Section 1 : 
Anarchism & Education: Learning from Historical Experimentations
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People :
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Author : Abraham P. DeLeon

Author : Alejandro De Acosta

Author : Alex Khasnabish

Author : Allan W. Antliff

Author : Anthony J. Nocella II

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SECTION I. Anarchism & Education: Learning from Historical
Experimentations

DIALOGUE 1 (On a desert island, between friends)



Alejandro de Acosta





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
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(accessed June 17, 2007).



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June 9, 2011).



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Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New
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Global Research (2006, October 20), Judge rules teachers have no free
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Godwin, W. (1796). An inquiry concerning politicaljustice. Charlottesville,
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Goldman, E. (2007, June 17). The social importance of the modern school.
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Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Retrieved from
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Kamiya, G. (2007, May 22). Why Bush hasn’t been impeached. Salon.com.
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17, 2007).



Liptak, A. (2008, April 23). U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other
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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





“Tietoja I.W.W. Liiton 13:sta Koventsionista” (1921, May 28)
Industrialisti, 1.



“Työväen-Opiston Johtajan Tomintakertomus,” (WPC Director’s
Activity Report, 1921–1941, Industrialisti): 1921, May 21, G. Humon;
1922, April 24, G. Humon; 1923, May 10, A. Vitikainen; 1924, April 22, A.
Vitikainen; 1925, May 7, G. Humon; 1926, May 12, G. Humon; 1927, May 3, G.
Humon; 1928, May 11, J. Kiviniemi; 1929, April 20, J. Kiviniemi; 1930, May
21, G. Humon; 1931, April 16, A. Rissanen; 1932, May 9, G. Humon; 1933, May
15, I. Vapaa; 1934, April 21, C. Keller; 1935, April 25, A. Vitikainen;
1936, May 16, F. Thompson; 1937, May 3, C. Keller; 1938, May 2, F.
Thompson; 1939, April 22, G. Humon; 1940, May 24, F. Thompson; 1941, May 2,
F. Thompson.



“Väärä Tulkinta” (1936, October 10) Industrialisti, 2.



Work People’s College Mission Statement. Retrieved from
http://www.iww.org/en/branches/US/MN/twincities/wpc.



“Yhdistysten ja Ryhmien Osotteita” (1927, September 28) Industrialisti,
3.



Altenbaugh, R. (1990). Education for struggle: The American labor colleges
of the 1920s and 1930s. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.



Campbell, J. The cult of spontaneity: Finnish-Canadian bushworkers and the
Industrial Workers of the world in Northern Ontario, 1919–1934. Labor/Le
Travail, 41 (Spring 1998), 117–46.



Etholén, K. Mailman Teollisuustyöläisten Litto 100 vuotta.
Merimies-Sjömannen 2, 2006, 10.



Hannula, R. Editor’s tribute to Jack Ujanen. Finn Heritage, 5(2) 1988,
23–25.



Heinilä, H. (1995). Work People’s College. Finnish Americana: A Journal
of Finnish American History and Culture, 11, 22–31.



Hudelson, R. & Ross, C. (2006). By the ore docks: A working people’s
history of Duluth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.



Jaska. (1924, April). Työväen-Opiston Lukukausi, 1923–1924. Tie
Vapauteen, 4(6), 23–27.



Karni, M. (1975a). Yhteishyvä—or, for the common good: Finnish
radicalism in the western Great Lakes region, 1900–1940 (Doctoral
dissertation). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.



Karni, M. (1975b). Struggle on the cooperative front: The separation of
central cooperative wholesale from communism, 1929–1930. In M. Karni, M.
Kaups & D. Ollila Jr. (Eds.), The Finnish experience in the western Great
Lakes region: New perspectives, 186–201. Turku, Finland: Institute for
Migration.



Kivisto, P. (1984). Immigrant socialists in the United States: The case of
Finns and the left. Cranbury/London/Mississauga: Associated University
Presses.



Kornbluh, J. (Ed.). (2011). Rebel voices: An IWW anthology. Oakland: PM
Press.



Kostiainen, A. (1976). Finnish-American Workmen’s Associations. In V.
Niitemaa, J. Saukkonen, T. Aaltio & O. Koivukangas (Eds.), Old
friends—strong ties: The Finnish contribution to the growth of the USA,
205–34. Vaasa. Retrieved from
www.genealogia.fim][http://www.genealogia.fi/emi/art/article257e.htm.]]



Kostiainen, A. (1980). Work People’s College: An American immigrant
institution. Scandinavian Journal of History, 5, 295–309. Retrieved from
http://www.genealogia.org/emi/art/article243e.htm#Alku.



Kostiainen, A. (1991). A dissenting voice of Finnish radicals in America:
The formative years of Sosialisti-Industrialisti in the 1910s. American
Studies in Scandinavia, 23, 83–94. Retrieved from
http://www.genealogia.fi/emi/art/article256e.htm#a15.



Kropotkin, P. (1880). An appeal to the young. Retrieved from
http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/kropotkin/atty.html.



Luoma, T. “The Wobbly Way” (1938, September 6) Industrialisti, 3.



May L. & Myers, R. (Eds.). Slaughter in Serene: The Columbine coal strike
reader. Denver: Bread and Roses Workers’ Cultural Center.



Mukana ollut. (1921, May). Opiston Toverikunnan Vaiheista Lukuvuotena
1920–1921. Ahjo, 39–42.



