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CHAPTER 6. Anarchist Pedagogy in Action: Paideia, Escuela Libre

Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan

For twenty-nine years, the city of Mérida, in Southwest Spain, has hosted what is probably the only anarchist school left in Spain: Paideia. The school is named after the classical Greek concept of civic education involving the process of personal and social training toward active citizenship, aiming not to teach “stuff” but to create a working community of learning. Broader than mere education, Paideia was conceived of as a lifelong process of character building in preparation for direct democracy. It involved the absorption of knowledge and skills, but most importantly, it was about creating a living practice of participatory self-managed citizenship. Through a unique pedagogical methodology profoundly rooted in anarchist values and principles, the small Spanish school has been facilitating such a practice with and by children.

This chapter is based on a three-day-long participant observation at Paideia, during which we shared the life of the children and the adults that constitute it. Even though this is a short period to carry out in-depth critical ethnography and, admittedly, did not offer us sufficient time to, for instance, ascertain potential discrepancies between discourses and specific practices, our sojourn in the school, during which we had unsupervised access to all students, classes, and activities, remains a good starting point for the description and analysis of anarchist pedagogy in action. Indeed it is notoriously difficult to obtain permission to visit the school, let alone undertake participant observation there and we were thoroughly vetted by the pedagogic team before being granted access in September 2007.

The chapter will describe and analyze the main pedagogical precepts that regulate the school, as well as explain how these are implemented in every aspect of the school life. Indeed, Paideia is fundamentally rooted in the notion that anarchism must be experienced, and it thus seemed crucial to communicate this through a form of reflexive storytelling. Our findings will thus be presented in the form of a narrative of our life on site.

Freedom as Responsibility

Located in an old two-story pastel yellow farmhouse on what was once the edge of the city, Paideia used to be surrounded by fields and lush olive groves. Today, every single tree has been bulldozed and the school sits in a desolate landscape of churned up brown mud and partially built roads, which make it feel like a threatened oasis stuck in the hell of urban sprawl. Enormous bulldozers roam around its edges, the old walls and floors shudder with every scoop of broken earth. When the bulldozers are gone, 1,500 brand new identical suburban homes will surround the school. “We are making the future,” declare the developers’ colorful billboards.

Term has begun a few days before our arrival and we have been asked to meet with the staff collective on the evening before we actually come to observe the daily activities of the school. The fifty-eight children have all gone home and despite the long days, from 10 a.m. till 6 p.m. with students and then admin till 9 p.m., the collective of pedagogues greet us with warmth and numerous kisses. We sit down at a large round table surrounded by messy shelves of books and towering piles of paper. Everyone introduces themselves. Josefa Martín Luengo, whom all here call “Pepa,” is one of Paideia’s founders and its main theorist; she has just published her sixth book on libertarian pedagogy, a reflection on the methodology developed at the school: Paideia, 25 años de educatión libertarian (2006). All seven female and one male teachers are adamant that they are not “teachers,” they are facilitators of experience and processes, rather than transmitters of knowledge. Most of the students call them by their first name or simply “the adults.”

Unlike “free schools” such as A.S Neill’s Summerhill in the UK (Neill, 1960; Miller, 2002), Paideia does not see the process of growing up free as something passive. It is not a relaxed laissez-faire attitude where children can simply do whatever they want while the educators remain impassive and value free. It is instead a dynamic exercise, which involves creating a working community that is held by a set of clear values and where the rights of educators and students are acknowledged as equal. Central to the life and learning of the school are seven values derived from anarchist philosophy: equality, justice, solidarity, freedom, nonviolence, culture, and most importantly happiness. More than math and languages, science and history, these are the real subjects. But how these values are learned is as important as what they represent.

“The first few weeks of term after summer are always different from the normal way the school runs,” Martín Luengo explains during this first meeting. “Returning from the summer holidays is always a problem, because for two whole months the kids live with their parents and their grandparents, who do everything for them, they watch a lot of TV, get influenced by consumerism and competitiveness. The children lose their autonomy. Thus, when they come back they forget how to do things: if they need to cut carrots, for example, they look at us with imploring eyes, they have forgotten what needs doing … Their minds aren’t free when they have to ask what to do!”

Practicing Self-Management in the Everyday

At the core of Paideia’s practice is enabling the children to take charge of their autonomy and practice self-management (Martín Luengo, 2006). From as young as eighteen months until they leave at sixteen years old, the students run the entire school in collaboration with the adults. Every aspect of school life is decided through assemblies attended by all. From organizing the lunch-time menu to planning the timetables, resolving personal conflicts to choosing what academic subjects to study, every detail is discussed and managed collectively without coercion or authority. As Martín Luengo explains: “They are free when they know what they want. It is so much simpler to be told what to do than being free. Passing on your responsibility to others is easy.”

Due to the number of students who have returned from summer holidays with “tendencies toward dependence,” as the adults call it, the school is temporarily under what is known as Mandado—which roughly translates as “to be ordered.” It is a state of exception, sometimes applied to individual students but in this case applied to the entire school. As the students are seen to no longer be able take the initiative to do things themselves and are asking the authority figures (the adults) what to do, they are mandado-ed, told what to do by the staff. This state of exception remains until the students decide to call for an assembly where they will discuss collectively whether they have returned to a state of freedom and responsibility. If there is consensus for the Mandado to be lifted, then the school will return to normal and no one will be told what to do anymore. “They need to re-find their anarchist values,” concludes Martín Luengo. “It doesn’t take long. No one likes being told what to do all the time. But if they want to be free they have to fight for it.”

The morning after, we go to the school for 9:30 a.m. and wait for the children. The school bus arrives, a long sleek brand new white coach. Children pour out. The older ones hold hands with the little ones guiding them down the steps and into the school grounds where they pat the two lounging school dogs and are kissed by the waiting adults. The smaller children, eighteen months to five years old, peel off to the kindergarten annex; we stay with the older ones in and around the main building.

There is a flurry of activity as the children scatter in every direction to join their different “collective working groups.” We follow the cooking group: seven children in mixed ages from five to sixteen go into the kitchen put on white aprons and start preparing the day’s meals. Outside, a couple of children are swinging on the trapeze attached to an old crooked Cypress tree but the rest are busy, some weeding the garden, some tidying the classrooms, and a few sweeping floors with brooms that are nearly twice as tall as them. Despite the state of Mandado, no one seems to tell anybody what to do. There is a constant flow and movement of energized children throughout the building, getting on with things without being managed by teachers or even a school bell. In fact the school has no bells, and the only clock visible seems to be a tiny plastic one tucked away in the corner of the kitchen where the cooking group are chatting away as they prepare breakfast. All take part: the older children and one adult look after the younger ones as even five-year-olds wield large knives, diligently cut up tomatoes, and stir the industrial cauldrons.

Every Friday, a working group in charge of the week’s daily meals meets to organize cooking for sixty people. Spanning from six to thirteen years old and chaired by one of the children but with an educator present to guide them on issues such as nutrition and balanced diets, the group decides a daily menu. Each child proposes an idea for a dish, which is debated and agreed upon. If it happens to be one of their birthdays, they have the right to choose the day’s menu without debate. Once the week’s menus are set, the children check what food is left in the store cupboards. Lists are made, the children, armed with specially devised forms, decide who will telephone the wholesale suppliers to place the weekly provisions order, and then cooking begins. Next week another group will take over.

“Come on, it’s time to work, Manu,” calls Carlos from the kitchen. Although he is only seven, and not the official coordinator of the cooking group, who is thirteen-year-old Arai, Carlos is able to see what needs doing and can gently wheel his friend away from playing and back in the kitchen. Meanwhile, three other children, who can’t be older than nine, are going around the entire school with a pen and paper, asking everyone how many fried eggs they want for lunch. They skip up the wooden stairs, past a 1930s framed poster declaring: “If the tyrant doesn’t grow the wheat; why do you demand bread?”

Food is seen as a key aspect of the socialization process at Paideia: not only is it a simple way of coming together and building relationships, but by giving the children the opportunity to choose their own food and cook, they learn to be much more independent and self-reliant. The nursery children are the first to eat in the morning. They arrive holding each other’s hands, accompanied by an adult. A five-year-old and two three-year-olds begin to set the tables for the twenty-three children of the nursery.

Values as Pedagogical Framework

The white walls of the dining room next door are plastered with colored pieces of paper each printed with a different quote, including Joseph Proudhon’s famous tirade: “To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censured, commanded” (1851).

No school is value free, state or otherwise. State schools are potent vehicles for replicating the values of capitalism (Giroux, 1984, 1987). For eighteenth-century philosopher William Godwin, there were two axes of power: government and education (Pollin, 1962). Godwin argued that since government depended on the consent of the governed, the most important area for political struggle was education, because it was there that people’s thinking was formed. In 1783, as the public debate over the implementation of mass state education was taking place, he published a prospectus for a school that abolished authority and valued the autonomy of the child, in which he expressed his fear that if education fell into the hands of the state, “governments [would] not fail to employ it, to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions” (1783).

His vision was prescient: individualism, competitiveness and the acceptance of hierarchical authority, the dominant values of our culture, are subtly encouraged through schooling to this day (Whitty and Young, 1976; Giroux, 1988). Although not necessarily part of the openly designed public curriculum, these values are transmitted through the conditions of learning and the way the school operates. It is a form of “hidden curriculum” where implicit values and priorities are picked up at an unconscious level. It is not blatant indoctrination but insidious influences that emanate from the everyday climate and structures of the school; the relationship between teacher and pupil, the layout of the classroom, the way the school is managed, the system of rewards and punishments, and so on. Added to this are the unexamined and unspoken assumptions of the teachers who send messages out daily: only certain kinds of achievements count, bookish learning is more valuable than practical skills, middle-class values are more worthwhile than working-class ones, obedience to law is good, disobedience is bad, certain career choices are more worthy than others, contributing to society is honored, criticizing is discouraged (Postman & Weingartner, 1969). Despite a long tradition of anarchist educational ideas and practices (Bakunin, 1969; Suissa, 2010), many which eventually percolated into mainstream education, there is rarely any mention of it in histories of education and pedagogical theory.

“Children must be accustomed to obey, to think, according to the social dogmas which govern us” wrote Spanish anarchist and educator Francisco Ferrer (Spring, 1998, p. 23) describing church-run Spanish state schools in the first decade of the twentieth century. Freed from religion, his Escuela Moderna (Modern School) was about “a drawing out rather than a driving in” (Avrich, 2006, p. 192). It was a process of self-development where the child’s unique spirit could be nurtured rather than shaped or suppressed. His ideas spread following the global condemnation of his mock trial and execution after the bloody suppression of a Catalan antiwar uprising in 1909. As a result forty-eight schools inspired by his ideas sprang up in Spain and many more across the world (Avrich, 2006). The notion that education could be for emancipation rather than subservience began to gain ground. Ferrer had been inspired himself by earlier anarchist experiments in France, first at Cempuis (Brémand, 1992), a state school where Paul Robin’s ideas of integral education aimed to develop every aspect of the child’s potential—physical, intellectual and moral and where sexes were mixed, something unheard of at the time (Demeulenaere-Douyere, 2003)—and later at La Ruche, which merged an independent school, with a cooperative farm funded by the production of honey.

To anarchists, the whole idea of teachers imposing authority on children and there being a hierarchical learning relationship where knowledge is poured into the silent, obedient heads of students, is an anathema (Avrich, 2006). Despite the evolution of teaching methodologies in the twentieth century and the recent trend of “student-centered learning” (Rogers, 1983a and 1983b), the underlying structures of most schools remain the same. It is still the teacher who decides when the “student-centered learning” takes place, where it will happen and what the student will learn. The student is certainly not the center of decision-making but a passive recipient of decisions made from “above.” They don’t learn to own themselves but to obey others. They have been ingrained with what primitivist author Derrick Jensen (2000) says is our culture’s central belief, “that it is not only acceptable but desirable and necessary to bend others to our own will” (p. 242). Spending six hours a day for twelve years in a place where they have virtually no say in anything, where being governed is all they know, a profound passivity becomes normalized, the hopelessness of submission becomes fixed deep below the child’s skin. It is a perfect preparation for the consumerist future that awaits them (Giroux, 2000).

Asambleas: The Core of Self-Management at Paideia

“Religion fuera de la escuela!” (Kick religion out of schools!) reads a red and black sticker stuck on the large oak double doors that open to reveal the main entrance hall. Children are running up and down the wooden staircase, the noise resonates through the building. A tall, skinny sixteen-year-old, her freckled heart shaped face framed by enormous jangling hooped earrings, bounds up to us. Everyone kisses and she introduces herself as Jara. “That was our collective work session,” she tells us breathlessly. “It is when we all do the cooking, cleaning, etc. Let me explain our timetable to you.” She leads us to a cork notice board at the back of the hall. Sepia postcards of the CNT anarchist-run tram system during the 1936 revolution are pinned beside colorful lists of workshop groups and numerous timetables decorated with children’s crayon drawings.

“After the collective work we have breakfast. Then from 11:15 a.m. to 2 p.m., we either have an assembly or attend a workshop, after that we have free time till lunch at three, unless we are in the cooking group that week. After lunch it’s collective work again till four, followed by an hour-and-a-quarter-long workshop and finally afternoon tea at five before we head home.” Jara realizes that she is dominating the conversation and turns to Manuel, a shy, spotty classmate of hers. She encourages him to continue the explanation. The timetables are decided by asambleas. Before each term starts, a general asamblea takes place in order to analyze how the last term went, decide what subjects pupils want to study in the workshops (the preferred term to “lesson”), what working groups they want to be in and how the timetable should be organized. There are four age groups in the upper school, each with a self-assigned name and their own classroom: five-to-seven-year olds’ “cool group,” the seven-to-eight-year-olds’ “tornado,” the nine-to-eleven “group one,” and twelve-to-fifteen “group two.”

