Sep 1, 2026 · 1 hr 13 min · 9 segments
Another Season Is Possible! On the first episode of season 3, hosts Jordan Corson, Eli Meyerhoff, and Olive introduce the podcast and explore what the new season is all about.
So we're going to talk about radical education, keeping it a bit biographical.
I went to a Montessori school through fourth grade, and I found it to be a very liberatory kind of place to learn music.
And that shift was really jarring for me, going from a kind of learning that was motivated by my internal passions and interests, curiosity to more external kinds of motivations for learning by grades and the need to obey the teacher.
And that kind of conventional school environment, I felt anxious all the time.
And I think that really shut down my desire to experiment and explore my interests, really instrumentalized learning.
But in the meantime, I escaped from school by being part of radical kinds of subcultures with my friends, like skateboarding and punk rock, hardcore hip hop.
And I think through those subcultures, I was exposed to a kind of radical, informal kind of education, learning about anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, anarchist kinds of ideas through the music, through the cultures.
And so I left a year early to go to college because I thought I could be more independent.
And so I majored in the most lucrative major I thought at the time, chemical engineering.
I really took an instrumental careerist perspective on studying in college also, just trying to get through so I could get a job and get paid and be on my own, independent of my parents.
But yet in college, I still had friends, made friends who were part of radical kinds of subcultures.
And in the year 2000, when I was like, I think a junior in college, the Democratic National Convention happened.
in Los Angeles where I was going to USC just south of downtown LA and yeah the DNC happened and there was a big counter protest Rage Against the Machine played and I went to the show and it was the first big protest I'd ever been to and the police rioted shot tear gas and rubber bullets and one of my friends got shot in the back with a rubber bullet and had this huge welt bruise and That was pretty jarring for me, very politicizing, radicalizing for me.
And it made me feel like I didn't want to be a kind of cog in the machine of the capitalist world.
So we're going to talk about radical education, keeping it a bit biographical.
I went to a Montessori school through fourth grade, and I found it to be a very liberatory kind of place to learn music.
And that shift was really jarring for me, going from a kind of learning that was motivated by my internal passions and interests, curiosity to more external kinds of motivations for learning by grades and the need to obey the teacher.
And that kind of conventional school environment, I felt anxious all the time.
And I think that really shut down my desire to experiment and explore my interests, really instrumentalized learning.
But in the meantime, I escaped from school by being part of radical kinds of subcultures with my friends, like skateboarding and punk rock, hardcore hip hop.
And I think through those subcultures, I was exposed to a kind of radical, informal kind of education, learning about anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, anarchist kinds of ideas through the music, through the cultures.
And so I left a year early to go to college because I thought I could be more independent.
And so I majored in the most lucrative major I thought at the time, chemical engineering.
I really took an instrumental careerist perspective on studying in college also, just trying to get through so I could get a job and get paid and be on my own, independent of my parents.
But yet in college, I still had friends, made friends who were part of radical kinds of subcultures.
And in the year 2000, when I was like, I think a junior in college, the Democratic National Convention happened.
in Los Angeles where I was going to USC just south of downtown LA and yeah the DNC happened and there was a big counter protest Rage Against the Machine played and I went to the show and it was the first big protest I'd ever been to and the police rioted shot tear gas and rubber bullets and one of my friends got shot in the back with a rubber bullet and had this huge welt bruise and That was pretty jarring for me, very politicizing, radicalizing for me.
And it made me feel like I didn't want to be a kind of cog in the machine of the capitalist world.
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