When I was 15, I began taking classes at The University of Akron full time. I should have been taking geometry, chemistry, and other subjects with peers my age, but instead I took Italian, psychology, college writing, and political science. One day, after my political science class, I stayed to talk with my professor about careers in politics. She asked what area of policy I was interested in. I said education. She asked why. I didn’t really have an answer, and I broke down and started crying. Not the cute crying where a single tear runs down your face. No, I sobbed. I didn’t have the language to describe how I felt. My professor recommended I consider other career options.
I have presented before about how the land analytic of development in my hometown specifically limited children’s mobility. This is just the first of many ways in which mobility was restricted. In addition to the territorialization of my neighborhood, I was expected to stay inside at all times when not under surveillance, of either an adult or a fellow child who was complicit (like me) in this panopticon. I was to study inside (at my desk), eat inside (in the dining room), sleep inside (in my bedroom), and so on, unless sanctioned to do otherwise. My life had layers of entrapment, both physical (in the landscape and the built environment) and metaphysical (in my spatial conception).
While in school, I was also expected to be inside at all times, and when I was permitted to go outside it was under strict surveillance. Beyond that, I was expected to be in a specific classroom at all times. Beyond that, I was expected to be at a specific desk. The spatial context of the state run educational-industrial complex, from the perspective of a student, is a desk where you sit down, shut up, and program your head with state approved curriculum. It is a pedagogy without even acknowledgement for the land. My schooling, too, was a site of physical and metaphysical entrapment.
In our society, we spatially divide sites of production, consumption, and habitation. A meadow is not a restaurant is not a hospital is not an apartment complex. To an extent, this all makes sense. We should not have random people sleeping in hospitals. But when you look at schools, it makes less sense. Why should we have one specific site for education? Isn’t education all about exploration, the (re)creation and (re)production of knowledge? Why shouldn’t children be in restaurants and hospitals and meadows learning, with support systems that exist to liberate rather than entrap them?
Of course I know why this is the case. US schools and neighborhoods are not designed to create the best conditions possible for children and to respect their agency. No. They are designed within the constraints of (neoliberal) capitalism and Christianity. If your goal is to raise generations of cubical office people who have 2.5 entrapped kids of their own, then perhaps this system works stunningly. If the goal is capitalist indoctrination, then to limit imagination to the desk makes a lot of sense. But perhaps if we’re trying to create a more just world, then we must use land as education.
Universities are fundamentally different sites of education than K-12 schools. Unlike (most) highschools, universities exist as landscapes with many goals other than simply education. Pervasive ageism and restriction of resources for minors continued throughout my early college experience. I never had my rights properly explained to me and didn’t have many rights that older students have. I was never taught what resources I had access to, including channels to report harassment or to request mental health care. Indeed, when I requested mental health services I was directed to my high school, which promptly did nothing to assist me.
When I arrived at the first university, I treated the campus the same way I treated high school. I got a ride from my brother to campus in the morning, I went to class and sat at the same desk every time, I ate lunch at the student union cafeteria, I went to my next class, and I took the bus home. I didn’t explore buildings I felt I wasn’t “supposed” to go into, and I didn’t venture off campus except to take the bus, partly out of concern for being deemed truant. In chatting with other early college students, this is the most common way to interact with college as an early college student. I have to assume this is largely because of the spatial conditioning of childhood continuing to metaphysically entrap us even as the physical barriers are gone.
Despite this, I was slowly able to morph my interactions with the university to fit my own education. I started entering random lecture halls, going on walks across the athletic campus, finding weird hallways and corridors and nooks and crannies to simply be in. I used the university in a way that it was not intended to be used, and I loved it. I loved reappropriating dead hallways, walking past peeling paint, seeing lived stories of built environments that neoliberal growth has forgotten.
When I was 18, I took the AP Environmental Science test. I figured it would be an easy and cheap way to get credit for something I know a lot about. I am neurodivergent, and per my accommodations I was brought into a small room to take the exam alone without other students, an odd degraded former teacher’s lounge. I couldn’t stop looking around at the walls and floors, seeing what stories they told about the room. Unfortunately, what the space once was is forgotten, buried under records from the 90’s. Just as when I was 15, I began to cry. I understood clearly, for the first time, why I hate school.
School took what I am best at, keenly observing my environment, and told me that it was a distraction. What I should have been focussing on was the time sensitive test in front of me. The context of the paper test, the space it's in, and the reasons they exist are irrelevant. The land and the environment don’t matter, only the desk does. Only what the state and capital deems "curriculum" matters.
I have spent 19 years trying to numb myself of my curiosity. I have tried so hard to focus on what has been asked of me that I forgot how to ask what I want. I forgot how to have fun. There was a time before the desk came into my life and there will be a time after. My education has not come from tests and term papers, it has come from conversations in, with, and of the land. Designing a landscape of childhood and education that limits children’s access to the world is oppressive. To educate with the land as the child’s infinite playground is liberatory.
I am no longer a child and cannot relive those years, but I can learn from the land I exist within now. It's time for me to embrace it as a lover with open arms. The land is real, the land is metaphysical, the land is built, the land is destroyed, the land is a pseudo-abandoned teacher’s lounge that some out of touch administrator thought was an appropriate place for neurodivergent kids to take tests in as a ‘distraction reduced environment,’ land is talking with friends and building class consciousness, land is the one sidewalk in Chicago that no one will walk on in 40 years. Land is my teacher, land is pedagogy.
And I think it’s time I take a walk.
This essay was deeply inspired by the article “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation” by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.
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