An anarchist educator talks GEDs, queer youth organizing in schools, how to navigate academia as an anarchist, free schools, homeschooling, unschooling, and other queer insurrection <3
mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids flipping out anarchy and deliberation. Here at The Child and His Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives.
And youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression. Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create feared, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host, MK Zariel. I’m 15 years old and I’m the youth correspondent of the Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog Debate Negro, and organizer for trans liberation in the Great Lakes region and beyond.
With me today is Jordan, a radical educator, here to talk about all this.
Jordan: Hi, yeah, my name is Jordan. I use he, him pronouns. I’m from Nebraska on the Great Plains Otoe, Missouri treaty lands. And I’ve been a GED program facilitator for the last 10 years. I’m an anarchist. I’m a feminist. I’m an abolitionist.
And I am a father to three kids.
mk: So when you originally pitched this to me, you expressed an interest in GEDs as an option for teenage humans looking to evade the statism of compulsory education. Can you talk a bit about this?
Jordan: Yeah, I was thinking so school districts have attendance policies and those policies lack the nuance to recognize really any of The complexity is impacting young people’s lives that would lead them to miss class and after a certain number of absences, an escalating series of consequences ensue.
This includes, this can include a referral to juvenile probation or sometimes diversion. And these truancy cases can also lead to caregivers being subjected to state surveillance, it can lead to young people being removed from the home. And while, there are circumstances where young people would benefit from being in a different environment or under different care.
I’m sure that the child and its enemy’s listeners can imagine myriad ways in which community care can be implemented or implicated without carceral systems being the driver of those interventions, but as it is now carceral systems of surveillance and control are all too often the consequence of quote unquote truancy.
The G. D. Routes. Even in a program that’s structured similarly to conventional school. Can provide a fresh start, right? And there might also be community based programs where you live that offer much more flexible structure. Thankfully that’s the type of program I’m involved with. You could also, you could attain your GED with the help of, with friends, trusted mentors.
You could also go the kind of library card autodidact routes and do a lot of this work on your. But there are, right? We should recognize that there are some barriers for young people to be able to access the GD. Some pro Programs will pay for testing, but, costs are associated with the GED.
You need ID from your state, like a state issued ID, and that often means, the name on your ID is the one you have to answer. To there there will be age based eligibility in your state, and that can vary some from state to state, like when you’re old enough to withdraw from school.
And the GED is not going to offer a lot of the opportunities that you might find in your public school, like art or drama or sports. So that’s another thing to take into consideration. You also, when you, if you want to pursue like post secondary ed. Which is totally still a possibility you very much, you very likely might lack the prerequisites to just jump into a four year university type setting, but those credits can still be obtained usually like at a community college yeah, so those are some of those options, some of those things to think about, also accommodations.
For learning disabilities are very, they make it really onerous the process to try to get that we can talk more about that if you want, but yeah, those are some of the barriers so all things to take into consideration but again, you have a different level of scrutiny from the state as a GED student, then you will.
Would as a traditional student. Yeah, that’s those are some of those initial thoughts.
mk: Thank you so much for bringing all that up. I find it fascinating and horrifying how even with this state sanctioned thing that is very much within compulsory education, there’s still some form of state repression and some form of stigma around it.
It’s almost as if statist beauty standards for education will never apply to queer and trans folks. Actually, that’s exactly what it is, because statism is deeply unethical, as our listeners know. How do you think that this can look for us For those of us who want to pursue higher education without engaging in statism, like I’ve known so many teens who have academic special interests and might want to for that reason, or maybe are fleeing homophobic states or harmful family situations so on an excuse to try a different location what can it look like to navigate college without engaging in that Commodification of life and education.
Jordan: Yeah. A tough question that a lot of us have faced, and but I think, my. The answer to that address is that we live in a society that individuates success and failure. Of course we know that’s a lie, that’s, not real. More predictive of someone’s academic success than their own intellectual capacities is the breadth of their network of support and the ease at which they can access that.
That’s where my head went with this. And I think of many of our quote, high achieving students those that receive accolades, high marks and scholarships are convinced. Instead of the same fallacies of meritocracy that delude those that are more generally accumulating into fewer and fewer hands, money, power, and prestige in our society and those those fallacies include, because I worked hard, because I’m smart and because I was blessed by God there’s no mention in those reasonings, Of the caregivers, that read read bedtime stories, or fed them, or drove them to their practices, and attended their events no mention of clean air and drinkable water, no mention of lead contamination, or the lack thereof, no mention of the unearned privileges of gender, race, and class, or the unfreedoms associated with those socially constructed modes of life, Oppression right the flip side of that coin many of your listeners will know that their immediate family.
