[Author’s Note: This podcast was recorded January 19th, 2025, fresh off the reversal of the TikTok ban. Since this recording, on March 20th, Trump signed an executive order to shut down several functions of the Department of Education. Very on the nose and a little too spooky even for us astrology heads at 4th World Oasis. Thanks for your patience on this, lord knows how many months of research went into this one. Enjoy :)]
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Book bans. Falling literacy rates. Police brutality at university protests. Chronic absenteeism. 1 in 7 children impacted by long COVID. Attacks on critical race theory. ChatGPT and AI decimating the critical thinking skills and attention spans of our future artists, surgeons, writers, and engineers. And to top it off, the Department of Education is essentially defunct. All with three months left until Uranus makes her long-awaited debut shifting into tropical Gemini for the 4th time in this country’s history.
The Gemini-Sagittarius axis encompasses the full scope of education from early primary school learning (Gemini) up into the higher and philosophical realms of university academia (Sagittarius). The past four years have already shown the shocking and unconventional ways that education can change overnight. And if we’re looking to the past for a hint at how Uranus in Gemini transformed education during Reconstruction and WWII, I’d say that the state of education is due for a major overhaul again.
Time stamps below, let’s get into it.
Time Stamps
0:00 — Intro: Welcome Nia! — Guest speaker Nia Òla joins me and CJ on this episode, diving into education shake-ups during this upcoming Uranus in Gemini transit.
1:58 — Brief Education Timeline during Last Uranus in Gemini Transit: Chronology of how American education was transformed between 1941 and 1949.
5:30 — Education Parallels from Previous Transit to Now: The connection between WWII, teacher shortages, and children absent from school during the last Uranus in Gemini transit.
7:23 — Parental Rights during Pluto in Aquarius and Uranus in Gemini: Nia expands on the current culture of parental rights in conservative circles and on the state level, citing Christian-nationalist and anti-vax motivations as a battleground for early school-age children.
14:50 — Children’s Autonomy in the Digital and Influencer Age: Child labor debates as child influencers create a new battleground for parents to exercise their control and ownership of their children.
17:49 — Current Social and Political Landscape of Children’s Education: CJ provides insight on the state of education regarding anti-teacher unions, reproductive rights, queer education, and conservative parents imposing their will on public school curriculum.
22:26 — Differences in Modes of Education: conservative book banning vs decentralized information sharing.
24:21 — The Future of Homeschooling and COVID: Long COVID and chronic absenteeism affecting the brain development of school-aged children, the precursor to children and teachers leaving traditional schooling due to disability.
30:15 — GenX and the Saturn in Pisces Generation: Younger Gen X as the first mommy bloggers subverting their lack of vulnerability to their children with forced over-vulnerability.
38:51 — Discrimination Cases in Favor of Anti-Vax Parents: neo-segregationist cases in Texas courts moving through to the Supreme Court. Religious and medical opt-outs for vaccines set the precedent to draft legislation allowing unvaccinated children into schools.
47:14 — Artificial Intelligence, Misinformation and the Death of Expertise: The destruction of truth and critical thinking in the push for tech dystopia.
50:38 — COVID Denialism and Lack of Public Health Education in Healthcare Spaces: Medical experts ignoring and/or denying the current state of COVID to conform with back-to-normal denialist public health policies, showing a growing disconnect between experts and those who seek out their expertise.
59:52 — Lack of Faith in Institutions: Folks realizing that we are in the Bad Place across many fields due to colonial institutions ramping up in their overt conservatism. Those seeking careers in these fields will be side-eyed.
1:03:25 — Reproducing Oppressive Logics in Decentralized Education Spaces: Freedom schools compromised by hyper individualism. The role of experts will face interrogation due to cloud, acclaim, etc.
1:07:31 — Educators Current Musings on the Future of Education: Decolonial and anti-oppressive curriculum facing consequences from higher authority in educational spaces. Struggles with administration at the educational and state level, particularly what that means with the abolition of the Department of Education.
1:13:38 — Successionist Movements in Liberal Cities: Coordinated attacks on liberal cities terrorizing folks into seceding or recreating segregated towns.
