Category: anti-nationalist

We at Love and Rage decided to post this essay by Emma Goldman on the anniversary of the murder of Francisco Ferrer to honor the legacy of the Spanish anarchist martyr. Today also happens to be the day that Mark Bray kicks off his speaking tour in Albany, NY at the Albany Free School on his book Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader.

Some of us at Love and Rage have been involved with the Mohawk Valley Freedom School in Utica, NY over the years which draws inspiration, in part, from the Modern School. The “idea” as it was called by revolutionaries in Spain: anarchism – and how it breaths life into liberatory practices in education is something which still makes an imprint in our struggle for freedom this very day. We need liberatory education now more than ever.

This essay was published in Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays (Third revised edition, New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1917).

by Emma Goldman

Experience has come to be considered the best school of life. The man or woman who does not learn some vital lesson in that school is looked upon as a dunce indeed. Yet strange to say, that though organized institutions continue perpetrating errors, though they learn nothing from experience, we acquiesce, as a matter of course. There lived and worked in Barcelona a man by the name of Francisco Ferrer. A teacher of children he was, known and loved by his people. Outside of Spain only the cultured few knew of Francisco Ferrer’s work. To the world at large this teacher was non-existent.

On the first of September, 1909, the Spanish government–at the behest of the Catholic Church–arrested Francisco Ferrer. On the thirteenth of October, after a mock trial, he was placed in the ditch at Montjuich prison, against the hideous wall of many sighs, and shot dead. Instantly Ferrer, the obscure teacher, became a universal figure, blazing forth the indignation and wrath of the whole civilized world against the wanton murder. Continue reading “Francisco Ferrer..Executed for UnSchooling .. from Emma Goldman and Love and Rage”