Piratical Pedagogues: Learners Above the Law
- darkclassroom
- Mar 18
- 10 min read
Updated: Mar 21
The Question: Who is a Piratical Pedagogue?
Welcome Aboard Dark Classroom explored how pirates reject society’s laws and expectations—just as educators are justified in challenging the rigid norms of traditional education.
Normal education was never seaworthy. Most teachers fear mutiny.
These norms, held in place by Critical Dispersion and imposed by the State of Normal, demand compliance, not growth. But those who refuse to obey? They are the piratical pedagogues. They are the educators who, through the art and science of teaching, expose the very mechanisms that keep both students and teachers trapped in self-perpetuating “normal.”
These wounded warriors of education stand firm, modeling the growth mindset not as a slogan but as a lived resistance. Their weapon? Critical thinking, deployed vigilantly against the State of Normal.
A piratical pedagogue is more than a teacher—a title designed to constrain; they are educators among a crew of fellow rebels: instructors, content experts, instructional designers, learning architects, instructional technologists, librarians, accessibility specialists, and even the learners themselves. These agents of pirattitude thrive as learner-educators among learner-educators.
As a crew, they chart learning experiences beyond compliance, reclaiming curiosity, autonomy, and the love of learning. They revive the learning spirit by remembering: the body is the first, last, and most important educator.
Piratical Pedagogues: Diverse Bodies
Think of a pirate.
What comes to mind?
Most picture a ragged, lawless outcast. A man who is shaggy and unhygienic with weathered skin, long hair, missing limbs and / or other body parts, white or tan-brown-skinned and dressed in 18th century breeches, tricorn hat, headscarf, long coat with many buttons. Doomed to die penniless. This image isn’t accidental. It’s the product of centuries of norming tactics, crafted by those in power.
We named the State of Normal as the pirate’s enemy. And if your first image was made of any of those identifiers—you’ve just witnessed ideological control firsthand.
But history tells a different story.
The most successful pirate of all time: Ching Shih, a woman. Once a sex worker in China, she rose as the Terror of South China to command the Red Flag Fleet of 1,800 ships and 80,000 pirates Her empire was more powerful than some national navies. Blackbeard, by comparison, commanded four ships with 300 men.
Her rule during the latter 18th century was one of strategy, discipline, and negotiation. She was so formidable that, when she finally decided to retire, she dissolved her fleet on her own terms. The emperor knew he couldn't defeat her. This pirate queen secured full pardons for her pirates. Some went on to join the Chinese military and government, while she herself received full amnesty, kept her wealth, and opened a lucrative gambling house and brothel.
This is piracy: not chaos, but adaptation. Not lawlessness, but self-governance. It is defying an imposed, imperialistic structure to build one’s own.
The Pirate as Abject
If a pirate’s identity is shaped for public perception by the very structures that vilify them, they expose the contradictions of those systems. The State of Normal claims to uphold growth mindset and critical thinking, yet it demands passivity and complacency. Those who refuse compliance (i.e. pirates, both at sea and in the classroom) become abject figures, cast out as threats to the established order.
This notion of the pirate is a perfect example of abjection, a concept developed by Julia Kristeva to describe what is excluded, marginalized, or deemed impure within society. Abjection is the human reaction—disgust, horror, rejection—when faced with something that threatens the boundary between self and other, between subject and object. It marks what is "good and clean", and violently rejects the unclean and improper. While this often applies to physical elements (death, waste, bodily fluids), its psychological and social dimensions are just as powerful. I would add that the linguistic dimensions are also important.
The abject is anything that disrupts meaning and order and must be expunged.
Referring back to the War of Spanish Succession, for Spain and England, these war-minded seafareres were not abject during times of war. They were tools of statecraft. The moment those privateers lost their political backing, they were jettisoned as pirates, framed as enemies of all civilization, including the enemy nation.
As Kristeva (1982) writes:
What is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws [the learner/pirate] toward the place where meaning collapses. A certain ‘ego’ that merged with its master, a superego [e.g., the mother society], has flatly driven it away. [The pirate] lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter’s [the State of Normal's] rules of the game. (p. 2)
Put simply: we define what something is by defining what it is not, including humans.
A pirate’s identity exists in this space of abjection. The pirate is the one cast out by being called something different—but in that rejection there is a choice: accept the label as a mark of shame or embrace it as a source of power.
Hypocrisy is a Pirate's True Power
Every pirate is forged in the moment they identify hypocrisy and reject its hold on their survival.
