“There’s people sleeping in the snow

while parents tuck their children into bed,

and for what future, I don’t know”

- Pigeon Pit, “People On The Bus”

It seems that it’s becoming more and more difficult to be a child these days.

The United States advanced its public schooling with the New Deal and post-war liberalism, and experienced growing affluence in the start of the neoliberal era. Similarly, the returns of the second-wave feminism and gay rights movements advanced liberal notions of “progress.” Even though the material realities of children included abuse, discipline, and violence, there was at least an idea that children will consistently inherit a better world with each generation.

Somewhere, that idea fell apart.

Maybe it was the War on Terror, a strengthening surveillance state in both the government and the home, the 2008 economic crash, the dismantling of the university as a tool for class mobility or stability, increases in mass shootings, a global pandemic, moral panics over sex and gender, or an impending climate catastrophe. The particulars of social collapse change depending on children’s positionality. For some children, this social crisis is something like a reconnaissance of their private and public lives. For others, it’s an increasingly authoritarian and antagonistic christo-fascist government, intent on eradicating queerness and transness in young people and broader society, and a disturbing “parent’s rights” movement. Or, it’s the growing militarization of the police and regulation of public space; or, the I.M.F. and World Bank continuing to drive the Global South into deeper poverty, forcing children to enter the labor force in abject conditions. Maybe it was never one of these things, and there may never be an agreement on why that idea faltered. At any rate, the last 25 years have made the political struggles of children more pronounced.

This is especially unfortunate, because the solutions that are commonly touted in mainstream discourse aren’t really about children. Trans children, excluded from medical decisions, are under the de facto control of parents and doctors, as well as the state and church. The response of neoliberalism’s ideological and state apparatuses  to abuse and gun violence in schools has led to more carceral school systems and class-stratified private-school mechanisms, while contemporary pseudo-scientific anti-intellectualism has formed new waves of retrograde conservative homeschooling. Child laborers, primarily in the Global South, are seen as either a tragic case for NGOs to solve, or as unfortunate but necessary casualties for global capitalism to function. Nowhere in mainstream discourse are there solutions that don’t reify adult supremacy. To move out of this, we—children and adults— need revolutionary arguments and visions.

There is a history of family abolition in radical feminist traditions. Perhaps most well known are Canadian radical feminist Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex and Soviet politician and theorist Alexandra Kollontai’s idea of a “universal family of workers”  presented in her essay “Communism and the Family.”1 Family abolition has had somewhat of a revival in the last several years. K.D. Griffiths and J.J. Gleeson published their essay “Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st Century Family and a Communist Proposal for its Abolition” in 2015, followed by Sophie Lewis’ Full Surrogacy Now and Abolish The Family in 2019 and 2022 respectively, and M.E. O’Brien’s Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care in 2023. O’Brien notes that these writers (and presumably herself) “are all concerned with the revolutionary project of communism,”2 contrasting them from queer theorists of the late-20th century and contemporary liberals. These recent materials illuminate two important pieces of information that those of us who want to live in solidarity with children must remember: the only people taking youth liberation seriously are those involved in revolutionary efforts (namely, communism, socialism, and anarchism; anti-racial-capitalist struggle; radical feminism; and queer/trans liberation). And second: here, beyond the limits of liberal inclusion and state-granted “rights,” is where we will find actual solutions to adult supremacy.

These twenty-first century works are all interlocutors in Madeline Lane-McKinley’s new book, Solidarity With Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy, published in November of 2025 via Haymarket Books. Lewis’ work is a self-described manifesto that makes specific demands, and O’Brien’s book develops a systematic critique of the capitalist family form. Both inform Lane-McKinley’s book, but the specific subject of the family form is not her primary focus. Instead, she starts from the point that the world is profoundly against children, and any revolutionary political struggle must account for and include children in their struggle. Without this, children are reduced to images and figures for adults to discuss, dissect, inquire about, mold, stoke fear over, and empathize for—though never to liberate.

What is required for solidarity begins with listening.3 This is a truly somber starting point. Is the struggle against adult supremacy so beaten down that our most immediate thing that we can and must do is simply listen? What a pitiful state to be in, that we are so far behind the first step of solidarity. As if young people’s stubbornness and indignation were trivial, or worse yet, a character flaw. At any rate, this is where we start. Solidarity With Children takes us from there to revolutionary vision.

