Retrieved from http://www.mondopolitico.com/ library/pjproudhon/whatisproperty/toc.htm (accessed June 17, 2007).

Rohrlich, J. (2011). Why are prisoners building patriot missiles? Minyanville. Retrieved from http://www.minyanville.com/businessmarkets/articles/defense-industrial-base-defense-budget-defense/3/7/2011/id/33198? (accessed June 9, 2011).

Rush, B. (1786) Thoughts upon the mode of education proper in a republic. In A plan for the establishment of public schools and the diffusion of knowledge in pennsylvania; to which are added, thoughts upon the mode of education proper in a republic. Retrieved from http://www.schoolchoices.org/roo/rush.htm (accessed June 17, 2007).

Shierholz H. & Edwards, K.A. (2011, April 11). The class of 2011: Young workers face a dire labor market without a safety net. Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper #306. Retrieved from http://www.epi.org/latest_research/ (accessed June 9, 2011).

Spring, J. (1983). The public school movement vs. the libertarian tradition. The Journal of Libertarian Studies, 7(1). Retrieved from http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/7_1/7_1_3.pdf (accessed June 17, 2007).

Spring, J. (1994). Wheels in the head: Educational philosophies of authority, freedom, and culture from Socrates to Paulo Freire. New York: McGraw Hill.

Spring, J. (2005). The American school, 1642–2004. New York: McGraw Hill.

West, C. (2004). Democracy matters: Winning the fight against imperialism. New York: Penguin.

CHAPTER 3. Educate, Organize, Emancipate: The Work People’s College and The Industrial Workers of the World[1]

Saku Pinta

Introduction

Education has always been central to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union’s vision of working-class liberation. In an April 1927 article published in the Finnish-language IWW periodical Tie Vapauteen (Road to Freedom) the author, William Ranta, noted that “The first star in the I.W.W. emblem means working-class ‘education,’ the second ‘organization,’ and the third ‘emancipation,’” continuing, “An enlightened group organizes itself and an organized group liberates itself.” (“Valistustyöhön,” p. 7)[2]

Founded in Chicago in 1905, the “Wobblies,” as members of the IWW were known, fashioned a conception of “revolutionary industrial unionism” both as an alternative to the dominant union formations organized around trades or crafts and as an organizational form that would prefigure the desired self-managed economic arrangements of a post-capitalist society. Trade or craft forms of union organization were regarded by the IWW not only as being exclusionary, divisive, and conservative, but also as organizational forms rendered ineffective and outdated in challenging the power of employers due, in part, to technological changes in the labor process and the resultant “deskilling” of the workforce. Workers in the same industry, they asserted, ought to belong to the same union regardless of ethnicity, gender, or their particular roles in production. By organizing industrially, workers could increase their collective power and leverage in day-to-day struggles with the increasingly concentrated power of employers over wages, hours, and working conditions, while building the capacity of the working class to abolish capitalism. Direct economic action, as opposed to a reliance on “official” bureaucratic channels to settle grievances, was the preferred tactic (Kornbluh, 2011, pp. 35–64).

While direct action could serve to radicalize workers, forge solidarities on the shop floor, and increase the confidence and capacity for collective struggle—simultaneously, through these actions, laying the libertarian and democratic foundations for a new society structured from below—the importance of theory and of spreading of revolutionary ideas was routinely emphasized within the union as a crucial, complementary element. This was positioned alongside a critique of traditional education as promoting bourgeois values such as patriotism and uniformity in a system which, as one Wobbly argued, sought to “adapt one to the social order and teach respect for the class division of society into masters and wage slaves” (quoted in Kornbluh, 2011, p. 366). Workers’ education, then, should augment the class-consciousness generated by direct class conflict experienced at work, but it could not imitate the methods of the traditional education system as this would simply recreate the undesirable hierarchies associated with capitalist institutions. Consequently, strict divisions between leaders and led were eschewed, as were rote or authoritarian methods of instruction that discouraged critical, independent thinking.

One fairly well-known dimension of this commitment to radical working-class education was described in Salerno’s 1989 Red November, Black November, a work focused on the culture of the IWW. Salerno argued that “cultural expressions such as songs, cartoons, and poetry became a critical form and means of communication between the I.W.W. and its members” (p. 149). In print since 1909 and now in its thirty-eighth edition, the famous IWW Little Red Songbook—featuring “songs to fan the flames of discontent”—is but one well-known example of the union’s cultural approach to disseminating revolutionary ideas. In addition to the transmission of ideas through cultural means, the IWW press and enormous pamphlet literature played a key role in working-class self-education, as did two collective spaces—the union hall and the “hobo jungle.” These served as spaces for learning, critical reflection, and debate, particularly through the first three decades of the twentieth century. Rosemont (2003) writes that the union hall functioned as a radical cultural center, “meeting place, reading room, and hangout … the union’s alternative to such conservative institutions as church, tavern, gambling parlor, race-track, and men’s club” (p. 33). The hobo jungles “served a similar function” as the union hall, namely, as subversive spaces “in which the most down-and-out wage-slaves could express themselves openly” (ibid., p. 33).

