Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty

A manifesto for today’s broken schools.

Desegregation has failed. The schools filled with black and brown students have become plantations of social control, where the policing of behavior trumps the expanding of minds. Now, radical teachers and organizers in American public schools must help young people fashion an insurgency. This means, at the very least, seeing each student’s rebellion not as violation, but as communication.

Jay Gillen writes with both passion and compassion about the daily lives of poor students trapped in institutions that dismiss and degrade them. In the spirit of Paulo Freire, and using the historical models of slave rebellions and Civil Rights struggles as guides, Gillen explains what sort of insurgency is needed and how it should be created, with the tools and techniques required to build social, intellectual, and political power.

This poetic manifesto of revolutionary “educational reform” belongs in the pocket of anyone who currently works in, suffers through, or simply cares about public schooling and its students in this country.