Artwork by Dean May
In 2012, San Diego teacher Dave Burgess wrote Teach Like a Pirate, a book that became a New York Times best-seller, and influential enough that if you work in schools, it’s likely that you’ve at least heard the phrase “teach like a pirate,” even if you aren’t sure what it means. Here’s how Burgess explains it:
Teaching like a pirate has nothing to do with the dictionary definition and everything to do with the spirit. Pirates are daring, adventurous, and willing to set sail into uncharted waters with no guarantee of success. They reject the status quo and refuse to conform to any society that stifles creativity and independence. They are entrepreneurs who take risks and are willing to travel to the ends of the earth for that which they value. Although fiercely independent, they travel with and embrace a diverse crew (xii).
That all sounds good to me, but none of it is unique to pirates, nor is it meant to be. As Burgess says, it’s “nothing to do with the dictionary definition.”
But what if we take the “dictionary definition” seriously? What would it mean to teach like a historically-accurate pirate?
First, we need to get specific. People have been robbing each other at sea for as long as people have been sailing, but when historians refer to the “golden age of piracy” they’re talking about the period from 1650 to 1730, a period which peaked between 1710 and 1720. And the sailors who decided to turn pirate during that time were participating in one of the most ambitious experiments in radical democracy in the history of humanity.
Yes, you read that right. Teaching like a historically-accurate pirate means turning your classroom into an experiment in radical democracy.
We’ll get into that in a minute, but first, let’s address the elephant in the room.
When I first heard about Dave Burgess’s book, I was a little put off by the “pirate” thing, because I thought of pirates as being stylish but basically immoral. Like, they made their living by robbing and killing people, right? I’m against that, no matter how daring you are.
Context, in this instance, is everything. The “golden age of piracy” took place as Britain, Spain, Portugal and France were sending ships out around the world to take riches by force from anybody they could overpower. They were also kidnapping thousands of people and forcing them into slavery.1
In other words, pirates were stealing from thieves, and while that doesn’t make them any better than the governments of Britain, Spain, Portugal, or France, it doesn’t make them any worse either.
What set the “golden age” pirates apart was how they organized themselves on their ships.
It’s hard to conceive of how awful it was to live on a ship as a sailor in the early 18th century. Samuel Johnson memorably declared in 1759 that “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned” (Boswell). In his book Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (which is the main source for this piece), University of Pittsburgh professor Marcus Rediker paints a vivid picture of life aboard an 18th century merchant ship:
Sailors suffered cramped, claustrophobic quarters, “food” that was often as rotten as it was meager, and more. They experienced as a matter of course devastating disease, disabling accidents, shipwreck, and premature death. They faced discipline from their officers that was brutal at best and often murderous. And they got small return for their death-defying labors, for peace-time wages were low and fraud in payment was frequent (43).
Piracy wasn’t just a rebellion against these conditions, it was a totally different way of organizing life on a ship. Not only that, it was a totally different way of living in the world: at a time characterized by xenophobia, racism, slavery, and theft, pirate ships were multinational and multiracial. In Rediker’s words, a pirate ship’s “core values were collectivism, anti-authoritarianism, and egalitarianism, all of which were summarized in the sentence frequently uttered by rebellious sailors: “They were one & all resolved to stand by one another” (26).
There were two ways to become an actual, golden age pirate: either you banded together with the rest of your crew to mutiny and wrest control of your ship from the captain (after which you made your own flag and hoisted it), or, if you were on a ship that got attacked by pirates, you volunteered to join them.2
Reading that last paragraph, you may have noticed a problem with the premise of both Burgess’s book and this article: in order to have a classroom “like a pirate,” your students would need to mutiny, banish you from the room, and organize themselves without a teacher. Teachers are, whatever else we tell ourselves, agents of the state, which is (to put it mildly) not very piratical. Meanwhile, because students are compelled by law to come to school, it has more in common with the Royal Navy than with any pirate ship.