When we ask Lali, one of the adults, if it is OK for us to attend a workshop, she retorts sternly: “Don’t ask me, ask the children.” Feeling rather embarrassed at our faux pas, we get to the door of a classroom full of ten-year-olds. One of them stands out from the other distinctly Latin children, with his blond hair and blue eyes. He invites us in, in an English rounded by a strong Yorkshire accent. He has been living in Mérida for two years. At first he went to state school, but learned little Spanish since the only time he could practice speaking was in the playground: most of the school day was spent sitting silently in class listening to unrecognizable words. In Paideia, he quickly became bilingual: the school not only thrives on children’s conversations, but is run by them, through the debates at the asamblea.

The general asamblea is the main organ of school life, attended by both children and adults, and facilitated by the former; it is where every decision that affects the whole school is taken. Even in the nursery, the day starts with one, facilitated by four- and five-year-olds. Seeing our astonished looks, Augosto, the only male adult of the school, explains: “They do it really, almost better than older children because they take it really seriously. The small ones who cannot yet speak obviously don’t take part in the decision-making, but they know that the asamblea is where one sits quietly and listens.” In the primary and secondary school, asambleas are fed by a series of “commissions,” which give feedback about what is happening in the school. Made up of groups of two to four children, armed with complex tables to fill in, the commissions are mirrors to reflect the workings of the school back to itself. They relate information and analysis to the general asamblea, and rotate every fortnight. Chris explains that he is in the “solution makers commission”: “I have to be on the look out for problems and conflicts that arise … if there is a problem we go and try to help out, if we can’t find a solution there and then, we call an asamblea.” There are commissions to observe the school bus, manage the teaching materials, and even a “values commission,” whose members observe how the values of equality, justice, solidarity, freedom, nonviolence, culture, and happiness are being practiced.

Nonviolent Conflict Resolution

A dozen children walk purposefully through the open door of the classroom, none of them are older than seven. “Pablo bit me, we have to have an asamblea!” declares Miguel as they shepherd Pablo, a new boy, out into the main hall. They find a corner and sit in a circle on the floor. Everyone is talking. Hands are flailing passionately. Adriane, a supremely confident seven-year-old takes a piece of paper from her notebook and draws two columns on it: one for stacking the speakers, the other for the proposals. She begins to facilitate. A hush descends on the gaggle. One by one the children put up their hands to speak. Miguel calmly explains the situation: “Pablo snatched my workbook and then bit me.” The other children describe their version of events. Most of them seem totally relaxed, it is clearly a normal part of conflict resolution at Paideia. Pablo, however, is reacting differently: he is tense, frustrated and fidgeting nervously. “Why did Miguel call for an assembly when I didn’t do anything?” he shouts. He doesn’t wait for the facilitator to take his turn speaking. This is hardly surprising: while most of the children have been attending assemblies since they started school at eighteen months old, Pablo arrived here two weeks ago. The resolution of conflicts through nonviolent methods is a crucial part of the curriculum at Paideia (Martín Luengo, 2006, p. 96) and one that the children learn through practice rather than abstractly in “citizenship classes.”

Eventually an adult, Lali, arrives: she has heard Pablo speaking out of turn and decided to come and see if she could help out. “I wanted to see Miguel’s drawing … he wouldn’t let me. But I didn’t bite him,” Pablo remonstrates. Miguel shows everyone the bite mark on his arm. The children study it carefully, then one of them realizes one can tell who bit whom by looking at the shape of the bite marks and relating it to the tooth pattern. Suddenly they are all biting their own arms to see what marks they leave. But the bite marks on Miguel don’t seem to match Pablo’s. “Did you bite yourself?” Lali quizzes Miguel, who shakes his head blamelessly. Lali calmly mediates between the two children: “Pablo, you cannot force someone to show you their drawing. If your friend says he doesn’t want you to do something, you don’t do it.” She turns to Miguel: “And you have to help Pablo if you see him doing things in a violent way.” However, she lets Adriane play her role of facilitator of the spontaneous asamblea. The latter suggests that it is time to make some proposals. “My proposal is that Pablo should not be in the Tornado group,” suggests Carlos. Another proposal is that he is sent out from communal life for a bit. “I have another one,” says Lali, “Pablo is new and has to learn to behave in a different way. How can he learn to be different without being in a group? His problem is not the group he is in, but himself. The group has to help him and he has to respect the group.” Adriane summarizes the proposals, a vote is taken on each one, the kids raise their hands, Adriane counts and notes the results. Lali’s proposal gains unanimous support, apart from Miguel who abstains.

Learning at Paideia is thus not simply about acquiring abstract knowledge—dates, facts, and arithmetic—but about encouraging a different way of being in the world, evolving the senses and deepening the capacity to connect with one’s own potentiality and that of others. By instilling the seven values the school sets a clear and dynamic direction. Unlike the “hidden curriculum” of state schools, these profoundly human principles are the visible anchors of the curriculum. Constantly referred to, analyzed and reflected upon, they are the center of gravity of the school’s culture (Martín Luengo, 2006, p. 96).

The values of solidarity, justice, freedom and nonviolence all aim to resolving conflict through dialogue, which is one of the keys to the school’s culture (Martín Luengo, 2006, p. 122). The only time that a child has been expelled was when they were repeatedly violent. The value entitled “culture” is about acquiring the skills so that others don’t interpret the world for the children. As for “happiness,” it is seen as more than a value, rather it is the sum of all the values. However, as Martín Luengo had explained to us: “It is not about getting everything you want, it is about attaining emotional maturity and stability. It’s about being not having.”

The educators were candid about the fact the hardest value to attain was “equality,” which is a fundamental objective of Paideia (Martín Luengo, 2006, p. 111). This difficulty has actually resulted in one of the most controversial practices of the school: to alleviate social privileges and the acquisition of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1990), students are not allowed to follow any extracurricular activities.

Open Classroom

The history workshop is in full swing. “I like history,” Chris tells us, “especially the Napoleonic period, we should learn from the mistakes of the past so we don’t repeat them.” He chose to do the subject at the general asamblea where the staff suggest a dozen different workshops and the class groups collectively decided five that they want to do. Chris’s group chose: History, English, Global Economy, Grammar, and Art.

The classroom windows are wide open and the smell of cooking drifts up the stairs. Although a blackboard covers the back wall, there is no teacher standing in front of it lecturing. In fact there is no adult to be seen anywhere. The half a dozen students sit facing each other in a circle of desks each one getting on with their own work. Some are diligently writing notes or filling in workbooks while others are leaning back on their chairs chatting. Every now and then Chris gets up to pick a book off the shelves lining the wall. Anton has just aimed a rubber at a classmate, it ricochets off the side of his head. Iban asks Miguel if he can help: “I can’t do this. I don’t understand.” Miguel leans over to explain. Iban starts scribbling in his book, but it doesn’t take it long before he is distracted again. “Give me your pencil, Miguel.” He reaches across the desk. “No, I’m working,” Miguel replies, annoyed. “Oh, be quiet, Iban,” Anton pleads.

Despite the appearance of mild chaos, academic learning must be taking place: the school boasts excellent end-of-compulsory-education exam results. The school has not been properly legalized by the state, and consequently the students cannot take their final exams here. They must therefore finish their schooling in the local college.

Pepa walks casually into the classroom. “If your work is ready I can correct it,” she says. Iban trots out of the door, but Anton produces his workbook. “Hmm … there is a lack of good grammar, just like last year,” she says and strolls into another classroom. “Shit,” grumbles Anton, screwing up his sheet of paper, “I have to start all over again.”

We ask the children what motivates them to study in the absence of coercion. Chris and Anton explain that all students fill in and sign “commitment” forms, which list the personal commitments they have decided to make and a date by which they commit to have completed them (see examples Martín Luengo, 2006, p. 509). Commitments range from how many projects and workbooks they are going to complete, to how they are going practice the anarchist values, what collective work they will do, to what they commit to on an affective level. At the end of the term they collectively assess each other’s commitments. If the asamblea thinks that someone has not fulfilled them properly, they can be mandadoed for a while. They also make a commitment to do what is called “intellectual work.” This is a totally self-determined project, on a subject of their choice. Chris has decided to do a project on the Roman Empire. In a fortnight he will stand in front of his group and present it. He won’t be given any mark since there is no form of summative assessment. However he will have to take part in “La Prueba Larga” (i.e., the big test) at the end of term, an in-depth formative assessment that takes place one to one with an educator in Martín Luengo’s study. A holistic appraisal observing the development of the child, it looks at everything from motor coordination to numeracy, character traits to the way they engage with asambleas, energetic temperament to diction, artistic proclivity to relationship to food, emotional qualities to social skills, grasp of history to connection with their own bodies. All these traits are recorded on complex psychopedagogic tables (see templates in Martín Luengo, 2006, 366–508), which are evidence of the rigor of Paideia’s pedagogic methodology.

Punishments and Uprisings

Jara takes us into Pepa’s office. It is covered with political posters, including one that proclaims: “If fighting for a better world means being a terrorist; then I am a terrorist.” The lanky teenager plunks herself on the large, paper-strewn desk. “This is the headmistress’ office,” she smiles cheekily. “It is funny, most people in Mérida don’t understand this place, they think it’s a boarding school or somewhere for people with mental illness. They don’t believe anyone learns anything. But a lot of our friends are jealous that we don’t have any exams and so never fail anything.” We ask if there is any form of punishment. “The main punishment is to be taken out of the collective life, to do things on your own, to eat and study without your friends. Sometimes you have to spend all day cooking. Once I spent two weeks in this office, no one was allowed to come and see me, but they did anyway!” she grins. “When you decide that you are ready to go back, then you go to the asamblea and explain that you have realized why you were punished and have reflected on what you did.” She looks up to the ceiling thoughtfully. “You know, you can tell when people have changed. In the asamblea you can see when people have really thought through their behavior. Then everyone decides whether you should return from exclusion or not, sometimes there is a trial period … I think it’s a just form of punishment.”

At first, it reminded us of Maoist self-criticisms and confession rituals. Yet emphasis on the notion of responsibility as a collective as well as individual value, and constantly trying to eliminate all forms of authoritarianism quickly changed our opinion. Moreover an anecdote pointed to the coherence of the antiauthoritarian approach at Paideia. Indeed, as one would expect from an anarchist school, there have been student uprisings. The most serious one was five years ago when the children excluded all the adults from school and ran it themselves. It began, as it should, during an asamblea. Most of the time everyone moves about the school freely, weaving in and out of classrooms at will. There is hardly a closed door in sight. But there is a strict rule stating that no one is allowed to walk out of an asamblea without asking the facilitator first.

“One day,” Jara enthusiastically recounts, “we were all screaming and shouting at each other during the asamblea. Pepa got really annoyed, and walked out in a huff. The rest of the adults followed. So the children decided that as they hadn’t asked the facilitator, they should all be excluded. The adults agreed and went away. They spent their days reading and playing cards, only looking after the little ones. All the older children had to take on the adult roles, correcting each others’ work and so on, but this meant they did not have time to do any of their own stuff. After a week we realized it wasn’t working.” The children called the adults into an asamblea, apologized and asked them to come back: running the school without the adults was proving too much work! “Whenever I tell the story of our ‘occupation’ to my friends from ‘outside,’ they don’t believe me,” says Jara.

Constant Evolution and Experimentation

Schools most often seem suffused with a rigid sense of stillness, places where not much changed, where each term looked very much like the next, where bodies were tense and timetables static. Very occasionally a cathartic outburst would disturb the icy routine, but the authorities would soon repress it. The atmosphere at Paideia could not be more different. There is constant movement, not just the physical motion of the children’s bodies through the building, but the whole structure of the school is organically evolving and adapting. Timetables, subject matters, working groups; everything is always being carefully considered, revised, adjusted, and tailored to the specific students and situation. The only things that remain constant are the anarchist values, the moral foundations, everything else is up for amendment via the asambleas. Some might see this constant fluctuation as destabilizing and counterproductive to learning. But for anarchist educators, encouraging interactive experimentations is one of the linchpins of their pedagogy. Learning is a continuous feedback process fueled by free will. The role of anarchist education is to reclaim free will, not simply for the sake of practicing freedom but because free will is seen as the catalyst of qualitative learning, and learning to learn is a big step toward autonomy.

Yet it has not always been a smooth ride and Paideia has had a stormy history: it was founded in 1978 after a similar experiment in Fregenal de la Sierra (started by the same group of three women) was shut down by the right-wing authorities. It has always been run as a cooperative, made up of parents and supporters of the project and the adult collective of educators. Over the years there have been internal splits and parental coups, including attempts to abandon the principle of self-management. The main tension has been with parents who don’t understand the difference between a progressive school and a truly free school. For the founders, Paideia is not simply an alternative to mainstream schooling, in fact it is a radical critique of everything a school normally stands for. Some parents wanted to turn Paideia into what Martín Luengo describes as “a school for the bourgeoisie.” “They wanted the pedagogy but not the ideology,” she told us indignantly.

The school has survived the crises by constantly changing, evolving and responding to the problems over the years. Very little seems immutable here and anarchism’s emphasis on permanent experimentation is the key to its longevity. There is however a constant lack of money, illustrated by the slightly shabby feel of the buildings and decor. A monthly fee of 545 euros per student pays for the upkeep of the school, the rent, school bus, all meals and materials; what is left goes to the collective. If parents cannot afford the fee, arrangements are made to pay in installments and there is a solidarity fund for parents who can afford to pay more to help families who find the fees difficult.

