Reviews and Comments

Initially, I really liked this because it was one of the first introductions to anarchism and education that I'd had. It often feels like no one is talking about it, and it's sometimes hard to find information in a range of disparate sources.

I can't totally dislike this because it did send me on my own path towards finding projects and learning more about different school movements, but it's unfortunate that the author is a TERF and supports TERF-related projects. While I'm not going to say that I can't recognise that anarchists can be bigots (especially white anarchists), it still frustrates me that they manage to exist and perpetuate hierarchies that they should find unjustified and fight against. As a result, this is a book that I refuse to recommend to anyone. There are other people doing the work to bring the history and philosophy to light who aren't transphobes. [Note: It recently dawned on me that she may not identify as an anarchist and is simply an academic who is 'interested' in anarchism because I've never seen her identify as such. However, my point still stands.]

And if you need to get this book for any reason, pirate it. She deserves nothing, and the publisher needs to know she is not welcome in liberatory spaces.

I think, as a white person with a grounding in anarchism in North America and Europe, this book is absurdly necessary precisely because of its title. It's so easy to find information about the white men who discussed and organised under the anarchist banners, but everyone else seems to be strangely missing (from this ideology that, in many ways, is based on culturally stolen concepts that go unacknowledged).

This book highlights the ways in which anarchism (and similar ideologies) were at play in South Asia (specifically the places we know today as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) both before partition and before independence. It's incredibly interesting as an introduction and has definitely prompted me to look into many of the people discussed (and to revisit the few I did happen to know).

It's also brilliant in that it shows the ways in which anarchism is truly a global movement and that we should be practicing on more international lines. Many of the Indian anarchists and leftists mentioned in this book read and interacted with more 'famous' anarchists and visited them in the US and throughout Europe. Why is it that the names of, in this instance, Indian radicals are not as well known as those of their European contemporaries? (This is rhetorical; it's obvious.)

If you listen to the Have You Heard podcast, this book is going to be super predictable. It focuses largely on the GOP's push to dismantle US public schooling, and it focuses on Betsy DeVos more than anyone else. While DeVos definitely was responsible for harming schools, this has been a long process that has taken place over decades. It's frequently bipartisan, too.

The book has a strong liberal-conservative framework. Because of this, it smashes a lot of people into the same categories for the same reason without actually understanding the nuance behind beliefs. For example, they keep saying that people who want to dismantle public schools do so because they want to generate profit! Well, that's not true when you include people who want to dismantle public schools because they see school abolition as being part of the path to justice and freedom.

There's a lot of scare quotes around words like "system," as if we're supposed to forget that schools are part of a system. The authors want you to not view schools in that light, and I think that actually hurts their argument more than it helps.