Songs of school abolition

Abstract

In this article, I theorize school abolition as a shift needed to unsettle education within current times of ecological precarity. As a practice and horizon, abolition reorganizes schooling’s ruling episteme by articulating humanity as a collective performance beyond the pedagogical paradigms of western man. Because racial capitalist schooling produced the political and economic subjects enacting socioecological destruction, even a progressive reformation of the school into a socially just institution will not save the planet. Disruptive pedagogy and insurgent curriculum are now an existential necessity, and school abolition offers a foundation for building liberatory alternatives. In this article, I consider school abolition by way of Gumbs’s experimental M Archive, which grounds three interrelated lines of speculation. First, I theorize schooling and extraction as two interrelated forms of violence, utilizing the work of Hartman, Ferreira da Silva, and Wynter to argue that both constitute material transformations essential to western humanism. Second, I suggest that school abolition is a natural consequence of climate catastrophe, drawing on Butler’s Parable of the Sower to illustrate the importance of learning and teaching forms of knowledge while surviving ecological precarity. Third, I speculate on the role of music, working with Jordan’s “The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones” to think more about collective and everyday forms of school abolition. These unique threads are connected by their account of how school and its abolition (dis)organizes collective definitions of humanity and its relationship with the environment.