Toward a Tactical Philosophy of Education

Toward a Tactical Philosophy of Education: Post-Structural Anarchism and the Question of Power in the Classroom

Hi everyone!

My name is Ryland Frost, and I teach high school history in New York City. For the last eight years, I have been bringing my obsession with philosophy into my teaching practice and trying to contribute to philosophy of education from inside the classroom. This presentation takes up a book that has changed how I think about my work, and, I would argue, how anyone interested in power, agency, and human formation might think about theirs: Todd May’s The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism.

At the core of this talk is May’s post-structural conception of power as not merely suppressive but also productive: a force that not only destroys and oppresses individuals but also participates in creating them. Following May, I ask what happens when we stop treating power as something simply imposed from above and begin to see it as something that moves through our relationships, institutions, language, identity, and the ways we come to understand ourselves and one another.

Drawing May into conversation with John Dewey’s call to find out “what education really is,” I argue that philosophy of education must become tactical: it must begin from lived practice rather than from abstraction. To do so, this talk investigates how classrooms can become places where philosophical concepts are tested, revised, and made accountable to their effects.

Although my classroom is the “contact zone” from which I am philosophizing, beneath that educational tone lies a broader claim about public philosophy: our ideas should be tested at the local level, in the actual practices and relationships in which they take shape. This talk asks us to learn from experimentation and to see what our concepts become when they meet the world, or, in my case, the classroom. I look forward to sharing this work and to the dialogue that follows.

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This event is part of the NYC Philosophy & Psychology Readers Conference 2026. For full details please visit: https://www.meetup.com/reading-philosophy/events/314020228/
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This room holds a maximum of 80 people seated or 148 people standing. It will be first come first served. If you cannot make it please update your RSVP to decline to allow others to use your space.
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