BOOK REVIEW:Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators

Lessons in Liberation is an excellent toolkit for educators looking to bring more abolitionist views into their teaching practice. It is a series of essays, lesson plans, posters, poems and interviews that explores different people’s experiences of and points of view on abolition in education. It encourages educators to not stop their social justice curriculum at what they teach, but also how they teach it. How can educators change the “behavioral management” in their classrooms to acknowledge students full humanity and disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. Since the book is almost text book like and composed of many different articles it is hard to give it an overall review. Some of the essays I found resonated strongly, some lesson plans I cannot wait to implement, others felt less relevant. It could easily be read for a few essays that are most relevant to your practice and not read the book in its entirety.

I am an American reading this book and it seemed very based on American culture and education. Because of this I think some of the suggestions would be very hard to implement in British schools which take a different approach to grades, testing and teacher-designed curricula. However, I think there are things educators and even non-educators could take away from this book, when thinking about how to not base behavioral management on control, discipline, and punishment. This can apply to adults as well as children, to classrooms as well as individuals. I find that even though I profess abolition, my mind can be caught up in ideas of punishment as the solution to “problematic behavior” especially for myself. How can we break out of this? Lessons in Liberation offers some options.

Review written by Celeste Cahn