Having come to terms with the fact that you can never truly “teach like a pirate,” here’s how to get as close as possible:
The key to making everything work aboard a pirate ship was the “ship’s compact.” Whenever a pirate crew set out on a voyage or elected a new captain, they would collectively draw up a “compact”—that is, the rules that everyone would follow on board the ship. Crucially, these rules applied to the captain as much as to anyone else. As Captain Charles Johnson, author of A General History of the Pyrates, put it, “They permit him to be Captain, on Condition, that they may be Captain over him” (Rediker 65).
This will be familiar territory for many teachers—it’s much the same as creating “norms” for your classroom at the start of the school year. The big question here—the one that will determine whether or not you are ready to “teach like a pirate”—is whether you are prepared to be governed by the compact as much as everybody else is.
The highest authority on a pirate ship, according to Rediker, was the “common council, which met regularly and included every man from captain to foremast man” (68).3 Rediker goes on to say that “The decisions that had the greatest bearing on the welfare of the crew were taken up in open meetings that featured lively, even tumultuous debate” (68).
Captains were routinely outvoted in these councils, which took up decisions such as “who to attack,” whether or not to sink a ship they had just plundered, even which direction to sail next.
Rediker again:
The decisions the council made were sacrosanct. Even the boldest captain dared not challenge its power. Indeed, councils removed a number of captains and other officers from their positions. Thomas Anstis lost his position as captain; he was, as the pirates put it, “turnd before the Mast,” that is, made a common seaman on the ship he had once commanded. […] Shipboard democracy, especially to those who had labored long and hard in a totalitarian work environment, could be intoxicating. Some crews continually used the council, “carrying everything by a majority of votes.” Others set up the council as a court. They loved to vote, claimed a captured captain, “all the Pyrates’ affairs being carried by that” (69).
My guess is that this is the point where you’re most likely to bail and decide that “teaching like a pirate” isn’t for you. Putting your class’s most consequential decisions in the hands of the majority is risky (not least because of the needs of the students whose vote went against the majority decision). To be honest, I don’t know how far down this path I’d be willing to go myself, but I appreciate the challenge that the “pirate’s life” presents to my assumptions about how authority (even “democratic authority”) should operate.
You might be wondering why pirates bothered to have a “captain” at all, but there were certain situations in which the captain’s authority was absolute and unquestioned: “fighting, chasing, or being chased” (Rediker, 65). In other words, in any kind of battle, the captain’s word was absolute and unquestioned.
None of these situations come up very often in teaching, but the classroom has its analogous circumstances: the day of exhibition, for example, in a project-based classroom, or getting everyone back on the bus at the end of a field trip.
What fascinates me about the pirate captain’s dual role (basically powerless most of the time, but wielding absolute authority at crunch time) is how it runs counter to an idea I internalized about teaching without ever really thinking about it. I’ve heard a thousand variations of the idea that you need to make sure students follow your instructions when it’s not critical, so that you know they’ll follow your instructions when it is critical. Pirate ships ran on the opposite assumption: the crew followed the captain’s instructions if and only if the situation was critical. Otherwise, the captain’s word carried no more weight than anyone else’s. And if the captain couldn’t cope with that, well, it was time to elect a new captain!
On a “regular” merchant ship, “quartermaster” wasn’t an official officer, just an experienced sailor who other people listened to. Much like most ships, most classrooms have one or two unofficial “quartermasters.”
To see what I mean, imagine the following scene in your classroom: you’re assigning an essay, and it’s due tomorrow. Some kids are complaining that this is too soon, but you aren’t paying much attention to them because you knew there would be complaints about this. Then one kid says, “We really haven’t had a lot of time to collect our research for this,” and you suddenly think “Huh, if THAT kid is saying the due date is too soon, maybe it IS too soon.” THAT kid is the unofficial quartermaster of your “merchant ship” classroom.
On a pirate ship, the “quartermaster” wasn’t just an official officer, they were equal to the captain! Their role was to represent the interests of the crew. The quartermaster was also the most trusted person on the ship, and thus was put in charge of portioning out food and, after a successful raid, treasure.