The most significant and sustained achievement by the IWW in the area of workers’ education was the Työväen Opisto (Work People’s College; hereafter WPC), an immigrant institution very closely tied to Finnish working-class communities in the Upper Midwest. The WPC, however, did not begin as an IWW school. Founded as the Suomalainen Kansan Opisto ja Teologinen Seminaari (Finnish People’s College and Theological Seminary) in Minneapolis in 1903, the aims of the college were to provide religious instruction, promote Finnish language and culture, and address the growing need for a formal liberal education among new immigrants. A lack of enrollment prompted a move the following year, in 1904, to Smithville, a suburb of Duluth, Minnesota, where it was hoped that the school could draw on the support of the substantially larger Finnish communities in that region. By 1907, the year that the Western Federation of Miners led a mass strike in the mines of Northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Range, tensions surrounding the college’s religious curriculum had caused a rift between the radicalized Finnish working class and many of the institution’s officials. These divisions would ultimately culminate in the Suomalainen Sosialisti Järjestö (Finnish Socialist Federation; FSF)[3] legally gaining ownership of the college through the purchase of stock, changing the name of the school from the People’s College to the WPC in 1908. All religious instruction was now jettisoned in favor of courses on topics such as the history of socialism, Darwinian evolution, and Marxist economics. Ideological harmony at the WPC, however, would not prevail. In 1914, the FSF underwent a major split which pitted a radical Left faction, supporting the IWW and industrial unionism, against a more moderate, social democratic faction backing the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and embracing a gradual, parliamentary vision toward achieving socialism.[4] Many of the midwestern locals of the FSF, including those grouped around the WPC, had sided with the radicals. In fact, the WPC had been a major center of IWW support in the years leading up to the split, and for this reason had long been considered a nuisance by some of the more moderate eastern-based leadership of the FSF. Radical students at the school were pejoratively labeled tussarit (meaning “gunslingers” or “gunhawks”) by their opponents—a term which was irreverently reclaimed and proudly adopted by pro-IWW WPC students as their own. With the organizational split, the FSF withdrew its financial backing from the WPC and the now independent pro-IWW faction promptly gained stock ownership of the school.

For over twenty-five years (between 1914 and 1941), the WPC served as a residential labor college tied to the IWW and sustained by the Finnish membership of that union. The main three-story building featured classrooms, student dormitories, a drama room, gymnasium, and library with a smaller adjacent building holding a fully staffed kitchen and dining room. For a tuition fee of $39 a month (the equivalent of about $500 today)—a price which included meals and accommodations—students were provided with instruction in the skills necessary for union organizing, administering IWW union infrastructure, and staffing the large network of consumer cooperatives in the Upper Midwest, operating their own press, and ultimately, for self-managing a postcapitalist society. Instruction was carried out over the course of a five-month term, which typically stretched from December to April. The school also featured a small number of correspondence courses for students unable to take up residence at the WPC. Altogether, an estimated 1,600 to 2,000 students had studied at the school throughout the nearly four decades it was in operation and through its various transitions (Altenbaugh, 1990, p. 136).

Although the WPC represents the most outstanding historical contribution of the IWW to the area of workers’ education, it has received relatively little in the way of attention from historians, remaining largely unknown outside of a specialist audience. In terms of the existing literature, Ollila (1977) and Heinila (1995) provide excellent general historical accounts of the WPC while Kostiainen (1980) concentrates on some of the major debates and controversies generated over the course in the school’s early years. The WPC is also mentioned in several accounts of the Finnish-American Left (Wasatjerna, 1957; Karni, 1975a; Ross, 1977; Kivisto, 1984). By far the most in-depth analysis of the WPC is Altenbaugh’s well-documented book Education as Struggle (1990), in which the WPC is examined through the lens of Gramscian social theory—alongside the Brookwood Labor College (Katonah, New York, 1921–1937) and Commonwealth College (Mena, Arkansas, 1923–1940)—as “institutions clearly formulated to serve a counterhegemonic function, promot[ing] proletarian culture, and train[ing] a working-class cadre” (p. 8).

A comprehensive history of the WPC has yet to be written, but such a task goes well beyond the scope of this study. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an historical account of the WPC through its years as an IWW labor college, focusing on the years 1920–1941, and in so doing shed some light on some of the largely overlooked aspects of the school during this period. The first section will provide necessary background and context by discussing the institutions and ideology of the Finnish North American membership of the IWW—the ethnic contingent that established, supported, and sustained the WPC. The succeeding sections will cover WPC curriculum, students, and faculty. Beyond historical interest, there is further reason to revisit the WPC and its contributions to libertarian education. In 2006, the WPC was revived as a free educational project of the IWW Twin Cities General Membership Branch. The conclusion shall be devoted to an assessment of the legacy and impact of this working-class institution along with a discussion of the renewed WPC. If the historical WPC provides a glimpse at how a fairly large-scale self-managed working-class educational institute functioned, its current revival suggests the urgency of developing such emancipatory spaces and the contemporary relevance of these endeavors.

Background and Context: The Work People’s College and the Finnish Wobblies

From 1914 onward, with the split in the FSF, it becomes possible to speak of an organized Finnish presence in the IWW. At this stage, the WPC was politically positioned, in effect, as a kind of “Left-socialist” institution, openly advocating the revolutionary industrial unionism of the IWW but also accepting the necessity of a working-class political party. It was not long before the Finnish supporters of the IWW would adopt an explicitly anti-parliamentary Left outlook, rapidly becoming the largest foreign-language contingent in the union. Kostiainen estimated Finnish membership in the IWW to be somewhere between five and ten thousand through the first two decades of the twentieth century (Kostianen, 1976, section 5, para. 1), however, no systematic analysis of Finnish IWW membership numbers currently exists.

