Amanda Huckins | Anti-Profit Deprofessionalism
MATERIALS
I have this bolt of time
and only this one
to do this thing, to reach down
through crust and oxidation
and touch What I Have Found:
a little collection
of labors and works
formed mostly from chores
(the creativity of cooking,
seeing into the shapes of cans fruits jars
and to taste their future combination)
or from care.
there are a few poems.
a little drawing, a carving.
an sub-ensemble
familiar as art.
the alarm that wakes me up has
a reminder attached to it
which says: “you are living”.
*
when people touch parent-made art
that came from parenting,
there is often a bristling against,
a subtle request to stop
saying certain things about life.
care is uncomfortable to give,
it’s necessity is intrusive, i know.
*
the attempted separation of the animal-social work of taking care
(of anyone) from the work of Thinking or of Creating
is a weird output of the machine we live in.
it’s a machine that lets mostly wealthy people
record themselves into the
teachable libraries of thoughts or artworks,
allows those people to absorb lifetimes of the care of others
while constructing their monuments to their own perspectives.
the “geniuses” draining cups filled by domestic laborers,
wives, service workers,
creative frenzy uninterrupted by the motion it would take
to meet their own needs.
with a few exceptions, we’ve been elevating to the highest levels of esteem
the art and ideas that are furthest from care.
ANTI-PROFIT DEPROFESSIONALISM
I became a parent for the first time on Friday the 13th in January, 2023, but for over a decade before that I had already been spending a lot of time working with children: first as a substitute teacher’s aide in schools all across Portland, Oregon (kindergarteners to high-schoolers), then in one Lincoln, Nebraska elementary school’s special education department (pre-schoolers to 5th grader), and finally in an Omaha Early Head Start program (6 week olds to 3 year olds). Something that sort of blew my mind when I started working in schools was realizing how many there are. I began to notice every elementary school I’d pass on a single bus line, and I was newly aware of how many children were packed into those buildings. Many had overflow classrooms in “portables”, little mobile home-like structures lined up in multiples in playgrounds and on fields. As many school buildings as there are, children are overflowing from them. Teachers and other supportive adults, however, are in short supply.
It seemed obvious from my perspective as a paraeducator that many or most of the difficulties experienced by students and teachers in elementary school- from low comprehension of academic topics to social injuries like bullying to disruptive behaviors- would be alleviated by the simple increase in the number of thoughtful adults employed to work with children. In early education, where child to adult ratios are specified by statutes in most states, it is even more clear how much every aspect of children’s experience is improved by the addition of just one “extra” staff member in a classroom. Knowing how little the adults in schools are paid (even less in childcare programs for very young children) the fact that we, as a society, think we can’t afford to lower student/adult ratios in the places where children spend the bulk of their time is preposterous.
In the past 4 months, I have been building the organizational armature (and creating a viable physical space, with massive help from my partner) for what is nominally a business but that actually is an ancient social practice that is necessary for our species to exist. In the middle of last summer I stopped performing this practice at an increasingly corporatized, philanthropy-supported non-profit childcare center. In the new format of providing care alone in my home and charging parents directly, I will work longer hours caring for the same amount of children for just over half as much money and no benefits. But this set up will allow me to avoid paying my caregiver wages to another caregiver; I’ll be able to provide care to my own child “for free”.
Providing care is not profitable, even when parents pay a large portion of their wages to the care provider. The only way to make the Area Median Income in childcare is to work in a managerial or administrative position (not directly with children), work over 60 hours a week, or provide care for 8-10 children on your own. Providing care is not profitable because the value assigned to providing care is low, while the actual human cost to provide care is incredibly high.
When I’ve felt particularly bleak about the worsening childcare crisis, I have gotten a bit soap-boxy on the internet. This is how I’ve found out that only people who are parents know what is happening, how little childcare providers are paid, how many children they are expected to care for (let alone provide age appropriate developmental activities for, which is a licensing requirement), and how much parents pay for the working conditions to be so consuming. “We don’t do this work for the paycheck, that’s for sure” is the supposedly congratulatory (and martyrdom-tinged) line that pops up in professional development trainings (annoyingly uttered by someone whose paycheck is substantially larger than those of the people who directly provide the care). And it’s more true than ever that most people who work in childcare could earn the same or greater pay doing something else if pay was the only deciding factor. I’ve already mentioned the pay cut I’m taking to do this work in a different way. Why do we stay?
I’ve fostered the goal of running my own small child care program for over a decade, since long before my child was born, since before I was even sure I’d raise a child of my own. The reason I have this goal is because a friend once asked me, “what would you be doing if the revolution had already happened?” and almost without considering the question fully I blurted, “I’d be taking care of everybody’s kids”. I answered this way, I think, because I enjoy extemporaneous situations more than the predictable repetition of tasks, and because I feel energized by the curiosity and joy of young children, who typically haven’t yet been taught the very worst ways that people treat each other (meaning there’s also a chance to break cycles). But there’s a chicken and egg thing going on here: I imagine that after the revolution I’d want to care for children, but I also want to care for children as a gesture towards revolution.
