The Power in the Room: Radical Education through Youth Organizing and Employment

The Power in the Room is an ambitious book that tries to shift the paradigm of the American educational system bottom-up, based on a simple device: Pay young people to teach their peers what they know, and do this work through youth-led community-based cooperative enterprises. Many groups and organizations, mostly outside of schools , have started to do this already, with dramatically positive results. The relationships of young people to their own learning, to each other and to the adults around them begin to shift, and these new relationships open up all kinds of educational and political possibilities. The Power in the Room is about the economic, educational and political power that emerges when young people earn money teaching each other, and about how racist and caste-based education can be challenged in this very practical way.

 

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

Desegregation has failed. Schools filled with Black and Brown students have become plantations of social control, where the policing of behavior trumps the expanding of minds. Radical teachers and organizers in American public schools must learn to protect space for young people to fashion their own insurgency. That means, at the very least, seeing each student’s rebellion not as violation, but as potential openings towards communication, culture building, and organizing. Jay Gillen writes with passion and compassion about the daily lives of 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 to create it: the tools and techniques required to build social, intellectual, and political power.

 

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