During the 1916 IWW convention in Chicago, a motion to create formal ties between the union and the WPC was presented by representatives of the school, although no arrangement was reached. However, the 1916 convention was also notable for fulfilling the last wishes of the famous IWW labor martyr Joe Hill, namely, that his body be cremated and his ashes spread around the globe. In February 1917, a packet of Hill’s ashes was spread to the winds at the WPC, symbolically cementing the relationship between the union and the school from that point onward. Four years later, a May 28, 1921, report in Industrialisti (Industrialist) on the IWW convention in Chicago carried the news that the union would formally adopt the WPC as its school, ratifying an earlier decision made at the Lumber Workers Industrial Union convention to forge official ties (“Tietoja I.WW. Liiton 13:sta Koventsionista,” p. 1).

An account of Finnish IWW print media gives some indication as to the size of the Finnish membership in the union and the vibrant working-class culture of which it was a part. The two most important Finnish IWW publications were Industrialisti and Tie Vapauteen. Industrialisti was the daily IWW Finnish-language newspaper from 1917 to 1950, appearing five days a week in the 1950s, and later, published as a weekly until it ceased publication in October 1975.[5] Industrialisti was the only daily newspaper in the history of the IWW and the last of the surviving foreign-language IWW papers from the early days of the union.[6] At its peak in the early 1920s, Industrialisti had a distribution of over 10,000 copies and a readership spread throughout the United States and Canada, laying claim to be the largest circulating Finnish-language newspaper in America during this period. Tie Vapauteen was a monthly periodical published first in New York, and later, in Chicago, between 1918 and 1937, with a distribution fluctuating somewhere between 2,500 and 6,000 copies. Industrialisti along with a small number of annual Finnish IWW publications were published by the Workers’ Socialist Publishing Company in Duluth, a cooperative owned by IWW locals.

The September 28, 1927, Industrialisti directory still listed contact addresses for no less than seventy-eight Finnish IWW associations or groups (“Yhdistysten ja Rhymien Osotteita,” p. 3) and in 1930, Industrialisti held a readership of approximately 9,000 (Karni, 1975a, p. 222). By the early 1940s, the number of affiliated groups had fallen to less than forty and the distribution of Industrialisti to 6,000 (ibid., p. 222). Outside of the Upper Midwest, significant pockets of IWW support were to be found in Finnish communities in various locations throughout North America. Examples include the Detroit Finnish Marxian Club, the Butte Finnish Workers Club, the Chicago Finnish IWW Agitation Committee, and the Aberdeen Finnish Workers Association. In Canada, from the mid-1920s onward, Finnish Wobblies organized the Canadan Teollisuusunionistien Kannatus Liitto (CTKL; Canadian Industrial Unionist Support League). The CTKL was an IWW auxiliary organization with a cultural orientation. It was composed mainly of radical-minded small farmers (many of whom were blacklisted miners or lumber workers) who supported the aims of the union but were ineligible for membership as they owned productive property and were not wageworkers. Formed in the mid-1920s, the CTKL grew to include no less than twenty-three halls spread throughout Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia and regularly provided support for IWW strikes and other activities (Radforth, 1987, pp. 119–20). Students of the WPC were drawn from all of these areas, with the region around the Western Great Lakes as the main stronghold of Finnish IWW support. It is in this cultural and associational context that we must place the WPC.

Many locals held regular fundraisers, organized WPC support circles, and purchased stock to support the school. Gust Aakula, a former instructor, recalled “Over 30,000 shares had been sold, and as soon as some chapter had purchased a minimum of 1,000 shares it was granted a vote in the annual meetings of the Institute stockholders” (quoted in Wasatjerna, 1957, p. 230). A board of directors was elected yearly from the ranks of the stockholders. Aside from the purchase of stock, one unique example of the support for the WPC was the stipend program. “Two- or four-month stipends were issued by the school, and tickets were sold as either raffle tickets for donations to the school or as admission tickets to social events, where drawings were held. Winners could use the stipends, sell them to someone else, or give them away to friends” (Altenbaugh, 1990, p. 141). Another method to raise funds for the school was through the activity of the WPC drama troupe, which regularly toured Finnish communities in the United States and Canada during the spring and summer months performing plays, in later years, helping “to raise perhaps a third or half of the school’s annual deficit” (Roediger, 1993, p. 68).

Ideologically, Finnish Wobblies differed little from their organizational comrades, accepting Marxist class analysis and the materialist conception of history along with a deep distrust of parliamentary politics and the strategy of capturing state power. The revolutionary interpretation of Marxism preferred by the IWW was guided by a vision of communism, sometimes referred to as industrial democracy or the cooperative commonwealth, defined as “a form of economic organization in which private and state ownership of the means of production has ceased and replaced with social ownership; in which wage labor, economic exploitation, and all privileges and special powers have been abolished” (“ Väärä Tulkinta,” p. 2). Inspiration was also drawn from anarchist-communist theoretician Peter Kropotkin, the most widely read anarchist among the Finnish Wobblies. Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread was translated into Finnish in 1906,[7] and excerpts from his writings regularly appeared in the Finnish IWW press, particularly in Tie Vapauteen, the annual winter magazine Industrialistin Joulu (Industrialist’s Christmas), and the summer publication Punainen Soihtu (Red Torch). Of note is Kropotkin’s 1880 pamphlet An Appeal to the Young, which was distributed by the Workers’ Socialist Publishing Company. In this work Kropotkin succinctly outlined the role of intellectuals and libertarian educational work in terms that apply to the approach adopted by the WPC. Kropotkin urged those who possess skills and knowledge to offer their services to the oppressed asserting “remember, if you do come, that you come not as masters, but as comrades in the struggle; that you come not to govern but to gain strength for yourselves in a new life which sweeps upward to the conquest of the future” (Kropotkin, 1880, para. 79).

