Carnival and the Fake School: Transgressing the Vertical Imaginary of Education with and for Young Children

Abstract

This study examines the collective labor of imagining one educational world among myself and six middle-income, racially- and gender-diverse six- and seven year-olds via a two-year critical participatory ethnography of a six-family (including my own) pandemic cooperative—Fake School, as the kids playfully named it. Fake School was initially a semester-long temporary stopgap to arrange shared childcare amid remote learning that became a two-year collective project through the uncertainties and surges of the pandemic. Drawing on Stallybrass and White, I use carnival as an analytic to explore the verticalist imaginary of the education-based mode of study. I seek to narrate our Fake School situated within the broader context of the predominating notions of normalcy that delimit possible futures for public education. I suggest that the emergent educational world we briefly created offers important insights for authorizing young children’s perspectives on the future of education.

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms, and the children chose their own.

2 While a deeper discussion is outside the scope of this paper, James (2021) offers an important critique of “pandemic pods” as wealthier, predominantly white, families pooling resources, and as one part of a deeper individualized response to the problem of state abdication and neoliberal privatization of education, of which we were complicit. The long-term impacts of pods are unclear, as the costs and effort associated with pods are only manageable for those who already have access to private or selective enrollment schools (Jacobson, 2021). As James (2021) suggests, the problems with public education will not be solved by providing these services to “less privileged families” (p. 105), but in making demands on state reinvestment and public education’s ethical-political priorities.

3 I use gender neutral pronouns and refrain from using the child’s pseudonym here as an added precaution for anonymity.