Ollila, D. (1975). From socialism to industrial unionism (IWW): Social
factors in the emergence of left-labor radicalism among Finnish workers on
the Mesabi, 1911–19. In M. Karni, M. Kaups & D. Ollila Jr. (Eds.), The
Finnish experience in the western Great Lakes region: New perspectives,
156–71. Turku, Finland: Institute for Migration.



Ollila, D. (1977). The Work People’s College: Immigrant education for
adjustment and solidarity. In M. Karni & D. Ollila Jr. (Eds.), For the
common good: Finnish immigrants and the radical response to industrial
America, 87–118. Superior, WI: Työmies Society.



Oppilas. “Uutisia Opistolta” (1941, June 20) Industrialisti, p.3.



Radforth, I. (1987). Bushworkers and bosses: Logging in northern Ontario,
1900–1980. Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press.



Ranta, W. Valistustyöhön. (1927 April) Tie Vapauteen (4) 9, 7.



Rees, J. “X,” “XX” and “X-3”: Labor spy reports from the
Colorado Fuel and Iron Company archives. Colorado Heritage (Winter) 2004,
28–41.



Rein, W. (1929). Nuoriso, Oppi ja Työ (Youth, Learning and Labor). Duluth:
Workers’ Socialist Publishing Company.



Roediger, D. (Ed.). (1993). Fellow worker: The life of Ferd Thompson.
Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co.



Rosemont, F. (2003). Joe Hill: The IWW & the making of a revolutionary
working-class counterculture. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co.



Rosemont, F. (2011). A short treatise on Wobbly cartoons. In J. Kornbluh
(Ed.), Rebel voices: An IWW anthology, 425–43. Oakland: PM Press.



Rosemont, F. & Radcliffe, C. (2006). Dancin’ in the streets! Anarchists,
IWWs, surrealists, situationists & provos in the 1960s as recorded in the
pages of Rebel Worker and Heatwave. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing
Co.



Ross, C. (1977). The Finn factor in American labor, culture and society.
New York Mills, MN: Parta Printers Inc.



Sablich, M. (1928, April 15). There are some deep-rooted questions to be
understood in the industrial unionism. Industrialisti, 4.



Salerno, S. (1989). Red November, black November: Culture and community in
the Industrial Workers of the World. New York: State University of New York
Press.



Wasastjerna, H. (1957). History of Finns in Minnesota. Duluth: Minnesota
Finnish-American Historical Society.



Wilson, J. (1986). John Wiita: A Finnish-American in Canada, 1918–1923.
Finnish American: A Journal of Finnish American history and culture, 7,
19–23.



CHAPTER 4. From Deschooling to Unschooling: Rethinking Anarchopedagogy
after Ivan Illich



Joseph Todd



When we call ourselves anarchists, that is, people who advocate the
principle of autonomy as opposed to authority in every field of personal
and social life, we are constantly reminded of the apparent failure of
anarchism to exercise any perceptible influence on the course of political
events, and as a result we tend to overlook the unconscious adoption of
anarchist ideas in a variety of other spheres of life. (Ward, 1966, p.
397)



Colin Ward establishes a point of origin for anarchist theory, situating it
within autonomy and individual freedom. Although he is optimistic about
spaces where anarchic projects may be carried out, he is deeply aware of
the marginalized nature of anarchy as a political movement. We can see the
tension that Ward highlights in anarchism itself in the antagonistic
relationship between schooling and deschooling. Schools are one of the
institutions where the State sustains its stronghold, creating an
institutionalized form of authority over the nature of education, while
deschooling may be one of these spheres that might be anarchic without
explicitly stating so or even consciously attempting to be. Although
deschooling might remain highly marginal in practice and theory, as Ward
suggests, it may also gain enough strength to mobilize influence on policy
and act against the institution of compulsory schooling. Ivan Illich, the
major philosopher of deschooling, may have added an important dimension for
anarchist theorists in his insistence of including education in
revolutionary frameworks. However, we must be equally critical of these
alternative sites in hopes of creating diversity among anarchic
possibilities and experiments.



Contemporary compulsory public education is understood only through public
and private conceptions, which are increasingly narrowed by trends in
reform, while Illich is representative of a third, anarchic model that is
beyond this dichotomy. For this reason the focus of this chapter will be on
spaces of alternative education that emerge beyond or between the
public/private distinction. Illich provides a model of what this might look
like in theory, but it is not without its own limitations and will need to
be updated to account for changes in technology, social relations, and
globalization since 1970. The criteria he devised are as follows: reference
service to educational objects, skill exchanges, peer-matching, and
professional educators. Homeschooling practices demonstrate certain aspects
of Illich’s theory and could present possible resources for furthering an
anarchist project of social reconstruction, albeit from outside the
anarchic tradition. Some homeschoolers, who typically define themselves as
unschoolers, radical unschoolers, deschoolers, or no-schoolers accomplish
aspects of Illich’s model. For the time being, we will conflate these
groups, but as the movements expands it may be necessary to draw
distinctions between them to determine which, if any, approximate an
Illichean anarchopedagogy and which reproduce a public mode. By examining
these spaces critically we’ll find that some homeschoolers may not be
questioning the hidden curriculum at all and are creating explicitly
private educational models, albeit with alternative values and goals, but
private nonetheless, that does not challenge institutional learning and
cannot be perceived as a counterpublic.

