Carnival and the Fake School: Transgressing the Vertical Imaginary of Education with and for Young Children

Abstract This study examines the collective labor of imagining one educational world among myself and six middle-income, racially- and gender-diverse six- and seven year-olds via a two-year critical participatory ethnography of a six-family (including my own) pandemic cooperative—Fake School, as the kids playfully named it. Fake School was initially a semester-long temporary stopgap to arrange shared childcare amid remote learning that became a two-year collective project through the uncertainties and surges of the pandemic. Drawing on Stallybrass and White, I use carnival as an analytic to explore the verticalist imaginary of the education-based mode of study. I seek to narrate our Fake School situated within the broader context of the predominating notions of normalcy that delimit possible futures for public education. I suggest that the emergent educational world we briefly created offers important insights for authorizing young children’s perspectives on the future of education.