which doctor
4th August 2006, 02:49
This is just something I found interesting and I wanted to share. Enjoy!
An Insurrectionary Approach to Deschooling
by the Wild Youth Collective
The question of strategy and organizational forms is a recurring point of discussion and puzzlement amongst many radicals. We constantly want to know how to accelerate social revolution and which methods are most effective in eliminating the State, capital, alienation, work and all forms of domination. Taking from what I consider to be some of the more agreeable and radical tendencies – chiefly insurrectionary anarchism - I hope to confine discussion on praxis to one particular realm of struggle: high school.
I have chosen to do this because I unequivocally support the assertion that school acts as the reproductive organ of commodity society. It is in school that we are initiated into the variegated yet unified myth of industrial capitalism. Only when we conceive school as an industry that manipulates young men and women in their most formative years will we appreciate the importance of formulating coherent strategies of classroom revolt. Only when we recognize that capital’s production of commodity-satisfied demands begins with students’ successive consumption of curricula, will the revolutionary struggle of deschooling come to the fore. Once we converge on this basic premise, young people – with the support and experience of elders - can begin articulating our strategies and implementing them without reserve.
Classroom revolt and deschooling are two separate yet inseparably dependent projects. One can’t occur meaningfully without the other. For schools to be conclusively smashed - along with the individual dependency, helplessness and lack of control they thrive on - self-organized, informal, uncontrollable and idiosyncratic classroom revolts must come first. If such classroom revolts are to presage society wide deschooling, they will need to be marked by a degree of clarity and purpose. How to foment and precipitate such classroom revolts – or even school wide insurrections, but lets not get ahead of ourselves – and ensure their clarity and purpose is what I wish to expatiate upon here.
Old Tactics Worth Questioning
The opinions and propositions that follow are derived from personal and localized experience and should not be taken as prescriptive. They may prove entirely inapplicable in your unique circumstances or they may work best when combined with other suitable tactics. First we should affirm the ways not to go about transforming individual or group recalcitrance and defiance into deliberate and goal-orientated revolts.
1. The failings of ideology dissemination within high school have become all too manifest. Nowhere is Bonanno’s concept of severed communication more apparent than amongst high school students. They – like millions of others – would prefer not to read a ten-page treatise on the Spanish Revolution. Handing out pamphlets and distributing radical books will only reach so many. While I think there is room for compromise on this issue – such as refashioning our propaganda along the lines displayed by CrimethInc – very little of our time and energy should be exhausted on selling kids another prepackaged viewpoint, if for no other reason than to spare ourselves the dullness of such activity. If we are to use the written word as a chosen medium to connect with fellow youths, it should be limited to things like graffitied maxims, stencil art encouraging further stencil art and flyers promoting youth relevant issues and actions. Our propaganda must not reproduce more propaganda but incite self-directed action. We are guaranteed failure if we continue to exalt ideals over individuals, work over joy and consumption over being.
2. Activist or student organizations can be stressful, ineffective and unfulfilling for those involved and outwardly alienating for those who are not. Composing group visions, points of unity, organizing regular meeting times and locations and other formalities can often result in idleness. Such organizations also tend to suffer the same fate as radical organizations outside of school with self-preservation and factional disputes dominating members time and creative potential. So much effort is directed into promoting the group, building its numbers and administering internal affairs that little action conducive to classroom revolt actually occurs. To make things worse, the kids on the outside – who almost always happen to constitute the majority of students – can find themselves more estranged from such groups than the institution that quantifies their personal growth. This can be attributed to a number of factors, including their innate dislike for the prefabricated ideas and criterions of school and the analogous nature of formal organizations. Perhaps the single most important reason for reconsidering formal activist groups in high school is their conspicuousness and the unwanted attention it incurs. By establishing and promoting visible organizations we inhibit ourselves from militant action, as any such activity would immediately render ourselves suspects.
3. Mediating with school management only legitimates a specialized institution and increases our dependency on its pedagogical instruction. We participate in our oppression every time we negotiate with a teacher or administrator who seeks to preserve their place in the institutional process. When revolutionary students position themselves – inadvertently or not – as some kind of representative of widespread dissatisfaction we circumscribe classroom revolt and become practitioners of leftist politics. Instead, individual students must reclaim their own power free from the dictates of politically correct student-politicians.
The Insurrectionary Approach
The insurrectionary approach to deschooling need not be one of negation only and in fact is largely affirmative in its lust for informal groupings, uncontrollability and spontaneous self-generated revolts. The general direction in which I would like to see anti-school struggles move is exemplified by the Youth Liberation Front who only exist to publicize and support youth who take diverse direct action against their enslavement.