Knowledge Is Power: WPC Curriculum, 1920–1941

The WPC, during its period as an IWW school, did not require entrance examinations, and only one course was compulsory: Essentials of the Labor Movement (Altenbaugh, 1990, p. 99). One student gave the following description of a typical day at the WPC.

In the mornings, after having first gone to the dining area to fill our stomachs with a bit of porridge, we go off to digest in three different classes by playing with numbers. After this we get a good portion of nominatives and verbs in English and Finnish, twisting and turning the English-language into Finnish and vice versa. Now we are in the condition that we can digest a portion of Wobbly-ism [tuplajuulaisuutta]. On other days this is taken under the name of American working-class research which began with Columbus and went up to the Wobbly cooperative commonwealth. On other days we investigate currents in international social affairs, beginning with old-time Greek philosophy up to Wilson and Lenin via Martin Luther and “Kalle” Marx. Then we’ll chew on some hardstack and inflect our voices by reading the American language. After this we rest for an hour chatting with Bogdanoff and “Kalle” Marx. The afternoons get debit and credit for aspiring boarding and rooming house [poikatalo] managers, and those enthusiastic about public speaking and poetry reading get an opportunity to show their skills. (“Opiston Toverikunnan Vaiheista Lukuvuotena 1920–1921,” pp. 39–42)

All courses, at least up until the mid to late 1930s, were available in both Finnish and English, typically in elementary and advanced levels. In total, one week of study generally included around seventy hours of class time in various courses conducted by four full-time instructors. Aside from core courses (working-class history, Marxist economics, sociology, journalism, industrial unionism, IWW delegate duties, commercial studies, and languages) topics fluctuated somewhat, depending on the expertize of the faculty. English as a second-language satisfied the needs of a large segment of the Finnish student body early on, many of whom were first-generation immigrants, while courses in Finnish demonstrated the commitment to helping retain Finnish-language and culture among second and third-generation Finns. Esperanto was also taught for at least one term, in 1928–1929, by Hjalmar Reinikainen, and German was offered in earlier years. The emphasis on language training also included courses on translation. During the 1922–1923 term, for instance, Justus Ebert’s The Evolution of Industrial Democracy was chosen as the text to be translated by students from English to Finnish.

Practical courses in accounting, bookkeeping, and business mathematics were offered at the WPC. These courses were arranged primarily for the purpose of training and staffing the large network of cooperatives in the Upper Midwest, but also in order to train competent organizational business managers. In 1927, the Central Cooperative Exchange, a network of cooperatives located in the Upper Midwest, boasted a membership of 16,595 members in sixty member societies, “fifty-four of the sixty societies were either exclusively Finnish or mixed with Finns predominating. Only two of the societies were purely ‘American’” (Karni, 1975a, p. 280). Through the 1920s and 1930s, these cooperatives became a major site of political contestation as concerted, and ultimately unsuccessful, efforts were made by the Communist Party to control them (Karni, 1975b, pp. 186–211). Although the Finnish sections of the IWW did not officially regard consumer cooperatives as revolutionary institutions, large numbers of prominent Finnish cooperative movement members in the 1930s had nonetheless been trained at the WPC and came to constitute a radical faction (Karni, 1975a, p. 223).

Labor history courses generally used John R. Commons et al. History of Labor in the United States as a standard text along with various IWW publications and other materials, frequently discussing in detail such pivotal episodes as the 1871 Paris Commune and the Haymarket Affair. Marx’s Capital was, throughout the history of the WPC, the standard text used in courses discussing economic theory. Sessions on public speaking were designed to train effective agitators for union “soapboxing” and faculty with union organizing experience taught regular courses on the tasks associated with carrying out delegate and administrative duties as well as signing up new members.

Among the most innovative and participatory lessons at the WPC were the student-guided “tactical sessions,” organized Friday afternoons, which appear to have been tremendously popular among the student body. One student provided the following description: “During these sessions students in turn present an issue which is then discussed. The issues have always related to class struggle and industrial unionism, so everyone has had something to say about them. Discussions often become very lively and many-sided. Matters have come to be considered in detail and from a variety of perspectives. Students have learned a great deal as a result of these sessions” (“Työväen-Opiston Lukukausi, 1923–1924,” p. 26). Summaries of the issues discussed during the tactical sessions routinely appeared in Industrialisti, as did other student writings. The offices of the newspaper, located in Duluth, were also utilized by the WPC for the benefit of students who had an interest in gaining hands on experience in the various tasks associated with running a daily paper.

The Toverikunta: WPC Students

The tactical sessions are one indication of both the WPCs antiauthoritarian pedagogy and the student direction of WPC affairs. Students were organized into a student union, the toverikunta (literally, “comrade community”). The toverikunta held its meetings on Friday nights and had considerable input into the day-to-day functioning of the WPC. “By and large, the students,” observed one historian, “planned the program themselves and were free to choose their own courses,” with the toverikunta self-managing all matters relating to student conflicts and disciplinary issues, and “although its decisions could be appealed to the school’s board of directors, not much use was made of this right” (Wasastjerna, 1957, p. 228). The toverikunta was also responsible for organizing dances, social events, plays, and athletics. On the topic of extracurricular activities, a former student and faculty member Taisto Luoma noted “No, you don’t have to comb Marx’s whiskers all winter long, not by a long shot” (“The Wobbly Way,” p. 3). Sports and athletics were central to student life. An oft-repeated slogan among the toverikunta was “a healthy mind in a healthy body.”

