From Pedagogies to Ecologies: School Abolition and Education for Liberation

• In Event: Seeking New Suns: Murmurations on the Visual, Affective, Geographic, and Sonic Possibilities of Collaborative Liberatory Methodologies

Abstract

The purpose of education is to reproduce the social, political, and material conditions of the broader society (Illich, 1971; hooks, 1994; Althusser, 2010). In the United States, this has meant the reproduction of relations of domination: settler colonial violence, extraction, exploitation, dispossession, all toward the accumulation of capital. Capitalism is informed by a logic of enclosure (Marx, 1988), which in the original sense refers to breaking up commonly stewarded land into private segments for purposes of commodification and control, but can be expanded to divisions of space and time, the community, the body, knowledge, learning, labor, and the very experience of living (Luykx, 1999; Schnyder, 2010; Reyhner & Eder, 2017; Simpson, 2017; Slater, 2014). It is through this lens that I advance a definition of abolition: as the dissolution of enclosure, to liberate land, communities, bodies, cultures, knowledges, resources, and/or energy, across space and time, along collectively self-determined pathways.
In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, protagonist Lauren Olamina and her comrades form an intentional community around a religion called Earthseed, which laid out rules for living in the apocalypse (Butler, 1993). As if by prognostication, Butler anticipated our intersecting crises of climate catastrophe, economic collapse, and pandemic, but contrary to the hype, her insights stemmed from an understanding of the repetition of history (Butler, 2000), and reasonable projections as the ramifications of neoliberalism came into focus. While Earthseed laid a philosophical groundwork, the community was held together by a set of shared values, fugitive planning, and collective governance.
In the absence of a charismatic religious leader — who we should be skeptical of in any case — what might a practical, materialist (if also spiritual) Earthseed look like? Where neither capital nor the state are reliable mediators in the sociopolitical dynamics between people and communities, how do we live, learn, and labor together, in right-relationship to each other and the land? I argue that we must attend to a praxis of abolition, to breach the boundaries of enclosure. This means asking fundamental questions about lineages, identities, trajectories; about the space: what it was, what it is, what it wants to become (or return to); and about context: the interplay between bodies, spaces, and temporalities, etched indelibly into the land itself (Simpson, 2017). We excavate, create, and reproduce collective memory, to displace cycles of domination with cycles of regeneration.
Toward that end, I offer the “Five Dimensional Ecological Compass”, a framework intended to help make legible and explicit the relationships between people and with their environment, as mediated by power, affect, and materiality, at different spatial and temporal scales. This is a move from pedagogy to ecology, people engaging in the co-construction of knowledge, exploring possibilities for collective self-determination and resilience. What relationships do we need to cultivate? What skills do we need to learn? What capacities do we need to build in the “Pox” — not Butler’s dystopian future, but our own prefigurative utopian now?

Author

• Kermit O, Independent Scholar