Alt-Education looks at the stories the right tells about schools: a fight between an evil, indoctrinating government and a far-right freethinking truth warrior, between a frigid cultural Marxist teacher and a loving Christian mother.
This book explores the link between education, gender, and far-right metapolitics, and offers insights into the ways in which it circulates and is normalized. Through digital ethnography and fieldwork it explores the production, circulation, and interpretation of these discourses and the ideologies they express, tracing their movement across four groups of women in the US and UK – fascists, white nationalist, Christian nationalists, and Republicans. Although often understood to be opposed to education, the far-right is instead opposed to schooling – and offers its own practices of alt-education. Through media, alternative schools and home education, the far-right teaches their ideologies of gender and race, knowledge, and power, as well as transmitting alternative histories, sociologies, and conspiracies. From mom’s groups to digital discourses about the evils of public schools, social media are key arenas in which women not only teach, but are taught, far-right alternative knowledge. Alt-education teaches reactionary ideology as a timeless truth, normalizing it through discourses of home, family and love. At the same time, alt-education borrows and co-opts the language of critique – normalizing racism, sexism and fascism a kind of alternative knowledge, while making it exciting as a countercultural critique of “woke” liberal indoctrination. The book concludes with a look at this attempt to “speak post-truth to power” as a way of normalizing and spreading their ideology – bringing alt-education to a wide audience as their critiques of “woke” politics spreads across the US, UK, and into Europe.
This book is aimed at scholars of the far-right and gender, as well as scholars and practitioners of education. Written in an accessible and engaging tone, this book will be of interest to both researchers and advanced undergraduates.