One common line of arguments anti-vegans liked to throw at me was that some species are not fit to live in the wild anymore and so releasing them would be cruel.

At the time (wow has it been almost 10 years ago already‽), I didn't have a good answer, but I could still feel how wrong it was. Today, I have the words and ideas to back up this feeling.

The logic behind it is abhorrent and wilfully ignorant. It boils down to "we created an exploitative system which *literally creates miserable individuals*, causes them great harm, but also made its victims reliant on their tormentors. Putting an end to this system would harm its victims, so we must keep it in place." Once you put it like that, it's easy to see how awful it is, but it's never put like that. They ignore (consciously or not) the entire situation to focus on the one aspect that justifies the exploitation: some people depend on it for survival.

What finally helped me see beyond the façade of concern was engaging with anarchism and its less "popular" forms like primitivism, egoism and nihilism, but also digging deeper into police and school abolition, as well as anti-medicalism and anti-psychiatry.

Systems of domination create problems they then have to manage unless they collapse under the weight of their abuse or are overthrown by their victims. *Removing them is more effective than managing the harm they cause.*

#veganism #anarchy #AbolishThePolice #SchoolAbolition #antipsy

I often see adults claiming that kids are "resisting learning" or "wouldn't learn unless forced to" and what they ACTUALLY mean by that is that kids are not learning or would not learn exactly what the adults demand that they do.

This is an expression of frustration with children's noncompliance, because even a lot of "progressive" and "radical" folks think that, as long as they insist that its for their own good, children should obey them.

This is not only subjugation and thus completely unacceptable as a way to treat other people (children are people), it's also completely counterproductive.

People naturally resist compulsion. It actually feels like shit to have someone with far greater power than you attempt to control almost all aspects of your life, including what you think about, focus on, and do. We KNOW that. YOU know that.

If you make what you call "learning" into something forced, you introduce it as something to be resisted.

If adults are to stop attempting to coerce kids into "learning" (sometimes better termed "memorizing") what they want them too, that necessitates coming to terms with the fact that children (being people and all) have their own unique interests, passions, and goals, their own familial, cultural, and geographic contexts... In short? They're going to want to learn wildly different things, the same way you and I, as adults, choose to focus on very different topics and build very different skills.

The ethical necessity to stop perpetuating adult supremacy means confronting a whole lot of harmful beliefs about what "education" is supposed to be and what it's supposed to look like. It also means actually creating anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical places for kids to spend time in, because limiting their options to either the authoritarianism of State schooling or nuclear families, regardless of what those families are like, is such a miserably constrained set of options.

#youthliberation #selfdirectededucation #schoolabolition

School for children is usually positioned as an alternative to the exploitation of labour, but I think school has to be understand as exploitation itself.

What is demanded of children in schools IS labour. They are forced to work for eight hours a day, to turn their thoughts and actions towards the demands of an authority or face punishment, to bring work home where once more, they will be penalized for not complying with the demands that they complete it. They do not get to choose where they go or what they do with their own bodies, they do not get to choose who they spend time with or remove themselves from situations where they're trapped with an abuser (whether teacher or fellow student), they do not get to think of what they wish or do what they wish.

In many ways, school is far more controlling than most jobs, with even less recourse for poor treatment, and very importantly, it is *labour done for zero pay.*

I think the reductive idea that labour must necessarily produce something gets in the way of people's understanding of school as being unpaid labour, but I think it can be understood as what Graeber termed a "bullshit job". Malcolm Harris also elaborates on the way schooling functions as labour:

"The idea that underlies contemporary schooling is that grades, eventually, turn into money, or, if not money, then choice, or what social scientists sometimes call better life outcomes. In waged work we have the concept of valorization, which is the process by which laborers produce value above and beyond their wages and increase the mass of invested capital. But if no one is profiting off kids’ scholastic work — teachers definitely don’t — where does their product go? The sociologist Jürgen Zinnecker describes “the development of human capital” as a sink for students’ hidden labor. In the simplest terms...when students are working, what they’re working on is their ability to work."

Understanding this is important in seeing the shift from child labour in the classical sense to compulsory schooling not as an act of "emancipation", but simply a shift in the WAYS that children are exploited.

Is school better than factories? Obviously so, but it is still a theft of children time, their freedom, their ability to play, explore, and learn in the ways they wish to, a theft of their very childhoods.

Education is important. But as long as people see education as being synonymous with schooling, they will continue to practice that which is simply a kinder, gentler form of child labour.

#SchoolAbolition #childlabour