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(en) Canada, Anarchist Common Cause's free paper Linchpin Issue #9 - Educating for freedom by Sarah Lawrance

Date Thu, 30 Apr 2009 08:37:47 +0300



As Cindy Milstein notes in her talk Educating for Freedom, anarchists tend to engage
primarily in educational projects ­ ones that we often don't immediately understand as
educational. ---- Organizing and attending events such as bookfairs, conferences,
demonstrations, and workshops; coordinating and sustaining free school projects,
libraries, infoshops, and bookstores; and publishing books, zines, websites, and pamphlets
are only a few examples of how anarchists initiate and participate in processes of
educating themselves as well as the wider world. ---- The form of these projects and
spaces may be as temporary as an hour-long or weekend activity, while others are more akin
to semipermanent institutions. With all of their differences, these projects are united by
the intention to create space for the exchange and
development of ideas. Bookfairs, libraries, and bookstores create
an environment where diverse ideas can be shared, discovered, and
explored through discussions, social and political events, as well as
formally and informally published materials. Free schools, the most
explicitly educational projects engaged in by anarchists, tend to have
an uncomfortable relationship with their mainstream counterparts
because of their inherent challenge to the relationships of authority
that characterize and underlie the traditional education system.
Also educational in nature, demonstrations, pickets, and protests
tend to be the most visible and contentious public expressions of the
anarchist commitment to education, where the intent is both to inform
the public about the issue at hand while also expressing dissatisfaction
with its current state.
In addition to their content, these projects exist at an intersection of
education and politics in another way: their organizational structures
and the learning models they employ are often directly democratic and
involve organizers and participants together in the education process.
These projects tend to challenge the notion that learning must happen
in formal and specifically defined educational settings like traditional
Organizing and attending events such as
bookfairs, conferences, demonstrations, and
workshops; coordinating and sustaining free
school projects, libraries, infoshops, and
bookstores; and publishing books, zines,
websites, and pamphlets are only a few examples
of how anarchists initiate and participate in
processes of educating themselves as well as
the wider world.
schools. They also challenge the unequal relationships between students,
teachers, and administrators in the traditional education system by
providing an alternative where participants are all able to teach and learn
from one another, to varying degrees. These projects thus serve as living
examples of the kind of world their participants would like to create.
This last point is central to Milstein's analysis. Anarchist projects tend
to prefigure the kind of world their participants envision and desire. To
borrow from two books I love ­ Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments
Against Neoliberal Globalization (University of Toronto Press: 2006)
and Reinventing Anarchy, Again (AK Press: 1996) ­ all these projects of
"utopian pedagogy" are necessary to building the "revolutionary transfer
culture" that will get us from where we are to where we want to be.
Sarah is involved with Ottawa's EXILE Infoshop. She helped organize
the Unschooling Oppression conference where Milstein originally spoke.
Cindy Milstein's talk is published in zine format buy EXILE Press in
Ottawa (http://www.exilebooks.org/en/exile-press/)
and can be listined to at
http://www.archive.org/details/educatingForFreedom-CindyMilstein
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