Fugitive Pedagogy Comes To Florida: Socialist Teachers Actively Break State Law In The Classroom
This is how they will teachers will get around the anti-CRT bills
From September 1-3, I went undercover at the largest socialist conference in the country, Socialism 2023. In this series, I’ll show you what the real Marxist left talks about when they think we aren’t listening.
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One of the last sessions I went to at the Socialism 2023 conference was called Fighting Fascism In Florida.
During the discussion portion of the session, when anyone in the audience got a chance to speak, educator Jesse Hagopian came up to the microphone and confessed that teachers in Florida had zoomed him into their classrooms to teach concepts that Ron DeSantis and Florida law had banned.
He calls this Fugitive Pedagogy.
It’s also sometimes referred to as Smuggler Pedagogy. And it came up A LOT at the Socialism 2023 conference. This is how they plan to get around anti-CRT laws that are being passed on the state level.
I'm Jesse Hagopian I'm a teacher in Seattle and I work with black lives matter at school and the Zinn education project and rethinking schools.
So I've actually got to zoom in and do meetings with classrooms in Florida and with some bold teachers who invited us into the classroom in in the tradition of fugitive pedagogy. You know, and smuggling in contraband curriculum showing the film the rebellious life of Mrs Rosa Parks and then having us come and discuss systemic racism in the state where it's illegal.
This wasn’t even the first time Jesse presented this idea at the conference.
He presented a session the previous day called Freedom to Learn: Black And Asian American Solidarity Against Attacks on Antiracist Education. This was the same session I caught the ALA President Emily Drabinski stating she wanted to make libraries a site of Marxist organizing.
Jesse was a speaker in this session, where he not only discussed fugitive pedagogy, but how education should always have been the primary focus to transform the world into a socialist society.
“I want to wrap up by talking about why I think this struggle for anti-racist Education right now should be a central fight for the left for the Socialist movement in this country… too often left organizations have seen education as one just one among many arenas of struggle instead of seeing it as a centrally strategically important struggle that the potential to bring together tens of millions of people.
When you think of everyone - public school students and all the parents and all the educators who are unionized - this should have always been a major focus of those of us who want to transform the world and see a socialist society.”
Wayne Au presented with Jesse in the Confronting The Backlash session, where he also discussed the idea of smuggler pedagogy:
And others at the conference picked up and embraced the idea as well.
Here is an audience member in Confronting The Backlash embracing Smuggler Pedagogy:
Here is a sports writer scheduled to speak at Florida Atlantic University in November (a publicly funded university) that was told by administrators that if he called his talk “Sports Today” he could trick the administration into agreeing to let him do his real talk, which is “Burn It Down Ron DeSantis.”
The idea is that if they call the talk “Sports Today” to get approval, the speaker can show up and talk about whatever he wants. He cites this as an example of fugitive pedagogy.
In that talk, he plans to encourage students to be antifascists.
And finally, we have Erik Wallenberg, a former professor who was fired from The New College in Florida and a speaker on the Fighting Fascism in Florida panel.
He encouraged everyone to bring their fugitive pedagogy to Florida.
Erik also had a lot of spicy things to say about New College, and especially Christopher Rufo, which I will explore in my next article.
The point is this: Laws will not stop them from teaching what they want when the classroom door closes. School boards are not going to stop them either - there are only two states in the country where school boards have say over curriculum: Vermont and Connecticut. The rest is just for show.
Roughly half of the attendees at the Socialism 2023 conference were teachers and educators, and they are looking for ways to implement fugitive pedagogy to smuggle their ideas into the classroom, even when they have been banned.
Are you ready to combat this?
Questions?
Let me know in the comments!
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The nazis also taught bad curriculums behind the backs of parents. But they’ll just say “but I’m doing it cause it’s good according to me.”