[As recorded for the Final Straw radio show, 9 August 2020]

The Trump administration has been pushing for schools to mandatorily reopen in the Fall. Like everything else this fascist fuckweasel has advocated since the zombie apocalypse hit, his school reopening plans really have nothing to do with benefitting the students, but serves instead the larger economic order and his own political aspirations. Kids’ returning to school frees up their parents to return to work.
Never mind that schools will be a veritable petri dish spreading COVID-19 among students and teachers, and then their families. In this context, the reopening of schools and the mandate for students to attend are clear and present dangers to the lives and well-being of all of us.
I would suggest that this policy can’t be carried out if the schools aren’t there. If the schools happen to burn to the ground before the school year begins, there IS no reopening.
Now, just to be clear, I’m not saying you should go out while everyone is wearing masks and go burn all the schools down. Well, wait. Yeah. I am saying we should all go out and burn down the schools.
So, look. Before the idiot at the FCC calls the radio station again, let me make my case for burning down the schools as a public service:
First, beyond the health risks, schools suck. We do the majority of our learning from birth to 5 years old. We’re learning machines. Then, at age 5, we get sent to Knowledge Prison, regimented in rows and columns like miniature Nazi troops, subjected to noise pollution by adults who blather shit at us they themselves find boring.
It’s a 13-year process, preventing us from exploring our world and learning important things about how the world really works. Instead, we get bombarded with useless information. It’s so useless that we forget 90% of what we’re taught. Ninety percent. Shrinks have done numerous studies and found that we retain only 10% of what we’re taught in school. That means we toss 90% of what we learn into the mental trash bin. We know we have no use for it even when the teacher is teaching it to us. And you know the kicker? The teacher knows it’s useless too. The teacher learned that knowledge in school and summarily forgot it… which is why teachers all require teachers’ guides. Teachers’ guides are necessary because the teachers themselves long ago tossed all that course information into their own mental trash bins.
Given that we only retain 10% of what schools teach us, we could reduce the entire educational process from 13 years to just 2. Not only could we condense the educational process to just 2 years, but the people who run the schools have known this for decades.
So, when you went to school, whenever that was, the folks in charge knew they were wasting 11 years of your life to teach you useless stuff they knew you weren’t learning anyway. And yet, they paid teachers and principals and stuck you on a bus and crammed you into a classroom to suffer through it, all the same.
And you know why? Just to keep you busy until age 18 and keep you out of the job market. It’s a process to keep you dependent and useless well into adulthood. And it works.
Schools now are completely useless. It used to be that schools at least taught you 10% that you retained but now you don’t even need schools for that. Language, math and grammar programs online are just as effective as any public school and so schools are obsolete.
The real agenda that schools serve now is to selectively disable the poor and minorities through the inequitable distribution of educational resources. To affirm that black lives matter, we need to scrap an educational framework that devalues black lives.
We’re now in a situation where the schools do us no good and, in fact, might kill us. Back when I went to school, I felt like the English Lit teacher’s babbling would kill me. Today, it really could. Really.
So, I’m suggesting a proactive approach, the abolition of schools, a future where young people take direct control of their own learning… a direct process not mediated by fascists who themselves cannot outsmart a virus.
And you know what? If they didn’t want schools burnt down, they wouldn’t have made them out of such flammable materials. Just saying.
Our survival requires us to expand our direct action approach. Burning cop cars and police stations was a good start. Tearing down statues of colonizers, racists, and slave owners was a fantastic continuation of that strategy. But there are a number of institutions that are part of this structural racism and oppression, including schools.
They can topple just like statues.
Gravity is very egalitarian.
Gas is cheap. Matches are free. Schools suck.
This is Anarchist Prisoner Sean Swain in exile from Ohio at Buckingham Correctional in Dillwyn, Virginia. If you’re listening, you ARE the resistance…

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[Feel free to print this out and distribute to students everywhere…]

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Anarchist Prisoner

Sean Swain
DOC #2015638