Educating for Freedom

Since I seem to be in a space of not feeling inspired to write my usual picture-prose pieces for social media—call it winter or perhaps pandemic numbness—and as a way to encourage myself to do so again, I’m catching up on sharing some old writing. Or rather, some old talking that Sarah Lawrance kindly curated into a zine years ago, and then Kai Schmidt stumbled across it years later and surprised me by creating a new edition of the zine.

Truth be told, I haven’t had the heart to read my old words here, in the new and improved “Educating for Freedom” zine. Since I gave the talk that became the original zine at the unSchooling Oppression conference in Ottawa in 2007, there’s been much beauty, and yet also so much loss, and so much has shifted in the world, making it wrenching to revisit the “old” one via my musings here. But Kai asserts in the intro that one shouldn’t “be fooled by [the writing’s] age”; that the zine is “sharp, relevant, and generally incredible.” You can be the judge, of course!

And of course, I’m grateful to Kai for putting so much “labor of love” into this new version, from editing and design, to getting full consent from both Sarah and me, to hosting it on Kai’s website (www.ratpokes.com) and uploading it to internet archive. I’m grateful, too, to the good folks at Sprout Distro for making readable and downloadable/imposed versions available on their website, including for freely and widely distro’ing.

As enticement to check out this zine, here’s what Sprout says,

“The zine begins with a brief segment titled ‘why anarchism?’ that situates the rest of the talk, with an emphasis on the notion that a key aspect of anarchism is educating ourselves and inspiring others to question the way things are. For anarchists, education reminds us things haven’t always been like this and gives past, present, and future examples of alternatives. It also helps us to understand complexity and to remain vigilant about the work we are doing. The majority of the text focuses on anarchist projects and how they contribute to an ‘educating’ process within and alongside the anarchist space. The projects explored are local collectives, nonhierarchical institutions, and social movements. In these areas, anarchists educate themselves through practice and interplay with others.“

Excerpt from the zine:

“Because anarchists are interested in this idea of education for freedom, anarchism as an idea, and a huge percentage of the work that anarchists do – despite the stereotypes of anarchism – is actually about education. And some of it we don’t even see as education because it’s not how we’ve understood education to be.”

For the zine itself: https://www.sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/organizing/educating-for-freedom/

#EducatingOurselvesForFreedom #ReadWriteRebel #TryAnarchismForLife