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It’s been a while, but we’ve put together our fourth episode of Smash the Class!
Sparked by our experiences with Joyful Resistance, we wanted to talk about how our understanding of expertise and authority can inhibit a lot of the conversations and learning that can take place within our various communities. As we hosted these meetings, which were meant to act more in line as either a support group or space to just meet with others interested in anarchist pedagogies, we kept noticing that a lot of people seemed to want one thing: experts. There was an expectation that these meetings would have an expert to tell us what to do.
This isn’t inherently bad! And we’re not intending to shame anyone because we get it. But we just noticed that people wanted experts to provide answers and solutions to something we haven’t quite figured out, especially because we all come from different cultural spaces and backgrounds. We’d hoped to create a space for people to find others to connect with in their development of anarchist pedagogies.
So in this episode, we spend time discussing concepts like being able to make mistakes and feeling comfortable with it, the problems around focusing on individualisation while neglecting collaboration, and the ways that learning is a lifelong process that we all need to keep going through.
We also reference quite a few different things that have been done, these include:
- Little Tree (Mikro Dendro) in Thessaloniki, Greece
- Episode 3: A Discussion on Especifismo (and More) with Carl Eugene Stroud
- School Revolt Special: A Special Q&A with James Khost (video is available here)
- School Revolt Special: the need for unlearning in learning
- Budding Roses
And if you want to check out the School Revolt playlist for 2022, everything is available here.