Politics of Homeschooling



Educational publics are sites where parents and educators can resist or
reconstruct the state’s goals for education and schooling, debate and
agree upon various shared educational needs and visions, and hold the state
accountable for helping them to implement these visions. (Abowitz, p. 87)



In this section I will begin navigating the homeschooling landscape and
also test the political climate that homeschoolers are facing. Data on
homeschooling have been compiled by the National Center of Education
Statistics, a research extension of the U.S. Department of Education, which
has provided information exposing the growth homeschooling has experienced
in recent decades. There were an estimated 1.5 million homeschooled
students in the United States in 2007 (NCES, 2008, p. 1). Since 2003 this
signifies an increase from 1.1 million homeschooled students. More
specifically this represents a “74 percent relative increase over the
8-year period [since 1999] and a 36 percent relative increase since 2003”
(NCES, 2008, p. 2). However, this rise in homeschooling does not
exclusively signify an increase in deschooling. “From 2003 to 2007, the
percentage of students whose parents reported homeschooling to provide
religious or moral instruction increased from 72 percent to 83 percent [an
increase of 11 percent]” (NCES, 2008, p. 2). Whereas “interest in a
nontraditional approach to education, [increased only] 7 percent” (NCES,
2008, p. 3). However, there is a chance we can be more optimistic about
this because Grace Llewellyn finds that “[most] people who do fantastic
unschoolish things with their time call themselves homeschoolers, because
it keeps them out of trouble and it doesn’t freak out the neighbors”
(Llewellyn, 1998, p. 27). For our purposes we must remain aware that
“schooling can still take place outside schools themselves, and clearly
that is what many homeschooling families do; they are schooling their kids
at home” (Hern, 1996, p. 2). Obviously this includes homeschoolers who
choose to opt out of public school for religious reasons, but it also
includes homeschoolers who are not making the choice to leave public
education (Abowitz, 2003, p. 77). The percentage might in fact be much
higher but is represented lower because deschoolers could be intentionally
trying to avoid attracting attention. One thing that becomes clear is that
deschoolers, that is, homeschoolers of a particular variety, are a minority
within the minority. Regardless of the form homeschoolers are assuming,
this overall increase is significant because it may indicate a rise in
private models of schooling, not counterpublic models of deschooling that
entreats research into the public dimension of homeschooling.



Internationally, homeschooling has seen similar trends as in the United
States. In Germany for instance, the implementation of an educational
policy against homeschooling can be rather accepting or perceive
homeschooling as “deviant behavior” and a severe transgression of the
school law with sanctions to follow (Spiegler, 2009, p. 297). In Sweden the
practices of implementing the law against homeschooling is becoming
strictly regulated and institutionalized (Villalba, 2009). We again find
the distinction between religious homeschoolers “who considered the
public schools as too liberal and antiauthoritarian” and deschoolers who
are “liberal supporters of children’s rights for whom the school was
still too authoritarian and rigid” (Spiegler, 2009, p. 299). What we find
however, and this gives hopes to deschoolers in the United States, that
“the idea that it is adequate and helpful to sanction home educators with
high fines or imprisonment does not have much more acceptance than
homeschooling itself” (Spiegler, 2009, p. 302). Germany itself is
conflicted about homeschooling, illustrated by the contradictions in
sanctions and the inconsistencies between cases. Also of importance for
anarchic theorists is the fact that “home educators do not consider their
own behavior as deviant, rather the German law is seen as deviant”
(Spiegler, 2009, p. 304). This is a fundamental distinction of anarchists;
that they are willing to dispute the laws of the state they deem to be
unjust or reproduce inequality.



Domestically, homeschooling has met increasing opposition as the trend
toward deschooling and unschooling gains momentum. “Critics contend the
HSLDA [Home School Legal Defense Association] supports a conservative
political agenda as well and that the group has helped pass legislation
that hurts more relaxed home-schoolers—like new regulations in New York
that require standardized tests and official oversight.” (Kleiner & Lord,
2000, p. 52). The source of this opposition originates within the group of
homeschoolers representing the majority of homeschoolers. We find that
“[in] recent decades, home schooling has come to be closely associated
with religious conservatives and a Bible-based curriculum. This
school-at-home approach allows families to avoid a secular take on subjects
like evolution and to provide moral and ethical training according to their
own religious values” (Kleiner & Lord, 2000, p. 52). It is one thing to
face opposition from outside of the homeschooling movement and another
entirely to have to deal with it internally. Because of the extreme
diversity, conservative versus liberal, deschoolers now seem to be facing
more opposition from religious homeschoolers.



On February 28, 2008, judges in California “found that parents without a
teachers’ credential who educate their children at home could be
criminally liable under California law” (California Catholic Daily,
2008). Pat Farenga (1998), an associate of John Holt’s, recognizes that
“[parents] who wish to teach their own children are not required to have
a teaching credential in any state” (p. 128). This important observation
is the first step that removes power from teachers and schools as the only
place professionals can educate, nullifying the teaching profession.
Threatening the profession will lead to stronger opposition against
homeschooling because it threatens the institution itself from compulsory
schooling, to teacher education programs, to private professional
development companies, and teachers unions. In this case we find that
“among those filing briefs opposed to homeschooling were the California
Teachers Association, which warned the court that allowing parents without
credentials to teach children would lead to ‘educational anarchy’”
(California Catholic Daily, 2008). In response to this accusation,
profamily attorney and president of the Pacific Justice Institute, Brad
Dacus had this to say, “[this] is ignoring the facts that home schooling
is widespread in California. Over 200,000 children are being home schooled
right now in California—and they score higher academically than not only
public school children, but also children in traditional private schools.
If there is anarchy, the anarchy is in the public schools” (Johnson,
2008). The term “anarchy” is used sensationally and represents a
misunderstanding about anarchist theory by both parties; those opposed and
those in support of homeschooling. Also inherent in this squabble is the
fact that the Teachers’ Union seems to be threatened by homeschoolers
because they represent a political, ideological movement that undermines
professional certification of teachers and charts new educational terrain.



For Illich, “[citizens] conceive the inconceivable and thereby create a
world free from social inequity. Illich felt that change is a process of
demystification, the eradication of false ideologies imposed by a hegemon,
and in order to find those boundaries, citizens must create alternatives to
the status quo” (Sewell, 2005, pp. 11–12). What are the boundaries of
educational change and how do we know when we’re approaching them? In
light of the opposition to homeschooling and deschooling, both domestically
and globally, we find it likely that when the State reacts to these
educational alternatives with counterinsurgency tactics, we are tiptoeing
near the boundary and may even be stepping across, enabling us to look back
from the other side. Judging by the reception of homeschooling by the
State, teachers’ unions, the public, the media, etc, deschoolers are on
the right track because the institution is threatened and actively trying
to subvert deschooling projects and silence the movement (Lugg & Rorrer,
2009).



Overall, homeschooling faces predictable challenges. As has been shown,
there are separate battles being waged against different factions; some
external, such as the State and policymakers, and others internal, such as
other homeschoolers and conservative homeschooling advocacy groups. This
situation illustrates how we have confined our thinking about education
exclusively through public and private lenses. Consequently, anarchist
theory linked with education has been villainized by the Right and the
Left, with the effect that each misses the true political potential of
homeschooling, that of authentic freedom and autonomy. Borrowing from Nancy
Fraser’s model of the public sphere, Kathleen Abowitz helps to identify a
third model of social identity, in this case educational counterpublics,
but does not go far enough in suggesting how homeschooling and other
educational alternatives can nurture this new identity and engage in
collective struggles.

Anarchic Educational Counterpublics



A political program which does not explicitly recognize the need for
deschooling is not revolutionary. (Illich, 1970, p. 75)



Any anarchist struggle must be critically analyzed for its inclusion and
reconstruction of education, particularly alternative deinstitutionalized
learning, within the community as it exists and as it strives to become.
Anarchist theory and practice must account for deschooling in more direct
and explicit ways in order to rekindle its own revolutionary potential
which has waned but is seeing a strong resurgence and rearticulation that
focuses on liberty, active student-directed learning, and political
participation (Godwin, 1966, p. 424). Revolutionary struggles must actively
and consciously avoid reproducing the inculcating tendencies of the hidden
curriculum, less they compromise their project for social change in the
name of freedom and justice. In addition to analyzing anarchist struggles
and their articulation of deschooling as it relates to political and social
subjectivity, we can also examine spaces where deschooling may be happening
but not articulated as part of a larger anarchist tradition of struggles.



In tracing this demarcated line of schooling on one side and deschooling on
the other, we find descriptions that help to make the path more
discernible. Multiple homeschooling, deschooling, and unschooling advocates
put forward the negative goals of compulsory education such as coercion
into capitalistic hierarchies and unquestioning obedience, as opposed to
equality and community that are the targeted ideals of anarchists and
deschoolers (Hern, 1996; DeLeon, 2006; DeLeon, 2008; Wheatley, 2009). These
aspects of schools that are anything but empowering take shape through the
hidden curriculum and operate through mechanisms designed for conformity
and normalization. These techniques rely on shame, guilt, ridicule, and
peer pressure to reinforce and maintain the hidden curriculum.
Institutionalizing dependency on the State produces individuals that are
virtual wards of the State, incapable of inspiring any community action
toward social justice on a local level, and beneficiaries of the structure
in which they were produced and left forever with the impression that
things could not carry on or get done without the institution. If
“schools teach children to rely on teachers, instruction, and
methodologies for their learning rather than their own experience,
self-reliance, and individual abilities,” then this is where the project
of anarchopedagogues and deschoolers begins (Peretti & Jones, 2001, p.
377).



Deschooling itself requires a different structure and different
relationship to learning, but getting there requires a different kind of
social movement, bent on creating the alternative form of activism in the
present, instead of attempt to influence policy and wait for the effects to
trickle down. Anarchists argue for a different structure not reliant on the
institutions of the State, otherwise the hidden curriculum remains
unchanged and intact and will reproduce a similar State in the generation
to follow the revolution (Illich, 1970; Suissa, 2001; DeLeon, 2006). This
feature of Illich’s thought makes it possible to position him in anarchic
theory as it relates to education, the State, and institutions and an
individual’s relationship to each. Deschoolers confront, attack, and
sabotage the hidden curriculum.



In direct opposition to these debilitating practices, anarchopedagogy
stands to reimagine education, building it on principles of freedom,
equality, and community. For Illich a “renewal of education [requires] an
institutional framework which constantly educates for action,
participation, and self-help” (Illich, 1970, p. 64). Illich himself did
not articulate his project as anarchic but the similarities cannot be
ignored. Perhaps he moved through anarchy unconsciously as Ward suggested
in the beginning. The features that we must be aware of and actively seek
out and plan for in any educational alternatives are stated repeatedly by
anarchist theorists and deschooling advocates (Godwin, 1966; Ward, 1966;
Watt, 1981; Hern, 1996; Farenga, 1998; Llewellyn, 1998; Suissa, 2001; Holt
& Farenga, 2003; DeLeon, 2006; Morrison, 2007; DeLeon, 2008; Kahn, 2009).
These include:




at the level of the individual: autonomy, student-directed learning or
self-help, and active learning;





at the level of the community: participation, mutual aid, social/political
action, and participation;





and lastly at the structural level: decentralized management and
nonhierarchical relationships.