Between 1920 and 1930, average yearly total enrollment[8] at the WPC hovered around fifty-nine students a year, with a high of ninety-four students during the 1920–1921 term and a low of forty during over the 1929–1930 school year, with return students generally representing around a third of the student body year-to-year. Over this ten-year span, lumber workers, miners, and construction workers were by far the largest occupational groups represented in the student body. Based on available statistical data provided in the director’s annual report to the shareholders and published in Industrialists[9] (no detailed occupational breakdown was given for 1923, 1926, or 1928), we may surmise that lumber workers and miners together represented approximately half of all students (about 25 percent each), while construction workers made up about 16 percent of the student body. The remainder was composed of a variety of occupations, with workers in the foodstuffs, agricultural, and marine transport industries being among the more prominent occupational groups. Unsurprisingly, around 75 percent of the students during this decade belonged to the IWW, with small numbers coming from the Canadian One Big Union,[10] AFL unions, and “unaffiliated” workers.

Between 1931 and 1941 there was a gradual decline in numbers, with total enrollment averaging thirty-four students a year and only thirty registered over the final 1940–1941 term. Organizational affiliations were not discussed in director’s annual reports during this period, apparently due to requests from students to omit them. However, one of the notable trends during this decade was that, while the WPC had continued to be closely tied with Finnish working-class communities, significant numbers of U.S.-born or raised Finns began enrolling. The 1932 report notes that of the thirty-six students enrolled, twenty spoke English as their first language. In 1934, director Antti Vitikainen’s report noted that out of forty-three students, thirty-seven had been born in the U.S. and of these only two were non-Finns. Similarly, director Carl Keller’s 1937 report suggested that the need for basic-level English-language courses had almost totally disappeared. One year later, for the first time in the history of the WPC, no social science courses were taught in the Finnish language.

Although statistical information published in the annual director’s reports in Industrialisti did not always discuss gender, based on available numbers it is reasonable to assume that less than a quarter of the students were female—a shockingly small number for a segment of the union which had a strong reputation for gender equality (Campbell, 1998). The best known female student, and non-Finnish college alumnus, was Amelia Milka Sablich, popularly known as “Flaming Milka.” Sablich, the daughter of a striking coal miner and of Croatian parentage, at nineteen years old became one of the most prominent figures in the IWW-led coal miners’ strike in Colorado in 1927; a conflict now remembered as the “first Columbine massacre” after police opened fire on striking workers in Serene killing six and wounding dozens (May and Myers, 2005). “The Colorado coal strike,” writes Kornbluh (2011), “introduced innovations in strike technique” (p. 353). Sablich, and other youth and women, helped to maintain picket lines and organize the strike as union miners were arrested and deported, using “car caravans to carry their message to other communities to persuade workers to come off their jobs” (ibid.). Her determination, charisma, and leadership during the strike—as well as her fights with company thugs and her five-week imprisonment—garnered national attention and the adoration of the labor movement. Following a national speaking in support of the striking miners, in February 1928, Sablich became a student at the WPC. In a letter at the end of the term, in April 1928, Sablich wrote an open letter in Industrialisti praising the school and connecting the need for workers’ education with her own direct experience in class struggle:

When I was in jail for five weeks in Trinidad [Colorado] I found out that most of our fellow workers there spent most of the time studying and discussing the strike, the I.W.W. etc. I found out that the experience of former strikes and the labor movement was put in books from which we could learn much about what to do in any given situation.

After I got out of jail and went on a speaking tour in the east it became clearer to me that if I wanted to be a real wobbly I would have to do quite a bit of studying. That it was not everything to have a little experience of strikes, but that I should have to study quite a few books as well, and under the guidance of somebody that understood the connection between them and the labor movement of today. (“There are some deep-rooted questions to be understood in the industrial unionism,” p. 4)

Ollila (1977) lists such figures as August Wesley, Gust Aakula, Ivar Vapaa, George Humon, Ferd Jaakkola, Matti Kainu, and Jack Ujanen as key members of the IWW who had studied at the WPC (p. 107). Jack Ujanen, for instance—editor of Industrialisti for that paper’s final twenty-two years (1953–1977), retiring at age eighty-five—received his only formal education at the WPC (“Editor’s Tribute to Jack Ujanen,” pp. 23–25). Nick Viita, one of the leading members of the Finnish-Canadian IWW and CTKL for over five decades, is also included as WPC alumni, having studied there in 1919. Some former WPC students, such as John Wiita, drifted into the orbit of both the Canadian and American Workers (Communist) Parties in the 1920s, becoming a leading figure (Wilson, 1986). Other former students and faculty built on the skills and experiences gained at the WPC, pursuing university education. Walfrid Jokinen, for example, a student and teacher at the WPC, in later years went on to successfully complete postgraduate studies, becoming the chair of the Louisiana State University Sociology Department. Another former Wobbly and WPC faculty member, John Olli, also went on to earn a doctorate, at the University of Wisconsin, and taught at the City College of New York for thirty-six years (Kivisto, 1984, p. 193).