This is not a typical work of theory. There are brief discussions of Engels, Foucault, and several postcolonial scholars—though, they are present to lay the groundwork in explaining the mechanics of capitalist, disciplinary, and colonial structures, rather than open up large theoretical conversations on their own.4 Lane-McKinley uses the tools that theory and criticism give us, but the end product is something much broader than a typical academic book can offer. Some of this is encouragement to “do” theory, and Lane-McKinley has mentioned elsewhere that there are cross-generational reading groups for Solidarity With Children, where children and adults read and discuss this book together.5    

The actual genre of Solidarity With Children flows from manifesto to memoir, though much of this book stands as literature review. Lane-McKinley takes her readers through two centuries of histories, theory, and politics. She focuses on counter-readings of children’s books, Marxist-feminist analyses of domestic work and (re)production, and the legacies of American imperialism in schools. This is an essay against adult supremacy, and Lane-McKinley is skilled and experienced in gathering evidence to make her revolutionary case. This said, the introduction and first three chapters of this book read more like Lane-McKinley explaining the problem at hand. If you’re interested in the history of childhood, motherhood, schools, and social justice (especially if you are using this for academic work, as I wish I had been able to do in college), then this is an intriguing read. But these chapters are mostly reviews of other people’s work, with her responses worked into the chapters. The reason for this—once again, fulfilling the essay form—is because Lane-McKinley uses these issues to highlight the problems to which her argument is responding to. It clarifies the stakes of this discourse. “Childhood” is a social totality6 for which there is no clear or equivalent comparison, and of which all manners of freedom are regulated and conditional. So even at the book’s most edifying (which, to be clear, these moments are not presented in a tedious manner), it’s obvious that the point of that edification is to underscore the myriad of ways adults oppress children, from the exceptional to the mundane, and the benevolent to the revanchist.

Some of Solidarity With Children’s strongest sections are Lane-McKinley’s close reading of language and words. She unburies the word “adolescent” to expose its Latin origin, adolescere, meaning “to grow to maturity.”7 She urges us to salvage the verb “to grow,” something all of us are doing well past childhood. This opens us up to new possibilities of living and growing with each other in solidarity. There is also a brilliant section in Chapter 2, “The Possibility of Motherhood,” where she takes a scalpel to the word “mother.” She writes, “‘mothering’ is a gerund, both a noun and a verb—or, as I prefer, a verb breaking out of a noun. ‘Mother,’ by extension, is also split. As a noun, ‘mother’ is what one is called and, in worse cases, what one is made to feel obligated as. As a verb, ‘to mother’ can be much else.”8 In this extract, the analysis of the actual word “mother” and what that means is extremely clever in examining what words can do. This brings in the central questions of this chapter. What are the possibilities of care, and what are the possibilities of the language we use for it? Lane-McKinley works with language and text in the ways that literary theory wants us to: how do we make meaning? How does this shape acts of care? If discourse is so central, then what does it mean to mother, and what does telling stories about alternative kin-dynamics mean?

Lane-McKinley walks a gray area between Marxism and anarchism, and she brings the best parts of them together. These are, respectively, a rigorous analysis of social production, ownership, and property; and a spirited, defiant critique of state violence and capitalist-adultist domination. Especially lucid is Lane-McKinley’s observation that “if there is a history of childhood at all, it is a history of a property relation, of the idea that children can be owned.”9 In clarifying this idea, she references the postwar figure of the teenage girl, announced by LIFE magazine in 1944. She was unaffected by World War II, and now indulges herself in clothes, slumber parties, and cutesy decor. “She is, in other words, an ideal consumer, conjured by the culture industry,”10 Lane-McKinley writes. The real children of postwar America are overshadowed by this figure of the teenage girl, who exists solely as a market factor. This is a clear and acute diagnosis of the “political problem” of childhood: a collection of narratives and affective investments and a state of quasi-property are fundamentally anti-child sentiments, yet they are the groundwork for adultist conception of an entire group of people.11 If one can recognize this problem, then all of adult supremacy’s mechanisms (and resistance to it) start to fall into place.