The lack of money however means that salaries are very low, which forces Gloria, one of the teachers, to also teach in the local state school. This gives her an invaluable perspective on Paideia’s pedagogical approach. When we ask her if she thinks that the anarchist school is an island, her answer is a resolute “no.” “It’s the opposite of an island,” she tells us, “because people leave here with skills for critical analysis, they can engage and challenge the world. In the state system there is no critique of anything. The whole thing is based on domination and authority, between staff and pupils but also between older and younger pupils, heads and teachers. There are so many levels of authority and no love. That’s the island: kids who are little individualistic islands.”

The notion of love is primordial to Gloria. “In the state school the children are not loved by the teachers, in fact the students become an enemy and the whole idea is to domesticate them.” She also thinks that the whole experience of early schooling is deeply confusing for children. “At five or six years old, when the children move to primary school, they go from a situation where learning is about talking to each other and playing, to one where suddenly everything changes: they have to sit and be silent. The only way this can be achieved is by bringing in fear, punishment and authority.”

She tries to apply some of Paideia’s pedagogy to the state system, but it is complex: “The children get confused: suddenly they are allowed to talk, to have asambleas, to criticize. I use asambleas in my classes, but the other teachers are completely against it, they feel personally threatened. The parents at first thought it was a waste of time, especially when the children felt it was more important to resolve conflicts than to do math or languages, but now they have come to understand that it was worthwhile.”

Life after Paideia

The afternoon sun beats down, we retreat to the shade on the edge of the playground. We are chatting to ex-students Laura and Johanna. Eighteen years old, both dressed in tight white jeans and belly tops, they give off an air of relaxed self-confidence. “I come back here after college, sometimes every day,” Laura tells us, her big chocolate eyes framed by a mass of dark tangled hair. Both her and Johanna are at the local instituto (high school) preparing for their final exams, yet they are still deeply committed to the longevity of Paideia. “It is not like a school here, more like a family,” Laura explains. “People have their responsibilities and commitments to each other; everyone helps one another.”

“The hardest thing here,” Johanna chips in, “is the work one does on oneself, pushing oneself. In the end it’s worth it for the satisfaction of getting somewhere. But the other hard thing,” she says with a hint of sadness in her voice, “is leaving this place.”

We are intrigued at how it must feel to go from the freedom of Paideia to the rigidity of the state institute. One of the questions often leveled at alternative education is whether it can prepare students adequately for the “real” world. “The first thing I noticed was that we had to sit in rows instead of circles,” Laura gestures in disbelief. “I was shocked that I had to have my back towards my friends … Also the relationships between teachers and pupils, and between pupils themselves is so different, in many ways it feels ultra-masculine. There seemed to be men shouting and telling others to do things all the time. And they use the grammatical masculine everywhere, instead of @!”[21] Despite these elements of disruption, both teenagers insist that schooling at Paideia have given them a strong grounding, in that they have been taught how to learn and so has given them a huge advantage over the other college students who don’t seem to have the ability or the motivation unless they obliged and directed.

We are impressed by the maturity of Laura and Johanna, but cannot help wondering why did so few of the ex-students become “activists”; in fact we haven’t heard of any and this seems almost counterintuitive to us. Is the school really embedded in social movements or is it just creating free children, who would end up working in capitalist society as atomized individuals? Do these young adults schooled in anarchism really want radical change? Or, as political philosopher and social ecologist Murray Bookchin wrote in his abrasive critique of contemporary anarchism, did they “eschew any serious commitment to an organized, programmatically coherent social confrontation with the existing order” (1995, p. 58). They certainly are not what he calls “Lifestyle Anarchists,” wallowing in subcultures, celebrating “latter day anarcho-individualism … with polymorphous concepts of resistance … disconnected with the public sphere” (1995, p. 10).

Maybe what the school has taught them is a trick: to mask their anarchism, to work embedded in their communities and become anarchists “disguised” as hairdressers and postmen, psychologists and teachers, lawyers and nurses. In doing so, they refuse the division of labor that occurs when activists take on the role of social change expert. As Andrew X pointed out in his seminal essay “Give Up Activism”: “To think of yourself as being an activist means to think of yourself as being somehow privileged or more advanced than others in your appreciation of the need for social change, in the knowledge of how to achieve it and as leading or being in the forefront of the practical struggle to create this change” (2001). Activism, he explains, not only reproduces capitalism’s divisions of labor but it encourages hierarchies, fetishizes action, self-sacrifice, and isolates the “activist” from “normal people.” More often than not, he writes, “activism” gets in the way of real change. In the end it is not what we call ourselves that matters but the way we behave. This approach was confirmed by Martín Luengo herself: “We don’t want to produce conveyor belt anarchists, each student has to choose their own way,” she explained. For her, the ideal student is one that, “practices anarchy and anarchist values where ever they go.” “In Spain,” she continued, “many of the youth who gravitate towards Anarchism don’t really understand its core ideas—they are attracted to violence and rebellion without embodying the real values. In fact they embody the very things that the state identifies with anarchism: disorder and dirtiness. If you can’t change the way you think then you don’t change anything. In Mérida, students transmit their values to others, there is more free thinking locally, more libertarian unions, and a strong alternative culture. And …” she pauses, to allow a mischievous grin to spread across her face, “no student ever got married.”

Conclusions

At Paideia, the theory is that freedom and autonomy cannot be taught, only experienced. Its pedagogy is based on the conviction that when freedom is merely given, it tends to create a distorted individualistic concept of freedom, common within capitalist culture. For the pedagogues of Paideia, freedom is an active process, it is the art of developing personalities who have an uninhibited sense of volition embedded within acute consciousness of self and connection to the other. Only a transformed selfhood can display the attentive self-consciousness needed to engage in self-management and prepare us for living in a community of other self-realizing beings (Clark, 1984). The students learn to be free by working together to create the collective conditions for freedom; from which emerges not unlimited freedom but what political philosopher Alan Ritter (1980) calls “communal individuality.” Through a rigorous and highly theorized and reflexive pedagogical practice (Martín Luengo, 1978, 1990, 1993, 2006), the school enables a kind of direct feedback mechanism to occur, where individual freedom and collective responsibility go hand in hand and encourage each other toward ever-greater autonomy.

Note

This is an edited version of a chapter in Fremeaux, I. & Jordan, J. (2011) Les Sentiers de l’Utopie. Paris: Zones (a book/film available in French on www.editions-zones.fr from February 2011).

References

Andrew X. (2001). Give up activism. In Do or Die: Voices from the Ecological Resistance, 9. Also available at http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no9/activism.htm

Avrich, P. (2006). The modern school movement: Anarchism and education in the United States, Oakland: AK Press.

Bakunin, M. (1869). Les endormeurs. In L’Égalité, 26, June & 3, 10, 17, 24 July.

Bookchin, M. (1995) Social anarchism or lifestyle anarchism: An unbridgeable chasm. In Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. Oakland: A.K. Press.

Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J.C. (1977). La reproduction. Paris: Ed. De Minuit. Brémand, N (1992) Cempuis: Une expérience éducation libertaire à l’époque de Jules Ferry, 1880–1894, Paris: ed. du ML.

Clark, J. (1984). The anarchist moment: Reflections on culture, nature, and power, Montreal: Black Rose Books.

Demeulenaere-Douyére, C. (2003). Un précurseur de la mixité: Paul Robin et la coéducation des sexes. Clio 18. Retrieved from http://clio.revues.org/index615.html.

Giroux, H. (1988). Schooling and the struggle for public life: Critical pedagogy in the modern age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Giroux, H. (2000). Stealing innocence: Youth, corporate power, and the politics of culture. New York: Palgrave.

Godwin, W. (1783). An account of the seminary that will be opened on Monday the fourth day of August, at Epsom in Surrey, for the instruction of twelve pupils. London: T. Cadell.

Jensen, D. (2004). A language older than words. Vermont: Chelsea Green.

Martín Luengo, J. (1978). Fregenal de la Sierra: Una experiencia de escuela en libertad. Madrid: Campo Abierto.

Martín Luengo, J. (1990). Desde nuestra escuela Paideia. Móstoles: Madre Tierra.

Martín Luengo, J. (1993). La escuela de la anarquía. Móstoles, Madre Tierra.

Martín Luengo, J. (2006). Paideia: 25 años de educación libertaria. Manual teórico-práctico. Madrid: Ediciones Villakañeras-Colectivo Paideia.

Martín Luengo, J. (1981). Intento de educación antiautoritaria y psicomotriz en preescolar. Mérida: S.I.

Miller, R. (2002). Free schools, free people: Education and democracy after the 1960s. New York: SUNY Press.

Neill, A. (1960). Summerhill: A radical approach to child rearing. New York: Hart Publishing Company.

Pollin, B.R. (1962). Education and enlightenment in the works of William Godwin. New York: Las Americas.

Postman, N. & Weingartner, C (1969) Teaching as a subversive activity. New York: Dell.

Proudhon, P.J. (2004 [1851]). General idea of the revolution in the nineteenth century. Courier Dover Publications.

Ritter, A. (1980) Anarchism: A theoretical analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rogers, C. (1983a). As a teacher, can I be myself? In Freedom to learn for the ‘80s. Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company.

Rogers, C. (1983b). The politics of education. In Freedom to Learn for the ‘80s. Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company.

Smith, M. (1983). The libertarians and education. London: George Allen and Goodwin.

Spring, J. (1998). A primer on libertarian education. Montreal: Black Rose Books.

Suissa, J. (2010). Anarchism and education: A philosophical perspective. Oakland: PM Press, 2010.

Whitty, G. & Young, M. (Eds.). (1976). Explorations in the politics of school knowledge. Driffield: Nafferton Books.

CHAPTER 7. Spaces of Learning: The Anarchist Free Skool

Jeffery Shantz

Social theorist Michel Foucault used the occasion of his 1967 lecture, “Of Other Spaces,” to introduce a term that would remain generally overlooked within his expansive body of work, the notion of the “heterotopia,” by which he meant a countersite or alternative space, something of an actually existing utopia. In contrast to the nowhere lands of utopias, heterotopias are located in the here-and-now of present-day reality, though they challenge and subvert that reality. The heterotopias are spaces of difference. Among the examples Foucault noted were sacred and forbidden spaces which are sites of personal transition.

Decades later, Foucault’s notion of heterotopias would be echoed by the anarchist writer Peter Lamborn Wilson. Published in 1985 under the pen name Hakim Bey, the book T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism would become an almost instant contemporary anarchist classic. In T.A.Z. Wilson/Bey outlines, in often exhilarating flourishes, a lively version of anarchist heterotopias. These anarchist heterotopias, now called TAZ, are the anarchist society in miniature. In them structures of authority are suspended, replaced by relations of conviviality, gift-sharing, and celebration. They are living embodiments of what the anarchist Peter Kropotkin termed “mutual aid.” And they exist, not in a postrevolutionary future of in the distance, but right here, right now.

While Bey’s work put forward some unique visions, and did so in often-provocative language engendering a fair bit of controversy within anarchist circles, what he calls TAZ, or something very close to them, have always been part of anarchist culture and politics, as well as the culture and politics of the working classes and oppressed more generally. These have been, in other contexts, infrastructures of resistance (Shantz, 2009). To mention only a few examples, one might make note of the culturally vital and politically raucous Wobbly union halls of the 1910s and 1920s, the revolutionary community centers of Barcelona during the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s and the variety of squatted cultural centers of Europe from the 1960s to the present. Indeed Wilson/Bey’s inspiration is drawn explicitly from the diversity of heterotopias and intentional communities of history, including pirate utopias, the Munich Soviet of 1919, Paris 1968, autonomist uprisings in Italy during the 1970s, and the radical ecology camps of the 1980s and 1990s.

Over the last two decades, whether aware of this history or not, many young anarchists, punks and artists took Bey’s message to heart, building a host of community centers, infoshops, and free spaces in cities across North America, including Toronto. These spaces were intended as something a bit more permanent than the temporary autonomous zone. Envisioned as permanent autonomous zones, or at least potentially durable ones, these anarchist spaces have provided support structures for oppositional cultures, infrastructures of resistance. They have formed crucial aspects of the broader do-it-yourself (DIY) movements which provide alternative cultural and economic infrastructures in music, publishing, video, radio, food, and, significantly, education. Anarchist heterotopias provide important sites for skills development, for learning and practicing those skills which are undeveloped in authoritarian social relations.

Their existence allows for some autonomy from the markets of capital, some freedom from the restrictions of mainstream education. Their ethos runs counter to capitalist consumerism: play rather than work, gifts rather than commodities, needs rather than profits. For participants, they provide the imaginal, if not the material, means for undermining state and capital relations and authorities both ideological and structural. Practice often settles for something much less than that.

Contemporary anarchist heterotopias are not to be confused with the intentional or “drop-out” communities that have emerged at various points in North America, most recently the countercultural communes in the 1960s and 1970s. Contemporary anarchists are less interested in dropping out, preferring to build alternatives in alliance with people involved in more mainstream projects rooted in the day-to-day experiences of poor and working-class people. Anarchist heterotopias today are most likely to be located in urban neighborhoods and open and accessible to community involvement, rather than the arcadian spaces of isolated rural communes.

The following provides a glimpse into one such heterotopia, the Anarchist Free Space and Free Skool (AFS). Hopefully the images reveal both the promise and problems that people face while trying to create room for education outside of the confining structures of the permitted. These are experiences of collaborative learning over several years bridging classrooms and communities, particularly marginalized communities, to highlight opportunities for critically engaged teaching and learning. Through participatory approaches bringing students and street involved people together in contexts in which people are simultaneously teachers and learners these efforts contributed to a teaching/learning praxis informed by critical pedagogy and antiauthoritarian social perspectives contributing to empowerment for learners and communities. Along the way participants tried to effect positive changes in themselves, the skool, and the community.

