WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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The public school exists to make automatons and to reproduce class hierarchies and authoritarian power dynamics. How different is 2019 from 1906 when Emma Goldman was writing in “The Child and Its Enemies” that schools drive children to become foreign to themselves and to each other, arranged into files, classified, and numbered with quality giving way to quantity. And we are living the consequences. There are better ways to learn.
It should be obvious that any learning done in a hierarchical system will first be about that system, about the structure of power, and how the “learner,” the student, is a receptacle for instructions about her place in the social order regardless of the content of a particular lesson or discipline of study. McLuhan’s pithy formulation that the medium is the message rings very true here. But it also indicates a way out…create other spaces of learning, spaces outside the institutions of state power where learning can occur because it is freely sought and because it gives pleasure.
It probably won’t surprise you that our guest today began to be critical of the systems of state and corporate power via the lens of punk music. As a ten year old he was transfixed by a poster in his older brother’s room of the album cover to the 1979 album Feeding the 5000 by the anarcho-punk band Crass, featuring the face of Ronald Reagan on a muscle flexing bodybuilder and Margaret Thatcher expelling hot dogs and human skulls out her backside. A taste for subversion seemed only natural. To honor that experience, the music of Crass accompanies us throughout (though none of the songs off that album, sorry, Rob). We open with “I Ain’t Thick, It’s Just a Trick” off of Stations of the Crass.
GUEST
Today’s guest is Robert Haworth, editor of two recent compilations published by PM Press: Anarchist Pedagogies and Out of the Ruins: Radical Informal Learning Spaces and co-editor with Mark Bray of a Francisco Ferrer Reader called Anarchist Education and the Modern School. Haworth is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Foundations & Policy Studies at West Chester University. He teaches courses focusing on the social foundations of education, anarchism, and critical pedagogies.
RELATED
“The Child and Its Enemies” by Emma Goldman
Anarchy Is Intersectional: Learning From Emma Goldman (Interchange)
Dynamite Has No Politics: The Anarchism of Lucy Parsons (Interchange)
Punk Rock 101 (Interchange)
MUSIC by Crass
“I Ain’t Thick, It’s Just a Trick” (Stations of the Crass)
“I Know There Is Love” (Christ-The Album)
“Where Next Columbus” (Penis Envy)
“You Can Be Who?” (Christ-The Album)
“Systematic Death” (Penis Envy)
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Wes Martin