Illich advanced that “the way ahead will be found by those unwilling to
be constrained by the apparently all-determining forces and structures of
the industrial age” (Illich, 1969, p. 17). Imagining alternatives and
creatively inventing and constructing these alternatives is profoundly
anarchic. As an anarchic technique “[direct action] is most viable when
communities decide that institutional structures can no longer serve them
and actions must be done now to alleviate the problem” (DeLeon, 2006, p.
133). Homeschooling can be viewed as direct action of the family against
the institutional structure of school and deschooling, in its most overtly
political and activist-oriented manifestation, could even be viewed as a
form of institutional sabotage, another anarchic technique to use against
compulsory schooling.



The process begins politically as parents and students choose to defy the
expectations of compulsory schooling and instead invent their alternative.
Illich maintained that “[only] disenchantment with and detachment from
the central social ritual and reform of that ritual can bring about radical
change” (Illich, 1970, 38). In regard to this concern, there seems to be
a need for rigorous and sustained opposition to the social ritual and
reflective/ creative efforts to overcome schooling, outside of the
institution of schools. The institution is not only abusive to the rights
and freedoms of children and schools us to internalize this politically
desirable silence, but is equally oppressive to parents and even teachers,
the community, and society at large. John Holt doubted whether the public
would ever question and divert public school funding and, for this reason,
worked to provide alternatives outside of schools (Farenga, 1998, p. 127).
In order to challenge the funding one would already need to be deschooled
to an extent. In this way Holt might be right; we need a space to deschool
as individuals, families, and communities before the entire institution of
compulsory schooling can be combated.



There may come a time when the homeschooling movement will not encompass a
diverse array of religious homeschoolers, unschoolers, deschoolers, etc. It
may become more fractured and dislocated as each grows more incompatible
with the other. The consequences of this cannot be seen from our vantage
point but it may create less diversity within homeschooling networks,
revitalizing some of the concerns of Abowitz, and it may also weaken each
movement individually making them more susceptible to political opposition.
Homeschooling in general is challenged by public school institutions, and
deschooling in particular is facing opposition internally from
homeschoolers following a private notion of education, suggesting that,
deschooling does in fact represent a new social identity.

Homeschooling and Deschooling



Homeschooling may be able to cultivate this new identity, but it will need
to be cautious when interacting with other educational counterpublics.
Abowitz (2003) recognizes the problem of inequalities among publics that
could arise from the binary homeschooling counterpublic (p. 90). Inequality
is the pivot point for anarcho-pedagogues in that any educational
counterpublic that can be considered anarchic must avoid being reabsorbed
into either a public or a private model, rife with inequality. Deschoolers
are in a position to create this anarchic social identity but will need to
counter any efforts to define the movement in public or private
conceptions. She also acknowledges that “[thanks] to the works of
feminist scholars and activists, it is possible here to discuss public
spheres without automatically invoking the public/private dualism”
because these separate realms are no longer isolated and definitive
(Abowitz, 2003, p. 78). However, the fact that a counterpublic can evade
this public/private distinction does not necessarily mean that it is
representative of an anarchic identity. Although counterpublics are seeking
alternatives to compulsory public education, Abowitz’s examples of
educational counterpublics suggest a State-oriented or privatized models of
educational reform, reverting back into public/private dualism. According
to Abowitz, the counterpublics that avoid this relapse are those whose
practices can be defined as democratic, which deschooling may embody, but
is not typically the case with homeschooling generally because of the
internal opposition.



As the movement expands, the homeschooling counterpublics must address
deschooling on its own terms, but for now we can use models such as
Illich’s to measure the amount of freedom, autonomy, and trust they have
reclaimed from practices of schooling. “What prevents [the
counterculture’s or insurgency’s] frustration from shaping new
institutions is a lack not only of imagination but frequently also of
appropriate language and of enlightened self-interest” (Illich, 1970, p.
73). Anarchist theory can provide some of this vocabulary and
conceptualization, but also Abowitz’s suggestions for counterpublics will
provide a more robust definition of education. Abowitz suggests using
advancements made by contemporary critical theorists. The feminist
“counter public has, among other achievements, produced and introduced a
new lexicon into larger society, emblematic of the larger ideological and
legal changes it has brought about in the last century. [Terms like date
rape and sexual harassment] symbolize the feminist counter public’s
engagement with wider publics, with the effect of influencing the
prevailing understanding and notion about gender and power in American
life” (Abowitz, 2003, p. 81).



In effect this counterpublic then becomes institutionalized by infiltrating
public policy and carving out a space for their unique identity. In doing
so, the anarchic vision is limited, as the identity—in this case,
women—is reinserted back into the State. By using a model such as
Illich’s, the process of evaluating educational counterpublics, in the
most general sense of the term, can begin, with a focus on education and
power. As it gains confidence and variety, moving beyond Illich’s model
will result in a more complex model for which to base practice and
innovation. Illich’s model provides an immediate foundation that may be
in need of urgent revision considering the time the model was proposed, but
nonetheless imparts a vocabulary to begin experiments in deschooling. His
model may help anarchopedagogues suggest a model of learning that can
maintain its anarchic origins.

