Overview

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.

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9781032704296

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Reviews

“Catherine Tebaldi’s Alt-Education is a brilliant addition to our field. Her research fills a significant gap and avoids assuming the ignorance of far-right actors. As Tebaldi powerfully notes, ‘the far right is wrong, but not stupid’.” Aurelien Mondon, Associate professor, Co-convenor of the Reactionary Politics Research Network “In Alt-Education, Catherine Tebaldi has produced an insightful and powerful analysis of influential far-right movements in education. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the political forces and beliefs underpinning so much of the growing anti-public-school sentiment in the United States.” Michael W. Apple, Author of Can Education Change Society? “Tebaldi’s edifying, alarming account reveals the architecture of far-right fables and moral panics—as well as the rhetorical conflations that glue their education movements together. This book fully exposes the paradox of self-ascribed “free thinking” within sclerotic political ideologies.” Janet McIntosh, Brandeis University, editor of Language in the Trump Era “Tebaldi has written a fascinating, timely, and highly readable book on the growing right-wing alternative education movement. Combining ethnography and meticulous case studies, Alt-Education traces its origins and the diverse connections between Moms for Liberty, tradwives, homeschoolers, alt-right, and the Intellectual Dark Web. A must read for scholars, policymakers, and anybody interested in understanding the far-right.” Thomas Zeitzoff, Professor, School of Public Affairs, American University

Author Information

Catherine Tebaldi is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Humanities, University of Luxembourg.

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