RAD YOUTH LIB: Dismantling the roots of all oppression.

Chapter 3. We can't reform the school and the family.

Chapter 3.

"We can't reform the school and the family"

"No one is more truly helpless, more completely a victim, than he who can neither choose nor change nor escape his protectors"

-John Holt.

It's dishonest to claim that the family and the school aren't nightmarish institutions. Their heavy romanticization in culture and their association with highly valued concepts such as "love" and "learning" is the only thing preventing us from stating the truth. The brainwashing from adultist society has been so thorough that we seem to view "family" and "love" and "school" and "learning" as synonyms; they're oxymorons. Adults genuinely believe that is the case, though, and they're ready to dismiss any complaints children might hold about being prisoners. A child questioning the institutions of family and school is often either made fun of or treated as a blasphemer. One of the greatest taboos in our culture is probably admitting to hating your parents. But those same adults would never want to live that again. They treat the family and the school almost as luxuries; after all, what are you complaining about? You're clothed, fed, and "looked after", all for free! But as this satirical piece appeared in a parenting publication reminds us, "how great it would be to have no responsibility and to have someone else feed, clothe, and house us. There is one group of adults not making these assertions. Prisoners. Because they have all those perks, and they don't seem to think it's so spectacular" ("10 Reasons Why Being A Kid Sucks" Anonymous). Dinsmore and Pugh, in their 2021 paper, remind us that life in families would still be similar to life in prison even if child abuse did not exist and children's safety was guaranteed, as long as the surveillance remained, "prisoners in the United States usually receive three square meals with access to heat, light, and a roof over their heads; even if their physical safety was guaranteed, and not subject to threats from guards and other prisoners, it would come at extreme costs to their liberty, and undoubtedly they would choose their release, despite the abundant risks" (Dinsmore and Pugh, 2021). You don't even need to oppose adultism to see this; in a 2017 paper published in a philosophy journal titled "Why Childhood is Bad for Children," the author examines how the goods of childhood are minimal and do not even come close to approaching the bads of being ruled by all the adults in your life even if she doesn't seem to think there are any alternatives. After all, most people fear the prospect of being imprisoned even while they oppose prison abolition. They think prisoners deserve it because they did "something bad" it's clear that the logic of prisons comes from childhood socialization and the concept of "punishments" and (unnatural) "consequences". Despite this, prison abolition is already more widely supported than family and school abolition. It doesn't matter how "bad" an adult is; they still don't deserve to be "treated like a child". The situation of children who aren't criminals (as we must not forget that actual prisons for children do exist, they're no better than adult prisons, and you can end up there for behaving in ways that are considered normal for adults, see "status offenses") is perhaps even more similar to that of psychiatric patients than that of prisoners. They're constructed as irrational and as needing to be deprived of their freedom and human rights "for their own good" and that of others. After all, adulthood, which used to be exclusively for white men, is right now exclusive to neurotypical and abled people. The argument that children have it better because they receive free education while adults don't is similarly fallacious; it must be remembered that it's adults who gave birth to the equation between "child" and "student", to the idea that all children are or should be students and all students are or should be children because all children are ignorant and all adults knowledgeable and that "education" is a right for children but only a privilege for adults (while at the same time making it almost impossible to get a job without a college degree). School is also just not good for children. In the words of Nikhil Goyal, "On most mornings, millions of young people depart from their homes and travel by cars and yellow buses to drab-looking, claustrophobic buildings. Here, they will be warehoused for the next six to seven hours. Some are greeted by metal detectors and police officers, others by principals and teachers. In the hallways, security cameras keep tabs on them. Every forty minutes, they are shepherded from room to room at the sound of a bell. They sit in desks in rows with twenty to thirty other people of similar age, social class, and often race. They are drilled in facts and inculcated with specific attitudes and behaviors. They are motivated to participate in this game by numbers, letters, prizes, awards, and approval of various authority figures. If they get out of their seat, talk out of turn, or misbehave, they risk being drugged to induce passivity. Their day is preplanned for them. In a world of increasing complexity, there is little critical thinking expected of them. To succeed, orders and rules must be followed. The fortunate ones have recess. During lunch, many have little choice but to consume unhealthy, unappetizing food. At the end of the day, they return home bone tired. There, they are forced to complete a few more hours of free labor, known as homework. They follow the almost exact same routine five days a week, 180 days a year, for thirteen years, until they are set free or begin another game called college with its own set of absurd rules. This is what is known as school for most children. If a sensible race of aliens paid a visit to our planet, they would think we are crazy. It still amazes me how most people don't find it particularly odd that you have this small subset of the population-people from ages five to eighteen-who are locked up in buildings for seven hours a day, while most of the rest of us are living and learning in the world" (Goyal, 2016). Those who lie are the most cowardly of all oppressors of children, those who think that there isn't any other way are deeply wrong, but at least they're honest. To this day, very few people