This is the essential tension between pirates and the State of Normal. Since pirates must constantly be aware of the tactics used to annihilate them, they are the figureheads of critical thinking. Yet, that is precisely the condition that Normal rejects as improper.
Are you ready for the irony? Reputation, dictated by those in power, brands pirates as illegitimate and anti-authorized. Yet, the pirate is the most authentic figure of all, living not by abstract laws but by the tangible realities of survival, adaptation, and community.
Their very existence challenges the hypocrisy of state authority, not just by rejecting it, but by wielding its own tools more effectively and honestly.
The State of Normal punishes betrayal and fickle alliances. Except, that is, when it engages in them itself. It denounces pirates for shifting loyalties, breaking agreements, and exploiting opportunity, yet it flips alliances, abandons its own, and punishes those it once rewarded—all while claiming the moral high ground. This is the core contradiction of power:
When a pirate breaks an alliance, they do so transparently—out in the open, with full acknowledgment of the game being played.
When the State of Normal does the same, it hides in the dark, claiming necessity, righteousness, or inevitability.
By condemning pirates as evil for tactics it also employs, the State of Normal weakens itself because every time it engages in these betrayals, it must either justify its hypocrisy or risk exposing itself as no different from those it demonizes. The pirate, however, is unburdened by such self-deception. In embracing the game for what it is, they become more firmly piratical, while the State of Normal erodes its own legitimacy by breaking the very rules it claims to uphold.
This is the pirate’s greatest power. Their power is not lawlessness, but the ability to turn the State of Normal’s weapons against it, without apology, without pretense.
When a pirate lives hypocrisy transparently, they change the label. Instead of hypocrite, pirates are agents of their own design as savvy, justified survivalists. More than that, the more Normal abhors them for their feckless livelihoods, the more they thrive. This is why the pirate rises—not as an outlaw, but as a force of necessary defiance.
Piratical Pedagogues Start as Privateers
Remember that, in this schism between thought and reality, pirates have very legitimate reasons for their behaviors.
Normal education deploys mechanisms, both figurative and literal, to maintain comfort, ease, and compliance. This is especially true for teachers, whose identities were validated by Normal as students and then further entrenched by choosing a profession that preserves the system. The title of teacher is narrow: it's reduced to being a part of legitimacy by longevity. The label student is just as restrictive.
Teachers were funneled as students into the trauma machine by their guardians. Then they went to normal schools (teachers' colleges) to be sanctioned as pedagogy's privateers. To be handed a degree is like being handed a letter of marque.
That’s often the hardest, most painful part to admit. But it can be the easiest to accept when teachers realize they were tricked. What happens next is their choice. If they don't shed the label teacher for something more powerful, they choose complicity.
Traditional schooling conditions teachers into compliance, threatening abjection, just as the State of Normal distorts the pirate’s legacy. It did this in an always-already existing machine. The ideal “good teacher” has never been the one who encourages true intellectual exploration, but the one who efficiently delivers pre-approved content, manages a controlled classroom, administers standardized testing, demands adherence to one-verb quality markers, and reduces learners' worth to quantitative scores. Those who refuse to conform (e.g. educators who don't grade, who position project-based learning as proof of success, who allow qualified non-teachers to adjudicate quality) are marginalized, dismissed, or forced out. The system does not nurture educators; it disciplines them into obedience.
To go piratical, teachers must relearn their very natures. They must return to their spirit as learners in the State of Learning and recognize that in being self-taught, they are also educators. The moment an educator recognizes what is truly traumatizing in Normal education and chooses to act is when they become a piratical pedagogue: a learner-educator.
If this rattles the teacher to the core, pedagogy calls this discomfort the surest sign of a learning moment. That very discomfort collapses the contradiction in the State of Normal: If education is truly learner-centered, then we should want to thrive in that power as learners, too—not be disconcerted by it. If we have a growth mindset, it shouldn't feel like a gut-punch to realize we've made mistakes in guiding learners.
Some abjections must take place within, to jettison what is unclean in our own practices.
The bravest pedagogues go that far, becoming dynamically defiant of their own behaviors.
Dynamism teaches and involves learners' worlds as they exist now. That is the world an educator enters when they leave the "legitimate" (land-locked) classroom. The pirate rejects being told how things should be, forging a new path through the chaos with the best tools of its creator.
There is no better way to defy, to question all norms, to use what we’ve learned to dismantle the very structures that hold us accountable to a system that is not accountable to itself than by admitting that learners have the right to teach us, too.
As a piratical pedagogue, you must continually stand in opposition to tradition for tradition’s sake. Challenge what you experienced in your own education and what you have, knowingly or unknowingly, chosen to reinforce in your own practice.
Piratical Pedagogues Self-Authorize
For pirates, suspending judgment about land-locked laws that governed them was a death sentence. Keep in mind:
The pirates’ realism changes with the tides and allows no outside authority or reputation to fix him into a static figure unable to adapt. It is his critical awareness that can read the weather and allow him to make contextually appropriate choices... (Greathouse, 2023, 104)
Survival is about the body’s context and its very nature to perceive, assess, and act accordingly. Mistakes are built-in, and the chance to do better is assured. This makes the body the first, last, and most important teacher. No language required. No state control to dictate learning. This is the right of the learner spirit to self-authorize.
Most teachers feel this threat in their bones as a denial of quality of life. How do we know? They don’t last—burnout drives many out within five years. This is evidence that the State of Normal is evicting those it raised and rewarded.
Decades and dollars lost. Tens of thousands in debt for a degree. Years of conditioning out a learner spirit. And once they’re forced to exist beyond classrooms, their bodies break—headaches, gastrointestinal issues, heart disease (Salvagioni et al., 2017). Their emotions twist into anger and cynicism. Their relationships suffer. Their bank accounts are drained, not just by debt but by the expectation to fund student needs. Worst of all, their values and identities—once anchored in the belief that Normal is good and just—crumble under the weight of critical dispersion.
In this contradiction and conditioning, resentment rises—a justified, though passive, pirattitude.
Moving from resentment to defiance is the switch where piratical pedagogues transform from abject objects to self-authorized agents of their own design.
This is why pirates have the power to disrupt, deviate, and defy. By seeing themselves as pirates, educators recognize their resistance against the same systems of control. A pirate’s relationship with authority is fraught with rebellion, but it redefines legitimacy. Educators who embody this mindset cease to be subjugated by Normal, using the system’s own tools to disrupt its complacency. The piratical pedagogue’s existence becomes more credible with every act of radical exclusion and abjection, challenging norms and threatening stability.
Now jettisoned, piratical pedagogues have the skills and passions to turn back—defying what stole their decades, dollars, and dreams. This is the pedagogy of their pirattitudes.
This approach isn’t about breaking the system for destruction’s sake, but reclaiming their learning spirits from the State of Normal and repurposing them for learners' quality of life—including their own. That can’t be done from the inside.
Piratical Pedagogues: A Very Motley Crew
Learning spirits seek survival reliant on their bodies as their first, last, and most important teacher; thrival, however, goes beyond mere survival as the community of these learning bodies that shelters this learning in a collective goal for the greater good.
Piratical pedagogues challenge “normal” schooling with the most efficiency and savvy because they were trained by all of its toxicity, but practical success comes only by sigining onto a motley crew.
A pirate ship is not made of a single type of outcast, and neither is Dark Classroom. There is a reason there are many roles on a ship, such as captain, bosun, quartermaster, gunner, doctor, cook, powder monkey, carpenter, and more. For the same reason, there are many different roles to be considered a piratical pedagogue. It's not made of just wounded teachers and students. There are:
☠️ Learners
⚓ Instructors
🏴☠️ Trainers
🦜 Coaches
⛵ Docents
🗺️ Learning Architects
📜 Instructional Designers
🔧 Instructional Technologists
📚 Librarians
♿ Accessibility Specialists
...and more.
If a pirattitude calls to you, regardless of your role, sign on and leave a comment.
On Deck
A Piratical Pedagogue in Action: Defying Normal with Its Own Tools.
Explore exactly what behaving like a piratical pedagogue looks like—and accomplishes.
Keep a weather eye out for:
Motley Crew: The Roles of Piratical Pedagogues
Dark Classroom Ships Code: 5 Commitments of a Motley Crew
References
Greathouse, S.E. (2013). Romancing the tides: A theory of the literary pirate in children's literature [Doctoral dissertation, Illinois State University].
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection (L. S. Roudiez, Trans.). Columbia University Press.
Salvagioni, D. A. J., Melanda, F. N., Mesas, A. E., González, A. D., Gabani, F. L., &
Andrade, S. M. (2017). Physical, psychological and occupational consequences of job burnout: A systematic review of prospective studies. PloS one, 12(10), e0185781. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185781