Another way to think about this bridge: Solidarity With Children grounds itself in Marxist content, but expresses itself with an anarchist style. Returning to Lane-McKinley’s evaluation of the words “mother” and “mothering” as gerunds, one can appreciate how she locates acts of “mothering” in a labor relationship. Her expressed point of this chapter is not the how, but “more a matter of unbolting the verb from the noun of ‘mother.’” Marxist in its object of analysis (“mother,” a labor practice), anarchist in its syntax (“unbolting,” an act of liberation).12 If there is to be justice, whether economic or social, it must require liberation. Instead of working to draw linkages between the two theoretical traditions, as many leftist writing attempts to do, Solidarity With Children knows this political project already uses—and requires—both.

Any review of this book would be woefully inadequate if it didn’t mention its personal touch. Throughout, Lane-McKinley recounts fragments of her experience as a child and parent. She writes on pregnancy, post-partum depression, and raising a child in solidarity with them. Lane-McKinley showcases her strength as a writer, and there sits a reminder that she has also published poetry just behind the physical pages. She writes honestly about her pregnancy, the feelings of alienation, of undoing, of frustration at the lack of care after birth. I wasn’t sure what the uncomfortable feeling in my stomach was the first time I read this, but I recognized it the second time: fear. Whether I was scared for her or with her, I do not know. But I do know that, in making her argument for a radical collective care structure, that fear is important for me to feel. Fear is, after all, a defining emotion of both childhood and parenthood.

There is a crucial distinction between Solidarity With Children and its interlocutors. Solidarity With Children is obviously in dialogue and partnership with family abolition and youth liberation politics; these are the political projects Lane-McKinley is working with. But she offers something other volumes haven’t: methods.

The first word in the book’s title is not “children” or “youth,” nor the term “adult supremacy”; it is “solidarity.” When we regard solidarity as a method—a way to recognize difference, acknowledge shared struggle, and work together—we finally open up pathways to a freer world for all people. This is woven throughout the book. Lane-McKinley uses this framework to bring together some truly astounding observations of capitalist discipline and domination. In Chapter 1 she notes, “[i]n the history of private property, the figure of the child must be understood alongside the figure of the slave.”13 Upon first reading, this seems like an awkward tension. How can we claim children are quasi-property with the aim of arguing against adult supremacy, and then say that is a relative privilege in comparison to the history of chattel slavery? But the connective tissue between these two figures is that of a property relation; the only way of reconciling this tension is by finding solidarity between people under capitalist and state domination, both public and domestic. The primacy of solidarity is clarified further in Chapter 2, where Lane-McKinley references Mariarosa Dalla Costa, whose essay “Women and the Subversion of Community” reveals solidarity between children and mothers. Lane-McKinley touches on Selma James and Silvia Federici’s analyses of domestic class struggle: “the housewife/mother is left to personally endure the class conflict in relation to her husband and children. The child, by extension, cannot know the mother apart from these conditions” (emphasis added).14 This is where solidarity as a revolutionary socialist method starts to become clear, and Lane-McKinley elaborates on this in further chapters.

This book probably wouldn’t work as a plain and simple critique of adult supremacy. Every point she makes about adult supremacy opens up possibilities for more theorizing and critique. Notably, she sticks to the largest issues: the idea of childhood, the impossibility of motherhood, and the problem with schools. Listing every site of adultist domination would make one volume thousands of pages. For instance, if political rhetoric of “protecting the children” in the U.S. meant anything, we would be appalled at high school football. But that is so astronomically far from the point, dissecting that would be pointless. A project like this needs to focus on something else, something that we can use now and bring into the future, rather than leave in the past. This thing is solidarity.

Chapter 3, “The Trouble With School,” gives us the most examples of solidarity with children on-screen in the entire book. Lane-McKinley opens this chapter, in an obviously inter-generational solidaristic manner, expressing sympathies for students and for teachers, both of whom are under increasing pressure and scrutiny from state-enforced exams and reactionary political movements. Through the histories of residential schools and anarchist un-schooling practices, as well as analyzing filmic depictions of youth/student revolt, Lane-McKinley uncovers a powerful tradition of youth liberation and revolution in the face of institutional violence. In one of the most totalized social institutions, Lane-McKinley asks us to rethink schools: how can we make education a part of a freer world?