1:19:32 — Deporting Children and Far Right Curriculum: Generations of white supremacists socialized and propagandized in academia to favor whiteness. Potential new surge of militia training to protect whiteness and white history.
1:29:13 — Plans for Child Labor to Offset Deported Labor Force: New legislation to roll back protections in child labor, offsetting the labor shortages from the deported immigrant labor force.
1:30:00 — Decentralized Education to Sustain the Collective: When institutions fail, the community will know how to support themselves and the collective.
1:33:00 — Abolition of the Academic and the University: Students and teachers alike ruminating on how American academic institutions are enmeshed with genocide, displacement, and settler colonization, eventually opting to leave.
1:39:14 — Discernment on Professionals during Times of Crisis: Growing distrust of institutions prompting folks to have discernment on who they seek out in the underground to get their needs addressed.
1:42:14 — Assisting the Community in the Underground: Legitimacy in institutions losing their stronghold in an era of grassroots, decentralized, and revolutionary underground education.
2:04:00 — Police Brutality in Academia: Student protests, particularly since October 7th, 2023, displaying the full barbaric nature of teachers serving as soft cops and collaborating with them on behalf of imperialist institutions.
2:18:54 — Teachers Creating Revolutionary Curriculum: Teachers fighting district suppression to educate students on resistance movements and developing age-friendly anti-zionist and decolonial curriculum
2:23:15 — Death of the Career: Students looking towards non-traditional jobs and pursuits in the digital age
2025 transits
✧ March 30th — Neptune enters tropical Aries and will stay here for 14 years
✧ May 20th — Sun moves into tropical Gemini
✧ May 25th — Mercury moves into tropical Gemini
✧ May 26th — New Moon in tropical Gemini
✧ July 4th — Venus enters tropical Gemini
✧ July 7th — Uranus enters tropical Gemini for 7 years
Changes in Education during Uranus in Gemini
1860s
After the Revolutionary War, the second time America experienced a Uranus in tropical Gemini transit was between 1859 and 1871. Reconstruction, a period that conservative white Americans have punished the entire country for to this day, began in the middle of this country’s second Uranus in Gemini transit. This transit marked the start of the first schools for free Black folks post-Civil War, which had converted underground freedom schools into openly taught schoolhouses.
Literacy rates for formerly enslaved Black folks skyrocketed during this Uranus in Gemini transit. Aid societies formed by literate freed Black people opened new, self-sustaining schools where Black folks could pool their resources to recruit teachers, convert abandoned buildings into school houses, build schools from scratch, and raise funds to keep the schools operating.
While free Black folks and their allies during this transit were able to persuade the nation to embrace quality schooling for all, the steady advancement in Black education could not go without retaliation, and as such, free schoolhouses were constantly subjected to race riot attacks, vandalism, and schoolhouse burnings from jaded white folks. Two centuries later, as we approach this next Uranus in Gemini transit, these same attacks over black education and the teaching of black history are still carried out by white supremacists desperate to maintain their telling of American history and regain control of the narrative.
As with all fascist entities, assimilation and erasing of culture is one of the primary tools to plant the seed of oppressive thinking. The institutionalized assimilation era for Indigenous people began in 1819 with Congress passing the Civilization Fund Act, which would later be the catalyst for the Indian Boarding School era. This era marked systemic family separation, indoctrination, and abuse of Indigenous children in federally funded boarding schools to ‘civilize’ their communities. In 1871, during the final stretch of this country’s second Uranus in Gemini transit, the US government prohibited any further treaties with Indigenous nations while passing the Appropriations Act for Indian Education, which would require day schools to be established on reservations. This abusive residential school era lasted from 1860 up until 1978.
Instilling white Euro-Christian national identity into indigenous children using pro-American propaganda and curriculum was the primary function of residential boarding schools. Emphasizing American values, forced conversion to Christianity, watching revisionist movies like Cowboys and Indians, and perversely celebrating genocidal holidays like Columbus Day were ways to assimilate indigenous children in the mid-1800s. Knowledge of indigenous economies was omitted, and instead, colonial concepts like private property and capitalism were mandatory in the curriculum.
