This Olio makes a distinction between schooling and education. Schooling dumbs us down and education ignites fiery passions. This class will trace the rise of mass schooling, which was a means for society to re-shape itself, and a tool for the marginalized and uneducated to access the formerly inaccessible and discuss why mass schooling calcified into a factory-type functionalism that has become outmoded.

This Olio characterizes schooling as a violent assembly line that produces robots and alienates students from their teachers, from history, and from critical thinking, leaving them without the capacity to re-invigorate a malnourished democracy.

From teaching to the test, to stressed scapegoated teachers, to the school-to-prison-pipeline, to a cratered public school system, to intrusive attempts at corporatized hostile take overs, this class denounces these facets of schooling as authoritarian and useless for 21st century learning, and issues a call for a radical peace education that can challenge and equip teachers and students in co-imagining and co-enacting more just and sustainable futures!