Radical schooling is perhaps where we see the most immediate and obvious practices of solidarity with children. “Every day,” Lane-McKinley writes, “children go to schools where they are bullied by other children or abused by adults. Children are sent by adults who are legally responsible for their safety and care, without being warned of or prepared for the potential dangers.”15 Lane-McKinley returns to the first step of solidarity here: listening to children. Taking seriously their concerns and frustrations about schools, and what we can all do about it to make a freer and more lively education, one without fear of violence or assault, abuse or ostracism, disease or malaise, is paramount. This chapter, much like the one before it, recalls Lane-McKinley’s memories as both a child and a parent. She remembers Shuhada’ Sadaqat (née Sinéad O’Connor) ripping up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live as one of the first times she had seen a political act of solidarity with children.16 Child abuse is mostly done in the home and the school, and Sadaqat responded appropriately. Lane-McKinley traces the abuses of schools from residential schools in North America to the present as still a site of much destruction and death. She recalls the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on her kid’s schooling. Her experience as a teacher and parent surfaces above her training as a cultural scholar and dialectician. The era of online schooling was far from ideal, but did, however briefly, force us to re-conceptualize what schooling could be. When schools reopened, the mix of frustration and fear that most parents and students felt was a crucial politicizing moment. The adult anxiety of the supposed “learning loss” of the pandemic obscured the reality that the U.S. educational system was already in crisis, and as Lane-McKinley asserts, “the pandemic had simply made that reality undeniable.”17 Many children were forced back to schools before a vaccine rollout, and they recognized that they were not safe in schools. This did not matter, since it was the adult imagination and adultist institutions that mandated their return. Children, of course, knew this, and they knew many adults in their lives were lying. What might have come of that first year or two of schooling, had adults actually listened to the children around them? Would the functions and structures of school be completely different? What if we had children calling the shots on their own education? This practice of solidarity is an impossible horizon, so far away from what we currently do with schools—and that is exactly what we need.

Schools are only “for” children in the most ostensible manner. They center adults: teachers, administration, parents, and the bosses and statesmen who manage populations and resources once children matriculate. A solidaristic approach to school is one that does not make school “for” children, but is a way of schooling with children. One such way of schooling with children is that of deschooling, an approach first developed by Austrian priest and philosopher Ivan Illich.18

His philosophy of deschooling pairs neatly with Shulamith Firestone’s critique of childhood. She argues that feminist revolution must include “the elimination of the very conditions of femininity and childhood themselves,”19 and one of those conditions that constructs the cluster of “childhood” is the existence of schools. In other words, a radical feminist revolution includes the abolition of schools. We may look to the German aufheben to develop some frameworks for planning for school abolition. Aufheben is often translated to “abolish,” though it also means to preserve, to lift, to transcend—to pull to a higher or next stage. Another way to think of this: what do we want to lift out of the misery of school? And what will we lift it into? These are some of the questions that children and adults must ask each other.

Firestone’s utopian vision of the future fully communizes all parts of life—housing, the economy, education, and city planning, to name a few. For specifics regarding education, she defaults to cybernetics radically altering how teaching is conducted. Dialectic of Sex was published in 1970, so Firestone does not elaborate on the particulars of “cybernetic communism,” nor develop a specific political program.20 This, however, is not her aim; she’s making a case for radical feminist revolution, not mapping out a planned economy pertaining to specific pre-existing social and material conditions. And that’s fine, because other radical thinkers have done this. If Firestone offers a negative version of youth liberation (one concerned with dismantling oppressive systems in the name of radical feminist utopia), then K.D. Griffiths and J.J. Gleeson, along with Ivan Illich before them, offer positive versions (potential programs that can be worked with for a solidaristic relationship with children). Griffiths and Gleeson suggest an “anti-dyadic crèche” as a communist program that will take care of children from gestation to adulthood (inasmuch as “adulthood” has any meaning in a communist society). They affirm that “the project of communism is to collapse these three levels of social reproduction [wherein the family produces individual workers, acts as a site of collective labor, and links the working class to the state] into a single organically constituted sphere.” This crèche is the sector of this concerned with socially reproductive and educational labor. The distinction between early childhood care, early childhood education, and higher education break down in the crèche. In addition to providing childcare, healthcare (including vaccines and transition related care), food and housing, these crèches offer education that ensures a surplus of skilled labor, and would do away with what we call post-secondary education as a marker of elite class distinction.21