The only people that are really sanctioned to be your network of support under our current paradigm can’t always be relied upon for the kind of support that students require. My best advice is to look, to our chosen families whatever your educational pursuits consist of. I think you should arm yourself with the love and care of your committed your community as you pursue those, academic interests.
Even if it’s, one peer Don’t go it alone. I was thinking of Kropotkin. In Conquest of Bread, there’s discussion of how capitalism doesn’t just exploit the labor of the living, but it subsumes into its, mass, all of the work that our ancestors did. And, all of the Discoveries, the intellectual developments and all those things become, used and abused by this system.
The work on behalf of those that actually did the labor was intended for the prosperity of future generations writ large and not for the profit of an increasingly fewer. A few number of expropriators the genes of crops that were domesticated by the ancestors of people indigenous to where I live are now the intellectual property of Monsanto.
We know better than this though, right? We have to reject the internalization of these fallacies. We are all interdependent, and we are all connected. So ideally, I think you would have a study group that is outside of academia, where you can develop your interests and sharpen your skills, and together with the support of your network and your developed analytic analytical skills I think you can confidently enter into those spaces and those spaces will benefit from your participation.
And there are benefits that you can derive being in those kinds of academic spaces, but it’s not. It’s not our home it’s not a resting place, it’s a site of struggle, it’s a contested space and, yeah we can’t concede that space to our enemies either yeah, it’s a site of struggle and, yeah, there are things that those kinds of intellectual pursuits and That kind of environment can benefit us and I think that we have stuff to offer to the conversation certainly so it’s, striking a balance there.
mk: I love this idea that being a queer anarchist teen in academia is conflictual as someone who has started an anarchist group at my middle school before. Like it’s so valuable to be in those spaces, especially because so many people there really haven’t had access to anarchism or access to queerness even, and desperately need peer support and care that’s outside of that graded judge.
community, but at the same time, it shouldn’t be the only place we derive our identity from. One can’t be an anarchist while also thinking that their grades define their worth. We all think that sometimes being alive, but I digress. So zooming out for a second, what do you think education would look like in your vision of queer and trans anarchy?
Jordan: Yeah. I think the first word that comes to mind is queer. Prefigurative or prefiguration, right? As with as with a lot of organizing for a better world, a world where many worlds fit, we have to be deliberately experimenting with the means of our collective liberation in ways that honor and demonstrate the principles and values we want to build into those worlds.
Those include, but are not limited to, autonomy, free association, participatory democracy, horizontality, and direct action. I would emphasize experimentation in this process. There are no panaceas. Young people are under different material conditions, and each of them brings their own idiosyncrasies.
idiosyncrasies to their, yes, to the table. And if I can pin down one piece of this, we would look to play. Play gives us the freedom to iterate, to experiment, to generate means of our pedagogy and relationship to each other and to our environment. And I’d emphasize that play is not the standard. Sometimes if we say oh, that’s just play it separates it from, real material conditions.
The real muscle memory and the neural pathways that build our capacity to do everything from the dishes to dealing with conflict are very real capacity to cause harm. I think that should be, at the fore of our educational pursuits. Early and often discussing, playing at, and dealing with the ideas of consent and community agreements and boundaries.
Again, how do we deal with conflict? How do we navigate and embrace our messy humanness? Polycentric and horizontal and messy systems are more robust and sustainable. hierarchical top down systems. That’s a shout out to Elinor Ostrom. This is the frustration and misery of many of our young people.
They know intuitively that there’s a better way. Better way. Yeah. And then if you like, basically anything that I’m saying in this interview, it’s coming from community, it’s coming from study. None of these are my original ideas. And a lot of this I’ve learned in community with my kids and with, their learning community.
So two of my kids go to a school whose philosophy is they say democratic self-directed, and the youngest is in a Montessori school. There’s a relationship there to unschooling. We’re going to get to that, I think. And, but yeah, so I can’t really speak to unschooling, but in this case our school has taught us a lot about Clicked resolution, which I touched on in conflict resolution is a huge emphasis in their pedagogy.
It undergirds really all of their offerings. So the young people vote on, we do like a rate choice voting on what they’re going to learn and pursue and study and inquire, that, time period a quarter semester and but the conflict resolution piece is always present in how they’re navigating that space with each other and learning from each other.
