Making and Being Made: Children's Magazines and Anarchist Prefiguration at the Stelton Modern School

This paper examines the printing process at the Stelton Modern School (1911–1953), the longest-running anarchist educational experiment in the United States, through the lens of Voice of the Children (1920–1935)—a magazine written, illustrated, and printed by children. Focusing on the creative labor of students, this case study demonstrates how text and image production in the Stelton printshop was central to anarchist praxis, with bodies and tools actively shaping anarchist ethics and politics.

The chapter uses “prefigurative politics” to explore how printing enacted the ideal of a non-hierarchical, egalitarian society. Drawing on Kathy Ferguson’s Letterpress Revolution, it extends her insights into anarchist print culture to show how students engaged with the materiality and politics of printmaking. The printshop culture at Stelton fostered collective labor, mutual aid, and improvisational creativity, collapsing traditional power dynamics between adults and children who shared materials and space.

This paper foregrounds the bodily knowledge and skills of students, who learned by doing, making, and collaborating. Their work evidenced an “aesthetic politics of resistance,” as labor wove anarchist values into producing texts and images. Highlighting interactions between physical properties, artistic strategies, and pedagogical practices, the paper shows how tools and techniques of printing at Stelton cultivated a distinct anarchist ethic.

Ultimately, the Stelton printshop emerges as a site where bodies, texts, and tools converged to enact anarchist philosophy, reimagining students not as passive learners but as active participants in the political activism of anarchist print culture.