Author: Professor Ruth Kinna, University of Loughborough
I’m not a diligent watcher of royal events, but I was excited to read about the Princess of Wales’s recent visit Reggio Emilia to learn more about the way early years learning has developed in the city. The BBC report calls its child-centred approach ‘distinctive’, perhaps not realising that education across the region of Emilia-Romagna has for years been shaped by antifascist initiatives and anarchist pedagogies. In a 2012 study of early childhood education and care, Arianna Lazzari notes that the quality of provision in Emilia-Romagna is explained by the ‘collective struggles of progressive movements’, both ‘women’s movements’ and egalitarian ‘social justice movements’ (Lazzari, 2012: 557).
According to David Kennedy, anarchists seek to promote and encourage sensibilities that ‘instinctively’ resist ‘violence, hierarchy, exploitation and domination’ and promote approaches to learning ‘informed and guided by an ethos of mutual aid and cooperation’. (Kennedy, 2017: 562). How? Most plans have two interrelated parts. One is institutional. Anarchists like self-governing, grassroots, consensual community organisations, and push against old-style ‘prison models’ that lock learners into highly regulated spaces for set periods of time as a way of preparing them for the world of work. The other is philosophical. Anarchist educators cultivate theories of knowledge that encourage inquiry using possibility, uncertainty, doubt as invitations to debate, discuss and interrogate ideas about the world. Not infrequently, they also centre the curriculum on aesthetics and art. Here, the guiding idea is that collective creativity and individual self-expression stimulate cooperation and mutual aid, as well as imagination and experimentation.
There are strong affinities with Ivan Illich’s de-schooling critique and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, the rejection of the ‘banking’ model of learning and the promotion of problem-solving methods. Nineteenth-century anarchists coined the term ‘integral education’ to describe their aspiration for holistic learning. It was an inherently cross-disciplinary, decolonising project designed to counter worrying trends towards specialisation and division. Observing the spread of state education, anarchists argued that the introduction of school curricula had incentivised educators to establish the boundaries of disciplines and distinguish their content and/or methods from cognate subjects. Once defined, disciplines were further categorised as ‘arts’ or ‘sciences’.
For writers like the geographer Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), the implications were horrendous. Specialisation was a route to elitism and insularity: those who determined standards of excellence in any field would soon become its experts – monopolists of the knowledge the discipline comprised. Few of even the most proficient learners would glean much about other fields. Over time, the chance for meaningful cross-disciplinary exchange would diminish. Even if the opportunities for exchange arose, the languages of discrete disciplines would become virtually impenetrable to those unfamiliar with them. Scientists would have to solve the climate crisis. Artists would be tasked with producing images of the worlds destroyed by it.
Kropotkin’s response was to rethink the relationship between the arts and sciences. Following the lead of Michael Bakuinin (1814-1876), who had set out his vision for integral education in 1869, Kropotkin defined ‘art’ as knowledge gained from life experience and ‘science’ as knowledge based on the generalisations that proceeded from ‘art’. Art, he argued, was plural and diverse, because life itself was. People lived in different conditions and had different perceptions of the world. Their knowledge reflected this. In contrast, ‘science’ expressed truths about the world, deemed constant across diverse spaces and populations.
Kropotkin did not prioritise science over art. If the point of education was to promote cooperation and mutual aid, then sharing insights about educational practice in Emilia Romagna was as valuable as the advancement of abstract science – say, Darwin’s theory of evolution. Kropotkin’s contention was that you couldn’t really have one without the other. Science detached from life was likely to be unreliable. Art without science was impoverishing. The conundrum for the educator was to find a way of enabling art to inform science so that science remained pertinent to it. This required interconnection, trust, collaboration and dialogue. The way forward was to fashion institutions ‘from the bottom up’ to facilitate artistic exchange and the dissemination of science across communities.
These ideas about education, teaching and learning continue to animate anarchist practice. There’s a lot to learn from the art of Reggio Emilia and Emila Romagna more widely. But northern Italy is not the only place where you can find inspiring examples. The UK also boasts a range of free skools, free universities, along with experiments in curriculum design and teaching practice. In mainstream education, too, anarchists work with professionals to find spaces within the crowded school curricula to share information about anarchist approaches.
Rebel City is an initiative in this mould. While aiming to engage learners at all levels, the project has been most successful in providing workshops to students studying A-level politics or involved in extra-curricular activities, such as politics clubs. To date the collective has provided nearly 40 such workshops, mostly to schools in the Greater London area. Workshops are completely free and meet the required political impartiality guidance.
Interactive from the outset, the Rebel City technique is to challenge stereotypes, using doubt and possibility to stimulate debate. In 2023 the collective published a book based on questions raised by students during the workshops. Highly accessible and with an expansive glossary, each topic is addressed in no more than 300 words. Copies of the book, ‘For a future made by us all’ are available to download from the Rebel City website.
In future Rebel City is keen to extend its workshops to GCSE students taking Citizenship studies.
The collective would love to hear from anyone in the Greater London area or easily accessible from London who is interested in one of their workshops. Their website is https://rebelcitylondon.wordpress.com/ and the email is [email protected]
Author Biography
Ruth Kinna is a political theorist and historian of ideas with interests in historical and contemporary anarchism, nineteenth and early twentieth-century socialist thought, utopianism and political militancy. She is co-founder of Loughborough’s Anarchism Research Group and co-founder and co-convenor (2005-2018) of the Anarchist Studies Network (a specialist group of the Political Studies Association) and with Matthew S. Adams, co-editor of the peer review journal Anarchist Studies.
References:
Michael Bakunin, ‘Integral Education’ (1869) https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1869/education.htm
IDAC Group Freire-Ilich. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The Oppression of Pedagogy. The Pedagogical Debate, https://archive.org/details/ThePedagogyOfTheOppressed-FreireAndIllich/page/n1/mode/2up
David Kennedy, ‘Anarchism, Schooling, and Democratic Sensibility’, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 36, 551-568 (2017).
Peter Kropotkin, ‘What Geography Ought to Be’ (1884) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-what-geography-ought-to-be
Arianna Lazzari, ‘The Public Good. Historical and Political Roots of Municipal Preschools in Emilia Romagna’, European Journal of Education, 47 (4), 556-568 (2012).