Griffiths and Gleeson provide fertile ground for theorizing life beyond schools, even if their essay is primarily concerned with the family as an institution in capitalist political economy, rather than examining children specifically as an oppressed class. Illich sketches out an alternative to schooling more attentive to children in his ideas around deschooling. He refers to this new type of education as a “learning web,” and it is grounded as much in individual choice and movement as it is collective skill-sharing. Illich suggests that children would be entitled to private consultation with a teacher of their choice, and exchanged via educational vouchers; additionally, students would be dependent on libraries and apprenticeships. Illich clarifies this, writing, “[l]earners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. . . . [Learning webs] should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.”22 Illich’s program for free speech, assembly, and press to be fully educational points to a key node in his and Lane-McKinley’s writing: learning is something everyone can and does do for their entire life. The creation of learning webs neutralizes the assumption that we do not.

One incisive point that Illich brings up is that of free assembly. Under neoliberal democratic values,

“The right of free assembly has been politically recognized and culturally accepted. We should now understand that this right is curtailed by laws that make some forms of assembly obligatory. This is especially the case with institutions which conscript according to age group, class, or sex, and which are very time-consuming. The army is one example. School is an even more outrageous one.”23

For youth liberationists, it may be less valuable to think of schools as potential hubs of radical thinking and consciousness raising, as some radicals do,24 than it would be to recognize them as gravity zones where democratic ideals are pulled in and warped—at the expense of teachers as laborers, and especially at the expense of children. This is why deschooling is a helpful intervention. It offers us a radical potential to educate beyond capitalism, and hold close the agency of children we are in solidarity with. The obligation of assembly was most apparent—and ridiculous—in the early stages of the Covid-19 Pandemic that Lane-McKinley references, but is a fundamental feature of “schools” as we conceive of them, and have a great potential for harm.

This is especially the case for LGBTQ+ children, children of color, poor children, disabled children, and immigrant children. Classrooms and hallways always have the capacity to be the most volatile spaces for marginalized youth—this is a significant reason for queer and trans children’s truancy and homelessness.25 Much of my day-to-day life is spent working with teenagers outside the realm of schools. There are few things more heartsinking for queer adults to learn than the fact that the lives of queer and trans children have not gotten better since we were children. One of those few things is the knowledge that their lives have, in many regards, gotten worse. To consider the possibility that queer and trans children’s lives will become further politically and socially hazardous—that however bad it is now, it may, or will, get worse—is to fatally wound oneself. This is a blackpill—something we, as queer and trans adults in solidarity with children, and as straight and cisgender adults in solidarity with children, cannot accept. It is here where a utopian urge becomes a utopian imperative.

Lane-McKinley is an exciting voice in the utopian studies world. She once remarked on the New Books Network podcast, “I huffed a lot of Jameson in grad school.”26 She, along with co-thinkers Sophie Lewis and M.E. O’Brien, are the foremost authors weaving queer and feminist theory with family abolition and youth liberation. These are obviously utopian projects. So, after over 100 pages compiling issues of motherhood, gestation, labor, education, assault, the American racial-state, and a general dislike of children, her final chapter is a refreshing utopian scholar whose argument has been bubbling, waiting to erupt.