Learning Webs



Illich’s criteria help measure deschooling practices for their commitment
to “support personal growth rather than addiction” (Illich, 1970, p.
53). To reiterate, his criteria are, reference service to educational
objects, skill exchanges, peer-matching, and professional educators. Based
on what has been discussed thus far about deschooling we find the presence
of these features in deschooling and can also see how blatantly some
homeschoolers maintain schooling. Deschooling has the potential to instill
a different ethics of self, identity, freedom, spontaneity, discovery,
curiosity, etc., thus creating arrangements of power that are productive,
not oppressive, and preserve individual freedom and autonomy. These
arrangements or relationships must be considered not only on the level of
individual-to-individual or individual-to-community, but also
individual-to-content and individual-to-structure. This is central for Hern
who suggests:



… deschooling is about relationships, and is the antithesis of
professionalism. Genuine relationships are exactly what teachers are
looking to avoid. It is what they call “unprofessional.” But if adults
are willing to take the time to get to know the kids they are around really
well, to spend large amounts of time with their daughters and sons, to
listen carefully to their needs and wants, and to understand what they are
capable of, then trust can’t be far behind. (Hern, 1996, p. 62)



Basing his model of relationships on trust implies that there is no
inherent hierarchy in education, and can only be attained through
nonhierarchical relationships.

Homeschooling Networks



Anarchists and deschoolers, as well as educational theorists, argue for the
creation of networks, as opposed to institutions, that are temporary,
autonomous, and nonhierarchical, and facilitate a variety of diverse modes
of learning and community interaction (Ward, 1966; Llewellyn, 1998;
Abowitz, 2003; Holt & Ferenga, 2003; DeLeon, 2006; Morrison; 2007; Olsen,
2009). Abowitz (2003) recognizes how “homeschoolers are forming informal
networks for specialized study and activities—like writing groups or math
clubs and forming associations, support groups, legal aid societies,
publishing networks, and Internet sites to support homeschooling families
and connect them with one another” (p. 89). This is reiterated by Olsen
(2009) who adds that “homeschooling networks are becoming increasingly
sophisticated and self-sustaining” (p. 201). She goes on to illustrate
how “many more mainstream, middle-class American parents and students
themselves are beginning to see homeschooling as a way of conscientiously
objecting to the wounding culture of schools. More and more people are
opting out of school, and finding the alternative viable, attractive, and
very rich socially, academically, and economically” (p. 198). In a
similar thread, John Taylor Gatto (2003) wants parents and students to
address their own needs, focusing on the needs that are not met or even
addressed by schooling such as leadership and adventure, critical thinking
and independence, and lastly self-initiative and creativity (p. 38).
Illich’s criteria may set us on our way, but the need to include new
characteristics of deschooling will become evident.



The first of Illich’s criteria is reference service to educational
objects. The resources he is referring to include the materials in
libraries, museums, and theaters, as well as opening the local community
industries and services to individuals seeking to learn about things or
processes in factories and farms (Illich, 1970, p. 78). This represents
Illich at his most prophetic, foreseeing the possibility that technology,
in a similar way to telephones, can connect not only people but also people
and resources. The Internet is a virtual library that allows for access to
countless materials, not censored by public schools or the State, at least
in its most ideal form. This converges with Holt’s and Farenga’s
conception of technology and education. Farenga (1998) states that
“homeschooling can be seen as the logical destination for the convergence
of education and technology customizable curricula, seminars in new
educational techniques, educational TV, video-taped classes and lectures,
Internet, CD ROMs, are all touted by some educators and homeschoolers alike
as being more efficient education delivery systems than schools” (p.
132). This, combined with autonomy, enables self-disciplined students to
learn independently yet effectively and meaningfully. Having a robust
structure that allows for this type of learning is paramount for the
proliferation of other freedom-based educational alternatives.



Illich’s second criterion is relationships that allow for skill
exchanges. The network will provide a database of individuals that are
willing to demonstrate their skills to others, the skills these individuals
are associated with, and the conditions these individuals are able to share
their skills. In some ways this is already happening in an organic way but
needs to be developed further to create larger networks, allowing for a
more diverse set of skills and a wider pool of individuals sharing and
learning skills. Many homeschool networks provide these services internally
to members of their networks or sister networks and center around parents
or community members who are willing to share a set of skills. Morrison
(2007) has also taken note of this characteristic, finding that families
participate in the “4-H club, and they are also active in doing service
projects, such as taking care of preschoolers, serving food at soup
kitchens, and helping out at the animal shelter” (p. 46).



The third criteria of Illich’s model concerns peer-matching or locating
like-minded individuals interested in coinquiring into a specific skill or
topic. By finding a cohort of individuals, the skills available in the
skill-exchange network increases because any individual can serve as a
potential skill-bearer or skill-seeker. The network has the potential to
increase and amplify; however, Illich (1970) is aware of the tendency that
the poor, the group who needs peer-matching the most will unlikely take
advantage of such a practice (p. 95). This might become irrelevant for
deschoolers who make conscious efforts to diversify their homeschooling
network or learning web taking a more inclusive approach and averting any
homogenizing effects. There is recognition of increasing diversity, both
racially and economically, within deschooling networks (Nichols-White,
1996; Kleiner and Lord, 2000).