In addition to pro-American propaganda, governmental efforts to eradicate ‘barbarous dialects’ of indigenous peoples and replace them with English became standard school policy in 1867 after President Grant criticized the use of bilingual missionaries who taught students in both their native language as well as English. This resulted in Native students being prohibited from speaking their first languages and forced to speak English regardless of fluency, otherwise they’d be subjected to physical abuse by educators. Amidst the forced labor and institutionalized abuse, linguistic assimilation and verbal expression (Gemini) served as the primary tool of non-physical violence in residential schools during this transit.
Fast forward to 2025, American society is neck deep in the heaviest wave of anti-migrant (read: anti-indigenous) rhetoric, parroted blatantly from this administration. Trump is no stranger to echoing similar desires for the familiar linguistic assimilationist policies of the 1800s. With the current Gemini Jupiter transit giving all our predictions a head start, Trump wasted no time in taking a page from these archaic mercurial policies by signing language assimilation into law via cementing English as the official language of this country. With birthright citizenship now on the chopping block and attacks on critical race theory, the terms of enrollment for immigrant and racially marginalized children in public schools could soon revisit old and oppressive haunts.
1940s
The most recent years of Uranus in Gemini lasted between 1941 and 1949, with WWII smack in the middle of it (we’ve already discussed at length how the US loves to go to war during a tropical Uranus in Gemini transit). Before this period, a non-standardized laissez-faire attitude towards schooling had been the norm, particularly in rural communities. But as a new immigration wave swept the nation alongside a widening wealth gap due to 19th-century industrialization, a different approach to education demanded that the State have a central role in overseeing what curriculum is taught to the youth.
The issue of a nationwide illiteracy problem, teacher shortages from the draft, and anxieties around preserving the faith in American nationalism and democracy in the youth during wartime were central motivations for the previous Uranus in Gemini education reforms. The 1944 Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, later known as the G.I. Bill, was passed just days after the D-Day invasion of Normandy. This bill provided both educational benefits to help veterans via low mortgage rates, school supplies, and fully covered tuition. Financial assistance brought a college education to millions of folks who would have normally entered the blue-collar labor pool. By 1946, 53% of students in college courses were war veterans, and in the years after V-J Day, 70% of the male population enrolled in colleges were vets.
As veterans returned home, the emphasis on how to live in a democracy continued. In addition to instilling a sense of nationalism, an international understanding expanded the culture of learning in American schools. This was done through an emphasis on social studies, business, sociology, geography, and an emphasis on learning other cultures and languages; a stark opposite to the mentality surrounding the future of education during this upcoming Uranus in Gemini transit.
With the war impacting the entire world, education globally, but specifically in the United States, changed immensely. American education became more centralized and standardized due to changes ushered in just as Uranus was about to leave Taurus; most notably, child labor protections and a new grasp on the American educational system from previous military drafts. As a result of the worker-led initiatives and military acts from both world wars, this transit marked the start of what we consider modern-day childhood.
Child Labor Laws
The introduction of child labor laws from the previous Uranus in Taurus transit in 1938 laid the groundwork for assessing the state of the American education system when children were leaving the workforce for the schoolhouse. This time, the state had to quickly figure out how to occupy the time and attention spans of millions of students who were no longer legally delegated to factory work. But as with everything in this country’s dark history, not all policy was created equally.
As with the cultural and linguistic erosion enforced in residential schools during the 1800s Uranus in Gemini transit, exploiting Indigenous students for domestic labor was another key component of residential school curriculum. The “Placing Out System” sent indigenous students out to American households for either a summer or up to a full year, with the time away serving as a way for students to be used as cheap physical labor. Residential schooling focused on making indigenous children marketable to American society through trade school education. Boys were taught manual labor like farming and blacksmithing, while girls learned how to cook, clean, and raise farm animals, along with other gendered labor fields.