Anarchy and Education

For anarchists, learning should help people to free themselves and encourage them to change the world in which they live. As Joel Spring (1998, p. 145) suggests: “[E]ducation can mean gaining knowledge and ability by which one can transform the world and maximize individual autonomy.” Anarchist pedagogy aims toward developing and encouraging new forms of socialization, social interaction, and the sharing of ideas in ways that might initiate and sustain nonauthoritarian practices and ways of relating. At the same time it is hoped that such pedagogical practices might contribute to revolutionary changes in people’s perspectives on society, encouraging broader social changes.

Anarchists seek freedom from internalized authority and ideological domination. “In the modern state, laws were internalized within the individual, so that ‘freedom’ merely meant the freedom to obey the laws that one had been taught to believe” (Spring, 1998, p. 40). Internalization of the laws through socialization in school has been viewed as a means to end disobedience and rebellion. Freedom is freedom from direct control of the state but only if one acts according to the laws of the state (Spring, 1998).

The protoanarchist Max Stirner referred to the thought that one could not get rid of, the thought that owned the individual, as “wheels in the head.” Such thought controlled the will and used the individual, rather than being used by the individual (Stirner). What Stirner called “the ownership of the self” meant the elimination of wheels in the head. Stirner distinguished between the educated and the free. For the educated person, knowledge shaped character. It was a wheel in the head that allowed the individual to be possessed by the authority of the church or the state. For the free one, on the other hand, knowledge facilitated choice, awakened freedom. With the idea of freedom awakened within them: “the freemen will incessantly go on to free themselves; if on the contrary, one only educates them, then they will at all times accommodate themselves to circumstances in the most highly educated and elegant manner and degenerate into subservient, cringing souls” (Stirner, 1967, p. 23). For the free, knowledge is a source of greater choice rather than a determiner of choice (Spring, 1998, p. 39). Ideas, as wheels in the head, subject people to the ideas themselves. Domination does not refer only to the internalization of ideologies that refer to sacrifice for supposed needs of society, external to the individual. It also refers to moral imperatives that capture a person’s creative capacities.

There were two levels of wheels in the head. The first leveled people through everyday life. One went to church and paid taxes because that was what one was taught; that was the way one lived. On the second level were ideals—ideals that move people to sacrifice themselves for the good of the fatherland, that made them try to be Christ-like, ideals that led them to give up what they were for some unrealizable goal. It was this realm of ideals upon which the strength of the Church and State was built. Patriotism and religious fervor were the results of people being possessed by ideals. (Spring, 1998, pp. 40–41)

Stirner objected to notions of “political liberty” because it only spoke of the freedom of institutions and of ideology. Political liberty “means that the polis, the State, is free; freedom of religion that religion is free, as freedom of conscience signifies that conscience is free; not therefore that I am free from the State, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them” (Stirner, 1963, pp. 106–7). This perspective proved profoundly influential for a range of Free Skool participants, as it has for anarchist educators for decades.

The free school movement finds its inspiration in the anarchist Modern School movement begun by Francisco Ferrer in Spain. The free school movement emerged in the 1950s and spread through the 1960s as an effort to develop alternative forms of education and self-development in a context that was considered increasingly alienating, rationalized, and industrial. Anarchists were actively involved in the free school movement and their involvement is seen as crucial to the antiauthoritarian character and direction of the movement. Free schools were viewed as “an oasis from authoritarian control and as a means of passing on the knowledge to be free” (Spring, 1998, p. 55). Indeed, one of the principle proponents of the free school movement was the best-known anarchist in the United States, Paul Goodman, whose works were widely read and discussed during the 1960s and 1970s. Notably, contemporary anarchist activists have rediscovered Goodman’s works through recent emerging movements. Free schools were, for Goodman, part of a broader decentralization and de-bureaucratization of social institutions. Goodman argued that schooling had become a process of grading and certification that largely benefited industrial elites who gained trained, and largely obedient, personnel. Education had become more and more geared toward perceived labor market demands. For Goodman (1966, p. 57): “This means, in effect that a few great corporations are getting the benefit of an enormous weeding out and selective process—all children are fed into the mill and everybody pays for it.” In response Goodman argued for the development of small-scale schools or minischools in urban centers. Through participatory involvement and decentralization, these minischools could allow for direction according to the needs and desires of students and the communities and neighborhoods in which the schools were situated. Goodman also suggested that “in some cases schools could dispense with their classes and use streets, stores, museums, movies and factories as places of learning” (Spring, 1998, p. 56). Indeed Anarchist Free Skool participants pursued such an approach regularly holding classes on the sidewalks in Kensington Market. On other occasions classes were held in laundromats, nearby parks, and at picket lines where workers were on strike.

The Anarchist Free Skool

The Anarchist Free Space and Free Skool (AFS) was begun in April 1999 by artists and activists who had organized a fairly lively freeskool at a soon-to-be-closed hangout, the Community Cafe. When the Cafe shut down some of the freeskool participants, looking to keep things going, set up shop in a roomy storefront location in Kensington Market, a multicultural, historically working-class neighborhood in downtown Toronto.

The Free Space was intended as a venue for committed anarchists, novices, and nonanarchists alike to come together and share ideas about the prospects, difficulties, and strategies for creating new, antiauthoritarian social relations. The primary vehicle for this was an ambitious schedule of classes on diverse issues. The hopefulness of the new collective was expressed in a statement on the front page of its course calendar.

Education is a political act. By deepening our knowledge of ourselves and the world around us, sharing skills and exchanging experiences in an egalitarian, non-hierarchical setting free of prejudice, we challenge disempowering habits and broaden our awareness of alternatives to the inequalities of a capitalist society. The Anarchist Free School is a counter-community dedicated to effecting social change through the application of anarchist principles in every sphere of life. This Space represents and opportunity for the community at large to come together and explore these alternatives. The Anarchist Free Space welcomes all applications for use of the Space.

Courses reflected the desire for openness—they weren’t all about anarchists talking to anarchists about anarchy (though a few of them were just that). Some of the courses included “Love Songs of the 20s and 30s,” “Street Art,” “Understanding Violence Against Women” and “Alternative Economics.” Not just the mind but the body was taken care of in a yoga class and in shiatsu workshops. For most of the year at least one class was running every weekday evening. Far and away the most successful and long-running were “Introduction to Anarchism” and “Class Struggle Anarchism, Syndicalism and Libertarian Socialism” (See Appendix).

For me, some of the most interesting courses weren’t courses at all but more like events. Every Tuesday at 9:23 p.m. sharp the International Bureau of Recordist Investigation gathered for excursions in their particular type of mayhem. The Recordists promised and often delivered “A weekly meeting, open to those with an interest in Recordism, Surrealism, and other currents of the Fantastic and the Absurd in contemporary art and culture (and spirituality, and politics, etc., etc.), for the exploration of those topics via discussion, presentations, game-playing and other collective activities, and general nonsense and tom-foolery.” One Recordist evening consisted entirely of a fellow cutting his way out of a cardboard box. Eyebrows were raised throughout the space when one of the Recordists’ mummies turned up in the basement. The mummy proved popular, however, eventually garnering its own wardrobe and securing a privileged place in the front window.

Another interesting event-class was the ponderously titled and sadly short-lived “Drifting as Foundation for a Unitary Urbanism.” Inspired by the Situationists’ dérive (or creating spontaneous pathways through the city), “The Drift,” as it became known, brought people together to wander through the nighttime city exploring the hidden, unseen, out-of-the-way places of an alter-Toronto.

In addition to classes the AFS tried to revive the anarchist salon tradition. As the course booklet noted: “Salons have a colorful history throughout the world and in particular within Anarchist Communities. Salons are intentional conversational forums where people engage in passionate discourse about what they think is important.” At the AFS the third Friday of every month was reserved for lively discussions on various topics decided upon by participants. Often the salons included a potluck dinner and performance. By all accounts the salons were enjoyable and engaging affairs drawing upwards of forty people.

Other memorable happenings ranging from the wacky to the profound included the infamous Satanic Ritual Party which brought the cops and almost made one of our pagan members quit; the Go Guerrila performances and zine launch; a couple afternoon punk shows organized after Emma closed; and (on the profound side) the Books to Prisoners poetry readings by ex-lifer John Rives.

Some projects never did come together and others suffered a lack of attention. The lending library suffered regular neglect as no one seemed interested in taking care of it. Eventually it fell into complete disrepair. A proposed free table for used goods never really got started. Neither did the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL). More positively Anti-Racist Action and the Toronto Video Activist Collective (TVAC) continue to make use of the space for meetings and video showings. Others such as Food Not Bombs and the Recordists pulled out before dissolving completely.

Free Skool participants openly acknowledged the example of the anarchist educator Francisco Ferrer who suggested that radical pedagogy should question and challenge the traditional or habitual practices that sustain existing social structures (Ferrer, 1913). Courses emphasized the capacities of people to act and shape society’s direction, starting with local environs in which they lived, worked and learned. The anarchist Paul Goodman argued that, within free schools, “The use of certified teachers could be dispensed with and people like the druggist, the storekeeper, and the factory worker could be used as teachers” (Spring, 1998, p. 56). The participants at the Anarchist Free Skool pursued such an approach. In place of instructors who presented information in a unilateral fashion, with a dominant voice, classes involved AFS members who acted as facilitators, taking responsibility to photocopy and make readings available, and ensuring that the space was available and open and people welcomed. Given their initial familiarity with anarchist ideas and texts they helped to fill gaps in knowledge, particularly about specific practices, theories, or histories, where possible and necessary or to suggest texts for future reading. Often new students would ask specific questions about how anarchists had handled particular issues, such as justice or punishment, historically. Typically, responsibility for introducing a topic rotated through the class participants according to their personal interests or availability as they volunteered to take responsibility for specific readings or weekly topics. Following a brief introduction to the readings or cases, classes were opened up to a loosely structured discussion based on individual and collective readings of the topic.

Even more, within Free Skool classes and meetings, anarchists tried to develop active listening, respectful debate and productive disagreement, in a context that recognizes the harm done to many “students” by their previous negative experiences in mainstream schools. Punctuality, passivity, and obedience were in no way promoted at the AFS. Emphasis was on training for community action and the development of critical social consciousness. Some even identified the structures and pace of modern urban environments themselves as barriers to learning.

Organizers realized that there are many barriers people face to free and independent learning. They emphasized efforts to break dependency and inhibition within the learning process. The anarchist Emma Goldman criticized approaches to learning that emphasized the actions of rulers, elites, and governments. Such an approach, still too common today, conditions people to accept a society in which the majority of people are passive, expecting groups of leaders to direct events. Such approaches typically reinforce authoritarian institutions. Anarchist Free Skool participants saw the impacts of such teaching first-hand. In initial meetings of classes nonanarchist participants often expressed an acceptance of social stratification or presented a view that elites were entitled to the unequal social rewards they received. One of the common responses was that they had “more important jobs” or “greater responsibilities.” The Anarchist Free Skool classes provided an important opportunity to discuss such questions in a constructive and respectful manner. Anarchists noted that often the most important jobs, such as garbage pickup, were least rewarded. Similarly, work with the most responsibility, such as mothering, was not rewarded monetarily at all. Caring work, such as early childhood education and nursing, was not rewarded in terms of status and was often underrewarded monetarily, relative to the work’s importance.

For anarchists, learning should contribute to independence of thought and action and contribute to capacities for self-determination. In the view of Free Skool participants, it is always important to avoid ideological approaches to learning. Anarchist ideas should be subjected to lively criticism and revision like any other ideas. Debate should always be open and welcomed within anarchist spaces. Dogmatic insistence on the rightness of particular theories or ideas must be avoided and tendencies to dogma actively undermined.

Anarchists at the Free Skool did not view the space as a place to indoctrinate or spread a particular ideology. Such an approach would be bound to fail anyway, and furthermore it would contravene participants’ principles of anarchism and antiauthoritarianism. Education should support people in freeing themselves from social dogma and encourage their efforts to change social structures and social relations positively. Rather different varieties of anarchism and other steams of radical thought were presented for debate, discussion and appraisal. Hidden histories of resistance and alternative social organizations were explored.

Classes enjoyed participation from around five to thirty people. Gender was mixed with the proportion of men, women, and transgender participants varying by class. Similarly classes were facilitated by men and women in roughly equal proportion. The AFS was quite successful in overcoming the generational divisions that afflict many activist groups, particularly some of the direct action groups of the alternative globalization movement. The Free Skool provided a space in which children as young as a few months old played while folks in their eighties debated and shared jokes. Participants in classes ranged widely in age, with classes generally enjoying involvement from a range including late teenagers to sixty- and seventy-year olds.

In addition to classes, the Free Skool also served as an information center in which books and other media were available on loan to community members. More than simply offering courses on alternative and independent media, the Free Skool made cameras and movie-editing equipment available for community movie making. Experimental filmmaker Kika Thorne brought equipment for editing Super 8 film and showed anyone who was interested how to use it.

This was all part of the broader emphasis on skill-sharing. People registered their various skills with the Free Skool so those seeking to learn specific skills could easily contact someone willing to share information and experiences. Larger workshops were regularly held on specific topics, skills, and activities including zine-making, guitar, art, knitting, cooking, and gardening. Sessions were also provided on self-defense. Reflecting holistic approaches to health, classes, and workshops were provided on nutrition, first aid, and basic health care.

“Class” Organizing

Libertarian or anarchist approaches to education emphasize participatory involvement, consensual practices and relations and the limiting of stratifications based on expertize or experience (Spring, 1998). At the Free Skool the educational emphasis was on learning for social justice, learning as social justice. This was not an academic or even purely intellectual pursuit but rather a holistic approach to education in and as practice. For participants learning was geared toward positive social as well as personal transformation. Learners who were also teachers had a commitment to use their opportunities and resources, collective practice, knowledge, to contribute to the betterment of particularly poor communities. The Free Skool encouragement of social justice was not limited to the radical content of courses but as expressed as much in the structure and practice of courses and the space more broadly. In particular this included consensus-based decision-making processes and participatory practices in which learners guided the direction of courses and the space itself.