In addition, hierarchies begin to be dismantled, a benefit for challenging
the hidden curriculum, because we find that “other adults, and/ or
children who become ‘teachers’ of [homeschooled] children are not just
planners of activities for the children (although they can be). Rather,
they are resources, facilitators, ‘mid-wives’ for children’s
learning” (Morrison, 2007, p. 47). Peretti and Jones (2001) recognize
that “[schools] provide a functional environment where youngsters can
associate on many different levels with equals, as opposed to teachers,
parents, and other adults” (p. 379). It is interesting that Peretti and
Jones express that only peers can be viewed as equals and, intentionally or
not, reinforce educational hierarchies. This is an aspect of the hidden
curriculum that is reproduced in schools, positioning children at the
bottom and requiring them to blindly accept their status, or lack thereof.
What is needed is a reconstruction of the teacher-student relationship,
which skill-exchanges and peer-matching touches upon. Hern (1996) addresses
this through the typical rhetoric of teaching and parenting styles,
supporting “approaches to parenting which are neither authoritarian nor
permissive nor authoritative, but egalitarian” (p. 61). Llewellyn (1998)
shares this sentiment of equality between teacher and student or child and
parent, fostering relationships built on trust. In addition to nurturing
the direct relationships between individuals, the larger picture of this
criterion demands rediscovering one’s local community to uncover peers
and available skills.



The final criterion of the deschooling model is access to professional
educators. This may be the most problematic of Illich’s features because
in some ways it reintroduces teaching as a profession. He puts forward that
the rise of the professional educator will coincide with the elimination of
schoolmasters (Illich, 1970, p. 97). Illich does not equate professionalism
with attaining degrees and certifications and instead suggests a more
pragmatic structure where professional educators are identified by the
niche they fill. Illich identifies two areas in which professional
educators could prosper. The first concerns assisting parents with
understanding and contributing to their children’s learning experiences
(Illich, 1970, p. 97). The focus here is on having knowledge of human
learning, in a form that allows for freedom and autonomy to flourish, not
perish. For the most part, parents themselves are assuming this role and
using the standard homeschooling texts of Holt, Farenga, Llewellyn, Hern,
etc., as their professional guides. The second concerns the learners
themselves and the need for guides that will help to introduce educational
encounters and offer a critical model of understanding and making meaning
of these experiences (Illich, 1970, p. 97). The type of experiences and the
disposition desired is determined by the individual learner who then tries
to find professional educators who match their descriptions.



It is within the criteria of professional educators that we might find
permissible levels of inequality but only in the sense that the
relationship is such that one individual serves as a temporary guide who
can encourage and facilitate learning that might not be achieved by an
isolated individual. Llewellyn (1998) classifies these “adults” as
teachers and tutors, role models, mentors, or other less concrete, more
ambiguous relationships that, without compromising egalitarian ideals,
still maintain a degree of hierarchy; a nonoppressive power relationship.
Most importantly about these professional educators is the nature of the
relationships they build with learners that can be traced back to
philosophical traditions in Ancient Greece. Citing Aristotle, Illich (1970)
defines how these learning experiences are based on friendship, trust, and
leisure (p. 101). Todd May (2009) offers concerns for radical politics that
apply to models of deschooling by “[looking] at an arrangement of power,
[and asking] whether it is creating something bad for those who are subject
to it” (p. 14). This suggests that the power relationship that is present
in any educational encounter carries with it an opportunity for the hidden
curriculum to reemerge and taint such an encounter.



After reviewing the previous criteria there are at least two concerns that
are brought to light. Using the model loosely, not dogmatically, will allow
for the tampering of the model and usher in improvements to the deschooling
model. The first criticism involves the myopic focus on schools. Although
Illich argues for the centrality of public schools as the dominant
manipulative institution, we now have other equally manipulative
institutions. It may also be the case that schools do not hold this unique
totalitarian power. Instead the power may have been redistributed to other
institutions. Deschooling must take on the project of deschooling these
other manipulative institutions and create convivial alternatives within
them. The second concern is a way for parents and learners to maintain the
suspicion of and participate in the deconstruction of the hidden
curriculum.



George Wood (1982) finds it “unreasonable for schools to be singled out
as central among such socializing institutions as the family, the media,
the church, and other ideological apparatus” (p. 367). Schools are not
solely responsible for maintaining the social order as there have emerged
new institutions that reify the hidden curriculum which must be considered
and included in deschooling practices. These new institutions include mass
media, the workplace, the home, the family, marriage, democracy, parenting,
etc. (Falbel, 1996; Hern, 1996; Llewellyn, 1998; DeLeon, 2006). Other
institutions are present and critical homeschoolers, aside from using a new
model of teaching and learning will also need to establish ways to critique
media, marketing, politics, technology, etc. Critical homeschoolers must be
wary of all institutions and evaluate their manipulability or conviviality.
Hern (1996) wants “to encourage deschoolers at every level to take the
analysis and impulses that led them to reject traditional schools and apply
them to the wider community. I want people to look at hospitals and cities
and eating and houses and sex and city halls and shopping malls and
community centers and everything else with the same critical eye they bring
to bear upon school” (p. 6). He is pushing it into all institutions
physical/conceptual, explicit/ implicit and asking for the same rigorous
critique, rejection, and renewal. Parents, with the help of professional
educators, will need to develop strategies that enable deschooling these
other institutions in the same way that homeschooling can challenge
compulsory schooling.