In a classroom, this means taking the role of quartermaster more seriously than “that kid you implicitly trust.” For one thing, it’s not up to you to decide who should be quartermaster, it’s up to the class! The “quartermaster” would represent the rest of the class, taking part in decision-making with the teacher and helping to decide which decisions were important enough to merit a vote from the “common council.”
Ship’s officers made a lot of money in the 18th century, but most sailors were poorly paid, and sometimes not paid at all. On pirate ships, on the other hand, after a successful raid the quartermaster made sure the booty was divided between everyone in the crew. That’s not to say everyone got the same amount (for example, the people who actually boarded the ship got paid more) but the differences in payment were relatively small. These allocations were set down at the start of the voyage in the ship’s compact, which, as I mentioned, the crew wrote together. No pirate would have dreamed of setting off on a voyage without understanding (and having a say in) exactly how treasure would be allocated to them and their peers.
While I don’t recommend using the term “booty” with your students, it’s worth considering what the “booty” is in your class—that is, what is everyone working for? What’s the goal that animates your efforts?
The most obvious answer, for better or worse, is “grades.” For many students, grades have real monetary value, because financial aid is tied to GPA. So a classroom of pirates would start the year by deciding collectively what should be assessed for a grade, and how.
But while grades are the “currency” of class, as teachers we hope that our students will be inspired by a loftier goal than “get a good grade.” This is pure speculation, but I suspect that a big part of the reason that pirate ships seem to have worked so much better than the average utopian commune is that they had a clear shared goal that was more specific than “live in a multiracial democratic social experiment.”
Of course, their goal was “plunder other ships for treasure,” which is where this stops working as a metaphor for teaching, but every project-based classroom has a similar shared goal, whether it’s “put on an exhibit,” “stage a play,” or “build a submersible drone.” If you and your students can come up with a goal that the whole class is excited about and you pursue it as a collective, making democratic decisions along the way, you really will be “teaching like a historically accurate pirate.”
This is a tough one: the amount of authority you would need to relinquish in order to truly be the teaching equivalent of a “pirate captain” is pretty extreme. And, notably, the “golden age of piracy” lasted for eighty years. Ultimately, radical democracy was no match for brutal hierarchy.
The world we live in, and the way we think about it, were shaped not by the pirates but by the nations that stamped them out, so one way of looking at it is that living like a pirate didn’t even work for the pirates, so how likely is it to work out for us? On the other hand, given a choice between life as a sailor on a merchant vessel or a pirate ship, I know which one I’d choose, without hesitation. So maybe the most important question isn’t “what kind of classroom do you want?” Maybe it’s “what kind of classroom do your students deserve?”
I’ll leave you with one final thought about pirates. According to Rediker, “‘Merry’ is the word most commonly used to describe the mood and spirit of life aboard the pirate ship” (72). And we could all use a little more merriment in our lives, and in our schools.
1. Marcus Rediker writes that when European governments decided to crack down on piracy in 1720 (bringing about the end of the “golden age”), “the final assault was launched in large measure as a response to demands by the increasingly powerful traders in West African slaves” (137). In other words, piracy was eradicated because of the threat it posed to the slave trade.
2. Unlike other groups (most famously the British Navy), pirates almost never forced sailors to join their crews, a decision based on both ethics and practicality (ships work much better if everyone wants to be there).
3. Pirates, like all sailors, were overwhelmingly male, though there were at least two female pirate captains, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Rediker tells both of their stories in detail in Villains of All Nations.
Boswell, J. (1791). The life of Samuel Johnson. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1564/1564-h/1564-h.htm
Burgess, D. (2012). Teach like a pirate. Dave Burgess Consulting.
Graeber, D. (2019). Pirate enlightenment, or the real Libertalia. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Rediker, M. (2004). Villains of all nations: Atlantic pirates in the golden age. Beacon Press.
The print version of this article features artwork by Dean May. Here it is:
Dean May is an artist based out of Southern California. He is currently the Lead Technical Artist at Aquifer Inventions, and has taught at Laguna College of Art + Design and Riverside Community College. From Dean: “All due respect to Ilya Repin, whose painting “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks” stuck with me through art school and immediately came to mind when I was illustrating for ‘Teach Like a (Historically Accurate) Pirate.’”
Artwork by Dean May
In 2012, San Diego teacher Dave Burgess wrote Teach Like a Pirate, a book that became a New York Times best-seller, and influential enough that if you work in schools, it’s likely that you’ve at least heard the phrase “teach like a pirate,” even if you aren’t sure what it means. Here’s how Burgess explains it:
Teaching like a pirate has nothing to do with the dictionary definition and everything to do with the spirit. Pirates are daring, adventurous, and willing to set sail into uncharted waters with no guarantee of success. They reject the status quo and refuse to conform to any society that stifles creativity and independence. They are entrepreneurs who take risks and are willing to travel to the ends of the earth for that which they value. Although fiercely independent, they travel with and embrace a diverse crew (xii).
That all sounds good to me, but none of it is unique to pirates, nor is it meant to be. As Burgess says, it’s “nothing to do with the dictionary definition.”
But what if we take the “dictionary definition” seriously? What would it mean to teach like a historically-accurate pirate?
First, we need to get specific. People have been robbing each other at sea for as long as people have been sailing, but when historians refer to the “golden age of piracy” they’re talking about the period from 1650 to 1730, a period which peaked between 1710 and 1720. And the sailors who decided to turn pirate during that time were participating in one of the most ambitious experiments in radical democracy in the history of humanity.
Yes, you read that right. Teaching like a historically-accurate pirate means turning your classroom into an experiment in radical democracy.
We’ll get into that in a minute, but first, let’s address the elephant in the room.
When I first heard about Dave Burgess’s book, I was a little put off by the “pirate” thing, because I thought of pirates as being stylish but basically immoral. Like, they made their living by robbing and killing people, right? I’m against that, no matter how daring you are.
Context, in this instance, is everything. The “golden age of piracy” took place as Britain, Spain, Portugal and France were sending ships out around the world to take riches by force from anybody they could overpower. They were also kidnapping thousands of people and forcing them into slavery.1
In other words, pirates were stealing from thieves, and while that doesn’t make them any better than the governments of Britain, Spain, Portugal, or France, it doesn’t make them any worse either.
What set the “golden age” pirates apart was how they organized themselves on their ships.
It’s hard to conceive of how awful it was to live on a ship as a sailor in the early 18th century. Samuel Johnson memorably declared in 1759 that “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned” (Boswell). In his book Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (which is the main source for this piece), University of Pittsburgh professor Marcus Rediker paints a vivid picture of life aboard an 18th century merchant ship:
Sailors suffered cramped, claustrophobic quarters, “food” that was often as rotten as it was meager, and more. They experienced as a matter of course devastating disease, disabling accidents, shipwreck, and premature death. They faced discipline from their officers that was brutal at best and often murderous. And they got small return for their death-defying labors, for peace-time wages were low and fraud in payment was frequent (43).
Piracy wasn’t just a rebellion against these conditions, it was a totally different way of organizing life on a ship. Not only that, it was a totally different way of living in the world: at a time characterized by xenophobia, racism, slavery, and theft, pirate ships were multinational and multiracial. In Rediker’s words, a pirate ship’s “core values were collectivism, anti-authoritarianism, and egalitarianism, all of which were summarized in the sentence frequently uttered by rebellious sailors: “They were one & all resolved to stand by one another” (26).
There were two ways to become an actual, golden age pirate: either you banded together with the rest of your crew to mutiny and wrest control of your ship from the captain (after which you made your own flag and hoisted it), or, if you were on a ship that got attacked by pirates, you volunteered to join them.2
Reading that last paragraph, you may have noticed a problem with the premise of both Burgess’s book and this article: in order to have a classroom “like a pirate,” your students would need to mutiny, banish you from the room, and organize themselves without a teacher. Teachers are, whatever else we tell ourselves, agents of the state, which is (to put it mildly) not very piratical. Meanwhile, because students are compelled by law to come to school, it has more in common with the Royal Navy than with any pirate ship.