Anarchists emphasize the school as a site of political, cultural, social, and economic power. Schooling instills a respect for authority and builds a habitual deference and adherence to the laws of the land. In the words of one of the directors of the anarchist Modern School movement in New Jersey in the 1920s, “From the moment the child enters the public school he is trained to submit to authority, to do the will of others as a matter of course, until the result that habits of mind are formed which in adult life are all to the advantage of the ruling class” (Kelly, 1925, p. 115). Criticisms of the government-based public school system include its nationalistic emphasis (with anthems to start school days and flags on buildings and images of presidents or monarchs in every room. Also of concern is training for the demands of the labor market and industrial system rather than for critical analysis or engaged “citizenship.” It is part of organizing more broadly against patriotism and moral regulation within society as well as school systems.

Anarchists, like other radical education theorists, raise concerns about ways in which traditional schooling trains people to accept work that is monotonous, boring, or without personal satisfaction (Spring, 1998, p. 14). There is great, and growing, pressure from policymakers, government officials, bureaucrats, and corporate leaders to direct all education toward the fulfillment of perceived or anticipated demands of the labor market. Education is viewed primarily, or even solely, as career preparation. Learning s placed in the service of a future social role and preparation for that role. As Spring (1998, p. 146) notes: “Knowledge is not presented as a means of understanding and critically analyzing social and economic forces but as a means of subservience to the social structure.”

Not simply an abstract or philosophical concern, Free Skool participants were critical of the neoliberal education policies of their own province, which shifted the emphasis of education toward training geared to the labor market almost exclusively. The Ontario government at the time the Free Skool opened had recently legislated the requirement that university programs justify funding on the basis of the employment success of graduates. It forced programs to justify their existence on the basis of vague references to employability. This employability proof shifted emphasis in programs away from critical analysis toward supposedly practical considerations. Sociology programs, for example, shifted from critical theory or social movement studies toward supposedly more marketable areas such as criminology and family studies.

Another concern of anarchists is the contribution of educational discourses to the myth of social mobility within stratified capitalist social relations. Within these popular discourses, educational credentials are uncritically accepted as a basis, even the basis, for social rewards, or more as a measure of social worth or standing (Wotherspoon, 2009; McLaren, 2005, 2006). Unfortunately, such credentials are largely distributed along existing lines of inequality and reflect ongoing divisions of class and status. Rather than increasing mobility, education, and the focus on credentials, prestige, and reward reinforces social class divisions (Spring, 1998; McLaren, 2005; 2006). As Spring (1998, p. 29) notes:

The poor are led to believe that schools will provide them with the opportunity for social advancement, and that advancement within the process of schooling is the result of personal merit. The poor are willing to support schooling on the basis of this faith. But since the rich will always have more years of schooling that the poor, schooling becomes just a new way of measuring social distances. Because the poor themselves believe in the rightness of the school standard, the school becomes an even more powerful means of social division. The poor are taught to believe that they are poor because they did not make it through school. The poor are told that they were given the opportunity for advancement, and they believe it. Social position is translated through schooling into achievement and underachievement. Within the school the social and economic disadvantages of the poor are termed underachievement. Without school there would be no dropouts.

The anarchist approach aims at radically transforming society rather than reforming it. As Joel Spring (1998, pp. 9–10) suggests, while reformist approaches to education try to eliminate poverty by educating the children of the poor to function within existing social structures, radical education tries to change the social structures that support and perpetuate unequal social relations. Reformist approaches can certainly make improvements, and these improvements are not to be dismissed, but they do not make the thoroughgoing sociostructural changes needed to address poverty and inequality. In Spring’s (1998, p. 10) words: “The first approach would emphasize changing behavior to fit into the existing social structure while the second would try to identify those psychological characteristics of the social structure which keep poor people under control.” For Free Skool participants, education should be part of processes of social transformation and human emancipation. Individual efforts to succeed within existing structures tend not to end inequality and injustice. Schools should not reinforce the social organization of society. They should challenge and change it.

What must be sought in the future is a system of education which raises the level of individual consciousness to an understanding of the social and historical forces that have created the existing society and determined an individual’s place in that society. This must occur through a combination of theory and practice in which both change as all people work for a liberated society. There should not be a blueprint for future change but, rather, a constant dialogue about means and ends. Education should be at the heart of such a revolutionary endeavor. (Spring, 1998, p. 146)

For anarchists, educational alternatives are situated as part of overall attempts, within collective movements, to change broader systems of power, including but not limited to those of education. Anarchists seek a de-institutionalization of the socialization process. For anarchists, schools teach people to trust the judgment of the educator while developing distrust for their own judgment (Spring, 1998; McLaren, 2005; 2006).

Implied in the concept of a society without schools is the end of all other institutions which are breeding grounds for dogma and moral imperatives. In a sense the church and state are themselves schools, with ideas of how people should act and what they ought to be. A society without schools would be one without institutions of mysticism and authority. It would be a society of self-regulation where institutions would be a product of personal need and usefulness and not sources of power. (Spring, 1998, pp. 52–53)

For anarchists at the AFS, working toward a new society depends, in part, upon changes in ideas and attitudes. New social relations do not spring into being fully formed from nothing. They must be taught, learned, played with, experienced, revised, and relearned. At the same time, less acceptable or less desirable practices must be unlearned or discarded. This is not done immediately, the outcome of an act of will. Even more, people who are raised in authoritarian contexts, socialized within authoritarian assumptions, will understandably need to learn new ways of acting. They will need to adjust, through trial and error, to new ways of relating to one another. Yet there are relatively few accessible spaces available in which such practices can be engaged. The anarchist Max Stirner (1967, p. 23) was drawn to ask: “Where will a creative person be educated instead of a learning one, where does the teacher turn into a fellow worker, where does he recognize knowledge as turning into will, where does the free man count as a goal and not merely the educated?” The AFS anarchists tried to provide opportunities for people to experiment and struggle with creating new forms of relationship, interaction and understanding one another.

Most Free Skool members struggled under public schooling regimes, finding their education to be constraining, restrictive, and lacking in venues for the expression of creativity. Many of the people who participated in Free Skool classes were decades removed from formal schooling. For them, the Free Skool provided a welcome alternative to their generally unsatisfactory and unsatisfying educational experiences. Many were thankful for the presence of the Free Skool, suggesting that they had searched a lifetime for such engaging learning experiences.

For Free Skool anarchists, the question of content is not the only one. Anarchists also stress the importance of methods. As in other areas of activity, anarchists stress the importance of a correspondence between means and ends, form and content. For anarchists, antiauthoritarian relations and practices cannot come from authoritarian methods. In education there is a link between methods and approaches to learning and the organization of the classroom and the character of the development of relations among participants. Learning can be an end in and of itself and should be an enriching process that allows for the rewarding experience of nonauthoritarianism in practice.

Concerns over the types of methods pursued in the classroom involve the nature and extent of control and authority (Spring, 1998, p. 26). Radical education critics suggest that classroom techniques have been related to shaping a character that fits within and functions according to existing institutions of authority outside the school (in government or corporations). Modern mass consumer societies, according to critical theorist Ivan Illich, require a citizen character that relies upon, or is dependent upon, the advice of experts, which can be broadly integrated within decision-making processes (see Hardt and Negri, 2009). The society depends upon the consumption of packages expertly planned and circulated according to marketing strategies. For radical critics, schooling prepares the individual by assuming responsibility for “the whole child” (Spring, 1998, p. 26).

By attempting to teach automobile driving, sex education, dressing, adjustment to personality problems and a host of related topics, the school also teaches that there is an expert and correct way of doing all of these things and that one should depend on the expertize of others. Students in the school ask for freedom and what they receive is the lesson that freedom is only conferred by authorities and must be used “expertly.” This dependency creates a form of alienation which destroys people’s ability to act. Activity no longer belongs to the individual but to the expert and the institution. (Spring, 1998, pp. 26–27)

Indeed Free Skool participants were explicitly working to overcome the dominance of experts in social life. This is not to say they reject the knowledge developed by some people in specific areas, such as computers, health care, nutrition, or woodworking, based on experience and training. Rather it is the dominance of broad spheres of social life by experts and the frame of mind that suggests an uncritical deference to authorities. It also speaks against the proprietary character of much expert knowledge, as privileged possession or competitive advantage, within capitalist societies. More specifically, the Free Skool anarchists sought to allow everyone opportunities to develop their own expertize and confidence. This was part of an overall emphasis on do-it-yourself (DIY) or do-it-ourselves (DIO) practices. People were encouraged to formulate answers and develop solutions to problems in a participatory and collective way, brainstorming, experimenting, practicing, and reworking with fellow participants.

Anarchist critics argue that poor people learn in school that they should submit to the leadership or authority of those with more schooling. Those with more schooling, in terms of years and grade levels, tend to be those from more privileged class backgrounds who complete postsecondary education and graduate school. Thus anarchists seek to subvert this relationship of education and leadership or authority, particularly on the basis of class.

Here the concern is not with order and efficiency but with increasing individual autonomy. The goal of social change is increased individual participation and control of the social system. This model rests on the conviction that a great deal of the power of modern social institutions depends on the willingness of the people to accept the authority and legitimacy of these institutions. In this context the question becomes, not how to fit the individual into the social machine, but why people are willing to accept work without personal satisfaction and authority which limits freedom. (Spring, 1998, p. 131)

Anarchists attempt to overcome traditional teacher/student relationships which can inhibit students and reinforce authority structures of command ad obedience. For Stirner, education should assist individuals to be creative persons rather than learners. Learners lose their freedom if will in becoming increasingly dependent upon experts and institutions for instruction on how to act. Rather than learning how to act they might determine for themselves how to act.

Anarchists seek educational practices and relations that will contribute to the nurturance of nonauthoritarian people “who will not obediently accept the dictates of the political and social system and who will demand greater personal control and choice” (Spring, 1998, p. 14). This includes experience in the development of collaborative practices, knowledge sharing and mutual aid, rather than the competition, for grades or status, or emphasis on individual knowledge possession, intellectual property, and “originality” that marks much of mainstream, particularly postsecondary, education.

For anarchists, methods of discipline and reward in mainstream teaching undermine freedom and self-determination (Spring, 1998, p. 25). Too often teachers use extrinsic motivation, through grades, threats of punishment, or promises of promotion (Spring, 1998, p. 25). The focus can readily be displaced onto the extrinsic motive, such as grades. This is a common feature of the neoliberal classroom, as grades, a surrogate for wages, become a primary concern of students seeking a specific credential, which can be converted to a job on the labor market. This is similar to the process by which satisfaction in the intrinsic qualities of labor has been displaced toward satisfaction in the wage, even where the work itself is despised or debilitating.

Part of the modern state’s power rests in its awareness of the significance of the “domination of the mind” (Spring, 1998, p. 40). For anarchists, freedom must extend beyond political liberty and equality before the law, to emphasize self-control over one’s perspectives, beliefs, and practices. Most educational systems have been geared toward the internalization of values and beliefs or the development of a conscience that favors support of existing social structures and relations (Spring, 1998; McLaren, 2005; 2006). Nonauthoritarian practices of education seek to encourage this broader approach to freedom, through people’s own efforts and experimentation, successes and failures. Anarchists do not claim to have perfect pedagogical practices or ready-made answers to difficult questions. They recognize that they themselves have much to learn about practices of freedom and radical transformation, socialized within authoritarian systems as they have been.

Anarchist Colin Ward suggests that one of the tragedies of social struggle is that people do not know immediately how to deal with freedom. We all need to learn through experience practices of consensus, direct action, mutual aid, solidarity, and restorative justice. Education is a key aspect in organizing any society, whatever its scale. The goal of libertarian approaches “is therefore an educational method which will encourage and support nonauthoritarian individuals who are unwilling to bow to authority and who demand a social organization which provides them with maximum individual control and freedom” (Spring, 1998, p. 131). The DIO approach to education pursued by Free Skool anarchists was driven by a belief that “no social change is meaningful unless people participate in its formulation” (Spring, 1998, p. 132). This convergence of revolutionary organizing and radical education is a key aspect of working to develop infrastructures of resistance. Thus it is an area of some emphasis for anarchists. For anarchists the failure of previous revolutions and their development in conservative directions, relates to the lack of “radically new means of education and socialization by which all people could be brought into the revolutionary movement and become acting members of it rather than its objects” (Spring, 1998, p. 133). Anarchist Free Skool members were clear that a nonauthoritarian society could not be wished into existence and it would not happen without organizing, discussion, and engagement. The Free Skool was part of those broader processes. At the same time Free Skool organizers were conscious not to become a therapeutic space and not produce dependency on the Free Skool as an institution.

In social and political terms the AFS was at its liveliest, and indeed its most relevant, during its second spring and summer when a number of members managed to bring a community organizing perspective to the space. Tired of the seemingly endless drift into pedantic debates and mystical dreaming the community activists tried to develop the AFS as a useful community resource. Importantly, unlike others in the collective, the community organizers had a clear vision and strategies they wanted to pursue. Taking the view that the AFS could (and should) be a worthwhile organizing and education center they reached out to serious activists in the city. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) was invited to hold their movie nights at the space every Saturday and held several successful large “screenings.”

The anarchist zine Sabcat was produced out of the AFS and since its first appearance has met with tremendous enthusiasm locally and abroad. Sabcat has presented original artwork, reviews, and articles on such topics as “green syndicalism,” “OCAP,” and “alternative education.”

Trying to overcome the educational divide that separates “citizens” and prisoners AFS members initiated a Books to Prisoners program which became quite successful. Poetry readings and hardcore punk shows brought in hundreds of book donations along with the help of some independent publishers and distributors. Before long the first shipments went out from the Free Skool to inmates in both women’s and men’s prisons.