And now, I am in a moment of intensified urgency to make such a gesture; my child is 8 months old in a warming-to-burning world.
Throughout the months of planning, filling out paperwork, and preparing to become self-employed by opening a childcare program in my home (also known as a Family Child Care program), I’ve heard a refrain from older coworkers and childcare-adjacent professionals (all women): “I did that when my kids were little”. I’ve also watched peers (who did not necessarily share an unconditional esteem for childcare work) give up their other careers to care for their own children plus a few others. The reality that became so stark during the very first school closures in 2020 is that in a patriarchal and sexist society, childcare falls overwhelmingly on the shoulders of women. Since long before 2020 this was the case, and historically the childcare industry also reflects the economically exploitative racism of this country: childcare falls disproportionately on women of color and immigrant women.
Within the industry, there is a complicated conflict between calls to “professionalize” (increase formal education, lean heavily on data and performance evaluation) in order to gain respect and compensation on one hand, and on the other hand, pleas to be recognized and appropriately valued for the profound impact caregivers have always had thanks to the attunement, nurturance, creativity, and intellectual power that long-term providers develop through the work itself. It brings up questions that are common amongst people who work towards social change: how much are we willing to adapt to a destructive system’s standards in order to survive? How can we combine our power to force a shift in the way the system functions? A key difficulty that is particular to the childcare system: it is especially fragmented, a patchwork of formal and informal arrangements, a workforce that is spread out through corporate for-profit centers, non-profit or government-sponsored programs, isolated independent in-home providers. How do we organize?
For me, the first step was to move towards the wilder, freer, and (to me) somewhat more terrifying margin where I can attempt to build a kind of work that could incubate revolution.
“MAKE IT UNPROFITABLE FOR THEM”
Diane di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letter #9” is a collection of thoughts on economic revolution. It insists on changes: “declare a moratorium on debt”, “no one ‘owns’ the land/ it can be held/for use, no man holding more/ than he can work, himself and family working”, “let[..]what you make/ above your needs be[..]/ a Common Wealth”. She mentions “Pound’s money, as dated coupons that come in the mail/ to everyone, and are void in 30 days”i. While looking up what “Pound’s money” might be and how it would be used, I found out about Silvio Gesell, an amateur economist who wrote down his theories about how to create “money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron”ii.
The most potent lines of the poem form a list of suggestions for ending the abuses that corporations enact on society, the planet, and individuals: “1. Kill head of Dow Chemical/ 2. destroy plant/ 3. MAKE IT UNPROFITABLE FOR THEM/ to build again.” This third item is challenging. It is not a single violent act or moment, not a revolutionary SNAP, not an event. Working towards “making it unprofitable for them” doesn’t threaten our lives and freedoms in the acute way the other items on the list would. And though it comes last in this list, it isn’t actually constrained by a sequence of events; it can be the first step. It is also the part that no one can do alone. A small group of defectors can’t accomplish it. What can?
Transformational caregiving feels to me like one of the most necessary elements of an attempt to replace profit motive with the social health that it poisons. We instinctively and easily absorb the behaviors and values of the environment we move through as young children, which is why most people who want a better world have to consciously reject what we eventually learn are the destructive habits and assumptions of our american culture.
I have begun to wonder: what if a significant majority of the efforts that are currently spent on trying to get adults not only to care about but to enact social justice, climate change mitigation, conflict resolution, etc. were redirected to raising children who never have to unlearn the mythologies and rules of our “morally bankrupt” systems?
What if all of the vacant childcare positions, all of the understaffed daycare programs, were suddenly filled with people who have developed a realistic perspective on our social problems and tools towards positive change? What would happen if we concentrated our efforts on guiding young people to be creative, self-regulating, collaborative members of a connected society instead of just future workers, tax-payers, and consumers?
Amanda Huckins is a Nebraskan poet whose work has been published in booklet form as "Trying to End the War" (merrily merrily merrily merrily, 2017) and featured in A Dozen Nothing (adozennothing.com), among other places on paper and online. In her weekday hours, Amanda is an Early Head Start educator and participates in building the brain architecture for social emotional and cognitive development in infants and toddlers. In addition to her paid work, Amanda is a grassroots organizer who works alongside fellow community members to build self-determination, forge non-transactional relationships, and create radical free spaces (such as past DIY spaces The Commons in Lincoln, NE and Media Corp. in Omaha). She is also a letterpress printer who produces posters and other ephemera in her garage print studio, where she teaches typesetting to anyone who wants to learn.