would honestly disagree with St. Augustine stating, "Who would not shudder if he were given the choice of eternal death or life again as a child? Who would not choose to die?", it is common to believe that just like children are human "becomings", not "beings", their life isn't a "life" but preparation for life. Adults always repeat that children need to be taught "real life", but children live real life. A life that they have little control over and in which they experience a disproportionate amount of domination and violence because they're part of an oppressed class. A life that will teach them the naturalness and the fairness of hierarchies and obedience to authority so that they won't question anything when they go into the society of adults. A life that, at least if they hold some form of privilege, will look nothing like the purportedly more "real" life of adults who are not imprisoned. Because this is how adults call the equivalents of family and school; imprisonment, and anyone who claims otherwise should be asked if they would be happy to depend entirely on a romantic partner judged to be stronger or more intelligent or if they would be happy to work without pay in those conditions if they were promised "learning" and future benefits. The concept of "childhood" usually gets the same treatment, the same romanticization cloaking a terrible reality. To be a "child" and fill that social role not only comes with the status of prisoner, "minor", which I discussed extensively but also means that you must live by the fantasies of others. Adults expect children to be a certain way, cute, dumb, weak, ignorant, innocent, and playful. They expect incompetence and dependence from them. They inculcate those traits in children from their infancy on while at the same time presenting them to children as natural and as the justified cause of their oppression. Adults train children to be dependent on them. Children who were never trained to be dependent or rejected that role are framed as a sinister aberration of the sacred concept of Childhood. We were taught to think of the image of a child living alone as creepy or sad, of a child earning their keep as being wronged by being deprived of something important like an idealized concept of what your life must be like for the first two decades of your existence, of a child who knows how politics, economics or god forbid, sexuality work as corrupted. We were never taught to think how profoundly disturbing the idea of being trapped with two persons who can do almost anything they want to you short of killing you (and sometimes that too, as in most states of America a parent has the right to withhold medical treatment from their child for religious reasons) who are seen as the legitimate proprietors of your entire self, starting with your name is. With no money, no power, and no possibility of leaving if it gets unbearable. This is the life that "minors" lead, with the previously noted addition of the torture of school, and we dare to blame the high suicide rates in this population on their brains being defective. Here the reformist might say that this is not what families and schools should be like! Children shouldn't want to escape childhood, and childhood should be made more liveable for children (as the reformist critic of Holt, Byrne, did). A reformed "family" and a reformed "school" still rest on the essentialist assumption that children and adults are completely different, that the adult/child binary is unquestionably real (so real that it needs to be reinforced by the violence of the state towards "status offenders" and "neglectful" parents who "fail to control a child"), and most problematically would still mean that children have to trust adults to treat them well. Penniless and powerless, they would still be expected to be happy that they were lucky and that they are not being abused because the alternative of living by oneself is still unavailable. They object that not all power comes from authority, that adults naturally have power over children, and that it's better for children to be protected by "good" adults from bad ones rather than relying on themselves. As stated already, this is not true. Still, it warrants a repetition because reformists rely on this argument to present liberationists as idealistic and avoid admitting to their misopedy. In every era, the most likely perpetrator of child abuse was an adult who held power over the child because of the role they found themselves in as a parent, teacher, and so on. Even when children roamed the streets alone from morning to night. That's still the case in the global south, where even for street children, the most common perpetrators remain parents, employers, and the police (as well as older street children) (Srivastava and Shareef, 2016). There have been, of course, cases of horrible violence children experienced at the hands of strangers in the form of rapes and murders (like the case of Jacob Wetterling, after whom the USA law which forces states to implement a sex offender registry is named. Countless children are on that registry today for failing adult fantasies of innocence) and also of everyday micro-aggressions from adults who feel children are violating the "adult-ness" of public space. But anyone who has even the faintest knowledge of the principles of the feminist movement should know this doesn't mean children do better when protected by the same group of people who enacts violence against them; quite the opposite. Later on, it will be discussed that the argument which situates all children as frail creatures to protect and all adults as "loaded guns", but at the same time as the only protectors children can rely on, is obviously a fiction used to keep children in their place by erasing their acts of often even violent resistance and making the prospect of liberation appear unrealistic. Paradoxically, the reformists' adultist arguments depend on the erasure of child-on-adult violence. The community's approach to violent children is often to imagine that children are out of control because their parents no longer beat them, because corporal punishment at school has been made largely illegal (theoretically), and to claim that the law needs to be more stringent with them. But the approach of academia, while appearing more benign on the outside, is equally discriminatory, because it almost presents the child as unable to