Theory Bites 2: Youth Liberation & The First Prison Works in Theory

Ep 9 - Theory Bites 2: Youth Liberation & The First Prison
We’ve got another short Theory Bites! First we discuss Youth Liberation - (I)An-ok Ta Chai, 2004, and then First Prison - William Gillis, 2018
 
Case Closed / Detective Conan (video)
Flanders’ Parents (video)
Dead Poets Society Dad (video - was that last episode?)
Rutger Bregman Real Life Lord of the Flies (article)
Angelica’s Last Stand (paywalled video)
When schools become The Lord of the Rings (tweet)
 
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Produced, edited, and transcribed by Allyson https://www.forestfreeter.com
Theme song by http://woulg.com/
Transcript:
Works in Theory
Theory Bites: Youth Liberation and The First Prison
Elysha: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another Works In Theory - Theory Bites. I am Elysha here from Works In Theory Podcast, and I am here with Tom-
Tom: Tom!
Elysha: And Nate. 
Nate: I'm Nate. 
Elysha: Yes. I don't know why we wanted folks to say their own names, but I did. And they did it. And I love that. So thank you. 
Nate: Yeah.
Elysha: We're going to try and smush two articles together today for this one bite. So this is big bite or two small bites. Both of these articles came from the anarchist library dot org. Which is sort of a loosely moderated library, archive of different anarchist texts. And I wanted to mention that because they're a great resource. If you're interested in browsing around for yourself,
Tom: But you shouldn't have to, our podcast is all you need. So don't worry too much [00:01:00] about that.
Elysha: Yeah, but just, just so that, you know, the tool is out there, you don't need it. You don't need you. Didn't, it's fine. But like it's, anarchist library dot org, and I just really wanted to mention it for these two texts because, the authors of these, you may not have heard of in the same way that you've heard of Emma Goldman.
So we've got two pieces here. I'm really not sure what order we're going to do them in, but we've got one by William Gillis, which is called The First Prison and one by (I)An-ok Ta Chai, which is called Youth Liberation. 
Nate: So I say, let's start with the youth liberation piece. Both because it's written earlier it's from 2004 versus the other one is from 2018. And because it's a little shorter.
Tom: Yeah. So the the premise of this one, the kind of question that I think I took out of it was we treat adults as infallible and self-sufficient children are incapable. But like, is that true? And are we just conditioning children for subservience to the state capitalism, other forms of control? Or [00:02:00] should we treat them with mutual respect and treat it like any other issue, any other anarchist position?
And it's similar to the Goldman piece, but I think it's it's got some distinctions. For one thing, I think it's a little more extreme.
Nate: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. In fact, you keep saying children, but the author actually would prefer that we say kids.
Tom: Oh, you're right!
Nate: Yeah, they bring up the fact that children sort of has like a connotation of like "childish", of like, "less developed" you know, just like built right into it. And even though the piece is called Youth Liberation, they said youth tends to refer to teenagers, which is, you know, generally correct.
And so what they're talking about as a, gerontocracy like just an overall system of like hierarchy in which adults have domination over kids. 
Elysha: The piece kind of opens up, asking the question of: how are people in society treated? And you can tell a lot about society based on how they treat their children and they're elderly. And I feel like we're kind of at like, [00:03:00] an era of reckoning with that, at least around here, we had so much trouble with like care homes for elderly people through the pandemic and schools brought up their absolute array of challenges as well.
And you know, not all of those are specifically rooted in like how