Whose Market? Against Poor Bashing

Almost everything I’ve ever read about such alternative spaces raises the business of gentrification in North American cities. This story is no exception. At the same time, the educational approach of the Free Skool maintained that members develop a commitment to social justice and community involvement in support of those lacking resources. Putting their education to work members of the Free Skool collectives took leading parts in the battle against gentrification in the Kensington Market neighborhood.

During a general meeting in May of 2000 a member alerted Free Skool participants to a petition which had begun circulation against plans by St. Stephen’s Community House for a soup kitchen and hostel for homeless people to be opened on Augusta Avenue just north of the Free Space. The rather viciously worded petition openly attacked poor people saying they were unwelcome in the Market. This was viewed by Free Skool members as an act of what antipoverty organizer Jean Swanson (2001) calls poor bashing. At the same meeting the collective decided without delay to interview every storeowner or manager in the Market to see who was carrying the petition and who supported the attacks on homeless people and the poor. Enlisting support from the AFS, teams of two spent the next few days talking to people throughout the Market. Where petitions were found, and thankfully very few places had accepted them, it was made clear that such antipoor propaganda was unacceptable. A boycott of a trendy cafe previously frequented by activists was begun, and perhaps coincidentally it closed by the end of the summer.

At the end of June a leaflet was distributed in the Market which asked, “Do you want Kensington Market to become just one more rundown neighborhood with no hope for its future?” A second leaflet, circulated by the Kensington Market Working Group hysterically raged against the planned soup kitchen suggesting that feeding and sheltering homeless people was simply cover for the real “goal of destroying the family shopping atmosphere that is Kensington.” Members of the AFS organized a campaign to attend the City’s Committee of Adjustment hearing and brought letters of support for the soup kitchen. Eventually the plans were approved though the Kensington business association has promised to keep up the attacks.

Later in the summer another more directly aggressive battle developed over harassment by the City of Toronto of a few homeless men living in the Market. The situation came to a head when one of the men asked several of us at the Free Skool for help in keeping city workers from taking his stuff to the dump. When we approached the workers they refused to tell us which bylaw they were citing when removing the stuff but implied that they were under pressure from the business association. After some debate we worked out a deal where the city workers promised not to touch anything left in the area fronting the Free Space. The guys hung out at the space and sold their wonderful array of used goods in front of and alongside the Free Space. For a couple of months it was like a real street bazaar. Shoppers loved the piles of stuff and there was always serious bargaining going on. They sold more in those two months than the AFS ever did.

Vision Trouble

The Anarchist Free Skool was open for participation by anyone who had a general agreement with nonauthoritarian and nonoppressive perspectives and practices. Anyone who agreed to these basic principles could take part in membership meetings and involve themselves in the decision-making process. The egalitarianism and participatory democracy of the relatively small collective should allow developing inequalities and grievances to be more readily identified and more immediately dealt with, as many anarchists historically have argued (Hartung, 1983, p. 96). At the Free Skool this was generally, if imperfectly, the case.

At times the Free Skool found it difficult to develop ongoing political projects. Even agreement on short-term actions was difficult to come by. The Free Skool vision, as reproduced above, was a rather vague commitment to “deepening our knowledge of ourselves and the world around us, sharing skills and exchanging experiences.” While promising a dedication “to effecting social change through the application of anarchist principles in every sphere of life” there was little agreement on what these principles were and even less sense of what strategies might be necessary to “effect social change” or even to “challenge disempowering habits.”

The collective took as its model of decision-making process the consensus approach outlined by the Public Interest Research Groups. Consensus, whereby decisions are based upon lengthy discussions and much compromise of positions, is an article of faith for many anarchist groups who believe it to be more participatory, more open, and more likely to lead to better and more satisfactory decisions. It was also viewed as an important part of participatory pedagogy.

Despite the commitment to consensus as a pedagogical tool, there were difficulties with the process. First, the Free Skool was sometimes fractious throughout its history, never quite sure if it was a countercultural “hangout,” an artist colony, or an activist resource center; never certain whether its politics were “lifestylist,” petty bourgeois market socialist or class war anarchist. Art, theory, practice education, or activism? The AFS suffered from a failure to bring these approaches together

Secondly, consensus, because of the long time involved in making decisions and because it always tends toward compromise answers, is in many ways unsuited to a lively activist group which must take quick decisions and may not be able to compromise on principles. Diverse groups with vastly divergent notions of what anarchism is about require a process which allows each vision to be expressed without either limiting or implicating the other members of the larger group. In practice this is very difficult to negotiate and to realize. Free Skool meetings often bogged down in hours of heated discussion over whether activist posters could be placed in the windows because some of the artists found the postings to be unsightly and esthetically displeasing. Needless to say the activists thought it more important to publicize important events regardless of esthetic considerations.

The persistent lack of analysis and vision along with a failure to assess the political context for action and develop useful strategies for meeting stated goals consistently undermined the collectives’ capacities to do political work. Clearly good intentions were not enough.

Conclusion

Projects such as the Anarchist Free Skool emerge to meet specific needs, transform as priorities and interests shift and eventually dissolve only to emerge elsewhere as the Anarchist Free Skool has morphed to become the Anarchist University. I prefer autonomist Marxist Harry Cleaver’s suggestion that such spaces are acts of “self-valorization” which can mess with the circuits of capitalist re/production. Certainly they represent places in which people have the time to value themselves and their relationships with each other beyond the commodified time in which much of our lives are contained. Following Cleaver we might understand temporary autonomous zones (TAZ) both as aspects of a refusal of domination and as creative attempts to fill the time, space and resources thus liberated.

One must be careful not to underestimate the rather large amounts of real labor required to keep a TAZ running. While Bey often portrays TAZ as profoundly mystical moments, it is important to remember that they have a substantial materiality. TAZ are constructed of the mundane, the everyday. As a sign in the Free Space proclaims, “Anarchy doesn’t mean dirty dishes.” (Although a glance at the Free Space sink too often suggested otherwise.) In the end its how well the demands of the everyday are met that can determine the success or failure of autonomous zones.

Still there is always an aspect of the carnivalesque in spaces like the AFS. Whether it be the lively conversations, crass hardcore music, the quirky zines, humorous buttons, joyful camaraderie, or the clarion of agit-prop, the spaces signal their difference from their surroundings, their “otherness.” As liminal sites they are places of transformation from present to future—glimpses of the “new world in the shell of the old.”

Autonomous zones are hubs of do-it-yourself (DIY) culture and politics. In scenes where transience and the ephemeral often predominate free spaces offer some permanence, some rootedness. They provide a space where the underground can move above ground and engage in an everyday discussion with nonactivists, with people who want to find out what this anarchy stuff is all about.

The Free Skool participants were successful at taking anarchist ideas beyond the confines of anarchist subcultures and radical political “scenes.” Unlike many other infoshops and free spaces the Free Skool did manage to bring people from the neighborhood into the spaces. Most just dropped by to chat but many took part in classes and a few even joined the collective. The Free Skool provided a venue, within a working-class neighborhood, for nonanarchists to inquire about anarchism, ask tough questions, and have discussions about anarchist theory and practice. It also provided a community center, a space in which community members could come together to discuss neighborhood issues and organize to address community needs, both through developing their own self-directed activities, but also by preparing collective approaches to local government authorities around aspects of city planning and policy. Without the Free Skool it is certain that the homeless shelter and soup kitchen would have been defeated and an important resource for poor people would not have been available in the neighborhood. It is also certain that homeless people would have faced greater harassment and criminalization.

That the Anarchist Free Skool was able to extend its reach beyond current students to bring in nonstudents, particularly individuals from poor and working-class backgrounds, and those who had long ago left school behind, stands as a testament to the promise of the participants’ commitment to open and engaged learning. It also showed the significant work done by Free Skool members in doing outreach into the local neighborhoods and communities, actively working to build bridges and take anarchism outside of any preexisting subcultural comfort zones. A promising beginning though it still has not grown in the way needed to forge an organic connection with other communities.

This is by no means the final paragraph in this story. New ones are being written at this very moment. Already a number of people involved in the AFS have worked to start up a new space, an activist resource center geared toward political projects and solidarity work. Rather than simply affirming a commitment to some nebulous notion of anarchy these folks are developing the basis for shared principles and shared work as part of the preparation for opening new projects.

Intended as something a bit more permanent than the temporary autonomous zone, these anarchist spaces provide the support structures for oppositional cultures. They are parts of the broader do-it-yourself (DIY) movements that provide alternative community and economic infrastructures in music, publishing, video, radio, food, and education. Anarchist heterotopias are places for skills development, for learning those skills that are undeveloped in authoritarian social relations.

The existence of TAZ allows for some autonomy from the markets of capital. Their ethos is counter to capitalist consumerism: play rather than work, gifts rather than commodities, needs rather than profits. In theory, they offer means for undermining state and capital relations and authorities both ideological and material. Practice often settles for something much less than that.

As always, the challenge is to maintain openness and inclusion while actually working to create “the new world in the shell of the old.” Many at the Free Skool struggled to show that freedom is not some fanciful idea, something for philosophers and mystics to ponder. It only has meaning when it is lived.

Appendix

Course descriptions for the most popular courses at the Anarchist Free Skool:

CLASS STRUGGLE ANARCHISM, SYNDICALISM AND LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

Anarchism, as a political movement, emerged as part of broader workers’ struggles for socialism and communism and contributed greatly to those struggles. Contemporary anarchists in North America, however, have generally forgotten this important connection, as anarchism has become a largely subcultural phenomenon. Similarly distinctions between authoritarian and antiauthoritarian traditions within the diverse history of socialism have been obliterated by the horrors of state capitalist regimes calling themselves “socialist.” This course seeks to reconnect anarchism with the struggles of working people to build a better world beyond capitalism of any type. The course is initiated by activists concerned with class analysis and day-to-day organizing and is not intended simply as a study group.

INTRODUCTION TO ANARCHISM

This course will be a broad introduction to anarchist theory and practice, as well as a look at the history of anarchism and anarchist struggles. There will be readings taken from some of the major anarchist thinkers such as: Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman and others. Also, the class will be structured in such a way that the participants may suggest the focus and direction of the readings and discussion topics.

References

Bey, H. (1985). T.A.Z.: The temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. New York: Autonomedia.

Bookchin, M. (1995). Social anarchism or lifestyle anarchism: An unbridgeable chasm. Edinburgh: AK Press.

Cleaver, H. (1992). The inversion of class perspective in Marxian theory: From valorization to self-valorization. In W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn & K. Psychopedis (Eds.), Open Marxism: Volume II, theory and practice. London: Pluto Press, 106–44.

Ferrer, F. (1913). The origin and ideals of the modern school. London: Watts and Company.

Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, 16(1), 22–27

Hartung, B. (1983). Anarchism and the problem of order. Mid-American Review of Sociology, 8(1), 83–101.

Shantz, J. (2009). Rebuilding infrastructures of resistance. Socialism and Democracy, 23(2): 102–109.

Spring, J. (1998). A primer of libertarian education. Montreal: Black Rose.

Stirner, M. (1963). The ego and his own: The case of the individual against authority. New York: Libertarian Book Club.

Stirner, M. (1967). The false principle of our education. Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles.

Swanson, J. (2001). Poor bashing: The politics of exclusion. Toronto: Between the Lines.

CHAPTER 8. The Nottingham Free School: Notes Toward a Systemization of Praxis

Sara C. Motta

Nottingham Free School was formed in the summer of 2009 as a space to develop nonhierarchical and noninstitutionalized processes and practices of radical education. The members of the original group shared a reaction against experiences of alienation, exclusion, and oppression from within formal institutions of education. To differing degrees we sought to develop an educational practice that was against and beyond formal education. Fundamentally this would be based on principles of openness, collaboration, egalitarianism, and relevance for activist and broader community needs and desires. We wished, as a collective working with and in community organizations and activist communities, to take control of the process and outcomes of learning in a creative and constructive way.

We shared a commitment to education as a means of resistance, creation, and fundamentally as a way of constructing the types of horizontal postrepresentational communities that create worlds beyond capitalism to which we aspired. We hoped to gain inspiration from past and current examples of education being used as part of a process of liberation and emancipation, and hope to do what we can to continue that legacy in Nottingham. In terms of theoretical-practical inspirations particularly influential have been Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1971), and experiences with the ideas of Open Spaces of Dialogue and Inquiry (OSDE, http://www.osdemethodology.org.uk/). Empirically the group had different experiences with radical education from the coordination of skill-shares in Nottingham based on the idea of mutual aid and horizontal learning processes, coordinating activist networks, and consensus decisionmaking to working with popular education with autonomous social movements in Latin America.

We therefore spent our first few meetings discussing how we should begin to work and with whom. While we wanted to work with working-class communities in Nottingham it was agreed after much discussion that we couldn’t inorganically create relationships with these communities if they weren’t existent at present. We therefore focused on the communities that we did have relationships with and participated in autonomous activist groups and communities in and around Nottingham. Our entire process has been experimental, very much making the road by walking, influenced by our traditions, experiences, and commitments but not preplanned, predictable, or necessarily successful. The process has not merely involved the development of workshops, skill- shares, and discussion groups but has also begun to forge a collective of radical educators in Nottingham. This process of construction has demonstrated to us that radical education and its role in the construction of autonomous anticapitalist communities, subjectivities, and social relationships combines the intellectual, affective, political, personal, and cultural. Learning to know and trust each other, understanding the particular exclusions experienced and lived by fellow collective members, drinking together, looking after each other’s kids, crying together, cooking together, and thinking together. All these are part and parcel of breaking down the divisions between the intellectual and the emotional, between imagination and theorizing, between mind and body, and between teachers and learners that characterize institutionalized and alienated educational practices.