This legacy of chattel slavery and anti-indigenous child exploitation has persisted. Since the last Uranus in Taurus transit in 1938, federal labor laws have excluded child farm workers from child labor protections granted to other working children. Children aged twelve and under can legally work in agriculture, with experts estimating that over 500,000 farm workers are under 18. The majority of children working in agriculture are either first-generation or migrant children themselves who came with their families looking for work; the same folks conservatives simultaneously want deported overnight, while somehow still available to do the grueling work that middle-class American society would never even consider taking on.
Conservatives have never been shy about their desire to ‘strengthen border security’ by carrying out mass deportations. Dozens of ICE raids and deportations, regardless of following any myth of due process under the illusion of the Law, have increased from the last presidency. But if a massive population of an already dehumanized labor pool starts to dwindle, conservatives will have to figure out a new set of exploitable bodies to fill their shoes. And as much as the vapid tech-bros are dying to see androids toiling over food crops, a caste of humanoid field slaves is not anywhere on the horizon.
Last January, a Florida Senate committee (shown above) had advanced a bill that would allow employers to schedule kids to work on school nights until midnight. Children are always the first in line of easily exploitable and abused people. While it might be conditionally taboo for kids to work now, this attitude societally is expected to change if folks are left with no community and no alternatives to get by. And with mass layoffs across every industry, increased migrant deportations, the cost of living skyrocketing, and millions of essential workers dead from COVID, reversing child labor laws established a little under a century ago to fill out gaps in the workforce is sure to be on the agenda during this incoming transit.
Parental Rights, Homeschooling, and COVID-Era Education
A significant problem of the 1940s Uranus in Gemini transit was teacher shortages in the thousands. Educators were forced to leave the classroom to be shipped off to fight in Europe, and folks who were rejected found even more difficulty filling in a dwindling workforce. Between 1939 and 1944, it’s estimated that more than one hundred thousand teachers took jobs in the military or defense industries. As a result, seventy-five thousand American children went without schooling because of wartime teacher shortages. These educational disparities eventually led to the increase of trade schools and the expansion of community college programs to train the remaining workforce. The resulting expansion in trade and higher education fully cemented the military’s relationship with higher-education research.
We’ve already given our thoughts about a potential draft being reinstated sometime during this transit. But even outside of whatever mandatory service might be in store, teacher shortages due to COVID have been a running problem since 2020. Teachers are also leaving the profession due to a multitude of educational and public health policies negatively impacting public education.
Not only are the schools severely underfunded, but teachers and students alike are chronically absent due to long COVID symptoms that no school boards or state departments of education want to mitigate. Teachers across the country have reported that their students have weak vocabulary, have trouble with analyzing complex texts, and, most worrisome, struggle with their ability to understand different points of view.
During the WWII draft recruitment process, the US military rejected millions of enlistees not only due to health complications, but primarily because draftees were illiterate. Government-backed assessments that selected which soldiers would be eligible to enlist could determine that a person’s ability to read, write, and understand basic mathematics largely depended on where one lived regionally. The Project for Literacy Education in 1946 measured adult literacy in the U.S. population, helping to create materials suitable to train adult literacy teachers to teach adult literacy education.
In 2017, it was reported that 19% of U.S. adults ranked at the lowest levels of literacy. In 2023, that figure increased to 28%.
The current literacy data from 2022 to 2023 reports that:
130 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their children
54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level
45 million are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level
The illiteracy rate for the incoming generation is no better. And between long COVID impacting the cognitive abilities of the youth, children relying on ChatGPT to write basic papers, and attacks on critical race theory in classrooms by the government and parents’ rights groups, teachers seeking to provide a quality, well-rounded, non-revisionist account of history are facing a serious dilemma regarding the future of education. The result: individuals who do not have the educational background or experience tend to take their spots, mirroring the last Uranus in Gemini trend of teacher shortages.
It’s no secret that the American education system utilizes white code to center and legitimize white supremacist world views to shape the youth into the most ideal nationalist laborers. In the final stretch of the 1940s Uranus in Gemini transit, the House Un-American Activities Commission (HUAC) in 1949 mandated that lists of books used in school courses be submitted for inspection due to growing hysteria around students discovering Communist literature. Today, book bans, internet archive removals, and anti-communist anxieties have government officials hysteric that the youth are being educated out of American propaganda.
