Unschooling as Protest
The Public School System is Also Guilty for the Deaths in The Haditha Massacre
Please excuse typos as I cram in writing between wiping noses, being used as a human trampoline, and listening to play-by-plays of "Hello Neighbor 2".
I only recently learned about the Haditha Massacre that happened in Iraq in 2005. A roadside IED bomb exploded while a Marine vehicle was driving by, causing the death of one soldier and injuring two others. In retaliation, a group of Marines slaughtered dozens of Iraqi civilians - children, women, elders, and men. It is a war crime but none of the Marines that went on the killing spree were found guilty. Twenty four innocent Iraqis were murdered by men whose identities are known and yet their lives continued as if nothing had happened; as if they had not shot children and mothers cowering in bed in the head at close range. If only this were an isolated incident. The Iraq war was a blood bath in which “America” killed one million Iraqis based on a lie about “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. And this country, the United States, continues its legacy of inflicting horror by arming “Israel” and facilitating the ongoing genocide in Palestine that has officially killed over 40,000 people (16,480 of which are children) and unofficially killed 186,000 (and counting).
What does this real-life nightmare have to do with unschooling? First, because I believe that the United States school system is guilty by association due to perpetuating the ignorance that led to the Iraq War in the first place and, second, that led to the cover up of the Haditha Massacre. This is not hyperbole. I truly believe that due to the lack of education about the Middle East specifically and the truths about US colonialism and Imperialism in general, generations of “Americans” are falling for misinformation, at best, and acting on that misinformation, at worst. Violent and deadly lies like that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or that Hamas beheaded babies on October 7th, 2023 has fueled wars and cost millions of lives.
When the Haditha Massacre occurred I was just out of college, finally finished with my decades-long stint in the “American” school system. My brother, a Marine, had recently returned from Iraq, shell-shocked and traumatized, unwilling (to this day) to talk about his time in the war. Yet, existing within the parameters of these two solid “American” institutions - the United States school system and military - I did not hear a single mention of the massacre. It took almost twenty years for me to find out about this atrocious crime committed by the Marines, and that’s only because The New Yorker sued the Navy and Marine Corps for the photo evidence about this massacre.
I’m not blaming the school system for not explicitly teaching about the massacre. What I am blaming it for are the skewed truths I was taught about the “Middle East” during my K-12 years of schooling (in Florida and Texas). All I remember learning about places like Iraq and Afghanistan were that it was a hot, desert type environment and that there was a lot of oil. I learned that Jesus died for our sins but not that Bethlehem, the city where he was born, was in Palestine. In fact, I learned nothing of Palestine at all. Even the history of America was extremely one-sided, having been taught about Thanksgiving and Christopher Columbus “discovering” this continent with no mention of all the Indigenous people that have always been here. These skewed truths have led to nation-wide ignorance about the world, and ignorance can be a very dangerous thing.
There are so many more examples of the underwhelming education we receive in school, but that would take ages to write and there are already books written on this taught ignorance so I won’t go into more. Suffice to say, the education we receive in the American school system is extremely frustrating. This is not the fault of most public school teachers (of which I was for 10 years) but of the public school system that determines the standards that will be taught. Many teachers themselves are just as upset with the system as I am and some are even trying to disrupt from within the classroom, doing what they can with their limited pedagogical freedom to teach truth to power. However, in general, the United States school system is a neglectful and frustrating institution.
It is neglectful to teach everything from the influence of the global West and I’m frustrated at an education that centers the United States. I’m frustrated by the lack of critical thinking skills we develop when our entire education is based on meeting pre-determined goals meant to arrange us on a binary scale of learning - average, above average, and below average. I’m frustrated at all the time I spent learning things I’d never use again in my life - like algebra - rather than on things that matter more to me, like etymology, where I could have learned that algebra is an Arabic word: al-jabr.
Maybe if I’d learned the origin of the world algebra then my curiosity would have led me to dig deeper and I would have learned that over 4,000 years ago, ancient Iraqis (Mesopotamians) carved algebraic equations into clay tablets. And maybe if I’d learned that Arabs invented algebra so many thousands of years ago I would have had a deeper connection with Arabic culture and history. And maybe if Arabic culture and history was taught more profoundly in grade school then we’d have a more intimate understanding of Arabic people. And maybe if we felt more connected to Arabs then we would have questioned all the U.S military bases in Arabic countries. And maybe if we’d started questioning why the U.S had so many military bases in Arabic countries then we might understand why so many Arabs don’t trust the U.S military and its people. And maybe if we understood a little more about U.S Imperialism then we wouldn’t have believed the lies about “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq. And maybe if our critical thinking skills had us questioning the WMDs then we have fought harder against going into another war in Iraq. And maybe if we hadn’t started another war in Iraq then we wouldn’t give young, impressionable, and angry men with trust issues and post-traumatic stress disorder military weapons. And maybe if they hadn’t been armed to the teeth in a foreign country then the Haditha Massacre, and all the others before and after, would never have happened.
Maybe.
One can dream.
One must dream. Abolitionist Mariame Kaba insists that “Imagination is required because we need to invent new worlds and new ways of being with each other. We have to pre-figure the world in which we want to live”. It is within this practice of pre-figuration that I continue to choose unschooling as a form of protest against the public school system and beyond. It is within this imagining that I created the Empower Oceanside Cooperative and that I invite families to join us in dreaming “the world in which we want to live” together. I refuse to be subdued into accepting massacres and genocides as part of life. And keeping my kids out of the public school system is my refusal to let them be manipulated into this worldview, too.
* I use quotation marks around “America” and “Israel” in keeping with some journalist practices I’ve read that indicate skepticism and disagreement with the legitimacy of the state of “Israel” and “America” as a nation.
