Teaching against Hierarchies: An Anarchist Approach

The state of California spends more on prisons than on colleges and universities, and the fact that these two budgetary figures are often compared shows the relationship between the two state institutions. Our classrooms, starting from a very early stage, not only prepare children to be productive members of the consumer economy but educate them for complacency in the face of state violence and mass incarceration. In attempting to move away from hierarchical models of education, this article looks at the feminist pedagogical theory of bell hooks and antiauthoritarian and anarchist theorists such as Jacques Rancière and Derrick Jensen in order to begin investigating alternatives to current education systems. It also identifies major problems in attempting to construct antihierarchical classrooms within a larger society that is still suffering from oppression and structural inequality, and claims that, if not paired with direct action, any attempt for revolutionizing education will meet up against repressive state institutions.