As fascism in this country continues to reveal that it’s gone full mask off, the choice for parents to pull their kids from schools might not even be up to parents organically. Schools closing due to a lack of state funding, rollbacks on civil rights for marginalized youth, conservative school board curricula, increased climate catastrophes, and divestment from special programs will rapidly accelerate and sometimes might come out of nowhere, as Uranus is an extremely volatile and unpredictable planetary energy. This energy might force parents’ hands in making sure that their children get quality education when the state has its priorities in advancing fascism.
Children have always been used as vessels to push conservative agendas. With Christian-nationalist parents’ rights groups feeling even more victimized about students learning non-revisionist American and global history, this Pluto in Aquarius transit (opposite of Leo = children) will likely see the introduction of legislation that extends homeschooling capabilities, primarily seeking to diminish vaccine requirements in public school children. There are already 11 states with no regulation or required notice to the state, and as COVID denial continues to run rampant, this could extend to additional states.
Now will parents pull their children from traditional school completely in favor of either freedom schools or homeschooling as a whole? It’s honestly looking like it to be quite honest. Because we’ll be in this Aquarian energy generationally, these modern-day freedom schools will first organize online (perhaps on the deep web if some Gen Alpha kids are savvy enough to help with the coding). With attacks on institutionalized schooling, kids will either have to get the truth online or be sucked into more misinformation. Expect to see parents creating curriculum and enrolling their children in freedom schools to learn the foundations of liberation politics, non-white washed American and global history, and age-appropriate radical theory that is easily conveyed to the youth (Woke Kindergarten is a fantastic example of this already.)
During the Residential School Era, Indigenous families resisting their children being forced to attend boarding schools meant entire villages would refuse to enroll their children. Encouraging children to run away and coordinating mass withdrawals were other forms of resistance against oppressive schooling (promptly met by the US government withholding food rations to reservations). With this Aquarian communal energy blessing this transit, similar community resistance and support to get these freedom schools established and run effectively will not be a challenge and might very well boom to prominence across the country, let alone the world. Resource sharing is easier than ever due to the internet, and democratized education will become less unorthodox as these transits progress.
On the flip side, we have to remember Pluto is about destruction. The social media crackdowns from the state will already be in intense overdrive due to social justice education through. These schools will be targeted by the state and local conservative opposition seeking to overhaul the state-funded public education system in the first place. Don’t be surprised if attempts at outlawing freedom schools outrage over faux-concern for the welfare and development of the youth come about during this time.
Opportunists and Decentralized Education
The rise, fall, and ultimate failure of Hillmantok that occurred in February perfectly showcased how liberal co-optation of grassroots movements inevitably leads to the demise of decentralized movement work. What began as an organic hub for Black educators and experts of all areas of study to provide free and accessible courses quickly devolved into a grifting opportunity for Black professionals. Some folks were quitting their real-life jobs for administrative positions that did not exist, others were creating offline HBCU-esque mixers requiring an admission fee, defeating the entire purpose of building a freedom school in cyberspace.
None of this was surprising, aside from how quickly the turnaround time for this co-opting process panned out. The misleadership class, particularly among Black professionals, wastes no time in injecting themselves into activism-oriented spaces for personal and monetary gain. What should have resulted in a fully democratized expansion of free education became a cash grab for folks seeking to reproduce the same hierarchies that create systemic educational barriers for marginalized folks in the first place. The digital freedom school experiment failed this go around, but it’s far from being the last.
Freedom schools rose to prominence in the 1960s during Uranus in tropical Virgo (the second mercurial sign). The upcoming transits in 2025 will be a parallel of this era when Uranus ingresses into Gemini (the first mercurial sign).
Freedom schools in this era were designed to facilitate discussion and reflection on the daily oppression of Black people, serving as a revolutionary response to the insufficiency of segregated schools. An example from one lesson titled “Material Things and Soul Things” stated that its aims were:
to develop insights about the inadequacies of pure materialism, and
to develop elementary concepts of a new society.