Yeah, a big shout out to. While learning. My kids’ school,
mk: I love the idea here that education isn’t just about factual information that we can call on. It’s about learning to build dual power and practicing what social organization might look like that’s anarchist. Like personally, even as someone who’s in the education system, I’ve learned much more in the practical sense from anarchist organizing than I have anywhere else.
And honestly, anarchist organizing teaches so many skills implicitly, like especially around technology in my case, like I would never know how to do the basics of digital security or graphic design or any of it. If I hadn’t been engaged in anarchist organizing since I was 13 and I feel like even for youth who aren’t into organizing or maybe don’t want to do anything that’s conflictual, which is totally valid, that idea of DIY and autonomous ways of educating each other rather than passively waiting to be educated are absolutely crucial.
How do you think anarchists can disrupt the education system in the here and now other than opting out and building alternatives? What would be the insurrectionary answer to this rather than the prefigurative one? And on that note, what are your thoughts on homeschooling and unschooling?
Jordan: Yeah, first, so the unschooling I will defer to other folks on, that, that know more about that that movement.
Homeschooling is interesting because it can be. An escape from that compulsory education, state education but it can also be like a retreat into like toxic family dynamics, right? So it’s it’s, it can be very much what you make of it. And, it can be used as a way to free young people.
It could be used as a way to control young people. Yeah, but I think it’s definitely something that a lot of folks are taking, more seriously and taking a close look at and really asking themselves, if it works with their family, with their community to be able to, meet the needs of young people and children in that setting, it’s totally achievable.
And there are resources to support that work, and the other, big question there. I think, the first part of that is, I think of solidarity, which will not be a new concept to your audience. School can be, I also, yeah, we need that. School can be a significant source of stress.
To the students and to the family. And I think of all the adults that we know that myself included, that still have the, the nightmare where you, we forgot your homework or you didn’t realize there was a pop quiz or, you’re, you have some sort of humiliating experience in the classroom or something like that.
But that’s like you pretty well recognized as as something that, we, many of us that share that experience have an after effect of right. And yeah, it can also, as I said, it can be a source of tension in our relationships at home and in our communities, especially If we’re on the receiving end of those attendance policies we talked about earlier so I currently work in an office with seven people and I see four to ten participants in a given day and this is enough, For me to drain my social battery, on some days and weeks where I need, alone time to recover or like nature time to recharge, but we have the expectation that our young people navigate school buildings with like Very often thousands of students, not to mention teachers, administrators and support staff, and these high social demands can be a source of anxiety for a lot of students.
And I’d say a significant percentage of the young people in my GED program sought out this alternative because of the social pressures. More so than simply being like credit deficient behind, In credits or something like that, but because they are feeling a sense of school misery, right?
A sinking gut feeling that they don’t want to go back there. And so in my experience, what we can do for our young comrades and others that are invested in the education system. Is recognize the reality of their experience, recognize those realities that I was just now trying to countenance and we are all in a state of constant development of our sense of self and place and with, ongoing genocides and climate catastrophe and ecological.
or, imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy as bell hooks would say, we have every reason to be alternatingly sad and determined indignant With rage, overwhelmed by love, despondent, joyful, and these are all our human emotions. And I dare say, in this context, that even the desire to end one’s life is human.
Yeah, I want to address this. Because as with a abstinence only sex education, or a just say no to drugs idea, if we can’t look at our messy human reality, we can’t help each other. And we can’t do harm reduction, we can’t understand risk, and while there are tools that I would encourage people to seek out from biomedicine, or psychology, psychiatry, those things can be vital, and but we shouldn’t only medicalize what has been called a sacred crisis of self.
The point being that your sensitivity to your world around you is not merely you being chemically unbalanced. This is a real response to stimuli. And the solution is not a world without you, I promise. The solution is our collective struggle towards liberation. The world with your presence and the presence of justice together, those things together, as as Martin Luther King who was murdered, with at least the complicity of the state said, there are things in our nation and in the world to which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I call upon all people of goodwill, To remain maladjusted until the good society is realized. I must honestly say that I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination.
I never intend to adjust to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions which take necessity. It’s from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self defeating effects of physical violence. We keep us safe.
Some folks may need to have watch kept over them and other interventions. But people also need empathy. People need commiseration. We can’t fix everything. But We can be in solidarity with our friends that are going through dark places, and we can’t gaslight them they’re the thing that is unwell in this world.
We have to recognize the darkness and collectively commit to the fight back against it. Access to liberatory education is suicide prevention. Hosting. Housing, excuse me. Housing is suicide prevention. Environmental justice is suicide prevention. Anti imperialism is suicide prevention. Anti fascist organizing is suicide prevention.
