Adventures in Learning

When we pretend that children are just adults in hatching, waiting to become real participants in the world, we don’t merely take away their agency and lose out on their wisdom; we deny that they are already full participants in the world, on the front lines of the most critical struggles in modern history. Moreover, we rob them of global legacies of radical activism and community organizing which have been catalyzed and led by youth, with adults following their example. Traditional education is a hierarchy, and like all such systems, it is often those placed at the bottom who have the most knowledge of how that structure denies justice, and the most insights into what is to be done to change it. A radical education seeks to give youth a real voice, the ability to critique the systems of which they are a part, and the space to teach their communities what they already know of the world, and what visions they have to bring justice to it. It imagines youth as fully-realized global citizens, and as the present–not just the future–of our struggles for equity, peace and liberation.