The downfall of Hillmantok is a fantastic case study on how the necessity of discernment, principles, and code of ethics will be lifesaving skills when developing a new society with the youth during this Uranus in Gemini transit. Discerning the grifters and opportunists from the folks committed to building an accessible alternative mode of education will be vital as traditional academic institutions start to collapse. Non-existent hierarchies and community-oriented approaches to learning, educating, and building will be the primary repellent. Opportunists preying on communities to seek authority, money, or power will be snuffed out, and much of this will require that the vision of new freedom schools leaves no room for capitalism to defang the liberatory nature of these spaces.
The vision of a new society where knowledge is free of barriers, readily disseminated, and accessible to all who are curious will have to be sustained and implemented so radically that anyone seeking to commodify these spaces will never stand a chance.
Abolition of the University
I remember being disillusioned with the progressive laquer of academia back in 2016. From the ways my college refused to acknowledge our campus SJP org in favor of Zionism, to protecting MAGA hat-wearing golf-bros who repeatedly antagonized marginalized student safe spaces (another New York university, mind you), the fire of social justice that our college claimed to value seemed to burn conditionally.
Today, student protestors in solidarity with Palestine are also coming to terms with this disillusionment. It’s been a year of encampments, campus raids, kidnapping, and police brutality with zero signs of redirecting tuition funds away from weapons contractors and the zionist entity.
American universities have a deep history in profiting, benefiting, and producing racial-colonial capitalist violence; as such, none of the institutional violence now being directed at monied and non-Black and non-Native students in protest of another genocide at the hands of this same empire should come as a surprise.
The most prestigious American universities were funded from the profits of chattel slavery (Columbia), and some universities enslaved people themselves (Georgetown). Many universities were both agents and beneficiaries of stolen land from the indigenous people they tried to assimilate and displace into extinction. Land grants for universities have been one of the most silent tools of Indigenous genocide. Columbia is the greatest offender when it comes to the legacy of displacement by serving as one of the biggest landlords in Manhattan, unrelenting in their continued displacement of Black Harlem residents. Romanticizing the post-WWII public university era is easy to engage with, especially compared to the current higher education crisis. But this nostalgia only creates a revisionist account of the institution by distancing American universities from their genocidal domestic and foreign policy entanglements, erasing their complicity in genocide and displacement altogether.
While the Golden Era narrative lauds the expansion of public university systems across the country from the 1940s to the early 1960s, both in the size of their enrollments and the scale of their budgets, it often does so without attending to the material motivations, conditions, and implications of these shifts. So, for instance, Jeffrey Williams can excitedly describe the virtues of the post-war “welfare-state university” as it was underwritten by the 1944 GI Bill, without contending with the fact that the bill’s intended purpose was the absorption of the surplus population of returning veterans.[10] Williams discusses how the bill’s structure provided funds to students rather than directly to universities and thus “made universities beholden to those who would make use of their services.” He does not, however, consider the material implications of this arrangement in fomenting and inflating a market in higher education, a market notably predicated on the exclusion, or at best limited and conditional inclusion, of people who fall outside of a white, heterosexual, masculine, citizen norm.
‘Abolitionist University Studies’ (Boggs, Meyerhoff, Mitchell, Schwartz-Weinstein, 2019)
Columbia is the current face of how the logics of academic capitalism are foundationally violent. Their latest mandate requires all new students and faculty to finish an orientation that asserts anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Tenured Columbia and NYU faculty stood watching as their students were targeted and hunted down by ICE. The academic institutions teaching freshman college students about resistance movements are the same institutions revoking degrees and enforcing state-sanctioned violence for putting theory into praxis. Western academia breeds cowardice, rejects the militancy of the oppressed, and defangs the spirit of budding revolutionaries with the promise of class and social mobility.
As well-intentioned as the student protestors are, many of them, along with a slim few professors, have starkly come face to face with how the school-to-prison pipeline operates. Instead of funneling black and brown primary school children facing institutionalized abuse, college students from even high socio-economic tax brackets experienced the consequence of turning against white supremacy.