And queer liberation is suicide prevention. So I feel like that’s not maybe the most direct answer to your question, but I feel like that’s our starting place to build networks of solidarity around the real world that we’re living in to be outside of and against until we can, Build that better world or as we build that better world and make it a reality in our relationships in everyday life.
That’s the best. That’s the best I’ve got for that question, especially in the context of young people trying to escape compulsory education and find their own path. Let’s and let’s, as. As we are at which is, often hurting. And that is that’s where I took that.
Yeah.
mk: Thank you so much for talking about that. The idea that mutual aid and queer networks of care and see mental health struggles not just as something to resolve and then move on from, but as a symptom of statist harm is so real. As someone who is neurodivergent, just by virtue of who I am, but has also had mental health challenges as a result of statism, honestly, like pervasive anxiety about state repression and the like, I appreciate that so much, because there will always be a range of neurologies and that is absolutely beautiful and necessary.
But if people are suffering in the mental health way, that isn’t like physical disease, it isn’t something to just. Medicaid and then ignore. It is something that statism causes and so often youth are totally ignored when we struggle with that. There are carceral hotlines, there are peer support groups that don’t do anything, but there isn’t flexual organizing, which is so often just what we need for our mental health.
So On that note, so many queer and trans young people, myself included, have faced anti queer bias at school, whether from administration, other students, or just the system of compulsory education. So from a queer liberationist standpoint, what can we do to resist anti queer bias in our schools?
Jordan: I continue with the theme, and I quote here, Mariam Kaba, everything that is worthwhile is done with other people.
There will always be the need for individual acts of defiance, and we will always have moments where we have to face the consequences of upholding our principles. The best way to resist anti queer bias in education is collectively. Across the lines, between educators and students, possibly across the divisions between age grades, across the queer and cis heteronormative divide.
But in doing this, I think the experience of the most impacted by this oppression needs to be centered. queer youth shouldn’t be organized by people outside of that experience. To say that organized queer youth can in principled alignment with other groups. Form coalitions, or they could agitate within established groups for example, a queer caucus within an existing student organization or student government, but as opposed to the individual candidate in that case participating in student government, thinking that they could reform the system from within either have a separate organization, that can choose to align with other groups as conditions allow or be self organized as like a cadre, a caucus, an affinity group within larger organizations that You have the clear objective of agitating toward collective liberation and away from the kind of performative reforms that, are gainable, maybe through some of the tactics of even on this smaller scale, like of electoralism, but does that really get us to collectivism?
Liberation and the other observation I had here is that, you really have to as a young person in these spaces, you have to work very hard to avoid being tokenized. It’s rampant in these spaces that are ostensibly for young people tokenism will elevate the stories of resilience, right? In this frame, barriers are to be like heroically overcome to inspire others.
Not ripped apart, not torn down. This obviously maintains the same system of oppression. Nobody’s free until everybody’s free. We don’t accept tokenism.
mk: Thank you so much for speaking to that, and like this exp The experience of being the only teenager in any queer liberationist group, and the only queer person in any teen focused group, is so real. And honestly, this is why The Child and His Enemies facilitates two online spaces on Discord and Signal, respectively, for anarchist teens to come together and build that translocal community, and maybe even plan meetups in various bioregions, and just do whatever it takes to Build teenage anarchist faces that are not about ageism and are not about tokenism.
Yeah, thank you again. And to close out, are there any shameless plugs that you have for various organizations or other media that’s meaningful to you? Yes,
Jordan: I do have some plugs. If I wanted to chat about some of the mutual aid organizing in my community,
The Lincoln and Omaha Street Medics, The Legible Distro, Mississippi State Prayer Camp and its Land Defenders. Shout out to them. Shout out to Black Cat House and Common Root. Shout out to Omaha Tenants United and the burgeoning Lincoln Sister Org. Lincoln Tenants United. Look out for them. And WOW Learning.
It’s cool, as I mentioned before. And there’s a really cool school for preschool age. Included in Omaha Falls one community childcare, which yeah, and I wanted to throw this in here. We talked about some heavy content today. If you’re looking, you need to talk to somebody now, you could call the nine eight eight you suicide or crisis.
Available in several languages. And and I’ll also make my contact available to any listeners who could use help navigating this. Yes, that’s it.
mk: Thank you so much for sharing your youth liberation journey. This has been Jordan and you’re listening to The Child and Its Enemies. If you want to learn more or join us on Discord and Signal, our website is thechildanditsenemies. noplots. org. I’m MK Zariel, thanks for listening. Stay safe, stay dangerous.