What is School Abolition?

The first time I encountered the term “school abolition” was at the Free Minds Free People conference in 2017 in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. David Stovall was hosting a workshop called “Are we ready for school abolition?” and the question felt provocative, dangerous, forbidden. I was tired from an overnight drive from Detroit to Baltimore, crossing the mountains in my little Prius and hoping this conference had some worthwhile answers for my weary youth organizer soul.

I had no idea how transformative this little basement classroom would turn out to be. Dr. Stovall captivated the room with his dynamic speaking style and larger than life presence. He patiently explained to us that a place where silent children in matching uniforms had to walk single file along a taped line in a hallway could not credibly be called a school-to-prison “pipeline” but must be identified, by any honest assessment, as a prison. This was the first time I had heard an educator put this reality so simply. I knew that the youth activists I worked with would say something similar about how it felt to be a student in a classroom, and I had felt it when I dropped out of school, but I had never had the language, the permission, to make this systemic argument.

In the 8 years since discovering I was “ready for school abolition”, the term abolition has become more widely mainstream thanks to the work of many dedicated prison and police abolitionists. I never expected to hear a politician argue for “abolishing the department of education” but Donald Trump is an expert at weaponizing our language for his own agenda. However, I am not prepared to cede this language to the far right just yet. In fact, it is because of the progressive movement’s myopic focus on school funding as the sole solution to systemic educational injustices that the far right has been able to claim such broad authority to reshape, dismantle, and defund schools. Therefore, I believe it is high time to articulate a School Abolitionist vision for education justice.

School abolition simply means applying the lessons of hundreds of years of abolitionist organizing to the schooling system. This is possible because schools, like slavery and policing, are historically and materially situated at the core of capitalism and colonialism. Schools are ideological institutions that owe their existence to the violent program of residential schooling of indigenous children and the industrial revolution’s drive to whitewash immigrants in the urban centers. Today we like to imagine schools as benevolent caretakers of children, striving towards the American dream and creating politically neutral good citizens. This is, unfortunately, no more true today than it was in the early 1900s.

But what the Trump administration doesn’t understand is that abolition never means simply erasing an institution people rely on and leaving them to scramble for themselves. As abolitionists from W.E.B Du Bois to Mariam Kaba have taught us, abolition must be a creative process - a vision for a “constellation of alternatives” (Angela Davis) to policing (or schooling) that positively achieves the real justice our communities deserve. A world without schools doesn’t mean a world where no one ever learns to read or swim or dance, just as a world without prisons doesn’t mean a world where people steal and hurt without consequence. 

In order to envision a constellation of alternatives to schooling, we need to understand what “schooling” actually is. According to Ivan Illich, who wrote “Deschooling Society” around the same time his comrade Paolo Freire was writing “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, schooling consists of three main components: Coercion, Institutionalization, and Hierarchy. Coercion is any type of threatening force: suspension, arrest, grading, or a ruler on the knuckles are all types of coercion that exist in schools. Institutionalization means learning is only allowed to happen through an institution. It’s similar to when we talk about the “monopoly of the state” on violence. The state also claims a monopoly on education, including acceptable curriculum, behavioral standards, and testing. Finally, schooling is based on Hierarchy, or what Illich calls “certification.” This means the system reproduces itself by moving people through a series of its own certifications which give them access to greater and greater agency, power, and legitimacy within the system.

These three components of schooling form the foundation of our capitalist system, socializing us to accept and even value systemic violence and hegemony. They are not accidents of an underfunded system doing the best it can, they are baked into the founding logic of how schools are intended to work. The best our movements have ever been able to do is carve out small niches of liberatory education within this edifice, easily attacked and dismantled when we present the slightest actual threat to the system’s real goals.

With this definition of schooling in mind, we can see that the far right is not actually anti-school. They are deeply pro-school, evidenced by their hyperfocus on religious schools, virtual schools, vouchers, school police and, most recently, artificial intelligence. A tech billionaire and AI advocate recently admitted as much, saying schools would always have to exist because “people need childcare.” Schools are, first and foremost, a warehouse for the children of workers and, secondly, a machine for sorting those children into their “appropriate” economic class - working class kids get VoTech, ruling class kids get leadership development.

When the left’s response to the legitimate critiques of school made by students and parents with an uncritical call to “fund schools” we cede an important part of the debate to the right. It is our unwillingness to meaningfully address the contradiction between schooling and education, the many ways even well funded schools harm children and families, that has kept us from winning actual education justice in any community anywhere in the country. The pro-school progressives unintentionally push out youth and parent activists who are the most harmed by and aware of this contradiction and who aren’t interested in being part of a booster club for their harmful, dangerous, and oppressive schools.

School Abolition is a call for a visionary approach to education justice, to look past the schooling smokescreen of Coercion, Institutionalization, and Hierarchy and see the liberatory education happening throughout our communities every day. Much of this work is unfunded, unscalable, and unreplicable - specifically because of the monopoly exerted by schools. School Abolition calls us to divest from this harmful, oppressive system and invest our collective time, money, and passion into building a constellation of alternatives and a vision of an education system that is truly just and liberatory.