The outcry and disbelief over police brutality being weaponized on university students, especially on Ivy League campuses, has highlighted plainly how the majority of this country, subconsciously or not, believe that this kind of state terror is reserved for colonized peoples. The suspensions, expulsions, zero-tolerance policies, and threat of physical restraint or arrest at the hands of school-hired police officers primarily enforced on Black and/or urban youth were now directed at lighter, older, and financially well-off faces.
The state-sanctioned violence unleashed on students daring to protest genocide should be a wake-up call to middle-class America. Your degrees will not save you. Your white collar job will not save you. Your proximity to Whiteness and capital will not save you. You will be subjected to the same terror as the rest of society’s ‘undesirables’ the second you go against the empire. Pleading to the cops that you’re a faculty member as a moral appeal doesn’t mean a thing if you’ve made it clear which side you’re on. Proving your innocence and affirming your nonviolence is pointless when the only language your opposition knows is violence. As long as these colonial institutions exist, the violence will continue, no matter how many campus reiki sessions, respectability-politic-drenched chants, and solidarity dance parties are held.
“The crisis consensus is a mainstay of political ideology that functions with particular ardor in higher education, where it pivots on the invocation of the university as a good in itself, as an institution defined ultimately by the progressive nature at its core. The crisis consensus thereby settles in advance the constitutive problems and paradoxes — to say nothing of the forms of real expropriation and violence — that continue to constitute the university as such. With the glossy patina of an ostensibly progressive liberal humanism, the crisis consensus invokes the university as the protector of time-honored and tested values, one whose defense requires a temporality characterized simultaneously by urgency and nostalgia.”
‘Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus’ (Boggs & Mitchell, 2018)
The terror inflicted from college campuses against students protesting genocide has resulted in nationwide ego death for the students who have been primed to be the future beneficiaries of racial-settler colonization in the core. Almost one full Gemini Uranus cycle from the last time wartime impacted American education, in protesting genocide sustained by the empire abroad, students are experiencing firsthand the state violence that poor Black and Indigenous folk encounter every day.
The myth of the meritocracy, the illusion of progressive institutions, and the facade of liberalism valuing ‘peace and order’ have all been shattered in the wind. Folks are learning the hard way that the meritocracy is not real, and that safety blanket of white supremacy will be yanked away with all its privileges the second you defy it. As students continue to see these universities for what they truly stand for, a growing refusal to enroll in solidarity will continue for the foreseeable future.
It’s a running joke that people unsure of what to do stay in academia for life. If you’re in social justice-oriented spaces, a lot of it stems from not feeling ready enough to utilize all that juicy radical theory and put it into practice. While I’m not in grad school, I catch myself with this mentality often; if I just Read More, if I Study More, if I just have More Information, I’ll eventually be in the best position to help everyone around me. Which is silly — the best time to act was yesterday. What can you do right now to take revolutionary action, big or small, rather than pushing it off towards a future date that may not be guaranteed?
As decentralized learning becomes common, the legitimacy of the institution of the University will no longer hold the weight that it used to. The desire to learn will always exist. The youth will always be emboldened to fight the good fight. But the universities will not save us. We need to build something new.
Death of Expertise
Concurrent with suspicion of institutions and the abolition of the university, folks transitioning away from these spaces will thus be tasked with re-education, for better and for worse. Uranus in Gemini is gearing us up for a misinformation age like we’ve never seen, and with artificial intelligence presenting itself as a growing dystopian nightmare, it won’t be enough to tout a degree or certification as the sole proof of trusted expertise. Forgetting the predatory price tag, what will a college degree be worth if AI were used all four years without ever having to write a paper?