perform willful acts of violence. Amanda Holt describes this phenomenon in her chapter "Parricides, school shootings and child soldiers: Constructing criminological phenomena in the context of children who kill" in a book about non-normative trajectories of development. I believe that both of these approaches are rooted in adult guilt. Adults, anxious or in denial, know they have something to fear because they know how they treat children. Writer Zak Slayback is right in his article about the abolition of childhood "...Adults are simply persons who have grown past a certain point of development (he reminds us earlier in the article that the age at which one should be considered biologically adult is twenty-five). They do not wield inherent authority over children that is not given to them in virtue of some other role, i.e. parent" ("Let's Abolish Childhood", Slayback). I would add that just the social recognition of being an "adult" or even just "older" is enough of a role that confers them authority that they wouldn't otherwise have on a purely biological level. And even if they did have it, they haven't been using this authority for good, and the concept of families, schools, and childhood still needs to be rethought. The reformist loves to present themselves as if they were the one whose theses were grounded in reality and paint the liberationist as somehow dangerous. The family and the school are still deadly institutions, despite reformists. "The abolition of childhood may appear radical on the face, but is leaving an entire generation to the current system not radically cruel when we know we can do better?" ("Let's Abolish Childhood", Slayback). And they're all rooted in viewing children as less than adults. "Minor" literally means lesser. And "minors" are surely treated as the word suggests. Votes at 16, 14, 10 or the loosening of other limitations in the lives of "minors" wouldn't erase that some people are "minors". Monarchs, dictators, colonizers, enslavers, and abusive husbands have all compared themselves to parents; the people they oppressed retaliated because they weren't children. Teachers' existence is contingent on a perception of children as needing an adult to learn. Childhood, family, and teaching may seem like the most natural things out there; they're all social constructs with an explicit purpose; that of taming youth. They're incompatible with wanting liberation. Even if we detach them from the age group today designated as "children", that doesn't make it better. It would just be oppressing an even larger amount of people. Children also aren't the only ones impacted by age oppression. The reason why it's important to be radical, to go at the roots of a problem, is that if we bring down the pillars upon which youth oppression rests, it can hardly find new ways to regenerate itself. You will hear a reformist talk and hear nothing but what they truly believe, that the only thing that needs to change is the degree to which children experience misopedy, or the number of people that should experience it. The adults in charge made us believe that society would crumble without those institutions and the reformist doesn't question that. But maybe they're right. It would crumble, because our whole society is an act of child abuse. We should have the bravery to welcome its end. There's no easy way out, no amount of communal child-rearing and "free schools" can change the fact that if you think children need adults to live you're adultist. Adults need children to live because "adults" would just be people if there wasn't the most oppressed subject class who magnified their greatness by partaking in the rituals of violence and indoctrination of the family and the school. "Adulthood" and "childhood" would be destroyed as normalizing categories used to discipline us, but adults would start looking at the mirror and see nothing more than a person, and they can't have that. They can't have that because they would have to look at the children they used to be and recognize that they suffered for nothing. They would have to look at their parents and teachers and recognize that that wasn't how love should have looked like, that they didn't have their "best interests" at heart. They would have to recognize that history isn't over, that there are still people experiencing forms of oppression that we see as incompatible with liberal principles because liberalism defined "people" as adults and children as "Other". The history of liberal philosophy (truthfully of philosophy in general), is a violent history for children, liberal philosophers managed to even condone the murder of children by their parents to justify why they were excluded from those principles. An example is Thomas Hobbes. Holly Brewer thinks there's ample evidence to believe that (some) children fared better before liberalism, and that liberalism stripped them even of the little power they used to possess. Before liberalism after all, most adults were children to more powerful adults and some children were adults to less powerful ones. "The child effectively came to represent all that should exclude a subject from citizenship" (Mae Duane, 2010). What did the "age of revolution" mean for children when they still haven't gotten rid of their monarchs? What did it mean for them when it further affirmed the supremacy of their "monarchs" over them? Has the emancipatory history of children even begun? I would argue that it did and that as I pointed out it's radical youth liberation theorists who should write it. But unlike DeMause's history of abuse, it shouldn't imply that children are better off now because some families and schools aren't as monstrous. It should talk about the continued refusal of children to comply, until abolition is accomplished. It should be the history of runaways, status offenders, truants. It should be the history of "school refusers" and of children diagnosed with the contemporary equivalent of drapetomania, "oppositional defiant disorder" (ODD). The history of these young abolitionists who carry the dream of the abolition the family and schooling in their hearts is the only beam of light which can illuminate the way forward. Curiously, their number only seems to have increased since what was purported to be "the century of the child". They're tired of waiting for some unrealistic reforms of institutions that are rotten to their core. And they are right.