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Here are some thoughts on the academies of education as a long-time anarchist who upon leaving high school told myself once to never set foot in school again. Long story short, I somehow ended up eventually becoming a tenured professor and for the last 10+ years having been teaching. Queue terrible person chants… now!

I like that the question has academies in parenthesis, because like all things – this idea seems to have many areas. For example, some tenured anarchist university professor writing and lecturing on these things, applying and researching for grants, editing and publishing really expensive books, and other parts of campus life is how I imagine the ideal anarchist academic. Think Noam Chomsky. Or the post-anarchist tradition of professors writing on the subject.

This is far from the world I know as a professor though. Then you have smaller community colleges and professors, many of whom are adjuncts. Working as an adjunct is like the worst teaching job ever, as the pay is quite bad and the work load demanding. I imagine these people as anarchists IRL who just work teaching something, like maybe computer science to the kids. However, full-time tenured at a community college seems like it would be, if there was an ideal, the best possible place for anarchists working in the academy (maybe?).

And last, you have the secondary and elementary school teachers, often public – rarely Waldorf or other anarchist friendly alternative. Within this academy, for anarchy you have to really look hard to find the moments, like maybe an after school club. Depending on the state you live and work in, you might not even have to have a college degree, although many of the “higher ranked” states require teachers to have a master’s degree (often 6 years of college) and continual professional development and workshops / paper work over your career. Plus, you have to deal with kids all day, and sometimes their even worst parents / family. I think on some level, these are the three main areas of what could be called the academy of anarchist instructors.

I’m not researching and writing papers for the academy, although the option is there, if desired I suppose. There are also region, state, and national organizations one can join based on the exact field of the academy one belongs to, although nothing specifically anarchist about that, unless perhaps the subject material was anarchist related. My job, in many ways really has nothing to do with anarchy other than the small moments one may find the idea in. Like Chomsky, my field is that of language. I prefer the book “Letters of Insurgents” and Sophia’s thoughts on teaching and organization / non-organization of their classes as a guiding principal; and, of course, the Modern School classics, Pablo Freire, too many to name. Today, there are certainly a lot of popular anarchists within the academy in the USA. As Sophia wrote in LoI, “I decided during my first teaching job that I wasn't going to let myself be reduced to a means of production for the production of means of production.”

On the brighter side of things - One thing I really like about this line of work is the amount of time off and vacation throughout the year. For people who aren’t consumed by the job, and it can definitely happen if you let it, there is a lot of time for other, perhaps more anarchist projects. The job has definitely taught me a lot about unions as well, with many opportunities for interaction, as the teachers union is often in the news, especially as schooling has become a major news headline. On the educational institute level, everything across the board seems to be really really bureaucratic at so many levels and it’s often a wonder professors and teachers even have time for writing or other academic pursuits with all the paper work needed for stuff.

For the last 10+ years working as a professor, I’ve never really thought about myself as an anarchist academic, especially because my job doesn’t entail me talking about specific anarchist content, but rather just another job and means of surviving doing something for a living – another worker in the mix of it all.