EDUCATION & ANTI-CAPITALIST STRUGGLES

The capitalist model of education is failing. Student movements around the world are expressing this through mass protests and student revolts. In Mexico and Chile, Quebec and California students are occupying their schools, shutting down state institutions, and building alternative spaces of learning and politics.

From the autonomous Zapatista schools to the workshops that grew as a part of the Occupy movement, autonomous movements everywhere are radically rethinking the meaning and the form of learning, replacing the hierarchical model education most clearly embodied by state schools with more collaborative spaces for sharing and collectively producing knowledge. From Oaxaca, Mexico, Gustavo Esteva asserts that “education and capitalism are twins.” If we take up this provocative statement, then we are forced to consider a distinction between education and learning. In doing so, we ask: What is learning oriented towards? What are schools or “skools” for? Do they simply reproduce a system? Or do they generate and multiply radical politics? And what happens when learning is simply about survival?

On today’s show, we’ll hear updates from the massive student movements against privatization in Chile and Quebec, and our own student rebellions here in California. Shifting our focus to alternative learning spaces, we’ll be interviewing compañerxs from various projects here in Oakland, to explore the connections between anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian politics and education. We’ll wrap up the show with an interview with Mexican hip-hop artist and community organizer Bocafloja about the use of rap and poetry in radical pedagogy.