Having come to terms with the fact that you can never truly “teach like a pirate,” here’s how to get as close as possible:
The key to making everything work aboard a pirate ship was the “ship’s compact.” Whenever a pirate crew set out on a voyage or elected a new captain, they would collectively draw up a “compact”—that is, the rules that everyone would follow on board the ship. Crucially, these rules applied to the captain as much as to anyone else. As Captain Charles Johnson, author of A General History of the Pyrates, put it, “They permit him to be Captain, on Condition, that they may be Captain over him” (Rediker 65).
This will be familiar territory for many teachers—it’s much the same as creating “norms” for your classroom at the start of the school year. The big question here—the one that will determine whether or not you are ready to “teach like a pirate”—is whether you are prepared to be governed by the compact as much as everybody else is.
The highest authority on a pirate ship, according to Rediker, was the “common council, which met regularly and included every man from captain to foremast man” (68).3 Rediker goes on to say that “The decisions that had the greatest bearing on the welfare of the crew were taken up in open meetings that featured lively, even tumultuous debate” (68).
Captains were routinely outvoted in these councils, which took up decisions such as “who to attack,” whether or not to sink a ship they had just plundered, even which direction to sail next.
Rediker again:
The decisions the council made were sacrosanct. Even the boldest captain dared not challenge its power. Indeed, councils removed a number of captains and other officers from their positions. Thomas Anstis lost his position as captain; he was, as the pirates put it, “turnd before the Mast,” that is, made a common seaman on the ship he had once commanded. […] Shipboard democracy, especially to those who had labored long and hard in a totalitarian work environment, could be intoxicating. Some crews continually used the council, “carrying everything by a majority of votes.” Others set up the council as a court. They loved to vote, claimed a captured captain, “all the Pyrates’ affairs being carried by that” (69).
My guess is that this is the point where you’re most likely to bail and decide that “teaching like a pirate” isn’t for you. Putting your class’s most consequential decisions in the hands of the majority is risky (not least because of the needs of the students whose vote went against the majority decision). To be honest, I don’t know how far down this path I’d be willing to go myself, but I appreciate the challenge that the “pirate’s life” presents to my assumptions about how authority (even “democratic authority”) should operate.
You might be wondering why pirates bothered to have a “captain” at all, but there were certain situations in which the captain’s authority was absolute and unquestioned: “fighting, chasing, or being chased” (Rediker, 65). In other words, in any kind of battle, the captain’s word was absolute and unquestioned.
None of these situations come up very often in teaching, but the classroom has its analogous circumstances: the day of exhibition, for example, in a project-based classroom, or getting everyone back on the bus at the end of a field trip.
What fascinates me about the pirate captain’s dual role (basically powerless most of the time, but wielding absolute authority at crunch time) is how it runs counter to an idea I internalized about teaching without ever really thinking about it. I’ve heard a thousand variations of the idea that you need to make sure students follow your instructions when it’s not critical, so that you know they’ll follow your instructions when it is critical. Pirate ships ran on the opposite assumption: the crew followed the captain’s instructions if and only if the situation was critical. Otherwise, the captain’s word carried no more weight than anyone else’s. And if the captain couldn’t cope with that, well, it was time to elect a new captain!
On a “regular” merchant ship, “quartermaster” wasn’t an official officer, just an experienced sailor who other people listened to. Much like most ships, most classrooms have one or two unofficial “quartermasters.”
To see what I mean, imagine the following scene in your classroom: you’re assigning an essay, and it’s due tomorrow. Some kids are complaining that this is too soon, but you aren’t paying much attention to them because you knew there would be complaints about this. Then one kid says, “We really haven’t had a lot of time to collect our research for this,” and you suddenly think “Huh, if THAT kid is saying the due date is too soon, maybe it IS too soon.” THAT kid is the unofficial quartermaster of your “merchant ship” classroom.
On a pirate ship, the “quartermaster” wasn’t just an official officer, they were equal to the captain! Their role was to represent the interests of the crew. The quartermaster was also the most trusted person on the ship, and thus was put in charge of portioning out food and, after a successful raid, treasure.