To facilitate a process of reflection and beginnings of systematization of our practice to date I will focus on two workshops that we developed, a series of skill-shares and the process of the development of a collective of radical educators. I hope to reflect in relation to a number of elements: their ability to open up spaces of dialogue and reflection; their ability to contribute to the development and practice of autonomous anticapitalist communities; and their contribution to praxis of horizontalism and postrepresentational knowledge production. The forms of systematization developed are firstly an evaluation of the lived experience of the project in relation to predetermined frameworks of analysis based in Freirian, Illichian, and OSDE-inspired conceptualizations of radical education. This evaluation links the theoretical with the practical and contextual as a means of creating new theoretical practical insights. Secondly, this is combined with a dialectical systematization, which seeks to create new theoretical and practical knowledge as a means of contributing to transformations in reality and social and political change (for further conceptualization of types of systematization see Mejía, 2010).[22] This is not a final end product but rather a contribution to our ongoing process of learning. As we state, “We don’t pretend to have all the answers, and are committed to a continuously evolving process in which those participating have ample opportunity to evaluate, challenge and contribute to the running of the project.”

Nottingham Free School Workshops

We developed a workshop called Radical Education. This workshop sought to explore the nature of radical and alternative education and its use for the construction of the communities and relationships we desire. We explored how and if it was desirable to move completely away from institutional education. We ran the workshop perhaps seven to eight times over a period of about a year in different activist and community settings. After each session we discussed what we thought had worked and what not and adapted the workshop accordingly. As a group we were also open to a facilitator changing the workshop and experimenting with different structures and methods. The first structure was envisaged as a four-hour-long session to which we invited individuals and groups that we thought might be interested in participating in the Nottingham Free School. The workshop was framed as part of the development of identity or identities of the Free School, which was trying to get a sense of its objectives and forge a community of radical educators. This workshop was organized as part of this process and its main objectives were: i) get to know each other’s backgrounds, interest in radical education, and understanding of radical education; ii) problematize terms like “radical,” “education,” and “learning” in order to help make explicit our assumptions about education, learning, teaching, the nature of knowledge, what knowledge is for and how it is created, etc. in order to iii) make clearer resonances and dissonances/similarities and differences between us and build on these constructively and creatively.

It began with a reflection upon one’s life history of education. In which we asked participants a number of questions: note down experiences of education (formal and informal) where they remember learning something; what it was they learned, how they learned it and what it had felt like. We gave participants a sheet of paper and asked them to answer these questions in any way they wanted: drawing, text, and image. We then asked participants to put their paper up on the wall and organized a break where people could get tea, coffee, etc. and also look at each other’s education life stories noting anything that struck them as interesting, they wanted to learn more about or they were puzzled or intrigued by. We began from the experiences of participants in the workshops as we believed, following our experiences but also the ideas of Freire and Illich that transformatory education has to be relevant and meaningful. It needs to be embedded within the experiences, histories, and cultures of individuals and communities in this way turning on their head the assumptions of traditional education in which the teacher is the knower and the student an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge (Freire, 1970; Illich, 1971, pp. 30–35). As Freire argues this type of dialogical learning is designed to make people “feel like masters of their thinking rather than passive learners” (1970, p. 95). Fundamentally it needs to recognize the validity of the experiences and knowledges of participants and be premised in the rejection of the self-sufficiency and privilege of the educator (Freire, 1970, pp. 62–63). Therefore we thought that to make this discussion meaningful and relevant and to bring in the knowledges of participants, we needed to pull out those elements which had been enjoyable in learning that we could link to forms of radical education and help participants to systemize and name these experiences in relation to traditions and practices of radical education.

Therefore our next step was to begin to pull out generative themes from the educational timelines that participants had made (Freire, 1970, p. 69). This was done as a group in which each individual was asked about any issues or questions they had in relation to the education timelines they had looked at and their own. The facilitator tried to bring out key themes and issues from the discussion which she began to note on the wall. This was a means of beginning to make our own concepts and lines of investigation and exploration into radical and alternative education. From this basis we wished to move onto a next step. This we called “naming/making assumptions explicit.” On the basis of the themes and issues identified we aimed to split participants into groups and assign them a particular reading[23] with questions but also leaving the group open to come up with their own questions. The next step was to return to the broader group and discuss the answers the groups came up with. If a group didn’t come up with an answer to a question then we encouraged the group as a whole to work through an answer(s). The penultimate step, “working through what different conceptualizations of radical education might look like in practice,” involved participants returning to their small groups and developing a miniworkshop based on the tenets of radical education fleshed out in section 2. Each group would then run a minisession for the entire group for about ten minutes. Finally the session would end with a short summary by the facilitators of their understanding and experiences of radical education and why they were interested in running this type of workshop and then a group evaluation of the workshop.

When we tried to run the workshop we reached stage two at which point we needed to end the workshop as some participants felt emotionally upset and uncomfortable. When bringing out generative themes tensions had arisen in relation to different understandings of the nature of authoritarianism in education and what a liberatory education should and should not include. These tensions had been intensified due to the personal nature of the reflections. The breakdown in the workshop threw up some important questions for us as a collective. We had planned the workshop as a space to bring out resonances and dissonances and to question what we mean by radical and alternative education. We had purposefully made individual experiences and histories central to this collective reflection and process of knowledge construction. However by bringing together a disparate group of people, some with knowledge of each other, others without, who vaguely shared an identification or interest in radical education we had created an open space but not necessarily a safe space (Andreotti, n.d.). We had brought to the fore the individual, the subjective, and the emotional in a situation in which people did not have the bonds of struggle, experience, or history between them to have created trust and a shared understanding of limits and norms of respectful dialogue. The inevitable conflict that would arise when breaking down consensus and assumptions and bringing out difference and variety was something we were not ready to deal with. We were unable to transform this conflict into productive grounds for dialogue and further engagement and instead were faced with the breakdown of the workshop. This raised important questions for us about the nature of openness. We had assumed a setting as found by Freirian popular educators working with exploited and excluded communities whose territorially close-knit communities often give a commonality of experiences and struggles in which bonds of trust, reciprocity, and norms of dialogue have been and are being formed (Freire, 1970, pp. 52, 66). However, this was not the setting we were in. So the questions we asked where whether the openness we were looking for in the spaces we were creating needed to be defined by more grounds of commonality: that is, should we actively only invite people who shared some close political and social principles; or whether if we continued to have very diverse groups with little knowledge of each other should we not focus so much on the individual and perhaps focus on different concepts of radical education as is done in OSDE settings. OSDE is a critical literacy approach which in many ways is a development of the Freirian model as it also draws on dialogical and perspectivist concerns. It connects in particular to the idea of critical literacy: the ability to make sense of radically different perspectives and to situate these perspectives within relations of power-knowledge. The purpose is not to change people’s orientations on the issues under discussion, but to make them aware of the constructedness and perspective-relativity of their own knowledge, and hence to acquire critical literacy. Thus in OSDE workshops different assumptions about a topic are the building blocks of discussion and questioning taken-for-granted assumptions. These are then used as a means to think about one’s individual assumptions. However these individual reflections are not necessarily a point of general discussion, providing a kind of protection to individuals and a level of safety and security to groups who are not groups or collectivities outside of the learning space (Andreotti, n.d.). It also brought to the fore how openness which lacks community and collectivity can be highly exclusionary to vulnerable participants whose experiences of trauma and exclusion can be triggered unintentionally by different norms and understandings of respect, dialogue, and education.

We didn’t come up with any definitive answers to these questions. However, we did respond by organizing workshops about radical education with diverse groups and individuals in the university for example using a more OSDE methodology so scrapping step one and focusing instead on what participants associated with formal education and radical education and then moving on to step three in relation to traditions and experiences of radical education. We were also careful to bring in the personal to settings of distinct activist communities such as the Rossport Campaign, Radical Roots Gathering, and the Earth First Gathering where we assumed that a level of commonality and experiences of struggle together would create levels of trust, respect, and understanding to enable the possibility of a constructive transformation of conflict via facilitators and the group. We also immediately after the breakdown of the first workshop realized that a four-hour workshop was much too long and that therefore we needed a two-hour workshop at most, perhaps with an idea of developing a second sister workshop if desired. This meant that the radical education workshops tended to either focus on part one and two or a variation on these, or an adaptation of the groups’ ideas about radical and traditional education and then discussion about how and where we might develop elements of radical education identified.

An issue that we found with the workshop was that at gatherings and activist events, to which we were lucky in Nottingham to have a number scheduled through the spring of 2010 that we were often timetabled at the beginning or end of gatherings as the timetables were full with meetings/ discussion more directly related to the campaign/project. Additionally we were often unable to attract significant numbers to the workshops. After informal reflection and discussions with participants at the gatherings and other activist and educator friends we began to think about how education and radical pedagogies form in relation to movements and communities historically and contemporarily in the global south for example. We used the experiences of one of the collective with autonomous social movements in Latin America as a basis of informal reflections. Often what is found is that communities begin to organize around a particular issue like land or water rights or education and it is during the process of trying to consolidate their struggle and deepen their communities of resistance that questions of pedagogy become more important. However, this often happens as a result of key members of the community having a history and experience with popular and radical education (see for example Motta, 2009). While members of the collective participated in many of the activist communities that had gatherings in Nottingham these gatherings were not merely local communities but large national and at time international meetings. Thus there was something external to the relationship between movement and workshop (Free School). In many ways discussion and practices about the use of radical education and pedagogy for the building of the objectives of activist groups and movements and for building autonomous anticapitalist communities hadn’t taken place. This meant that for many there was perhaps little motivation or relevance in the workshop. This didn’t imply that the workshop was a failure rather perhaps that it was a contribution to an opening toward these types of discussions, reflections, and practices. The process of constructing communities and the organicity of radical education as a part of this is a process that becomes embedded in concrete struggles and communities. Through these experiences we began to learn about the possibilities and limits of particular workshops; what they could and couldn’t achieve. We also began to discuss the need to perhaps develop a NFS pamphlet which is interactive and dialogical as a means of deepening the discussion of radical education and its role in anticapitalist struggles with activist communities in and around Nottingham. This we hope will plant further seeds for the continued development of a collective of radical educators who are also activists in different movements thereby opening space to develop a praxis of radical education in Nottingham’s anticapitalist movements, networks, and communities of resistance and creation.

Finally we held a relatively large workshop at the Earth First Summer Gathering of 2010. There were participants from activist movements, individuals interested in radical education, and participants from other radical education collectives. The workshop went well in terms of personal reflection and developing generative themes. The final part was how and where we imagined we could be able to develop the practices of radical education identified. It was here that the workshop broke down somewhat and returned to general discussion about the different forms of radical education. On reflection with participants and other members of the Free School, we again thought about the limits and possibilities of workshops in different contexts. This time the problematic was not so much questions of trust and some sense of collective cultural norms (however exclusionary and problematic these implicit norms themselves can be as one participant commented) but rather a common political project, experiences, or objectives. This meant that we went from the concrete experiential to the generic but were unable to move back the complex concrete in terms of developing particular strategies, theorizations, and methodologies for moving forward with a political project or objective, as is assumed in Freirian praxis. This left some participants feeling frustrated at the level of generality of the workshop. However again this was a process of realizing possibilities and coming to an understanding and an opening toward the different types of openings and possibilities from our practices. It was a realization of the process like nature of all that we are involved in and that we cannot always look for concrete outputs and outcomes (as in capitalist understandings of success and failure) but rather move with the movement of creating and exploring different ways to engage and create collectively, or creating our own concepts of politics and praxis. Thus as a group of radical educators we were also involved in a process of learning to name the world and develop our own concepts (Freire, 1970).

Trauma and Privilege

The second workshop I would like to explore in these reflections was entitled Trauma and Privilege. This workshop developed out of a desire to explore the hierarchies, exclusions, and assumptions within activist communities. This desire was generated by participants’ experiences of these often-silent exclusions and power over, whether that is in terms of gender, class, race and, other contexts such as childcare responsibilities or histories of trauma and abuse. We discussed how it was often assumed how power, exploitation, and alienation was out there and that we as activists in autonomous social movements, communities, and relationships were immune to these alienating and alienated practices that reproduce hierarchies. When developing the workshop we knew that this was going to be a highly emotional and potentially explosive space; a space that actively looked to create ruptures and create productive uncomfortableness. In this sense we built on Freirian pedagogies desire to challenge common sense and taken-for-granted ideas and practices about and in the world, to create limit situations that push us out of the taken-for-granted (Freire, 1970, p. 16). However in many ways we stepped away from OSDE with its focus on external reflection as a prompt to internal reflection and action. For this we agreed, on the basis of previous experiences, that it would be run with consolidated activist communities and perhaps among ourselves as a means of engaging with each other and our experiences and histories. In this way, processes that were emotional and personal could not be respectfully developed with groups of individuals who shared no common experience, history, struggle, or knowledge of each other. The workshop aimed to open up a discussion around the issues of trauma and privilege, and their interconnectivity. Asking questions such as, How does our own psychological experience affect the ways in which we are able to act in radical social change? and How do we negotiate the social, cultural, or economic capital we have (or lack) as we experience radical political action and the traumatic events it can often cause? How does our social change work relate to trauma we have experienced?

The basic outline of the workshop was for participants as a group to talk about the type of privileges and hierarchies they had experienced in activist circles. We wrote these up into categories. We then asked participants to think about a trauma they had experienced in their life, break down into small groups, and discuss the trauma with others in their group. We also all agreed (three of us facilitating the workshop) that we would participate in this and be willing to use our experience in a small group if others didn’t feel they could. We then asked those in the group who had heard the trauma to think about if this trauma had happened to them how their situation might have differed from the person who experienced the trauma, not in a judgmental way but to think about how the types of privileges they had might change the experience. We aimed to encourage participants in their reflections to refer back to the hierarchies and exclusions noted in the first exercise. Our aim was to bring the emotionality of trauma and experience to the heart of collective thinking and feeling, to break down taken-for-granted barriers of norms and limits of dialogue. We aimed to challenge individuals to recognize and think about potential privileges that they have and how these might impact upon their behaviors and relationships in activist communities.

