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This essay has aimed to demonstrate how Graeber’s writing, ideas, and actions offer numerous pathways for critical educators (of any field or discipline) to explore and take up. A second aim of this essay was to (re)center imagination and possibilities in social studies education, what Graeber (“Possibilities”) describes as “a political ontology of the imagination” (p. 406). He contrasts a political ontology of the imagination with the dominant ontology that structures everyday life, what “realists” refer to casually as “political reality,” the way things are. Graeber calls this is a political ontology of violence, an assumption that

ultimate reality is one of forces, with ‘force’ here largely a euphemism for various technologies of physical coercion. To be a ‘realist’ in international relations, for example, has nothing to do with recognizing material realities—in fact, it is all about attributing ‘interests’ to imaginary entities known as ‘nations’—but about willingness to accept the realities of violence. Nation-states are real because they can kill you. Violence here really is what defines situations.
(p. 406)
It follows, then, that standardized social studies curriculum can, quite easily, perpetuate a political ontology of violence, in so far as students are made passive receivers of a past-present that is handed down to them, a technocratic circularization of how things are and an avoidance of interrogation and critical contestation.