There are students who appear content with their submission and find consolation for their own suffering in the misery of others. They seem disinclined to start turning over tables and barricading classroom doors. This may very well be true. But nevertheless, their latent love of riotous moments is not so easily extinguished and after being thrust into the convulsion of high school rebellion they may soon release their repressed anger with greater intensity than we could ever have imagined. There are students who are reactionary bigots, whose backward ideas, homophobic taunts, sexist jeers and racists slurs cause us to brand them as ineligible. Indeed this bigotry must be overcome if we are to even begin deschooling school. Although intellectual arguments will not work and anti-fascist fights will only divide us more. Some will never renounce such intolerance, but others will. We must attack school now, and by doing so others will learn to attack too. Then there are students who have been smuggling weed, stealing school supplies and vandalizing equipment before we even discovered the real meaning of anarchy. They are the ones who feel the emptiness of life more acutely yet less consciously than us. They are the ones who are responsible for explosive yet aimless reactions, and it is with them that we find our project most promising. They are inherently skeptical of politics, representation, and all spurious opposition. When they revolt it is unmanaged and serves only their interests. We must create the ideal conditions for their and our revolts. We must intervene in their revolts not as young pedants but as fellow oppressed, and help vocalize their goals in consonance with ours. We have to organize together around the immediate and relevant realities of young people by listening to and analyzing their situation. Our inimitable circumstances, the people around us and our imaginations will determine how we go about doing this.
Every time a kid is pulled up for uniform. Every time a kid is castigated for eating in class. Every time a kid refuses to request permission to urinate. Every time a kid is caught smoking or stealing art supplies to paint on his own terms. This is when our intervention should occur. This is when we can respond with similar behavior to vindicate the disobedient student and show other kids they’re not alone. This is when we can articulate their demands and set intermediate goals. Schoolmasters can deal with one or two uncooperative and aimless students, they can’t manage revolts of twenty or thirty demanding an end to surveillance cameras or degrading uniform. Focusing on popular issues relevant to youth and promoting revolt by example in the present will bring us closer to deschooling in the future.
The only way I can see such intervention happening is with the formation of affinity groups. These would consist of three or four conscious individuals committed to classroom revolt, deschooling and youth liberation by all means necessary. Affinity and an intimate understanding of each other would unite the individuals within who share a clear and cogent analysis of their immediate surroundings. Only then, after achieving a flexible and cohesive group, can we intervene and foment classroom revolt. This can be achieved by agitating around existing rebellion and fighting for limited objectives – from toilet paper in bathrooms to extended lunch breaks – rather than attempting to proselytize as many students as possible. As mentioned above, propaganda may still serve a purpose, but only if it provokes kids to act and advance the insurrectional project. When institutional reprisal comes – as it surely will – affinity groups can dissolve and recommence activity quickly, ensuring the permanence of struggle. Only when we reject mass school wide struggle and recognize that the deconstruction of school won’t occur tomorrow will be able to effectively retaliate, advance the project of deschooling for posterity and enjoy ourselves while we flood the school again and again.
An Insurrectionary Approach to Deschooling
by the Wild Youth Collective
The question of strategy and organizational forms is a recurring point of discussion and puzzlement amongst many radicals. We constantly want to know how to accelerate social revolution and which methods are most effective in eliminating the State, capital, alienation, work and all forms of domination. Taking from what I consider to be some of the more agreeable and radical tendencies – chiefly insurrectionary anarchism - I hope to confine discussion on praxis to one particular realm of struggle: high school.
I have chosen to do this because I unequivocally support the assertion that school acts as the reproductive organ of commodity society. It is in school that we are initiated into the variegated yet unified myth of industrial capitalism. Only when we conceive school as an industry that manipulates young men and women in their most formative years will we appreciate the importance of formulating coherent strategies of classroom revolt. Only when we recognize that capital’s production of commodity-satisfied demands begins with students’ successive consumption of curricula, will the revolutionary struggle of deschooling come to the fore. Once we converge on this basic premise, young people – with the support and experience of elders - can begin articulating our strategies and implementing them without reserve.
Classroom revolt and deschooling are two separate yet inseparably dependent projects. One can’t occur meaningfully without the other. For schools to be conclusively smashed - along with the individual dependency, helplessness and lack of control they thrive on - self-organized, informal, uncontrollable and idiosyncratic classroom revolts must come first. If such classroom revolts are to presage society wide deschooling, they will need to be marked by a degree of clarity and purpose. How to foment and precipitate such classroom revolts – or even school wide insurrections, but lets not get ahead of ourselves – and ensure their clarity and purpose is what I wish to expatiate upon here.
Old Tactics Worth Questioning
The opinions and propositions that follow are derived from personal and localized experience and should not be taken as prescriptive. They may prove entirely inapplicable in your unique circumstances or they may work best when combined with other suitable tactics. First we should affirm the ways not to go about transforming individual or group recalcitrance and defiance into deliberate and goal-orientated revolts.
1. The failings of ideology dissemination within high school have become all too manifest. Nowhere is Bonanno’s concept of severed communication more apparent than amongst high school students. They – like millions of others – would prefer not to read a ten-page treatise on the Spanish Revolution. Handing out pamphlets and distributing radical books will only reach so many. While I think there is room for compromise on this issue – such as refashioning our propaganda along the lines displayed by CrimethInc – very little of our time and energy should be exhausted on selling kids another prepackaged viewpoint, if for no other reason than to spare ourselves the dullness of such activity. If we are to use the written word as a chosen medium to connect with fellow youths, it should be limited to things like graffitied maxims, stencil art encouraging further stencil art and flyers promoting youth relevant issues and actions. Our propaganda must not reproduce more propaganda but incite self-directed action. We are guaranteed failure if we continue to exalt ideals over individuals, work over joy and consumption over being.