The most prominent Finnish labor movement figure and former WPC student was Niilo Wälläri. Wälläri, a sailor, came to the United States in 1916 after jumping ship in Boston. He joined the IWW in Seattle in 1918, attended classes at the WPC, and became active as a union organizer and agitator in the Great Lakes region. Arrested in 1919 as an illegal alien and radical, and deported back to Finland the following year, Wälläri later assumed the role of chairman of the militant Finnish Seamen’s Union (Suomen Merimies-Unioni; SMU) from 1938 until his death in 1967. Adopting a staunch anti-Stalinist Left position in the 1920s, his contributions to the Finnish labor movement include successfully winning the first labor agreement in coastal and inland waters shipping and the eight-hour day in 1946. The militancy and political autonomy of the union, as well as the industrial structure of the SMU, demonstrates IWW influence. Wälläri and the SMU maintained independence from the left-wing parties in Finland and included all maritime workers regardless of trade in the union. Furthermore, the commitment by Wälläri and the SMU to social justice was evidenced by the support for the antifascist cause during the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. SMU members helped to smuggled arms to Spain and contributed volunteers, and later, assisted Jews in escaping to Sweden from Nazi Germany (“Mailman Teollisuustyöläisten Litto 100 vuotta,” p. 10; notes from Harry Siitonen, 1999 Seattle FinnFest lecture).

Junior Wobblies

Another key segment of the WPC student body over the final decade of its operations, often neglected in the historical literature on the school, were the Junior Wobblies. The Junior Wobblies’ Union was another innovation connected to the 1927 Colorado miners’ strike, formed for the purpose of “class education of workers’ children to prepare them for the organized labor movement in industry” (Rein, 1929, p. 126). To facilitate the growth of the Junior Wobblies the WPC began to organize summer youth courses for children and teenagers aged twelve to eighteen. These courses ran for four to six weeks between the months June and July for a fee of twelve dollars. The WPC summer youth courses proved to be fairly successful through the 1930s. Ollila (1975) reported that in 1929, the first year that a youth program was introduced, 130 students enrolled, eventually dropping to forty-two students a decade later (p. 112). In 1941, the final year of adult and youth courses at the WPC, seventeen students attended the summer sessions (“Uutisia Opistolta,” p. 3). Aside from courses on natural history and the history of the working-class movement, the summer youth program included activities such as swimming and sports. Baseball appears to have been one of the more popular sports.

In 1929, the Workers’ Socialist Publishing Company produced a textbook geared for IWW youth attending summer courses: Nuoriso, Oppija Työ (Youth, Learning, and Labor). The book, written by W.M. Rein, was explicitly aimed at a Finnish-American working-class youth audience. The text’s foreword further reveals the libertarian pedagogy adopted by the WPC. Instructors, it noted, should ask, and be asked questions, rather than encouraging memorization, as rote methods of learning would merely result in dogmatism and fail to fully develop the student’s ability to think critically (Rein, 1929, p. 2).

Divided into two sections, the book’s first part was written entirely in Finnish and intended for younger children, given that “the children of Finnish-speaking parents may preserve their ability to speak Finnish with relative ease” (ibid., p. 2). This section, written in the form of a story, follows the adventures of Arvo and Irma as they learn about the natural world, class society, and the working-class movement. The first section closes with the question, “where is the worker’s homeland?” The internationalist, antiracist conclusions were that, despite the fact that patriotism and the superiority of the white race were taught in most schools, all people are equal regardless of skin color, ethnicity, or culture. The workers’ homeland, it goes on to state, is “nowhere or everywhere” since workers will go where they are best able to earn a living, and thus, their “homeland” may change very quickly and often (ibid., pp. 79–80). The second part, written in English, was designed for older children and teenagers. It covered such topics as the evolution of human beings and early human history, the shift from feudalism to capitalism, the history of the American labor movement, industrial unionism (including the IWW Industrial Union Manifesto in full as well as the Preamble), an introduction to socialist theory (focusing on the Marx and the “materialist conception of history” and anarchist theory), and a detailed discussion of the history of the Finnish people and language.

Faculty and Staff

Over its years as an IWW school, the WPC generally employed no less than four full-time faculty during the course of its five-month term. Leo Laukki and Yrjö Sirola were two of the best-known instructors at the WPC as towering intellectual figures in the Finnish-American Left and direct participants in the revolutionary movement in Finland.[11] Their tenures at the school overlap during the period between the WPC as a school of the FSF to its leftward drift to the IWW: indeed both Laukki and Sirola were integral in instigating the radical left orientation of the college. Laukki became the chief theorist of the pro-IWW radical faction in the Finnish left, and under his directorship, the WPC curriculum changed to reflect the ideas and practices of revolutionary industrial unionism over that of parliamentary socialism. Sirola supported these views as well, but as Campbell (1998) notes, “Industrial unionism, the general strike, and basing anticapitalist struggles in the union, rather than the party, made sense to Sirola and other Finnish leftists in a North American context, but not so in a Finnish context” (p. 124). The same perspective might equally apply to Laukki, who enthusiastically supported the Bolsheviks after October 1917.