Chapter 4, “Child Liberation: A Utopian Problem,” is a dazzling, vivid account of youth liberation as a utopian problem. Her prose before mixes the strictly didactic with the hearteningly personal. Here, her arguments for utopianism feel more like painting than writing. She relates youth liberation to a cloud, an always-shifting and transient object. “Clouds accumulate, then diffuse. Clouds drift, like daydreams. If only for a moment, a cloud blocks the sun. Everything looks and feels different. The air cools, the light changes, and the moment passes.” Elsewhere, she describes child liberation as “something to approach delicately . . . with the hope of piercing through the fissures of a social totality—the ‘adult world’ of capitalism that is likewise against most adults—and nurturing the possibilities that ooze from it, however we can.”27 Though youth liberation is as of now an experiment in imagination, she makes it somewhat corporeal. The air changing underneath a cloud, the piercing of a fissure—these are the things we know through touch. In making the abstract a concrete political problem, Solidarity With Children brings utopian futures to the body. If “utopianism” is an intangible pipe dream, Lane-McKinley makes it tangible and cognizant. She illustrates her vision, if you want to call it a “vision,” with marvel.

Utopia, here, is not used as a classical, formal blueprint. Lane-McKinley echoes Shulamith Firestone’s assertion that flexibility is the most important characteristic of a revolution.28 This is the “utopia” in the vein of utopian studies scholars Ruth Levitas and Tom Moylan.29 It is a utopia, or rather a utopianism, that is, like solidarity, a method. It’s a way of thinking and acting. Lane-McKinley offers examples of solidarity with children: the Free Breakfast for School Children program the Black Panther Party put in place from 1966 to 1982, the Oaxaca uprisings of 2006, and the formation of the Movement of Working Children and Adolescents, Children of Christian Workers (MANTHOC) in Peru in 1977.30 These movements all demonstrated intergenerational solidarity and questioned the distinction between “adulthood” and “childhood.” These historical and contemporary projects all require a “childish” manner of dreaming and trying our new arrangements. This solidarity is rooted in a dynamic mode of questioning and experimenting with hopes of making more just worlds. What is that if not utopianism?

Youth liberation is of course a utopian thought. It strikes at one of the most universal power dynamics of adult/child. It is so far beyond the current structure of our world. Lane-McKinley claims, “With children we are immediately confronted with the realities of care and everyday life. And solidarity is how we reckon with this.”31 This is technically true for the commonplace practices of working with children for social, political, and economic justice. But underneath is this utopian longing for a better world. Utopianism (which is itself derided as “childish”) is what brings about the method of solidarity. What she sketches out in this last chapter is something like a feedback loop. Utopian thinking (toward youth-liberation) breeds solidarity with children, solidarity with children leads us to utopian thinking with them. Utopianism leads to solidarity, solidarity leads to utopianism, ad infinitum. It is analogous to the relationship between theory and praxis. For theory to have praxical muscle, there must be some application in activism and resistance. Utopianism, to have any praxical muscle, must have an application in our lived realities with children—what we call “solidarity.”

It’s not immediately clear how this will get us free. Lane-McKinley recognizes this, noting that she “never promised any solutions,”32 but hopes this book helps us grapple with the political problem of childhood. Grappling with anti-child adultism, much like class struggle, requires trial, error, planning, re-planning, and endless experimentation. It is a labor that needs to be done every day. Those of us who work with children in our daily lives already know this. The project now is for everyone to work in solidarity with children, keeping this skillset in mind. A total refusal of our current world sounds childish. This is the aim of working and struggling in solidarity with children—it is an invitation into its utopian horizon, and beyond.

