School Anarchology: (1/6) Anarchoracy as an Alternative to Democracy – The School as the First Official Hub for Practicing Anarchoracy

 School Anarchology: (1/6)

 Anarchoracy as an Alternative to Democracy – The School as the First Official Hub for Practicing Anarchoracy 

✍️ Mahmoud Sadeghi Janbehan

Translated by Maryam Sadeghi with the assistance of ChatGPT

Introduction

The structure of the school in the tradition of modern education has always been a site of theoretical and political dispute. The school has been seen not only as an institution for transmitting knowledge, but also as a reproducer of patterns of power and social order. Critical scholars such as Freire (1970), Illich (1971), and Foucault (1975) have shown that modern schools are shaped by a hierarchical structure in which principals, teachers, and students each occupy unequal positions of power. This structure systematically inculcates roles such as obedience, discipline, and submission in children, ultimately preparing their minds and bodies to enter an authoritarian society.

Nevertheless, throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, many efforts have been made to create alternative schools. Examples such as Summerhill in England and “free schools” in the United States have shown that it is possible to remove part of the formal hierarchy of schooling and to establish a more horizontal model of educational governance. These experiences matter because they demonstrate that “school” is not merely a place for preparing children to live in the future market or existing political system, but can itself become a space for the present experience of freedom, equality, and self-governance.

In this regard, the framework of School Anarchology and the theory of Anarchoracy as an alternative to democracy, offers a new approach for rethinking school and education. This theory seeks to redefine school not as an instrument of subjugation, but as the first hub for practicing anti-hierarchical life and a space for experiencing freedom and justice. The aim of this article is to examine the theoretical foundations of School Anarchology, compare it with existing critical traditions in the philosophy of education, and analyze the potentials and limitations of realizing the anarchorasic school in socio-political contexts.

✅ Theoretical Foundations of School Anarchology

This article refers only to one of the concepts of Anarchology that constitutes part of the theoretical foundations of School Anarchology. Naturally, addressing the entire system of School Anarchology is beyond the scope of this paper. In summary, these foundations refer to the set of perspectives, frameworks, and theories that shape the scientific and practical basis of this field.

They provide a comprehensive approach to understanding the structure of education, its transformations and necessities, learning methods, socialization, relations with sources of power, and the behavior and mental health of students in the school environment, all centered on the principles of Anarchology and a specific structure such as Anarchoracy. This concept emphasizes the self-governance of the educational environment and aims to eliminate hierarchical and authoritarian structures of teaching and upbringing.

In this system, the school environment becomes a creative and free space in which the dignity of students is preserved in cognitive, moral, and emotional domains, while the sole focus on discipline and grade-based assessment is abandoned. School Anarchology stresses the creation of conditions where the learning process not only develops skills and knowledge, but also cultivates self-awareness, intellectual independence, responsibility, and active participation in collective decision-making—thus enabling a free mode of existence.

Moreover, these theoretical foundations serve as a guide for designing educational services, pedagogical research, and school-related counseling, therapeutic, and educational interventions. They offer a framework in which freedom, creativity, and educational justice are simultaneously reinforced while preserving ethical and human principles.

✅ The School as the First Official Exercise of Anarchoracy

The school can be regarded as the first formal institution of socialization, where the child encounters relations of power and domination in a systematic way. The school experience is not limited to the learning of lessons or skills, but constitutes a field where individuals are exposed to a wide spectrum of social, cultural, and political relations.

Direct and indirect teaching, a predesigned environment with dominant ideological standards, compulsory curricula, structured interpersonal relations, coercive instruction, evaluative systems, hegemonic language and cultural norms, group dynamics and collective identity formation, understanding the complexities of social relations, the transfer of power from home to school, experiences of protest and submission, fear and courage—all of these continuously unfold within the school environment.

The school is, on the one hand, a gateway to the world of knowledge and awareness, and on the other, the first official arena of obedience, hierarchy, and subordination. In other words, this institution has two faces: one pedagogical and developmental, which apparently helps the child’s intellectual and social growth; and the other disciplinary and authoritarian, which situates the child within frameworks of power and domination.