We experimented with this workshop at the Rossport Gathering. The first part went relatively smoothly and a number of exclusions along age, gender, knowledge, class, and race were noted and discussed. But when we went on to discuss trauma, participants began to question the relevance and necessity of this process. They were understandably uncomfortable at being asked to reveal highly traumatic experiences in their lives and didn’t see the direct links with understanding privilege and hierarchy in activist communities. We therefore had to have time for this discussion in the workshop. We came to an agreement that this section was optional and that only those who wanted to participate would. However, the actual process of individuals talking about traumas and then others attempting to reflect on how their experience might have been different in relation to privileges was traumatic to say the least. There were three groups. In one group the conversation broke down and there was active resistance to the facilitator with the facilitator feeling unable to negotiate and transform the situation productively. In the second a facilitator and other participant shared their trauma. Those participating in the group engaged very powerfully and emotionally with the experiences of the individuals and engaged in a process of reflection in relation to potential privileges. In the final group there was a lot of discussion about the usefulness and relevance of a practice such as this, how it potentially opened up people who were vulnerable to more pain, and how there seemed to be no direct link with expressing and discussing trauma and thinking creatively and constructively about privilege and our role in reproducing unequal power relations and exclusions. Two people discussed their traumas in this group: a facilitator and a participant. The experience of discussing trauma was highly emotional and created an intense linkage and recognition among the two who shared their trauma and some reflections about privilege within individual histories and contexts and how this might affect dynamics within activist circles.

Our reflections about the workshop, its success and its productiveness were also relatively conflictual. One facilitator didn’t want to be involved in the running of this workshop again because the experience had been traumatic. This brought to the fore the importance of taking each other seriously as not external facilitators but internal participants in the workshops; how the experience of facilitating was also an emotional, effective, and intellectual process that challenged ourselves and put us potentially into uncomfortable situations or situations we felt we lacked the experience to deal with. This was a learning experience that profoundly impacted upon our relationships as a collective in the sense that it was a point of recognition of ourselves as embedded individuals and not merely as people working abstractly on a workshop to be delivered the following week. It raised the question of how we develop practices of care and support. It also made clear our lack of experience in dealing with such emotional reactions. It brought to the fore (often implicitly) the necessity of having tightly organized, intensely thought out, and highly trained facilitators to work in situations and workshops related to trauma and other emotional issues affecting workshop participants (including the facilitator).

Others differed on the extent to which the rupture and uncomfortableness created was productive, whether it actually helped to systemize and make explicit the hierarchies and privileges in activist communities. There were questions about whether there was a useful link between trauma and privilege. Nevertheless it was agreed that it had been a powerful experience which had broken down taken-for-granted norms of dialogue and opened a space of knowing each other which pushed boundaries of collectivity and understanding. For one facilitator the chance to make visible and give voice to an experience of trauma was a release and a part of healing. It had a testimonial element as found in much collective healing processes associated with feminist and indigenous political practices (Restrepo, 1998; Robinson, 2010). Yet these practices are generally collective whereas this was individual. However she also felt that she was ready to do this and that the process of healing from trauma is a long one with many different stages many of which are not about articulating publically or to others your experience. The impact however demonstrated the powerful emotions and consequences of the workshop, even if they differed somewhat from the stated objectives of the workshop. They did bring in to the open people’s traumas and the intensity of their lived experiences and emotions. While many participants’ feedback was focused around feeling uncomfortable or not seeing the relevance of the workshop there was a minority who found the workshop extremely powerful and able to create an opening to a different level of understanding of self and other in their community.

On reflection there was a tension between the different objectives of the workshop. On one hand we hoped to facilitate a space which made visible and gave validity to people’s traumas and their personal context in the tradition of feminist and indigenous political practices. On the other we wished to open up a space of reflection about informal and often invisible hierarchies and exclusions in activist communities. By attempting to facilitate two very different objectives we perhaps confused two different processes and ended up potentially opening up a situation which could have caused harm and reproduced (unwittingly and naïvely) emotional and psychological violence against participants and ourselves.

These two processes—a kind of collective therapy, an attempt at emotional bonding as a form of community building, and an attempt to challenge privilege in the activist movement—seem to require different methodologies and pedagogies. The first, as practiced by feminist groups, indigenous communities, and black groups have developed nuanced and complex forms of collective grieving and visibilization of trauma that are acutely political. They avoid the potential trap of our workshop that could easily lead to self-blame by its individual focus. The work of La Mascara feminist theater of the oppressed group in Cali, Colombia, is an example of such collective healing and visibilization. It uses popular education methodologies combined with theater techniques to make visible and contextualize the multilevel experiences of violence of displaced women and children. They contain a strong testimonial content. Yet individual reconstruction and understanding are embedded within transformative collective practices and contextualization realized through theater work (Medina and Teatro La Mascara, 2010; Motta, 2010). These processes are often embedded in intensely spiritual practices and rituals. The second objective of challenging privileges could perhaps be productively explored by the use of a framework closer to OSDE, which seeks to explore different understandings of a particular topic—be that privilege and hierarchy and their nature—from a number of different perspectives as a means of opening up processes of revealing personal and collective assumptions. This aims to create dissonances and uncomfortableness which are productive and achieved in a safe setting.

The combination of two very different processes into one workshop was unable to facilitate collective healing or collective reflection about internal practices of power and hierarchy. For me it intensely brought to the fore our responsibility as facilitators to each other and to the participants in workshops and the importance of continual individual and collective reflection of our experiences and experiments in radical education.

Sumac Skill-Shares

The Sumac skill-shares have been running for a number of years. They have been premised on Illich’s idea that to break down formal institutionalized education we need to take education into our streets, communities, and homes. Education needs to be horizontally organized and around knowledge that is needed by a particular individual or community (Illich, 1971, p. 80). It is assumed, as in Freirian philosophy of education, that all have knowledge and can participate as learner and teacher in the experiences developed. The skill-share approach is also similar to approaches found in indigenous education, where skills are learned mainly through activity (Ingold, 2000). The approach consists mainly in the transmission of skills through skill-modeling and learning by doing, with practitioners acting as instructors, demonstrating techniques and then overseeing learners who attempt to copy the techniques. However, in contrast to Illichian and indigenous learning, it is typically very short-term with a skill-share (treated as a complete teaching-learning relation) lasting usually a few hours. It is mainly used to disseminate practical knowledge. Therefore the skill-shares have traditionally kept to a format of someone learning and someone teaching in a particular skill-share, even if the following week the teacher would become the learner and the learner a teacher.

As one of our collective was a coordinator of the skill-shares since 2009 we decided in discussion with the other coordinator of the skill-shares to experiment with the format and content that had been developed up until then. Our orientation was to emphasize a praxis based on the idea that we are all skill-sharers and all have dormant skills and knowledges that we have developed throughout our life experiences more in line with the Illichian approach. As our pamphlet stated,

If communities are going to strive and flourish outside of the states control and influence then we must break down the current paradigm of learning and knowledge. There can no longer be a dependence on what has been established, but development of what is hidden and kept silent. In order to do this we must bring together all our existing understandings and create new ways of doing, learning and sharing. We must no longer reach to the outside for expertize, as there will come a time when that reach is slapped back and we will be left to fend for ourselves as a community.

Accordingly we developed a series of two weekly workshops around key themes and issues: housing, health, education, culture and media, and food sustainability. The basic organizing idea was that individuals would spend two consecutive Saturdays engaged in skill-sharing around one of these topics. We would facilitate the discussion not as teacher but rather as a participant facilitating questions, identifying themes and issues for further exploration, and pulling out resonances and dissonances. The premise was that all who participated had skills and knowledge in relation to the topic. We envisaged that the first half of the first day would be about discussing our understanding and pulling out our knowledge about the topic. The second half would be exploring and developing one of the themes or issues discussed and high-lighted in a more practical way. We originally had the idea of two training sessions for a group of facilitators who would coordinate the skill-shares and would ideally enter into a reflexive process about their facilitation that would help to systemize the methodology we were trying to develop. However, due to issues of time, this didn’t happen between regular Free School participants. It also didn’t happen with those we had hoped would join a facilitator team. To some extent this raised questions about the inclusiveness of our collective. Paradoxically the process of building group solidarity and understanding throughout the previous nine months while creating connections, collective learning, and relationships also potentially excluded others who had not been part of this process and made them feel that they were not equal participants or that this was not their project. The problematic remains, particularly how to expand and deepen the collective outside of a group of people who have built a deep level of trust or already knew each other politically and socially.

We framed the skill-shares with questions such as these. In the housing workshops, for example, we asked:

When exploring how we will create and maintain shelter for ourselves and one another, as individuals we already have life times of experience in doing this in a variety of ways, if we bring these experiences together what will we be able to create? What new knowledges will come forth? And will we make these knowledges both sustainable and flexible? These are the questions we’ll be asking in the first two weekends, where discussions will encourage us into action. Actions which will be determined by those who attend. Whether those practicalities are the setting up of a new co-op, squatting a new building, improving an old house or creating a chanty town.

And in the health workshops, for example, we asked:

In the third fortnight the attention falls on health. We all fall prey to sickness, whether that be a common cold or something more serious. But do we really need to be so reliant on the National Health Service and the medical industry? Which aim for quick fixes and quick profits, and are intrinsically tied up with the various causes for the illnesses that may come our way. What other options are there? What other options have people being used for centuries? How can we produce and share new models for maintaining our physical and mental health? What importance does our mental health and social situation play in our physical well being? What effect does child care have on the health of the child as they become an adult? As individuals we may have our own answers to these questions, but if we combine our knowledges and resources what can develop from that?

The skill-shares had very low turnouts with some having to be canceled. However, there were some productive discussions at the education and health workshops. At the education skill-share participants in the Really Open University (http://reallyopenuniversity.wordpress.com/) came up from Leeds and a long set of discussions about radical education, strategies for developing radical education, and potentials for linkages between the groups discussed. This has since been followed up by collaboration between participants in both radical education collectives. Three women participated in the health discussions, one as the facilitator. A huge amount of critique of current health systems and mental health systems was developed. This was built on by explored alternatives which potentially combined elements of dominant health systems with practices of indigenous communities and practices that have been lost and buried from previous groups of women midwifes and healers. We spent the second half of the day exploring lost traditions and alternative traditions as a way to begin to think about how we might use these in our everyday practices of health and healing. Since then, ideas about a mental health and trauma collective have been discussed with the idea of developing a network in and around Nottingham.

These were important moments of openings and connections which created resonances and recognitions building the grounds for collective praxis and creating. However, the low turnouts and subsequent cancellation of sessions opened up a series of discussions about the reasons for the lack of interest in the workshops as structured in this way. Previously skill-shares had been organized around the sharing of a specific skill. This has acted as a motivation of participation, which in many ways replicated the practice of learning as an instrumental process of attaining a particular skill or knowledge as a thing. Our rupturing radically that premise and opening up daylong workshops around a general theme without any immediately identifiable concrete skill or outcome was unable to reach out to people’s motivations and desires. To some extent, we put the cart before the horse. It is important to connect to where people are at, to their everyday concrete needs, desires, and interests. To sidetrack this is to miss one of the basic premises of Freirian popular education and Illich’s emphasis in deschooling society: that education to be liberatory and transformative must be relevant and context-specific. Disrupting traditional ways of learning and knowledge construction is a process. It takes a slow opening to learning that gradually breaks down fixed subjectivities and understandings of ourselves as learners (but not as teachers unless trained to do so) and of knowledge as a thing as opposed to a creative process. These reflections led us to agree that future skill-shares needed to combine the concrete needs and desires of potential participants with the development of a dialogical methodology that pushed to breaking down the divisions between skill sharer (practitioner/teacher) and learner in the skill-share space.

Conclusion

This piece has attempted to begin a process of systematization of the praxis of the first eighteen months of the Nottingham Free School. It has used the Freirian, Illichian, and OSDE philosophies and methodologies of radical education and the experiences of the facilitators to evaluate some of the practices and projects of the collective. It has done so in relation to whether they manage to facilitate open and dialogical spaces, help to construct postrepresentational and horizontal anticapitalist communities, and forge horizontal and participatory processes of collective knowledge construction. It has also reflected on the process of building a collective of radical educators.

Perhaps one of the most significant elements of the theory and practice that emerge from this systematization is the importance of taking into consideration the context and nature of the community that one is working with. There are distinct differences between working with organized political groups and varied groups of individuals and collectives that may or may not share common objectives and principles. This recognition implies the adaptation and transformation of methodologies and pedagogies from a range of radical education traditions. It also enables recognition of the limits and possibilities of working within different contexts. This lends itself to the development of a different conceptualization of success and politics, away from the output/object orientation of capitalism and toward and open and processal understanding of success and a multifaceted understanding of the construction of anticapitalist communities, which includes the affective, symbolic, spiritual, intellectual, institutional, and cultural. Fundamentally it also highlights the processal like nature of developing a collective of radical educators that are prepared and able to work in diverse settings. This is a long-term process with no shortcuts, which must be necessarily embedded in ongoing individual and collective reflection and systematization. The process of forming this collective is itself not merely about learning different methodologies and pedagogies but also learning to relate to each other in postrepresentational ways and unlearning our learned subjectivities which embed us in relations of power-over.

I hope with this piece to have contributed to this process of continual individual and collective reflection of the Nottingham Free School and to have provided some useful notes toward the problems, possibilities, and potentialities of constructing an educational praxis beyond capitalism.

References