Notes

1. Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, trans. Alix Holt (Lawrence Hill & co., 1977) 259.
2. M.E. O’Brien, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto Press, 2021).
3. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy (Haymarket Books, 2025) 17.
4. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 34–5; 49; 40–3. For those who want to follow these texts under the loose description of “theory,” Lane-McKinley offers a surprisingly easy “in,” applying it to the ideas of childhood that we all either have or were subject to as children, without losing sight of this book project. It’s also worth noting that these are in Chapter 1, so readers become familiar with some of these critical tensions surrounding the politics of children as they move through this book.
5. LEPHT HAND, “How Can We Build Solidarity With Children? with Madeline Lane-McKinley,” Acid Horizon Podcast, May 30, 2026, 1:08:15, https://lephthand.buzzsprout.com/2374135/episodes/19262849-how-can-we-build-solidarity-with-children-with-madeline-lane-mckinley. 
6. Childhood is built upon narratives that adults tell children and other adults, and is shot through the realities of living children in schools, houses, and in public spaces. A social totality is constituted by the material and cultural conditions that work together for subject-formation. When I say “Childhood is a social totality,” I am referring to this idea that “childhood” is an amalgam of property and social relations between children and adults, children and bureaucratized school systems, children and the family, and children with the myths of childhood. One of Solidarity With Children’s goals is to unthink these structures that make up the social totality of “childhood,” so that children can live freer lives.
7. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 53.
8. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 56.
9. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 35.
10. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 51.
11. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 27.
12. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 64.
13. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 35.
14. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 67–8.
15. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 103.
16. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 99.
17. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 107.
18. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (Calder and Boyars Ltd, 1971).
19. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1970) 102.
20. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 219–22.
21. K.D. Griffiths and J.J. Gleeson, “Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st Century Family and a Communist Proposal for its Abolition,” A New Institute for Social Research, 2015, https://www.isr.press/Griffiths_Gleeson_Kinderkommunismus/index.html.
22. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 75–6. Though he was an advocate for vouchers, Illich was critical of the right wing libertarian application of school vouchers, later writing, “it would be a fallacy to believe that the establishment of a free market for knowledge would constitute a radical alternative in education. . . . [A] free market in education would provide [pedagogues] with innumerable hidden hands to fit each man into the multiple tight little niches a more complex technocracy can provide.” Toward a History of Needs (Pantheon Books, 1977), 78.
23. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 93.
24. The classic form of this debate is framed as a question regarding the utility of school, focused around means and ends. Is the point of school to dismantle unjust power structures and create individual and collective consciousness that is critical of the current oppressive world order, or to create voluntary, non-hierarchical learning systems for all people? These are not mutually exclusive aims, and educational theorists with diverse radical perspectives share similar ideas about the ends of education being a structure that assists in building a liberated world. The means of achieving this world through schooling, however, are still a source for discourse. There is a tension surrounding coercive structures, including the state and school, and it would not be an overstatement to say this is a key site of tension between anarchist and non-anarchist (and even between anarchist) theorists of education. Even after dismantling capitalism and de-bureaucratizing schools, there will still be a coercive element in education. It is foolish on our part, as radicals in solidarity with children, to assume this issue either will “whither away” or should not be addressed. Nathan Fretwell works through the issue of coercive authority using a Derridean model of justice: Nathan Fretwell, “Anarchist Education and the Paradox of Pedagogical Authority,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 52, no. 1 (2020): 55–65. doi:10.1080/00131857.2019.1594196. This discourse is an important part of the political project of building solidarity with children. Though the specifics of this discourse escape the confines of this particular essay, I would argue that Lane-McKinley’s utopian method of endless experimentation gives educators a quality set of tools to work through this discourse.
25. See: V. Paul Poteat, Christian Berger, and Julio Dantas, “How Victimization, Climate, and Safety around Sexual Orientation and Gender Expression Relate to Truancy,” Journal of LGBT Youth 14, no. 4 (2017): 424–35. doi:10.1080/19361653.2017.1365037; Jack K. Day, Amaya Perez-Brumer, and Stephen T, Russell, “Safe Schools? Transgender Youth’s School Experiences and Perceptions of School Climate,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 47, no. 8 (2018): 1731–42, doi:10.1007/s10964-018-0866-x. ; Jerome Hunt and Aisha C. Moodie-Mills, “The Unfair Criminalization of Gay and Transgender Youth,” Center for American Progress, June 12, 2012, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-unfair-criminalization-of-gay-and-transgender-youth/; Alex S Keuroghlian, Derri Shtasel, and Ellen L Bassuk, “Out on the street: a public health and policy agenda for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth who are homeless,” The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 84, no. 1 (2014): 66–72, doi:10.1037/h0098852.
26. Annie Berke and Madeline Lane-McKinley, “Madeline Lane-McKinley, ‘Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times’ (Common Notions, 2022),” December 4th, 2022, in New Books in Film, produced by New Books Network, 48:34, https://newbooksnetwork.com/comedy-against-work.
27. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 134, 122.
28. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 211; Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 129.
29. See: Ruth Levitas, Utopia As Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Tom Moylan, Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation (Bloomsbury, 2020).
30. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 137–41.
31. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 135.
32. Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity With Children, 152.