By Ron Scapp
28th January 2026
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
(Grant Allen, 1894 (popularized by Mark Twain))
If Marxism is a passion for history, anarchism is the love of geography.
(Catherine Malabou, Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy (2023))
In 2018 I wrote a commentary titled “Notes on an Anarchist Pedagogy”for this AnarchistStudies.Blog. In short, it was my attempt to both reflect on my own teaching and, following bell hooks and Paulo Freire, consider how and in what ways I might better promote “education as the practice of freedom.”[i] Specifically, I was challenging myself to do this given the 2016 United States’ election results and the assaults on education and freedom initiated by Trump. Sadly, Trump is back at the White House, the geographical symbol of the United States presidency (literally destroying a large portion of it upon his return), and his assaults on education and freedom, in general, are even more harsh and meanspirited than during his first term as president.[ii] As a result, I am compelled to revisit the challenge I gave myself in those notes, and (re)consider “education as the practice of freedom.”
The United States has never been without oppression and violence – what nation state has? But since his reelection, Trump and his administration have certainly amplified and accelerated the language, logic and practice of domination and suppression. Almost every day Americans wake up to new expressions of Trump’s dominance, in both word and deed. And while the ongoing war in Ukraine, the continued bloodshed in Gaza and the recent military incursion into Venezuela may all rightly demand our attention and outrage, the numerous assaults on education (from banning books to retracting funding) ought to remain front and center as well, especially for anyone directly involved with education, at any level of instruction. Unfortunately, Trump’s strategy of “flooding” the media and the American people with multiple outrageous acts and proclamations at the same time has managed to camouflage his specific attacks on education.
Trump’s war on education, as numerous organizations and media outlets have appropriately identified it, is an all-out attack on federal grants, transgender rights, noncitizens, diversity, identity and equity (DEI) initiatives and campus protests. It is, as I wish to frame it, an all-out assault on education as the practice of freedom, in and out of the classroom, and on and off the campus. All of this, in short, is an all-out attack on freedom plain and simple. This postscript is intended to remind us that my original “Notes on an Anarchist Pedagogy” are of little value or import, if not enacted, if not put into place. And the place in question here is, for me, the classroom and the campus, the “sites” of teaching and learning, of possibility, of exhilaration, of transformation, of education. As bell hooks noted:
To enter classroom settings in colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement, was to transgress. Not only did it require movement beyond accepted boundaries, but excitement could not be generated without a full recognition of the fact that there could never be an absolute set agenda governing teaching practices. Agendas had to be flexible, had to allow for spontaneous shifts in directions. Students had to be seen in their particularity as individuals … and interacted with according to their needs … (1994: 7)
Unfortunately, more and more “instructors” enter the classroom with very fixed and rigid “agendas.” In fact, more and more academics are trained to do so. They do in fact enter the classroom and university with “an absolute set agenda governing teaching practices,” even the “liberal and progressive professors.” This is so for many reasons, but mostly, as I and many others have argued, due to the deleterious impact of neoliberalism and late capitalism on the “public good” generally, and education specifically. Rather than a place for the free exchange of ideas and “transgressing,” the university and classroom today are places of domination and indoctrination. And things continue to get worse. With the ever-growing use (popularity?) of online teaching and learning the very notion of the place for learning, the space of the free exchange of ideas, is physically disappearing and morphing into an exclusively virtual domain. In the United States today, actual physical colleges and universities are quietly closing at an alarming rate. Regrettably, the “consumers and costumers” seeking a credential, certificate or diploma seem less concerned with entering a classroom (wherein they might transgress), than to enroll online in order to secure their goal as quickly, cheaply and easily as possible. All of which is understandable, given the realities and dynamics of contemporary life in the United States and globally.
The question raised in my “Notes” surfaces again: what to do? The difficult but good news is, the answer remains the same: we must create spaces of possibility, of transgression, of freedom. How this looks, how this gets accomplished, depends on the circumstances, depends on the grade level of instruction and level of oppression present. But, the efforts to create such spaces must not get dismissed as utopian, as too vague or unachievable, we must not let those committed to domination dictate the conditions for teaching and learning. As Jeffery Shantz notes in his essay “Spaces of Learning: The Anarchist Free Skool”:
Social theorist Michel Foucault used the occasion of his 1967 lecture, “Of Other Spaces”, to introduce a term that would remain generally overlooked within his expansive body of work, the notion of “heterotopia”, by which he meant a countersite or alternative space, something of an actually existing utopia. In contrast to the nowhere lands of utopias, heterotopias are located in the here-and-now of present-day reality, though they challenge and subvert that reality. The heterotopias are spaces of difference. Among the examples Foucault noted were sacred and forbidden spaces which are sites of personal transition. (Shantz 2012: 124)
Of course, creating and sustaining such spaces and locations requires commitment, perseverance and courage. It also requires community and solidarity; this is not the responsibility of just one individual, although it is the ethical obligation of everyone committed to education as the practice of freedom, everyone committed to freedom itself.
For those curious about my own modest example of just one gesture to help create such a space, I invite you to read my original commentary (“Notes on an Anarchist Pedagogy”) published in May 2018. But I want to also invite anyone interested in sharing their strategies and efforts to engage in and strive for “education as the practice of freedom” to contact the AnarchistStudies.Blog editor (Jim Donaghey: jim.donaghey@ulster.ac.uk) or me directly (ron.scapp@umsv.edu) and send in your thoughts and suggestions. As bell hooks and Paulo Freire exclaim, time and again, dialogue is the way to freedom.
Works cited
Freire, Paulo (2000), Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
hooks, bell (1994), Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, London: Routledge.
Malabou, Catherine (2023), Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy, Bristol: Polity Press.
Shantz, Jeffery (2012), ‘Spaces of Learning: The Anarchist Free Skool’, in Robert H. Haworth (ed.), Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education (pp. 162-174), Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Notes
[i] See bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994) and Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage (2000).
[ii] As I write this postscript, Trump has sent the US military to Venezuela to capture (kidnap?) Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Adela Flores de Maduro, in part for drug trafficking and what the Trump administration calls narco-terrorism. This all unfolding just a few weeks after Donald J. Trump granted a “presidential pardon” to Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former President of Honduras who was found guilty and serving a 45-year prison sentence for drug trafficking. It appears that Trump and his Cabinet are sending mixed messages regarding US foreign policy and drug trafficking enforcement. While US federal law enforcement (ICE Agents) today (January 7, 2026) shot and killed a person in their car during a protest in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota.