Di Bascom (10:24)

Do you know what? I honestly, I just, I can't stand this fucking place.

Frank (10:27)

We're only here because you wanted to come, mate.

Di Bascom (10:29)

Yeah, I know, but does it look like anyone's learning anything in there to you? Just looks like a fucking holding pen. Videos in every class, Mr. Mallet. Just walking in and out only once. And you said it fucking smells.

Derek (10:45)

No, it just fucking stink.

Frank (10:46)

Our skills stink.

Derek (10:47)

So that's a little scene between Di's Bascom and Frank ventriloquizing the likely unintentionally deeply conservative politics of the series, which are covered over by the liberal seeming proceduralism of the legal system, which is kind of seen as the last resort for those who crave order in society. Frank goes on to mitigate her view by remembering a good teacher she once had. But on the whole the writers have basically cherry picked every trope of broken schooling out of the last 30 years of neoliberal media hits that consistently ignore the complexity and unevenness of school qualities based on funding, resources and luck. It appears that the adolescents creators want to sell the viewer on two contradictory points that educators are too soft and have completely lost any hold on discipline. But also that there is a roiling, mysterious, feral violence boiling over in schools that you can smell it, it stinks, and we really don't know what to do about it beyond centering ourselves as would be bringers of order. Every close shot of Bascom and Frank seems to prompt the quiet question what would I do if I were the cop? So I find that both sides of this Schools are shit, but kids are impossible Contradiction Offensive as the child of high school teachers, I'm used to the scorn that's heaped on teachers depicted as overpaid, lax surrogate parents with working days that are too short and too much time off. In the summer from the 1980s on, this was really about union busting and austerity. Now that's a perennial pressure. But now we also have the Jordan Peterson style propaganda of teachers being both overly permissive but also overbearing with the Woke Mind virus. So they can do pronouns and land acknowledgments, but they can't do cursive and arithmetic. And this is the kind of depiction that inflames conservative drives for school reform that are always about punishment, increasing testing, increasing surveillance, and lengthening school hours while always, always cutting funding. So I'll run some stats on the funding issue in the UK context on Thursday. The other side of the contradiction that kids are feral and smelly. It's even more offensive to me because it's repetitive and banal, and it draws on this tired old bigotry towards children as fundamentally wayward, undisciplined, and incurious. I've never met a single kid like that, but I've met a lot of kids who have unmet needs, or kids who try to puff themselves up defensively against an aggressive world made by adults. What I see in my kids and the kids around us is that they are always already enacting the best version of themselves they can so far be, and that they can always use more support. And here's a paradox. When you have a fairly lazy and homogenous vision of kids as parasites feeding on hapless and bloated parents in schools, the easiest default answers are conservative and individualized personal purification, personal responsibility, personal discipline. But These are also Jordan Peterson themes, and they come freighted with backlash against feminism and its perceived permissiveness and chaos. And we know how to follow that thematic pipeline to its manosphere spout, where the solutions are never social or relational, they are about cultivating personal power. The role that a series like adolescence can unfortunately play in this war is to concentrate our focus on the individual psychologies of tragic actors. But as we'll talk about on Thursday, the series one take technique actually precludes us from giving us access to Jamie's psychology. This essentially conservative mindset can take a lot of forms, some of them even benign, even if they're incomplete. So parallel to the viral success of Adolescence was a speech given by the former Team England football manager Gareth Southgate at the BBC's annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture series.

Gareth Southgate (15:30)

As real world communities and mentorship declines, young men end up withdrawing. Reluctant to talk or express their emotions, they spend more time online searching for direction and are falling into unhealthy alternatives like gaming, gambling and pornography. And this void is filled by a new kind of role model who do not have the best interests at heart.

Derek (16:00)

Southgate is a towering figure in England, widely credited for bringing the English national side back into contention for the first time in decades, but doing so through a pragmatic and defensive proceduralism that frustrated some older fans, along with an empowerment style manner in relation to his players that was very nouveau corporate and workshoppy. He generally kept his political views private, although he did make some comments perceived as anti Brexit from the point of view that football technique is better served by internationalist influence. In other words, we shouldn't confine football to our little island sort of thing. There were plenty of Team England hooligans that also hated his outspoken anti racism and anti homophobia. So all in all, Southgate is a generally solid center left figure. But let's think about some of his points closely because prior to the now viral bit where he's lumping video games, gambling and porn all together, I'll get to that problem comes this very polite laundry list of conservative talking points, which always sound intuitive until you really listen to them closely. The points are that boys are too coddled, they're not allowed to fail, so somehow being coddled leads to aggression, I guess. He says that the physical world where we should let them fail is far less dangerous than the online world, and I would say that that definitely depends on who you are and where you are. He says that traditional family and community role models are in decline. He says that 2.5 million children in the UK have no father figure at home. Of course, he doesn't say anything about women and mothers. Who's better off on their own? The weight of unpaid labor or the status of state accommodations or benef. Here's a quote. Boys are now more likely to own a smartphone than to live with their dad. Okay, so think about that for a moment. If smartphones become standard issue for a generation, you could say the same thing about toothbrushes, couldn't you? As in boys are now more likely to own a toothbrush than to live with their dad. This is another strange erasure of women and mothers. It might be more accurate to say boys are more likely now to own a smartphone they use to keep in touch with their moms than to live with their dad, who used to abuse them both. Maybe that's what's going on as well. And then finally he says, as many people do, sports and community activities are in decline now. I say you can't fault a lifelong God tier footballer who started his pitch career right out of high school for thinking that the football model of ennobling boys and men is the way forward. This is all this guy would really know. It seems that he pushed his sports envelope as far to the left as he could. And so that's great. But let's be honest, competitive football will always be competitive football. Obsessive practice playing through pain, officials letting the pros play with concussions, dads yelling on the sidelines when you're in school, and hooligans throwing trash at black players if you turn pro. The bar for better manhood is pretty low in this scene, and leaping over it doesn't challenge the basic logic of the culture. I'm talking about all of this because what I believe happens through the adolescence Southgate lens at this moment during the rise of global fascism is a continuation of a very old distraction. The manosphere they are pointing to is a harbinger of fascist politics, and it does indeed fill in the gaps left by alienation and the moral vacuity of liberal proceduralism. But those are not gaps that can be filled in by better manners or more disciplined football practices or by taking the phones away. Those answers do not connect the dots between state education and football training that prepares kids for a life of competition in capitalism. And what happens when this world goes into crisis and shows its ugly ass? Andrew Tate is successful at recruiting boys because, like a fascist, he co opts that alienation and rage at capitalist contradiction and inequality. The contradiction of you're a piece of shit, but you could also be a God, and he uses it to scapegoat women and minorities. In the absence of really tackling the manosphere as the symptom of a political crisis, folks will psychologize and individualize the problem. A near moral panic about Andrew Tate is mobilized not to change course on the status quo that produced him, but to default to an eternal appeal to return to liberal normalcy in which it's just assumed that everything else that's going on in the superstructure of the kid's life is balanced and sensible. And the idea that centrist dads are good role models who will ultimately champion a less violent society. But how will they champion a less violent society? With better conversations, or maybe therapy? These things can be a good start, but they won't do it by redistributing wealth or reversing deadly austerity policies, or safeguarding the NHS or stopping arms shipments to Israel. Are these heavy issues within the purview of dramatists? For Netflix and a retired football manager, no. But both adolescence and Southgate speech have been praised in British Parliament, with Keir Starmer himself agreeing that the series should become part of the secondary school curriculum. This is Labor MP Anneliese Midgley teeing it up for Starmer in question period on March 19th.

Frank (22:14)

Everyone is talking about adolescence, the series by Knowsley's own Stephen Graham and Chris Christine Tamarco. It highlights online male radicalisation and violence against girls. The creators of the show are calling for screenings in Parliament and schools to spark change. So will the Prime Minister back this campaign to counter toxic misogyny early and give young men the role models they deserve?

Keir Starmer (22:41)

Prime Minister yes. And at home we are watching Adolescent with our children. I've got a 16 year old boy and a 14 year old girl. It's a very, very good documentary to watch or drama. This violence carried out by young men influenced by what they see online is a real problem. It's abhorrent and we have to tackle it. We are putting in specialist rape and sexual offences teams in every police force doing work on the 999 calls. But this is also a matter of culture that I think it's important that across the whole house we tackle this emerging and growing problem.

Derek (23:24)

While Starmer delivers this somber reflection, his government is forcing through reductions in social service payments, including the Personal Independence Payment or PIP program that helps disabled and poor people stay alive. Cuts starting in the fall of next year year are expected to result in 800,000 to 1.2 million individuals losing between £4,200 and £6,300 annually by the end of the decade. An estimated 70% of PIP claimants reside in low income households, so the cuts are projected to push approximately 250,000 people into relative poverty. Labor is doing all of this without raising things like wealth tax. So I'm going to get to the issue of role models in Part two, but I'll just leave off here on Starmer by saying that yes, teenage boys can find videos of Andrew Tate visibly harming women online, but it's much easier for them to find video of this Lego haired Prime minister standing up in Parliament to give moral justifications for social welfare cuts that will throw poor people under the bus, exacerbating the conditions of cruelty and alienation that Tate hacks his way into labor. Media reps will try to tell you that Starmer is a reasonable and caring man and men like him have Andrew Tate to thank for that. So we have Vitelli and the sportsmen doing their part in the pacification of feral kids. But will pacified kids re routinized back into proper institutional rhythms stand up to fascism? No, they won't. Some boys are indeed being radicalized, but I fear that often the discussion around radicalization creates an alarmist fog that obscures the normal, everyday effects of trickle down capitalist logic and domestic misogyny. Yes, a very tiny minority of boys wind up trading Nazi memes and searching down ghost gun 3D printing files, but in my opinion it's the majority we should worry about who at best wind up swimming in mainstream content that keeps them ambivalent to fascism. We need those boys to stand up to the status quo just as much as we need to prevent the rare lone wolf from becoming a mass shooter or knife crime perpetrator. But let's go back to this line.

Gareth Southgate (26:07)

They spend more time online searching for direction and are falling into unhealthy alternatives like gaming, gambling and pornography.

Derek (26:16)

Okay, this one really pisses me off. These are three huge categories that he's just collapsed together, which makes me wonder if his two teenagers play video games at all. Online gambling and porn are peak extractive forms of capitalism that call for enhanced regulation and middle school level digital literacy and sex ed. But gaming is different. It has some famously dingy, racist, sexist trolly online nooks, and some of the worst people in the world like Elon Musk are gamers. Or they want to be. He's pretty mid in fact, and Gamergate commissioned countless digital soldiers into what became the Maga troll army. But painting gaming with an overly broad brush is just as backwards as panicking about Dungeons and dragons in the 1980s. Gaming communities are as diverse as the Internet itself and the world, and there are as many positive spaces of accessibility, creative thinking, skill and knowledge, expansion and sharing, and collaborative economies as there are cul de sacs of boredom, consumption and frustration. For the most part so far, gaming has been a boon in our house and in many others that I know of, and there's a thousand advantages I could cite, but to give just a few Our older kid has learned more about Buddhism at the age of 12 in three months of playing Black Myth Wukong than I learned in five years of study as an adult. It even introduced him to meditation, for fuck's sake. Our younger kid has been using the murder mystery game among us as a way of enhancing his reading, spelling and typing skills. The last time this game got media attention it was because some doofus at NBC found it in discussions of Luigi Mangione's digital footprint and thought, ooh, he was hooked on a game about assassination. Which makes about as much sense as believing that by watching the Smurfs you'll want to go out and kill people who aren't blue. Here's what I've learned over the past four years of going from 0 to 100 as a gaming dad, given our kids driving interests and the fact that the younger one homeschooling finds multiplayer environments offer the lower stress, lower demands and more boundaries socialization than public school can accommodate. And a side note on that I'm not going to expect a footballer to avoid the blanket ableism that ignores the fact that online spaces are often lifelines for the neurodiverse and marginalized. But that is a huge deal that all of this panicry completely erases. And it's par for the course because if the argument is for a return to normalcy, it will be crafted for the normative. So far what I've seen gaming give access to are the following how to face structured challenges and figure them out while limiting physical danger how to build and navigate alliances and friendships how to identify enemy behavior before it hits you how to understand advantages and disadvantages how to do sharing economies and on that note, I want every non gamer to know that there are hundreds of thousands of kids out there who learn how to code because they want to make mods or little hacking upgrades to the games they love. This could be a new skin or Persona, a new weapon, or new physics like being able to leap or dodge in a new way and so they write the code and they figure out where to install it into the source files of the game game, which is nuts to me. And then they give it away with full instructions for free just because they love doing it. It's incredible. I mean, this could be part of learning from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. To be honest. Also, I've watched kids who game become self aware of their roles and positions and how they differ in relation to others. They learn how to gather the best information that they can in order to make choices that give a sense of agency. They understand the difference between moral actions and strategic actions. They are able to envision themselves as helpers and caregivers or disruptors or anti heroes or anime demons or furry unicorns. One of my favorite philosophers in the world is friend of the Pod Thi Nguyen, and I'll link to the episodes we've done with him. They're excellent. He's a big gamer and he wrote a book called Games Agency as Art in which he basically says that games are not just a waste of time or just for fun, they are a way in which we practice how to survive and exist and be creative in the midst of struggle. And this is ideal for learning about anti fascism. As far as I'm concerned, the primary value of any game, Nguyen says, is that it allows the player to explore what it takes to have agency, which is the ability to make intentional decisions towards a goal. Agency in capitalism is unequally distributed. Some people have it and others are not allowed to have it. When capitalism curdles into fascism, agency is explicitly taken away from scapegoats. If games are an exploration of gaining and exercising agency in the world, they can have a role to play in anti fascist life because they are about learning what it means to become a whole person. I would even argue that gaming democratizes agency across a more diverse population than football or rugby or ballet ever could. Not that kids shouldn't do those things, but let's not falsely idealize or imagine that everybody can do these specialized activities. By the way, there's also a long list of anti fascist and anti capitalist video games out there, appropriate for various ages. In the Wolfenstein franchise, players battle Nazis. In alternate histories. In Watchdogs Legion, you join an antifa group called DEDSEC in the futuristic police state of London. In Final Fantasy VII remake, you join a militant ecological protection group fighting against the Shinra Corporation. And in Tonight We Riot, you're taken on a full street war revolution journey, battling wealthy corporations for the liberation of the working class. Now there's a bunch of games that are less on the nose if you prefer that Horizon Zero dawn centers on a strong female anti Imperialist named Aloy who battles the machines destroying her indigenous land. Jedi Survivor follows Cal Kestis through the wasteland left behind by a fascist empire trying to restore the sacred wisdom of the ancient Republic. And the Halo series is really interesting because if you play as Master Chief John 117, you start out fighting on the side of the humans, and that seems like the right thing to do. But if you get into the lore, you slowly come to understand that you were actually kidnapped as a neurodiverse child and socially engineered to serve an Imperial project against a highly sophisticated covenant of alien species who are on their own spiritual quests. That's complicated. So wrapping up this tour through online panicry, I need to ping here and just really ping because it deserves its own episode that behind the artistic thrust of adolescence and the pious appeals of Southgate towers the seeming academic authority of Jonathan Haidt, who argues in the Anxious Generation that mobile phones and social media are at the root of all that's going wrong in the land of children. It really seems like Haight started out with an Internet stuff bad feeling in his tummy and went out and hunted for statistics that showed that mental health diagnoses for young people spiked upwards around the time that social media use increased for that age Group in 2013. And he zeroed in on that correlation, but then crept it out wider to include gaming. But when actual discipline experts like Candace Odgers so hate is a moral psychologist, but Audgers spends her life in teen mental health data and Odgers has just more expertise. And when she studies his argument, she found that it left out all kinds of other factors. For instance, kids on social media might be finding validation amongst each other for feelings that they did not understand, and so they are motivated to go for professional help. It might be that online life provided an anonymous space to access more information about subjects kids couldn't speak about at home or school. And as I've kind of alluded to, I know that LGBTQ people and autistic people describe some online spaces as life saving even when they're not perfect. This is a discourse that also hand waves away the fact that online life in the 2000 teens was also associated with a large scale rise in awareness of global social and environmental crises. This allowed parents who read it to blame their kids anxiety on something they could the phones. And one result of this is that attention gets deflected away from the more existential issues in which older generations are actually implicated. Now social media obviously can be bad for mental health in a lot of ways. It can move too fast, encourage flimmersy relationships, degrade self esteem, increase bodily dysmorphia, spread misinformation, hook people into sales pyramids or fruitless political arguments or harmful porn. But I don't think any of this compares to what it feels like to be aware of genocide in Gaza, fascism in the US and climate collapse everywhere. No amount of pearl clutching over screen time will address those larger issues, which, by the way, Hate's generation is primarily responsible for. And on gaming, he's just full of shit. A key theme that he recycles from other discourses is that free play games like Minecraft or Fortnite should not be compared to physical playgrounds. I mean, come on. Obviously they are not jungle gyms made of steel and rubber padding. But his point is that they lack the developmental benefits of physical play, such as risk taking and learning to navigate social hierarchies in person. And this just tells me that he doesn't know anything about gaming because risks and social hierarchies are insanely well developed in these games or else they wouldn't be so popular and to the insinuation that gaming does not prepare kids for in real life challenges. Our oldest just completed Elden Ring and when he got to the final boss he was defeated. Like killed, dead, smoked eviscerated 137 times before he cracked the code of the boss's powers and attacks. I don't actually know of any other activity or skill in which you could fail really, really badly, like completely. You could die with blood spurting out of you 137 times and keep going and keep loving it. That just wouldn't happen with football, boxing, track or even chess. This is a type of play that Nguyen describes as striving play in which the main reward is in the process. In multiplayer games, it's the cooperation, the friendship between players and the time they get to explore and develop their skills. Losses are disappointing, but never final. And this in my opinion, is crucial for anyone who wants a training program in how to be an anti fascist because we lose all the time, but we keep going. So one last section here before I punt to part two. In gentler places like here in Canada and the uk, public education is perennially under the pressure of austerity regimes. But in the us a decades long agenda to completely defund public education has now been fully ratified and implemented with pro wrestling mogul Linda McMahon now in charge of the complete shuttering of the Department of Education, elite colleges are folding under political pressure, largely standing by while visa students are thrown into black vans. They're doing everything they can to comply with Trump's ideological needs, even as he slashes their federal grants. Meanwhile humming away in the background, AI systems are likely to obliterate professional categories over the next decade, making the notion of what secondary school curriculum should actually be a real mystery. Now, as a child of teachers and as a parent with two kids, one who at times has been barely served and one who is not at all served by the available public education in our center left city, and who both survived schooling during the pandemic, I have really mixed views on public education. Also, in a previous life I was part of a homeschooling group in rural Vermont, with all of the views you might expect in such a place. But despite my ambivalence and reservations, I'd no sooner give up on schools school discourse than I would on voting, because when relatively privileged white people go off grid with this stuff, it's really the poor who suffer. So what I'd like to do is point out some resources that are helping me think about how to participate in the educational discourse as someone whose primary value is anti fascism and who may or may not be able to utilize public schooling. A lot of these titles come from AK Press and PMpress. Excellent platforms. So the books are out of the the Emergence of Radical Informal Learning Spaces. This is edited by Robert Hayworth and John Elmore. 2. Anarchist education in the Modern School A Francisco Ferrer Reader. This is edited by Mark Bray. 3. The People's Republic of the Child vs. The State by Rob Johnson. Raising Free Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work by Akilah S. Richards. I'll talk about her in some depth, in part Teaching Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom, edited by John Mink. And then the last book I'll also talk about a little bit in depth in part two. It's called Trust Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy. Now these are all sources that emphasize anti authoritarianism, freedom and autonomy, cooperation and mutual aid, experiential learning, and the consistent goal of social transformation. And what I find really helpful is that they provide good conversational material for the gaps in schooling or homeschooling discourse. A general note about what you'll find, however, is that there is a line to walk between two extremes that Mark Bray actually alerted me to. First is this vision of education as completely Autonomous and self directed versus secondly, a vision of education based upon stripping out bad beliefs and instilling good ones. Wrapping up, that is the sound of Die Gedankensen Frei played on the flute. So this is a very old German song dating back to the 18th century at least, and it's become associated with the memory of Sophie Scholl, the most famous member of the White Rose resistance to Nazi rule. She and her brother Hans and their friend were executed by guillotine in 1943 after being convicted of distributing pamphlets to university students in Munich. So I'll tell more of that story on Monday and then get into other role model stuff. But we'll just note for now that this is Sophie's song, because a year before she was captured, her father, who is a mayor and public servant pretty famous for his progressive principles, was jailed for openly calling Hitler a scourge from God. And when Sophie couldn't enter the prison to visit him, she stood outside the prison wall and played this tune on her flute. Now, the first verse is typically translated as thoughts are free, who can guess them? They fly by like nocturnal shadows. No person can know them, no hunter can shoot them. And so it'll always be thoughts are free. So I'm leaving off with Sophie Scholl as a bridge to part two, because I don't think it's enough in an age of rising fascism to pretend that nurturing and supportive relationships are all about returning everything to normal, that if kids did less screens and games and more soccer and worked harder on their grades and never came across Andrew Tate, things would be just fine. As a teenager during the rise of Hitler, Sophie was indoctrinated as much as the next kid, joining the League of German girls at 12 and singing all the fascist campfire songs. But Robert Scholl encouraged all his children to debate politics at home with a critical eye, and he wasn't afraid to speak his mind to them. And this came with its own dangers, because a primary ideal of Nazi domestic life was to encourage family members to report each other for subversive thoughts. Robert's Christian pacifism and hatred of bigotry always held the door open for Sophie's higher instincts. As a kindergarten teacher fresh out of high school, she realized she was being asked to indoctrinate very young children, just as she had been indoctrinated. And for his part, Robert could see this all coming, and he set an example by speaking out. And in the same month that Sophie came to the prison wall with her flute to play his favorite tune, the resistance group she joined with her brother and a few of their friends started publishing leaflets to distribute throughout Germany. The first one opened as follows. Just listen to how hard this hits. Nothing is more shameful to a civilized nation than to allow itself to be governed by an irresponsible clique of sovereigns who have given themselves over to dark urges. And that without resisting. Isn't it true that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days? Who among us can imagine the degree of shame that will come upon us and upon our children when the veil falls from our faces and the awful crimes that infinitely exceed any human measure are exposed to the light of day? If the German nation is so corrupt and decadent in its innermost being that it is willing to surrender the greatest possession a man can own, a possession that elevates mankind above all other creatures, namely, free will, if it is willing to surrender this without so much as raising a hand, rashly trusting a questionable, lawful order of history, if it surrenders the freedom of mankind to intrude upon the wheel of history and subjugate it to his own rational decision. If Germans are so devoid of individuality that they have become an unthinking and cowardly mob, then, yes, they then deserve their destruction. So this is the standard I'd shoot for as a parent in this age. To nurture the solidarity it takes to take care of each other across the generations when the fascist fever rises. And to foster the moral courage and intellectual clarity it takes to go on to speak truth to power, come what may. Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon.