Welcome Aboard the Dark Classroom: The War Against Critical Dispersion

darkclassroom
Mar 13
10 min read

Updated: Mar 21

Welcome aboard the first post in an ongoing tome that uses pirate history, literature, and theory to describe the war in normal education and a haven aboard the Dark Classroom—The ship where pirates meet pedagogy.

Question: What’s the biggest threat to learners?

Learners and learning are under attack. Educators fight daily on the front lines of this battle, often without recognizing the true enemy.

The enemy is the State of Normal, and its most insidious weapon is Critical Dispersion. This systemic weapon is purposely designed to keep learners and educators passive, compliant, and disengaged. It's a mechanism of control that reduces people to mere tools of the state, ensuring they never question the structures that shape their reality.

But this is nothing new. History has shown us what happens when people are no longer useful to those in power. And few figures embody this betrayal more than the pirate.

From Privateers to Pirates: Normal Betrayals

To understand how "Normal" creates its own outcasts, we need to look at history.

Take the Peace of Utrecht (1713). This treaty ended the War of Spanish Succession. England and Spain had spent years locked in battle, with some of their most critical fights taking place thousands of miles away in the Caribbean, waged by men who weren’t kings or politicians, but privateers.

Privateers were government-backed pirates, or mercenaries of the sea, with official letters of marque that gave them permission to raid enemy ships. These privateers weren’t criminals; they were heroes of their nations, fighting to weaken enemy economies while filling the coffers of their rulers to keep the war going.

But piracy is always a matter of perspective.

Historical records show how easily these privateers were both celebrated and then, in a stroke of a quill, condemned. In a series of letters exchanged between English captain Joseph Lawes and Spanish official Benette Alfonso Del Manzano of Trinidad, each accused the other’s privateers of being pirates, while defending their own as legitimate warriors. Each man said that he would pursue to the death the other’s seafaring warriors as pirates.

Then came the treaty. With the agreement between opposing heads of state, the war was over. Just like that, thousands of seafarers, who had once been loyal subjects, were stripped of their legitimacy.

One day, they were sanctioned warriors of the state. On a land-locked "home" soil thousands of miles away in places these seafareres never lived, they were called heroes. The next day, they were called pirate, or buccaneer more specifically, enemies to be hunted down and exterminated.

The very countries that had armed, informed, and funded them now labeled them as criminals. Their status changed not because their actions or livelihoods changed, but because the rulers of far-off nations decided their usefulness had ended after they were taught how to survive with what had been taught to them.

For this reason, pirates can justifiably mark their opponent easily: The State of Normal.

Legitimacy By Longevity

This moment in history teaches us something critical about power: normal is whatever the ruling system decides it is.

When the war ended, these former privateers didn’t suddenly become more violent or more dangerous. They had the same skills, the same weapons, and the same survival instincts that were reliant on their Caribbean environments, cultures, and resources. That's why Spain and England deployed them in the first place. These sailors knew the terrain. All they needed were more tactics. What changed was that they no longer served the interests of the State of Normal.

Joseph Á Campo (2007) puts it out there:

Historical normality may say something about functionality, but it certainly does not say everything about legitimacy. The evaluation of piracy and anti-piracy measures is bound to centre on the question of which aspects of the imposed order were experienced as lawful and beneficial by which sectors of the population. (187)

In other words: Just because something is declared normal doesn’t mean it’s just.

The betrayal of the privateers is only one example. This practice of using people when they’re useful and discarding them when they’re not is a pattern throughout history. It’s how the State of Normal sustains itself.

Normal doesn’t need to be right. It only needs to be old enough and strong enough to enforce itself as the unquestioned rule. The State of Normal wins only by a condition of legitimacy by longevity reified by those it benefits.

Normal is whatever the ruling system decides it is and keeps repeating ad infinitum, but we have to remember that the ruling system had to do something abnormal and disruptive when the time and conditions were exactly right to find its own power.

Since the State of Normal denies its subjects the necessity to be high-context and rely on the realities and resources of time and place, it makes sense for it to be terrified of the next "abnormal" that comes along to replace it.

The State of Normal only sanctifies those who serve the state as it is and always "should" exist. Their legitimacy by longevity isn't just about making people follow rules. It’s about ensuring complacency. Subjugating the people to never test the rules in relation to their context in the first place.

The State of Normal should be ruthlessly tested by its citizens, not vice versa.

At the moment the ink meets the parchment, what bleeds into the law is a right to extract blood from its brethren. Once cast out from the system, pirates must constantly watch the horizon for the death that pursues them just for trying to live based on the context of their home environments.

Thus, to adhere blindly to an authority that once sanctified and outfitted their seafarer's lifestyle only to then deny their survival realities in favor of a land-locked "normal" is a pirate's death sentence.

State of Normal's Deadliest Weapon: Critical Dispersion

It's really difficult to test something when you can't define it, however. And we have to define the weapon to render it useless.

First mentioned in the work Romancing the Tides: A Theory of the Literary Pirate in Children's Literature (2013), I explain that Critical Dispersion is more than a method of compliance: It’s a mental condition and its subsequent behaviors permitting a slow erosion of autonomy that ensures people stop resisting before they even know resistance is possible. A condition instilled at birth and reified both directly and indirectly as they grow. It’s not active oppression; the mechnism is a passive and permitted erasure of agency.

At its core, Critical Dispersion is:

Complacency disguised as security – The belief that “normal” is not just stable but will always provide comfort and support.
Obedience without question – The quiet assumption that existing systems are inherently good and never deserve to be tested.
Legitimacy by longevity – The idea that because something has existed for a long time and everyone recognizes it, it must be right in all contexts and conditions.

But pirates? Pirates see the enemy because complacency is certain death. They have no choice but to engage in the Combats against Complaceny immediately.

Critical dispersion is the State of Normal’s weapon against thought, wielded to suppress inquiry. Its only counter is the pirate’s blade of critical thinking.

To understand what critical thinking is, we first need to understand what it is not. This is why defining the precise mechanisms and forms of Critical Dispersion is how critical thinking can verify its own existence. Only then can we target where and how the power of critical thinking is being denied to those who continue to serve the State of Normal.

Locating the Battlefields of Critical Dispersion

The State of Normal's reliance on critical dispersion flies in the face of what the system says it wants from its stakeholders and what it will permit its stakeholders to do.

The Spanish and English said they wanted their privateers to target a well-defined enemy (their opposing regime) and secure enough gold to thrive, but then those 2 countries banded together to take all of their subjects' gold for their own governments and pursue the now so-called pirates to death. These pirates were not allowed to identify their real enemy or defend their rights to their livelihoods.

This contradiction between words and actions inevitably leads to conflict, gaslighting, and justifiable resentment. This method of contradiction is the literal definition of hypocrite. Where you find these soldiers of critical dispersion wielding their contradictions is where you'll find a combat against complacency.

Combats against complacency in this war against critical dispersion mark both the battlegrounds and tactics of the pirate’s fight for critical thinking. Since a pirate must always be aware of the authority that seeks to annihilate them, they are the ultimate figureheads of critical thinking.

The most damning phrase—the rallying cry of stagnation, the siren song of the status quo, and the marker that the combat has begun—is this: “We’ve always done it that way.”

At those words, a pirate counters with a roar: “Hoist the black! PIRATES, TO ARMS!”

The Capitol of the State of Normal: Institutional Education

Normal is the very infrastructure of institutional education.

The term “normal school” comes from the French école normale, a sixteenth-century model school with standardized classrooms where teacher candidates were trained to reproduce “correct” teaching practices. In the United States, normal schools were established primarily to train elementary-level teachers for public education.

During the first Industrial Revolution beginning around 1760 and lasting until about 1840, the industrialized economies of Europe and the U.S. demanded something far beyond well-trained teachers. They needed a reliable, reproducible, and uniform workforce. They needed flesh-and-bone cogs and levers as leverage for their machinery.

Factory owners in the Industrial Revolution sought to instill their workers with moral subservience and mechanical precision. Their claim was that capitalism could improve quality of life. Education became the tool through which this was achieved, leading to the first uniform, formalized national curricula. Literal Normal schools were tasked not just with training teachers as norming machines, but also with shaping a society where obedience, routine, and passive productivity were virtues.

These schools are the architecture of a system that made student a word synonymous with cog. Humans meant to be replaceable, predictable, and standardized.

Was normalization ever really about providing a better quality of life? Or was it about ensuring that people never questioned the quality of life they were given because the machines they were sacrificing their safety for were for a greater good?

Education's Trauma Machines

Grading rubrics, standardized tests, curriculum pacing, punitive policies, behavioral mandates. These aren’t accidents. They’re the natural offspring of a system engineered to prioritize conformity over curiosity, efficiency over exploration, and obedience over autonomy. The machines intended for a greater good.

Education is so enamored with its normalizing function that it literally names institutions after it. Argentina and Mexico continue to call them normal schools. (I earned my doctorate in pirates, pedagogy and children's literature at ISU in Normal, Illinois—so called because it was home to the state’s first teachers' college.) This system glorifies its mission because it has no choice; its survival depends on it. It props itself up with a self-congratulatory history, mistaking longevity for legitimacy.

But here’s the truth: for humans and humanity, mechanical perfection (read: normal) is neither attainable nor sustainable.

No rubric, no grading scale, no standardized assessment will ever change that. These mechanisms were never designed to serve learners in the moment. They exist to serve the system, feeding it in an endless cycle. These are the trauma machines, punishing deviation, enforcing compliance, and then gaslighting its constituents.

If we are to resist—if we are to dismantle the machine and reclaim learning as thinking and thriving—then we must embrace the pirate’s role: to disrupt, to defy, to steal knowledge from the machine that hoards it after instructing them by it, and then turn it back on them.

Normal education thrives on contradiction. It says it will only reward critical thinking but punishes those who think too critically about the system itself. For example, it preaches the gospel of growth mindset while refusing to align learning with real-world needs. Educators recycle the same outdated, text-based content for years, failing to enrich it with current research, professional insights, or dynamic media like videos, podcasts, and case studies. Failing to do what is demanded of the most current research-based pedagogy.

The State of Normal claims to prepare students for the future yet shackles them to rigid, outdated models built not for innovation, but for compliance. It asks students for the money to fill its coffers, then foists them into a world that cannot supply them to buy their way out of their indebtedness.

And when learners and educators push back, they’re shut out.

Critical Dispersion at Work:

Convince people that what exists is the only way things can exist.
Vilify those who challenge it, branding them as rebels, troublemakers, or threats.
Disconnect people from their own power so they never realize they can change the system.

This is how education is weaponized against learners. It’s not enough to teach them what to think. The real goal is to ensure they never think critically enough to dismantle the system itself.

Why? Because normal isn’t just a byproduct of education. Normal is its foundation and framework.

But pirates? Pirates recognize the game for what it is. And they refuse to play by its rules.

This war rages in every normal classroom, every learning space, every moment when authority demands obedience instead of inquiry. That’s why the pirates of education— the piratical pedagogues who refuse to conform—must raise their flags at the first sign of hypocrisy.

To bring down the State of Normal is to revive of the State of Learning.

Dark Classroom: The Ship Where Pirates Meet Pedagogy

The State of Normal is a shadowed empire. It has to be: hypocrisy thrives in the dark. Rather than confronting its own contradictions, it turns the light outward, branding its dissenters as the hypocrites.

Most people fear facing the State of Normal. That is, until they have no choice. Until they realize Normal has wormed its way inside them as much as it seeks to destroy them.

If the War against Critical Dispersion is fought wherever real learning happens, then that’s where our classrooms must be. And the first, most important learning geography? The body. Learning is embodied. It is lived from the moment we are born. But no one fights alone. Meaning is made in community. It is made among a crew.

There are countless people who have been shaped, subdued, used, and discarded by the State of Normal—people who have survived its trauma machines and still hunger to reclaim their power. Both learners and educators. A pirate crew is a collective of such people: like-minded in defiance, diverse in experience.

The Dark Classroom is where that crew gathers. It does not fear the dark. It fights there because the greatest learning happens in disruption. It sheds light where the State of Normal casts its longest shadows. It is a ship for outcasts, thinkers, rebels—a vessel armed for combats against complacency, charting a course into the heart of learning geographies where the weapon of Critical Dispersion is powerless against critical thinking and the State of Normal deserves to meet its end.

Ready to sign on?

On Deck:

Discover what it takes to Sign On to Dark Classroom and what it means to be a Piratical Pedagogue.

References

Á Campo, J. N. F. M. (2007). Discourse without discussion: Representations of piracy in colonial Indonesia, 1816-25. In R. J. Antony (Ed.), Pirates in the age of sail (pp. 179–188). Norton.
Greathouse, S.E. (2013). Critical Dispersion: The Combat against Complacency. In Romancing the tides: A theory of the literary pirate in children's literature (Chapter 2, pp.69-75) [Doctoral dissertation, Illinois State University].