#kidlib

[isuggestyouthliberation]

What’s your suggestion for that phenomenon where kids will be bullied to the point of wanting to die for their entire school and the school does literally fucking nothing no matter how much you “report” or how many “trusted adults” you tell or how much you “just ignore them” (this has happened to me. The middle school experience lol)

child liberation is a massive project, and starts for alot of people with reckoning with school as an institution, and attempting to understand how it creates these kind of behaviors - and make no mistake it is the school system (and broader societal systems if power) which create and encourage this behavior.

'rebuild the whole system' isn't a great answer to an individual question, but it is a necessary one. while adultism continues to rob children of rights and autonomy, they don't have the societal tools they need to advocate for themselves successfully - they must build them for themself and in solidarity with each other.

[isuggestyouthliberation]

i've been reading Ursula K le Guin's The Dispossessed off of the recommendation of Madeline Laney-McKinley in Solidarity with Children and so far what has struck me about the story is the affectionate way adults are allowed to interact with children. The main character shares a kiss with his father, and later in life “got involved, as adults often did” in the education of the children. 

and this freedom, to me, exists in contrast to the hypervigilant fear i see in adults outside of childcare today, scared of playgrounds and public spaces for children. i cannot be sure whether this is a development due to the recently (relatively) developed ideas of 'stranger danger' or as a part of le Guin's utopian fantasy, but it is a scene which, for me, inspires some little hope at the future of education and some great fury at the state of things now.

[isuggestyouthliberation]

writing this now, while the blog is still new:

i'm white and from the US, which means my perspective on youth lib is gonna be limited by what i have experienced.

to try and counteract this somewhat: asks and messages are open to non-white, racialized, and people outside the US to describe their own experiences with adultism and child liberation.

[concreteafterrain]

making my own post not to bother people but like. There are a thousand critiques you can make about the USAmerican education system when you stop trying to use it to defend your own beliefs. Even besides larger critiques of systemic education and kidlib (grades, tracking, standardized testing, ect.) the education system remains racist and ableist in extremely identifiable ways.

One example, in New Orleans, my city - notably majority black, after Katrina we had our entire public school system replaced with charter schools, publicly funded but privately run - and the establishment of these schools, as always, favored white neighborhoods, where grants were easier to get. Richer students could pay for public schools, mostly run by various religious institutions. It was a system which further segregated the education of children along racial and economic lines (often one and the same) - and while this is an extreme, the pattern is borne out in education systems, large and small, across the country.

the USAmerican education system is a deeply complicated topic but one thing it is resolutely not is an excuse - if anything the experiencing the failures of that system should be a jumping off point for examining the other systemic failures of the US state

[bigbang74]

[bigbang74]

Kid Lib – Living In The Zone

Visit the post for more.

[dubplatesvinyls-blog]

Green Bay Wax - New Tp's #vinyl #kidlib #gbw

[schoollibraryjournal]

Hilarious cartoons by children’s librarians @hellomissamy & @lisano2 about on the profession (via Thirty for a little one)