Indeed, both Laukki and Sirola eventually ended up in the Soviet Union, although under different circumstances. Sirola left for Finland under his own volition in 1917 after revolution had broken out in Czarist Russia, participating in the short-lived Finnish Socialist Workers’ Republic in the capacity of minister of foreign affairs. Following the defeat of the revolutionary forces in the Finnish Civil War, Sirola fled to the Soviet Union, acting as a leading figure in the Finnish Communist Party in exile, Bolshevik government, and Communist International until his death in 1936. Laukki, on the other hand, was arrested along with 166 other IWW members during the wave of mass arrests in 1917 on charges related to newly created Espionage Act (covering sedition and interference with American military operations) during a period of intense government repression[12] Laukki was sentenced to a twenty-year prison term, but fled to Moscow along with William Haywood while out on bail pending their appeal—a bitter experience for many in the IWW, as thousands of dollars had been collected for costs associated with the trial and bail (Kivisto, 1984, p. 157). Laukki later disappeared during Stalin’s purges in the 1930s.

George Humon was among the most prominent WPC faculty members during its period as an IWW institute. Humon served as the school’s director for no less than seven terms. His contributions include an original Finnish IWW text, Uusi Yhteiskunta Ja Sen Rakentajat (The New Society and its Builders) and the translation of several IWW pamphlets, including Abner E. Woodruff’s 1919 IWW pamphlet The Advancing Proletariat: A Study of the Movement of the Working Class from Wage Slavery to Freedom. Taisto Luoma is also notable as he went on to become one of the IWW’s most celebrated cartoonists in the 1930s; “most were done in a sullen, grim style, full of dark foreboding” (Rosemont, 1998, p. 433). Luoma taught a course on graphic design at the WPC during the 1938–1939 term. Other longtime faculty included Otto W. Oksanen, Aku Rissanen, Antti Vitikainen, and August Angervo.

Ferd Thompson is among the best-known of the English-language faculty members. Thompson began teaching at the WPC in 1927, and continued as an instructor for seven nonconsecutive terms (including as a teacher for five summer youth sessions), ending his career as the school’s last director in 1940–1941. Covington Hall, a celebrated IWW organizer from the U.S. South, described by Kornbluh (2011) as “one of the most prolific of the I.W.W. writers,” (p. 259) taught labor history and industrial unionism at the WPC during the 1937–1938 term. Carl Keller, a leading member of the Chicago IWW for decades, serving as the union’s General-Secretary Treasurer in the late 1960s, was the only other non-Finnish WPC director (in 1933–1934 and 1936–1937).

Of course the WPC, nor any other educational institution for that matter, could not function without the many key tasks carried out by a support staff. In addition to faculty, the WPC also employed a business manager, responsible for the organization’s accounting, bookkeeping, and preparing annual financial reports to shareholders; kitchen staff; and a caretaker. A September 16, 1927, Industrialisti job advertisement for a head cook, two kitchen helpers, and a caretaker for the upcoming WPC school term notes that successful candidates must be members of the IWW or be prepared to join. Responsibilities of the head cook included preparing meals for the toverikunta and baking. It states that the WPC possessed both a gas and a coal oven [kooliuuni]. Kitchen helpers were tasked with cleaning, dishwashing, serving, and general duties as required, while the caretaker’s position mainly centered around the cleaning, upkeep, and heating of the building.

Conclusion: Evaluating the Impact and Legacy of the Work People’s College

At the close of the 1940–1941 term, the decision was made by the WPC shareholders to suspend courses for the upcoming year. Falling enrollment contributed to the decision, but the writing was clearly on the wall when, during the final term, several student stipends had remained unused. The property was leased and eventually sold, in 1962. One of the original WPC buildings still stands and now functions as an apartment building.

How might the experience of the WPC as an IWW labor college be evaluated? During the polarizing period of the Cold War and an era of government sanctioned social democratic labor relations—the era when much of the literature on the WPC was written—many previous commentators on the school’s history may be forgiven for attributing the school’s decline on the staunch and “sectarian” adherence to Wobbly precepts, which were argued to have alienated more moderate potential supporters, and the resultant failure of the school to shift to more “realistic” Communist or social democratic-oriented alternatives. How distant this all now seems with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the centrist political trajectory of modern social democracy, declining union membership numbers, and the global resurgence of an antistatist Left libertarian alternative. To be sure, the strong ties between the WPC and its radical Finnish support base, that are frequently cited in the historical literature, served as both a major strength and a weakness. In failing to penetrate more deeply into the broader North American working class, the ethnic ties and solidarities that helped sustain the WPC gradually unraveled as the second, third, and fourth generations of the Finnish immigrant population gradually assimilated into the dominant culture, often abandoning not only the language and culture of their predecessors, but also their associational, radical, and egalitarian commitments. In contrast, and by way of conclusion, the WPC and its impact on labor organizing, its contributions to the radical counterculture on the Finnish membership of the IWW, and its broader legacy will be examined. That the decline of the IWW approximately mirrors that of the WPC is evident, however, it is in the context of the specifically Finnish contingent of the union that the lasting contributions and achievements of this institute, and the culture of which is was part, must be assessed.

