I agree with this take and have been making similar arguments, especially to those who didn’t go because they didn’t see it as useful for a leftist cause. Like, as if sitting at home waiting for the revolution to happen on its own is somehow a better use of your time.
2% is huge. Mobilizing that many Americans is a massive accomplishment, and if even a tiny fraction of that go on to join the local orgs they likely just discovered or otherwise help to build up their local community, unlearn individualism, or do what they can to ease their community’s dependence on the global capitalist system, that’s still a hell of a lot more than anything else that would have happened this weekend.
Like, there’s this idea that some vanguard party is going to just take over the US and press the communism button and I really don’t buy it. We’re a very large country with a lot of people who’ve been propagandized since birth with neoliberal and individualist brain worms, and I think right now we really do need to be working to change that wherever we are currently living. That’ll create the material conditions necessary for a national change.
I’m really into youth liberation and the various ideas surrounding rethinking education. I’m a parent and am sending my kid to a Montessori, but I’d really love a whole system where child raising and education are seen less as responsibilities for the nuclear family unit to have full control over and a communal responsibility that everyone participated in. Letting kids guide their own education (under the general advice that anything important to learn will be intrinsically motivating, and anything that isn’t can be encouraged through instilling values rather than forcing curriculums), making things mastery focused rather than using grades and limiting ones future prospects based on their performance on tests (which, more than anything else, simply correlate with things like food security and access to tutors and stuff), generally getting rid of the concept of kids being rankable in intelligence, and above all defining a box of what’s “neurotypical” and what’s not (in favor of the neurodiversity framework).
With that in mind, I liked that this article made some good points about how this process should be decentralized and involve communities determining what they think will work best for them, and being okay with some not achieving the goals they set out with.
But I have to say, it was pretty hard to read. In particular, the negative parallelisms every 2nd sentence just interrupted the flow with constant thoughts of “this is likely written with the help of ChatGPT”.
Also, man it can be hard to find local community members to try any of this stuff with. A lot of the resources in unschooling are also tied to religious and/or conservative families wanting to homeschool so the parents can better enforce specific ideas on their kids, rather than seeking child liberation.