Within this framework, Anarchoracy as an alternative in educational thought makes possible a radical rethinking of the very nature of school. If the school is reread as the first official practice of Anarchoracy, it ceases to be a place for reproducing power and domination, and instead becomes a field for practicing freedom, equality, creativity, and ethical coexistence. Such a perspective opens the way to a serious critique of existing educational structures and creates the possibility of building novel and liberating institutions.

In school, the child:

• Encounters hierarchies of power and formal positions, from teacher and principal to the unwritten rules of peer relations.
• Experiences the obligation to respond and comply with a predesigned system, confronting the first organized form of obedience outside the family.
• Undergoes the first experience of group learning and of being in a broader social space, which holds both the potential for freedom and flourishing as well as the risk of reproducing domination.
• Confronts structural inequalities and injustices, from class and gender differences to hidden and explicit privileges in access to resources and opportunities.

As a dual institution, the school can either become an educational prison that reproduces blind obedience, or transform into a platform for freedom, emancipation, and self-governance. This duality is precisely the point of entry to what Anarchology refers to as the “first practice of Anarchoracy.”

Thus, school is not necessarily a site of knowledge transmission, but a field of practicing power relations and resistance, a space in which the child learns:

• How to confront domination and coercion,
• How to discover possibilities of emancipation,
• And how to turn imposed order into an experience of ethical and collective self-governance.

Therefore, the school may be considered the first arena in which the individual concretely and experientially perceives the tension between obedience and freedom, domination and justice, submission and self-governance. If this tension is approached and rethought through an anarchorasic perspective, instead of reproducing power it will nurture a generation that is free, aware, and responsible.

In its traditional form, the school more often resembles a mechanism for reproducing domination than an institution for flourishing and freedom. Rigid rules, hierarchical structures, and systems of reward and punishment habituate the child to blind obedience. The classroom, instead of being a space for inquiry and creative experimentation, becomes a stage for discipline and conformity.

In this framework, the school’s function goes beyond mere education:

• Denaturalizing freedom: The child learns that freedom of choice is limited and meaningful only within predetermined frameworks.
• Adapting to imposed order: Students learn that value lies not in independent thinking, but in compliance with official standards.
• Internalizing inequality: Privileges based on class, gender, or family background are entrenched within school relations and presented as natural.

In this way, the school may become a “factory of subjugation,” an institution preparing the individual for participation in the larger hierarchies of society.

What is presented in the school as “teaching methods,” “discipline,” or “administrative structure” is, in fact, a reflection of the broader logic of domination in society. For this reason, critique of school is not merely critique of a limited educational system, but critique of the process by which power relations are reproduced in everyday life. Through discipline, hierarchy, and seemingly natural rules, the individual is prepared to accept domination on a larger social scale.

From the perspective of School Anarchology, the school is the first hub that enables the exercise and experience of Anarchoracy—collective life without the domination of people over people. This vision transforms the school from an institution primarily transferring knowledge into a laboratory space for freedom, equality, and creativity. A place where children and adolescents not only learn content but also practice ways of being with others.

The central question in this framework is: How can the school be transformed from a hierarchical and disciplinary apparatus into an anarchorasic space? A space in which students and teachers, as equal members of a community, directly participate in shaping rules, curricula, and relationships.

Alternative educational experiments—from Summerhill in England to democratic schools in Europe and North America—have shown that education can be grounded not in reproducing obedience but in participation and self-governance. However, School Anarchology takes this a step further: for the anarchorasic school, what matters is not merely educational freedoms or partial participation, but the elimination of all forms of domination in the relations between teachers and students and in the institutional structure of the school. In such a model, the school is not a place for preparing individuals to enter the world of domination, but the very first field for living freedom, practicing justice, and experiencing genuine equality.

Reference

Sadeghi Janbehan, M. (2025). School Anarchology (1/6): Anarchoracy as an Alternative to Democracy – The School as the First Official Hub for Practicing Anarchoracy. Retrieved from:

• https://anarchology.blogfa.com
• https://anarchology-journal.blogspot.com