Anarcho-unschooling

Thoughts on the intersection of unschooling, parenting, and anarchism and the introduction of a youth led anarchist pod - The Child and Its Enemies

I came to anarchism through unschooling. Well, not entirely, but unschooling was the real thread that I pulled when our cultural fabric began to unravel, so I’ll credit unschooling. The truth is that I’ve always been fairly countercultural but didn’t call myself an anarchist until I started exploring oppressive hierarchies because of the deep analysis required to become an unschooling parent.

Not all unschoolers would call themselves anarchists, although the best ones I know are all anarchy-leaning, IMO. And most anarchists don’t give a lot of thought to the child-parent hierarchy that exists in our own homes, although if you read any work from pretty much any anarchist philosopher or sociologist, you’ll see them acknowledge the root of our social dependency on hierarchical systems found in the family. It’s where we teach the socially accepted behaviour that certain people have authority and others do not. In the family, we do this primarily based on age but also on gender, levels of income, class, etc., just as we do in a wider cultural context.

I’m always a bit shocked when I walk into a conversation where anarchists don’t want to acknowledge this ingrained behaviour within our own families. When I bring up the notion that young people are still, in fact, whole people capable of making decisions and performing actions for themselves without the direction of an adult, I get a lot of pushback. It’s the usual bullshit that unschoolers will be familiar with: they don’t have enough experience to make good decisions, they’ll run into traffic, eat sugar all day, or just play video games. I assure them that, yes, a lot of that does happen, but it’s not a factor of age. Trusting our young people to make their own decisions without the need for arbitrary top-down authority really can happen in the real world, and there are, in fact, many families that are already functioning quite well with distributed power systems founded on consent, respect, and open communication.

On the other side of the coin, there are many parents who subscribe to unschooling principles but refuse to acknowledge that the abolition of power hierarchy in the family is the REASON for their unschooling practice. Worse still, they will continue to uphold these systems of oppression in other cultural systems like racism, sexism, and even ageism for the rest of their lives. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re unschooling without acknowledging the intersectional nature of oppression, your unschooling practice is pretty useless.

I’m always a bit excited when I hear about popular thinkers that have focused their efforts on exploring hierarchy in the family context, and Bookchin doesn’t disappoint. He acknowledged that dismantling the imbalance of power between children and parents and between genders within the home is a critical part of abolishing hierarchical oppression at the cultural and societal level. Like other thinkers such as Goldman and Engles, Bookchin sees the family unit as the site for many of the oppressive systems that we then experience in wider culture.

While intersectional unschooling is one approach to undoing this damage within our family units, I’d argue that it is still very top-down. Another approach is to have young people take more direct ownership of dismantling these systems in ways that feel more equitable to them. There’s not a lot of room for young people in political movements, especially ones like anarchism that have the misplaced perception of being solely violent. (See Margaret Killjoy’s latest piece on construction versus destruction for some beautiful thoughts on the violence of anarchist protest.)

I could obviously write a lot more about this topic. It is an intersection that I am very passionate about. But I want to take this opportunity to point in another direction to other folks who are doing the work of pairing youth liberation with the anarchist movement. I met mk and sprout on the Institute for Social Ecology Discord server, and they shared about a new podcast that they’re working on: The Child and Its Enemies. They graciously agreed to answer a few questions about the podcast.

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What inspired you to start The Child and It's Enemies podcast?

mk: I've always been among the youngest in anarchist spaces, and I wanted to create a podcast about how organizing spaces can be more inclusive—and in turn, how youth liberation intersects with anarchy. How compulsory education and the nuclear family and age as a concept oppress us all, and why anarchist tendencies should be explicitly youth-liberationist. This isn't to say the positionality of being young isn't real, or that people of different biological and temporal ages don't have different needs—just that development is not linear, and that filling a societal role based on age should never be compulsory.

Who is the podcast for? Kids? Parents? Who else?

mk: This is a podcast for anyone who self-identifies as youth—meaning people who face anti-child ageism, people who refuse the social role of Adulthood, people who experience a younger temporal age (which isn't everyone!), or anyone else for whom that identity resonates. Accomplices of all ages and experiences can of course tune in, including parents, educators, people who do childcare work, community organizers, and everyone who wants to support youth and teens.

What can folks expect to hear if they tune in?

mk: Interviews with youth-liberationist organizers, artists, and community members—not only about these people's organizing, but about their own experiences growing up and how they were involved in organizing. This isn't a podcast about adults supporting youth in an allyship way, it's about accompliceship. It's a podcast about the lived experience of being young, as told by people of all ages.

sprout: We have all experienced youth struggles, even if we have since left them behind in so called adulthood. But connecting to that part of oneself is critical to being able to listen to current day youths with any measure of understanding or solidarity. We want to craft a podcast that reaches the child in all of us and brings it to the fore, if only for half an hour.

I'm really interested right now in intersectional collective liberation. Where do you feel that this podcast intersects?

mk: This podcast is explicitly at the intersection of youthlib, queerness, and neurodivergence—basically every identity that's joyously illegible to linear time and development. No matter your identity, the linearity the state imposes oppresses us all, forcing us into social roles without jouissance; we all need youth liberation, because we all need atemporality.

sprout: I love how much mk talks about the temporal nature of our current oppression. I think this is something that I myself haven't thought nearly enough about, but it resonates with a certain feral joy within my bones. Its in the poetry i write, the songs i sing, and the joy I find in committing acts of anarchy throughout my day. The ceaselessness of our struggle against oppression and for liberation is almost overwhelming at times, but this conversation around the atemporality of liberatory work is really inspiring because it gives a sense of radical love and harmony to that potentially discordant feeling of awe in the face of it all. It reminds me that anarchy isn't a final destination but an eternally ongoing process.

A lot of people feel like anarchism is inaccessible. Where should people start if they want to take part in the movement or integrate more anarchist principles into their own lives?

mk: I'd always suggest starting by finding smaller anarchist formations (in your city or online) doing direct community support that you admire. One of my first anarchist groups was a trans-anarchist space that mostly holds events for trans community members and fundraises for mutual aid, and because I love queer spaces, that was amazing for me. Whatever spaces you personally find joy in are the spaces that are a good place to start with organizing—or if online is more your speed, see if the anarchist resources you like need volunteer support in any way! Getting in touch through a cold email can sometimes make all the difference; the anarchist community loves building queered networks of care and connecting with new organizers, and whatever anarchists you admire or follow would probably love to connect.

sprout: Being in rural western Washington, we have found that if you want a group to exist you have to often make it happen yourself. This is a valuable lesson for people of any age: put what you want into the world. Find a model, or an example group, that you admire and literally just copy paste what they're doing. You will be able to adapt this model to your own situation after you get some momentum. But the key is to just go out and do it!

Where can folks go to find out more?

mk: Our website is https://thechildanditsenemies.noblogs.org. Go there to listen to the pod, and also for youth liberation resources :)

sprout: We're available wherever podcasts are given out for free. We are also a proud new member of The Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, so we would like to give them a shout out, and you can always find us at channelzeronetwork.com as well. Thanks for your time!

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You can also follow mk’s substack below: