Emancipating Education

John Lupinacci, Joseph Flynn

We are all living in a time of unprecedented uprising and revelation. Although building momentum for quite some time under the guise of neoliberal reform and conservative activism against progressive, critical, and liberatory pedagogies, practices, and curriculum, the nature and soul of American education is front and center in the political arena. Amidst conservative efforts to take control of public education, a resistance to these efforts reverberates across society, and strong voices for change are emerging that challenge extreme conservatism neoliberal politics, society, and schooling (Haerpfer et al. 2022; Redl et al. 2023; Teixeira, 2024). Young climate activists are shutting down city centers while Indigenous water protectors stand against pipeline construction (Sengupta 2019; Koeppel, 2019). Black Lives Matter protesters face down police brutality as mutual aid networks, reborn and forged in the crucible of COVID-19, demonstrate the power of community-based care (Davis-Cohen, 2020; Scott 2020; Gulliver-Garcia, 2022). In every corner of society, people are rejecting systems of oppression and creating new ways of being. Yet ironically, most of our educational institutions remain stubbornly anchored in compliance, control, and colonization.

The traditional school system was never designed for liberation. It was built to maintain social hierarchies, suppress indigenous knowledge, and produce compliant workers for capitalist economies (Spring, 2019). Even now, as the world burns and floods, as pandemics expose vast inequalities, as young people take to the streets demanding change, most schools continue enforcing outdated patterns of obedience and standardization. Despite the inherent nature of all teaching being political, there is a concerted effort from governments both local, national, and globally to teach climate science without ecological activism, civil rights without uprising and direct action, and history without revolution (Ayers, 2004; Martusewicz et al. 2021). There is a push to make things less political. However, the collection of the essays, musings, rants, and research shared in this project are born out of conversations about politics, music, art and all centered around how we teach critically and creatively to engage learners and to be unapologetically political—not simply a cog in the machine of any one political agenda or doctrine but to being situational, local, and in support of social justice and sustainability as healthy living systems (Lupinacci 2011; 2013).

Whenever ideas among critical educators start to form like clouds circling into a storm, it’s a beautiful thing. This book is nothing short of a good ole fashioned Midwest thunderstorm with some tornados touching down and of course some sideways rain from the wind and moments of sleet and golf ball sized hail because, why not. The call for this book came out before COVID-19 and with no shortage of energy had an eclectic response, and like when any critical call hits the internet or gets shared among critical scholars and their students, it seems to be met with great excitement and for the most part with a sustained interest—however, for some it’s not the same kind of excitement.

What we mean is that while some of us get amped for the potential convening and sharing of ideas and projects with colleagues with the hopes of learning together and potentially connecting with new collaborators, others—well, to put it bluntly—“Freak the fuck out” and see such convening as a threat to the gatekeeping of scholarship, higher education, the carcerality of schools, to social hierarchies and more. Sad but true, the fantastic freak outs of those crying for less political work is also a reminder for why me must continue to work together to find ways to keep critical work diverse and inclusive and to involve students and activists to learn with us together and take action to interrupt the increasingly neoliberalized and sanitized sharing of so-called research. So, what is the big threat? Well, before we introduce the contributors’ work in this collection let us pull from some artist-scholars to build up a case for why it’s ever important to maintain creativity and work as part of emancipating education from the grasps of schooling!

In 2016 Guitarist Tom Morello (2016) said: “100 percent of music is political. Music either supports the status quo or challenges the status quo. So, every artist is political.” Morello (2016) in the same interview in Rolling Stone said: “You are a historical agent, and if you don’t have your hands on the steering wheel, someone else does.” One hundred percent of education research is political; one hundred percent of research is political. Every chapter of this edited collection and every chapter of any book ever written is political, as is every last article in every single journal. So, why is it that certain work gets labeled as too political or even as political when everything is?