Review: A Rule is to Break: A Child's Guide to Anarchy

It is a sad day when you bring home a book called A Rule is to Break: A Child's Guide to Anarchy, and the biggest problem you have with it is how banal and prescriptive it is. I joked when I first heard of this book that my strong-willed adventurer of a seven-year-old must never read it. I still think that, but only because it offers so little to children who are feeling stifled by rules about what to eat, when to sleep, and how to behave.

The authors, john & jana, make a fundamental mistake: their entire book is a series of commands. "Don't look like everybody else. Be you!" "Build it. Don't buy it." "Forget about grocery stores and get dirty in your garden."

My favorite page has got to be the one that says, "No rules!" and then, right next to that, "Be nice!" Isn't "be nice" a rule?

I'm used to the liberals I know engaging in a game that goes, "Be a freethinker! Follow my rules instead!" but I'm discouraged to find anarchists engaging in the same bait-and-switch. I understand that exhortations to garden and build instead of shop are in keeping with anarchist goals not to support capitalism, but these pages could be re-purposed into any of a hundred didactic picture books aimed at the children of progressives, books about taking care of the planet or promoting peace or living more authentically.

As I read A Rule is to Break, I couldn't help answering back to it on practically every page. "Cake! For! Dinner!"? OK, but what if you're really hungry for tofu, or a nice piece of fish? "Stay up all night"? I have two kids who don't like sleepovers because of the pressure to do just that. "No more baths ever"? But what about how good it feels to be clean? "Don't look like everybody else"? But what if you don't care to draw attention to yourself by how you dress or wear your hair?

My kids bristle at being given a series of peremptory commands that might or might not suit them, and this book makes anarchists sound like one more set of grownups who want to boss you around and tell you what to think, even if the second-to-last page of the book does say, "Think for yourself." Too little, too late.

I'd have written a different book. Mine would have said things like:

"Have cake for dinner if you want! Or tofu, or a nice piece of fish! Whatever you're hungry for! Trust your appetite!"

"Bedtimes? Pah! Sleep when you're tired, or four hours after you got tired when you finally finish that book. You can stay up all night and watch the sunrise, or you can get up early and watch the sunrise, or you can never watch the sunrise at all."

"Baths are great if you like soaking in the water or want to get clean! But don't take a bath just because somebody else thinks you should! You can be bath-indepenent and make up your own mind!"

"You can follow a rule if it seems like a good one. But a bad rule wants to be broken."

My mother, for all her many failings, had her moments. And one of her best moments was during high school, when she said to me, "Susan, I wouldn't want you to do a thing just because everyone else is doing it. But not doing something just because everyone else is doing it is just as bad. You're still letting everybody else do your thinking for you." Staying up all night because people want you to go to bed, eating cake for dinner because they want you to eat spaghetti, wearing skinny jeans because everybody else has moved on to boot-cut: that's rebellion, not independent thought. It's an adolescent way to mark yourself as different from the herd. A Rule is to Break is, sadly, more "A Child's Guide to Oppositional Behavior" than a guide to anarchy. I hoped for more. I hoped for a book that might really feel too dangerous to give to my children.