On the crook of my left-hand thumb, there’s a scar. It’s nearly invisible now, but I still remember clearly, the sharp jolt when my knife slipped and hit bone.

Learning can hurt. That small scar is proof of a big lesson I learned at nine years old.

My grandfather had given me my first hunting knife. “I’ll teach you how to whittle,” he promised, carefully demonstrating how to strip bark and insisting that I never point the blade toward my body. He made me repeat it back until I understood.

Inspired by a carved face hanging in our home, deep eyes, long beard, I chose a stick from the woods and began. I don’t remember how my carving turned out, but I vividly recall gripping the branch awkwardly, trying to carve the eyes. The blade slipped, pain surged. I’d hit a nerve.

Alone in the woods, I panicked. Three fears took hold: the bleeding wouldn’t stop, I’d lose my knife, and worst, I’d disappoint my Grandpa.

Quietly, I snuck home, hoping it wasn’t as bad as it felt. Over the kitchen sink, I saw how deep the cut was. Shaken but determined, I rinsed, compressed, and wrapped my thumb tight. Later, when asked, I lied. It was just a scrape, something I handled myself. Being alone in the woods after school wasn’t unusual.

That small scar taught me something simple and lasting about real learning. It belongs to the learner, growing through curiosity, trial, solitude, and the urge to test limits.

Learning Does Not Belong to the Bureaucracy

I’ve reflected deeply on this idea in light of the second Trump administration’s attack on education. This is not only a fight over one federal department. It is a governing philosophy.

In Project 2025’s Department of Education chapter, that philosophy is stated plainly: federal education policy should be limited, the Department of Education should ultimately be eliminated, federal funds should be moved into block grants or education savings accounts, and major responsibilities should be scattered across other agencies. The language is dressed up as freedom from bureaucracy, but the pattern is more dangerous than that. It treats public education less as a shared democratic commitment than as a market to be broken apart, disciplined, privatized, and controlled.

The White House has put a similar argument into action. Its March 2025 education order framed the closure of the Department of Education as a return of power to parents, states, and communities, while also directing remaining federal education funds away from DEI and what it called “gender ideology.” By 2026, that argument had moved from rhetoric into administrative reality, with special education oversight and civil-rights enforcement being shifted out of the Education Department and into other federal agencies.

That is the flaw at the center of the attack. It confuses liberation with abandonment. It treats the removal of public responsibility as if it were the same thing as empowering learners.

Yet this moment reveals more than a political attack. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what learning truly is.

Education isn’t confined to buildings or bureaucracies. Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, argued education must liberate, not domesticate. It should spark curiosity, not enforce compliance. Myles Horton, founder of the Highlander Folk School, similarly believed real education empowers communities and fuels social movements.

At Hundred Hands Learning Lab, this belief sits at the center of our work. Movements themselves are living laboratories, spaces where communities harness creative power and confidence to shape equitable futures. Christopher Alexander, in A Pattern Language, insisted healthy communities require organic spaces for spontaneous learning, embedded in daily life rather than isolated, obedient institutions. H2L2 partners with communities precisely to create such spaces. Our politics keeps missing this distinction. Institutions can shape the conditions for learning without owning learning itself.

Schools matter. Universities matter. Libraries, public agencies, civil-rights offices, special education systems, community centers, grants, teachers, staff, and learning designers all matter. The conditions around learning can protect curiosity or punish it. They can open doors or narrow them. They can make it easier for people to inquire, practice, fail, recover, and create, or they can turn learning into compliance.

But learning does not belong to the bureaucracy.

Curiosity as a Radical Act

We often assume formal institutions are essential for learning. But Noam Chomsky reminds us otherwise. In an interview Adam Greenfield and I conducted through work I helped produce at MIT, Chomsky pushed back on the idea of education as filling a vessel. He described education instead as creating a path along which the learner can develop creative capacities, inquiry, and discovery. That idea has stayed with me because it clarifies the difference between instruction and education. Instruction can deliver information. Education changes a person’s relationship to inquiry.

My own attempt at whittling required no classroom, only guidance, risk, and yes, pain. A child learning language does not wait for a syllabus. A neighbor teaching another neighbor how to navigate a housing form is participating in education. A group of workers sharing what they know about safety, rights, and power is participating in education. A young person learning to repair a bike, remix a video, organize a mutual-aid table, question a news frame, or carve a face into a stick is participating in education.

This is why countercultural learning sources matter to me, even when they sit outside the usual educational canon. David Graeber’s The Democracy Project is not a school manual, but it is full of learning. It treats movements as places where people discover forms of coordination, decision-making, refusal, and mutual obligation they were rarely taught in formal institutions.

Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book is not polite curriculum. It is a countercultural artifact, sometimes messy, sometimes theatrical, and deliberately outside the sanctioned frame. But that is part of why it matters here. It insists that people learn by sharing tactics, building informal networks, and refusing the idea that all useful knowledge must come through approved channels.

These are not replacements for schools. They are reminders that education has always had a life outside the mainstream narrative.

In WNYC’s 2025 On the Media segment on Harvard and the battle over higher education, the fight over universities appeared not just as a budget fight or culture-war dispute, but as a fight over who gets to define legitimate knowledge, institutional independence, and public responsibility. That is why the present moment feels so charged. When political movements seek to control education, they are rarely only trying to manage schools. They are trying to manage what people are allowed to notice.

Curiosity threatens that kind of control. Curiosity asks why a system works the way it does. It notices who benefits, who disappears, and what gets described as neutral. It follows the thread past the official answer. It keeps asking what else could be true. That is why curiosity is not a soft value. It is a civic capacity.

Scarred but Stronger

These attacks misunderstand the core of learning. Budgets can be slashed, funding revoked, offices reorganized, institutions dismantled, and programs moved from one bureaucracy to another. But true learning thrives wherever curiosity and courage converge. It cannot be erased. It moves.

It moves into classrooms where teachers still ask real questions. It moves into community meetings where people teach each other how systems work. It moves into social movements, workshops, podcasts, zines, libraries, kitchens, repair spaces, sidewalks, and late-night conversations. It moves into the places where people still care enough to understand something together.

That does not make the political stakes small. It makes them more serious. If learning is larger than any bureaucracy, then the job is not merely to defend institutions as they are. The job is to defend and build the conditions where curiosity can survive contact with power.

H2L2 envisions a world where every community can be a learning laboratory, every learner can lead movements. One of our most formidable tools against tyranny isn’t institutional power. It’s the unstoppable momentum sparked by fearless curiosity and continual learning.

Curiosity is free, though it often costs us scars. Some scars are worth bearing.