2. Activist or student organizations can be stressful, ineffective and unfulfilling for those involved and outwardly alienating for those who are not. Composing group visions, points of unity, organizing regular meeting times and locations and other formalities can often result in idleness. Such organizations also tend to suffer the same fate as radical organizations outside of school with self-preservation and factional disputes dominating members time and creative potential. So much effort is directed into promoting the group, building its numbers and administering internal affairs that little action conducive to classroom revolt actually occurs. To make things worse, the kids on the outside – who almost always happen to constitute the majority of students – can find themselves more estranged from such groups than the institution that quantifies their personal growth. This can be attributed to a number of factors, including their innate dislike for the prefabricated ideas and criterions of school and the analogous nature of formal organizations. Perhaps the single most important reason for reconsidering formal activist groups in high school is their conspicuousness and the unwanted attention it incurs. By establishing and promoting visible organizations we inhibit ourselves from militant action, as any such activity would immediately render ourselves suspects.
3. Mediating with school management only legitimates a specialized institution and increases our dependency on its pedagogical instruction. We participate in our oppression every time we negotiate with a teacher or administrator who seeks to preserve their place in the institutional process. When revolutionary students position themselves – inadvertently or not – as some kind of representative of widespread dissatisfaction we circumscribe classroom revolt and become practitioners of leftist politics. Instead, individual students must reclaim their own power free from the dictates of politically correct student-politicians.
The Insurrectionary Approach
The insurrectionary approach to deschooling need not be one of negation only and in fact is largely affirmative in its lust for informal groupings, uncontrollability and spontaneous self-generated revolts. The general direction in which I would like to see anti-school struggles move is exemplified by the Youth Liberation Front who only exist to publicize and support youth who take diverse direct action against their enslavement.
There are students who appear content with their submission and find consolation for their own suffering in the misery of others. They seem disinclined to start turning over tables and barricading classroom doors. This may very well be true. But nevertheless, their latent love of riotous moments is not so easily extinguished and after being thrust into the convulsion of high school rebellion they may soon release their repressed anger with greater intensity than we could ever have imagined. There are students who are reactionary bigots, whose backward ideas, homophobic taunts, sexist jeers and racists slurs cause us to brand them as ineligible. Indeed this bigotry must be overcome if we are to even begin deschooling school. Although intellectual arguments will not work and anti-fascist fights will only divide us more. Some will never renounce such intolerance, but others will. We must attack school now, and by doing so others will learn to attack too. Then there are students who have been smuggling weed, stealing school supplies and vandalizing equipment before we even discovered the real meaning of anarchy. They are the ones who feel the emptiness of life more acutely yet less consciously than us. They are the ones who are responsible for explosive yet aimless reactions, and it is with them that we find our project most promising. They are inherently skeptical of politics, representation, and all spurious opposition. When they revolt it is unmanaged and serves only their interests. We must create the ideal conditions for their and our revolts. We must intervene in their revolts not as young pedants but as fellow oppressed, and help vocalize their goals in consonance with ours. We have to organize together around the immediate and relevant realities of young people by listening to and analyzing their situation. Our inimitable circumstances, the people around us and our imaginations will determine how we go about doing this.
Every time a kid is pulled up for uniform. Every time a kid is castigated for eating in class. Every time a kid refuses to request permission to urinate. Every time a kid is caught smoking or stealing art supplies to paint on his own terms. This is when our intervention should occur. This is when we can respond with similar behavior to vindicate the disobedient student and show other kids they’re not alone. This is when we can articulate their demands and set intermediate goals. Schoolmasters can deal with one or two uncooperative and aimless students, they can’t manage revolts of twenty or thirty demanding an end to surveillance cameras or degrading uniform. Focusing on popular issues relevant to youth and promoting revolt by example in the present will bring us closer to deschooling in the future.
The only way I can see such intervention happening is with the formation of affinity groups. These would consist of three or four conscious individuals committed to classroom revolt, deschooling and youth liberation by all means necessary. Affinity and an intimate understanding of each other would unite the individuals within who share a clear and cogent analysis of their immediate surroundings. Only then, after achieving a flexible and cohesive group, can we intervene and foment classroom revolt. This can be achieved by agitating around existing rebellion and fighting for limited objectives – from toilet paper in bathrooms to extended lunch breaks – rather than attempting to proselytize as many students as possible. As mentioned above, propaganda may still serve a purpose, but only if it provokes kids to act and advance the insurrectional project. When institutional reprisal comes – as it surely will – affinity groups can dissolve and recommence activity quickly, ensuring the permanence of struggle. Only when we reject mass school wide struggle and recognize that the deconstruction of school won’t occur tomorrow will be able to effectively retaliate, advance the project of deschooling for posterity and enjoy ourselves while we flood the school again and again.