In addition to opposing new trajectories of oppression we also need more
rigorous practices to finding our way out of schooling. We may need new
tools and structures that will allow for a more complete deschooling of all
manipulative institutions, in particular, the hidden curriculum. The new
social identity requires new skills which must be distilled into
deschooling practice. Within the unchallenged hidden curriculum we find
patterns of “[capitalism], racism, sexism, patriarchy, heterosexism, and
classism [which are] systems of oppression that anarchists resist”
(DeLeon, 2006, p. 3). All of these are a deep part of schooling and to such
an extent define the experience in schools. For this reason, it is not
enough to homeschool or even to unschool. An anarchic deschooler must
dismantle these systems of oppression; these manipulative institutions and
“pay much more attention to ‘missing standards’ such as positive
emotions, love of learning, initiative, creativity, and persistence”
(Wheatley, 2009, p. 27).



Deschoolers require and are advancing a different set of skills and
resources than their schooled counterparts. The difference lies in the
ideals of freedom and autonomy, but more specifically, on self-discipline,
motivation, and persistence that are inherent in the deschooling model. As
Illich suggests, “[the] ideal way of life would obviously be to a much
greater degree a do-it-yourself life, in which, individuals and small
groups took more responsibility for meeting a much wider range of their own
needs, rather than concentrating on one specialty and depending on a wide
range of other specialists” (Watt, 1980, p. 8).

Creating Autonomy



Homeschooling and deschooling, although not directly located within the
anarchy discourse, represent a way that anarchy might make some progress
while nobody is looking, so to speak. This may be a positive thing, given
the current global hostility toward homeschooling and the complete lack of
understanding and sensationalism surrounding anarchy. If deschooling were
to intentionally define itself as anarchic, deschooling youth,
deinstitutionalizing mandatory education, and deinculcating neoliberal
hidden curriculum, it would be viewed as far more radical and would warrant
accusations of corrupting the youth, unraveling the social fabric of
democracy, and possibly even be categorized as an insurgency, or worse,
terrorism.



Deschooling faces similar misunderstandings and resistance as anarchy. The
positive definition of anarchy, “a society based on cooperation, social
justice, community participation, and mutual aid,” resembles the positive
definition of deschooling which focuses on an individual’s relationship
to the knowledge she actively acquires and to the local community, with a
propensity for creativity and self-discipline (DeLeon, 2008, p. 123). More
simply, in deschooling, learning is without the imposition of the authority
of the master or the hidden curriculum of the State or the market (i.e.,
the public or the private). However, just as with the volatility of the
term anarchy, and the negative definition that follows, that of “lawless
disorder, violence, oppressive individualism, and chaos,” deschooling too
can be perceived with similar fear and hostility, from the individual who
has embraced the hidden curriculum as the means to happiness and
achievement, to special interest groups who have much at stake with
institutionalized education and the current trends of charter schools,
vouchers, and for-profit schools, and finally the state, which in many ways
education reifies (DeLeon, 2008, p. 123). The fear stems from the desire to
remove authority from the public or private definition of education and
recover a third option to pursue more autonomous learning experiences,
overcoming public and private rhetoric.



Illich was aware of the controversy surrounding any discussion of
“radical alternatives to school-centered formal education,” just as any
serious, informed argument in favor of anarchy is represented sensationally
by the media (Illich, 1969, p. 116). In this respect, anarchy and
deschooling couple together nicely because they are up against the same
misunderstandings and resistance but also share a radically humanizing
potential. If, as Ward suggested, there might be unconscious efforts toward
anarchy, and unschoolers are unconsciously manifesting these anarchic
tendencies, the cause might be better served if we are patient and allow
for the movement to become self-aware and find its own social identity and
anarchic voice to announce its arrival into radical politics, social
change, and education revolution. Abowitz (2003) recognizes that “[on]
the one hand [counterpublics] function as spaces of withdrawal and
regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training
grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics” (p.
82). This is something that will define the future of the homeschooling
movement and whether the deschooling fringe can make its unique voice
audible in wider and wider circles; first, other homeschoolers, then
educational policy makers and beyond. Abowitz (2003) suggests that the
educational counterpublics will be defined by its fractured overlapping
structure, and to some extent this will represent the topology of
deschooling, but more important is not the structure of the counterpublic
itself, but its structure as it relates to wider and wider publics.
Deschoolers are able to elude the dichotomy of public or private and are
able to avoid being reabsorbed into broader publics as long as they stay
true to their origin of disenchantment and desire to create a new social
reality. However, an anarchistic interpretation of deschooling allows us to
see the features that prevent it from being classified as public or private
and also suggests a distinct form of a counterpublic that Abowitz proposes.
The anarchist capacity of deschooling may lie, as Richard Kahn (2009)
suggests, “in our scholarly capacity to opt-out of the excited drive to
reconstruct education once again in the hope of a better world and to
recognize the programmatic suffering of our institutionalized existence as
students and teachers” (p. 133). We cannot theorize and design for
humanity, we can only practice humanity. And if humanity is not present in
obligatory schooling then the only places it has potential to creep up is
in deschooled learning spaces.



We can only live these changes: we cannot think our way to humanity…. The
many models which will develop should give each one of us an environment in
which we can celebrate our potential—and discover the way into a more
humane world…. We must build in hope and joy and celebration. (Illich,
1969, pp. 15–16)

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