Aside from the role of a few individuals, as noted above, it is somewhat difficult to accurately assess the impact that the WPC had in the field of industrial conflict, given the absence of documentation directly linking students to union organizing and strike activity. This in itself is a task that requires a much longer and more in-depth study. However, since a significant proportion of the student body were drawn from the mining industry, it is reasonable to assume that the IWW-led mass strike of miners on Minnesota’s Mesabi Range in 1916 included the contributions of WPC trained organizers and agitators. The same assumption might also be applied to industrial actions carried out in the logging industries in Northern Minnesota and Northern Ontario in the 1920s. At least one former WPC faculty member, Kristen Svanum, an instructor during the 1924–1925 term, was identified in the reports of company-hired labor spies as a leading organizer in the 1927 Colorado miners strike (Rees, 2004, pp. 32–35). Ferd Thompson held a more cynical outlook on the effectiveness of WPC organizer training, stating that his major criticism of the school was that “I.W.W. unions should have arranged to make more systematic use of it” and that he felt fortunate “if among the sixty or so students, there were a dozen who came there with the idea of increasing their capacity as organizers or labor educators” (Roediger, 1993, p. 67). It should be noted that Thompson’s comments may more accurately reflect the period of the institute’s general decline during his time there in the 1930s, rather than the WPC as a whole. His reflections, however, also hold invaluable insights. Thompson suggested, in retrospect, that the WPC should have sent “organizer-students” to places where organizing campaigns were happening at the time (namely, Detroit and Cleveland in the 1930s), where they could concentrate “partly on organizing chores, partly in systematic study and always trying to relate one to the other” (ibid., p. 69).

The tenacity of the Finnish Wobblies, however, most certainly owed much to the training and sense of camaraderie that the WPC provided. Industrialisti, with former WPC student Jack Ujanen as editor, as mentioned above, survived until 1975—a remarkable feat for a foreign-language radical newspaper in North America—as did the CTKL and several IWW-supported halls and cooperatives in the United States and Canada. Even as IWW unions began a sharp decline through the 1930s, Wobbly methods, ideas, and organizers remained devoted to the principles of direct action, solidarity, and labor militancy in the broader working-class movement. In the late 1930s, Wobblies or former members in Northern Minnesota and Northern Ontario actively participated in strikes in the lumber industry through “mainstream” unions—their inclination to rank-and-file control and direct action, instead of negotiating binding collective agreements, often aggravating union bureaucrats (Hudelson and Ross, 2006, pp. 190–92; Campbell, 1998, pp. 118–19).

At a later stage, the WPC and the militants it trained served as an important generational link between the “old guard” of the IWW and the New Left radicals of the 1960s who began the task of rebuilding the IWW. When Franklin Rosemont joined the union in 1962 in Chicago, establishing the Rebel Worker group and journal, he fondly recalled meeting former WPC students and faculty like Carl Keller, Aino Thompson (Ferd Thompson’s wife—the two met at the college), and Jenny Lahti Velsek (Rosemont and Radcliffe, 2006, p. 19). Rosemont also noted that the Solidarity bookshop in Chicago, included “a couple thousand old books from the IWW’s Work People’s College” (ibid., p. 30).

Fittingly, the latest incarnation of the WPC is in Minneapolis, the city in which the original People’s College was established over a century ago. In 2006, a decision was made by the IWW Twin Cities General Membership Branch to begin providing “free, radical, and practical education to the working women and men of our communities, education that will further the aims of the working class revolution that we advocate as a union” (WPC Mission Statement). Jeff Pilacinski, one of the leading figures behind the WPC revival, explains that the historical WPC was chosen as the model for this project for several reasons:

One, the obvious historical connection between the school and the I.W.W. was important to maintain. Second, as a self-managed working-class institution, the historical WPC offered educational opportunities whereby workers were teaching workers in an organized, yet loosely-structured environment. This is something that branch members wanted to replicate given the fact that there were few if no other opportunities of this kind available at the time. Third, we took inspiration from the school’s core curriculum and structured our offerings around working-class culture/history, sociology, Marxist economics, and industrial unionism.[13]

Courses, which began in mid-October 2006, have typically been organized during evenings for six to eight weeks at an accessible venue, such as a meeting room in a public library, usually for two hours sessions. Facilitators are responsible for creating a course framework and a list suggested readings combined with a strong participatory focus. Students largely guide the direction of each course with instructional methods varying widely course-to-course from group discussions and lectures to role-plays and media presentations. The revived WPC, like its historical namesake, is open to all workers and the occupational backgrounds of both its facilitators and study body are reflective of the working class in contemporary capitalism—the miners and lumberjacks of the historical WPC have now been replaced with workers from the service, education, and telecommunications industries.

To date five courses have been offered: Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, Imagination and Social Liberation (the thought of Cornelius Castoriadis), Political Economy in Karl Marx’s Capital, Chomsky 101: An Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Life and Political Thought, and Coup de Sabots and the Creativity of Direct Action. The flier for one course offering stylishly asserted that “credit for participation in this class is not transferrable to any state or private institution, but only to the daily struggle for the emancipation of the working class.”[14] Currently, the branch educational committee responsible for organizing logistics (room bookings, photocopies, child care, etc.) for the WPC is aiming to structure the WPC as a quarterly series of weekend sessions composed of workshops, panels, speakers, films, debates, and trainings[15]

In considering the importance of, and relationship between, theory and working place organizing, Pilacinski observes:

Each course included components that developed I.W.W. members and nonmembers’ abilities to situate themselves in and further understand the history and dynamics of their class—these developments fundamentally bolster the I.W.W. and its members capacities to organize where they work.[16]

He also notes that “the union also has a dedicated and successful workplace organizer training program that the Twin Cities runs several times throughout the year, including times when WPC courses are offered.” [17] These efforts have contributed to some of the most innovative and pioneering workplace-organizing campaigns in Minnesota and beyond. Recent campaigns initiated by the Twin Cities IWW include substantial work in the poorly paid, notoriously difficult, and almost totally unorganized fast-food industry.

If the best and most sincere tribute to the working-class militants of the historical WPC is to carry on their work, then certainly the revival of the school in the Twin Cities must be considered as the most important and critical component of the school’s legacy.

References