Distrust across many fields of expertise has intensified across the board since 2020. Academic faculty at universities where student protests have been protesting zionism for months have already chipped away at the inherent trust in experts. Professors who have made names for themselves writing about decolonial theory have released statements expressing their support for genocidal regimes while condemning indigenous resistance. Healthcare professionals who once emphasized COVID prevention measures during lockdown are now engaging in denialism by refusing to mask around patients unless they’re in the operating room. As institutions themselves become more overt in their willingness to abide by fascist thought, folks who were already weary of these institutions on both sides will begin to seek out alternatives. The anti-vaxxers, already distrustful of the healthcare industry, will continue to seek out alternative health measures with limited scientific backing, while jaded marginalized communities still deeply engaged in science and COVID-aware spaces will become even more selective in who they trust with their health by creating people’s clinics of their own.
Overall, this transit will have folks distrustful of institutions across all political leanings seeking out or creating alternative education spaces for getting to their idea of the truth, as well as taking it upon themselves to dip their toes into as many realms of knowledge as possible. Being hyper vigilant in the face of misinformation and disinformation, taking time out for individualized research and study, and having strong discernment on the motivations behind why folks are presenting themselves as alternative sources of knowledge could end up saving your life.
✧ Uranus in Gemini: Education Predictions ✧
Freedom schools
online, underground and/or decentralized freedom schools established as conservative curriculum, book banning, and attacks on internet archives start to sweep the country
fascist transformations to public and higher education
community education for folks to become self-sufficient and live communally
adult kindergarten and other forms of adult schooling created to reverse declining literacy rates
Homeschooling and shocking changes to traditional school
COVID complications and hyper absenteeism force families to pull students from traditional in-person schooling
polarizing education taught outside of formal schooling: either fascist and revisionist or revolutionary and liberatory
censorship and/or banning of foreign languages and revolutionary ideologies in schools
AI/ChatGPT revitalising the usage of handwritten assignments, papers, cursive, etc.
punishments dealt to students who do not comply with fascist policies becomes widespread; ex: speaking English only on school grounds, mandatory to salute the flag, pledging allegiance to the US (+ Israel), etc
pro-American revisionist propaganda becoming standardized
Transformations in child labor laws
child labor protections either eradicated or expanded to include legal loopholes to allow children under 14 to enter the workforce
child influencers gaining financial autonomy from their parents
children finding alternative and unconventional ways to earn money online to support their families triggers looser child labor protections
Abandoning traditional schooling for alternative spaces
COVID complications and hyper absenteeism force families to pull students from in-person schooling
teacher shortages due to COVID, lack of funding, war, etc.
children begin to learn skills on how to build a community over building a career (shift from Pluto in Capricorn to Pluto in Aquarius)
Abolition of the university
traditional academia challenged as institutions grow more autocratic and bound to fascist logic
militancy returns to student protests with deadly physical confrontations
police brutality, zionist enmeshment, and genocidal capitalist ties in the face of student protests turn students away from enrolling in private universities and higher education overall
university enrollment declines in solidarity with Palestine
cowardice from academics in the face of human rights violations turns the youth away from traditional academic institutions and career paths in favor of establishing freedom schools and valuing militancy
Parental rights
new legislation extending homeschooling capabilities
rollbacks in vaccine requirements to allow unvaccinated kids into public schools
faux discrimination cases set a precedent for conservatives to seek legal battles to reinstate segregated schools
Death of expertise
folks become increasingly suspicious of professionals as distrust of institutions grows
valuing evidence of expertise in equal or more weight to one’s certification of expertise
strict codes of ethics and accountability enforced in informal decentralized spaces and specialty services
Thank you all for your patience on this, genuinely. The research for this podcast + accompanying article has been in the works since last September, and to date has been the most labor and research intensive. Which, in hindsight, is very fitting given this episode’s subject matter. Very much an independent study project. I am HIGHLY aware of how much y’all have anticipated this, so I truly appreciate everyone’s patience to the moon and back.
In our next podcast, we will be segwaying into our sixth podcast episode — Uranus in Gemini: Military Edition. In the meantime, it’s on us to get ahead of the curve and stomp out these oppressive ideologies that are desperately trying to take root (if any of y’all have kids, I would love to know what radical and exciting lessons you’re teaching them!) Something new needs to be built, and we all have hands to lend.
Thank you for tapping in and for your support.
- dana, nia & cj <3
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