In a classroom, this means taking the role of quartermaster more seriously than “that kid you implicitly trust.” For one thing, it’s not up to you to decide who should be quartermaster, it’s up to the class! The “quartermaster” would represent the rest of the class, taking part in decision-making with the teacher and helping to decide which decisions were important enough to merit a vote from the “common council.”
Ship’s officers made a lot of money in the 18th century, but most sailors were poorly paid, and sometimes not paid at all. On pirate ships, on the other hand, after a successful raid the quartermaster made sure the booty was divided between everyone in the crew. That’s not to say everyone got the same amount (for example, the people who actually boarded the ship got paid more) but the differences in payment were relatively small. These allocations were set down at the start of the voyage in the ship’s compact, which, as I mentioned, the crew wrote together. No pirate would have dreamed of setting off on a voyage without understanding (and having a say in) exactly how treasure would be allocated to them and their peers.
While I don’t recommend using the term “booty” with your students, it’s worth considering what the “booty” is in your class—that is, what is everyone working for? What’s the goal that animates your efforts?
The most obvious answer, for better or worse, is “grades.” For many students, grades have real monetary value, because financial aid is tied to GPA. So a classroom of pirates would start the year by deciding collectively what should be assessed for a grade, and how.
But while grades are the “currency” of class, as teachers we hope that our students will be inspired by a loftier goal than “get a good grade.” This is pure speculation, but I suspect that a big part of the reason that pirate ships seem to have worked so much better than the average utopian commune is that they had a clear shared goal that was more specific than “live in a multiracial democratic social experiment.”
Of course, their goal was “plunder other ships for treasure,” which is where this stops working as a metaphor for teaching, but every project-based classroom has a similar shared goal, whether it’s “put on an exhibit,” “stage a play,” or “build a submersible drone.” If you and your students can come up with a goal that the whole class is excited about and you pursue it as a collective, making democratic decisions along the way, you really will be “teaching like a historically accurate pirate.”
This is a tough one: the amount of authority you would need to relinquish in order to truly be the teaching equivalent of a “pirate captain” is pretty extreme. And, notably, the “golden age of piracy” lasted for eighty years. Ultimately, radical democracy was no match for brutal hierarchy.
The world we live in, and the way we think about it, were shaped not by the pirates but by the nations that stamped them out, so one way of looking at it is that living like a pirate didn’t even work for the pirates, so how likely is it to work out for us? On the other hand, given a choice between life as a sailor on a merchant vessel or a pirate ship, I know which one I’d choose, without hesitation. So maybe the most important question isn’t “what kind of classroom do you want?” Maybe it’s “what kind of classroom do your students deserve?”
I’ll leave you with one final thought about pirates. According to Rediker, “‘Merry’ is the word most commonly used to describe the mood and spirit of life aboard the pirate ship” (72). And we could all use a little more merriment in our lives, and in our schools.
1. Marcus Rediker writes that when European governments decided to crack down on piracy in 1720 (bringing about the end of the “golden age”), “the final assault was launched in large measure as a response to demands by the increasingly powerful traders in West African slaves” (137). In other words, piracy was eradicated because of the threat it posed to the slave trade.
2. Unlike other groups (most famously the British Navy), pirates almost never forced sailors to join their crews, a decision based on both ethics and practicality (ships work much better if everyone wants to be there).
3. Pirates, like all sailors, were overwhelmingly male, though there were at least two female pirate captains, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Rediker tells both of their stories in detail in Villains of All Nations.
Boswell, J. (1791). The life of Samuel Johnson. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1564/1564-h/1564-h.htm
Burgess, D. (2012). Teach like a pirate. Dave Burgess Consulting.
Graeber, D. (2019). Pirate enlightenment, or the real Libertalia. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Rediker, M. (2004). Villains of all nations: Atlantic pirates in the golden age. Beacon Press.
The print version of this article features artwork by Dean May. Here it is:
Dean May is an artist based out of Southern California. He is currently the Lead Technical Artist at Aquifer Inventions, and has taught at Laguna College of Art + Design and Riverside Community College. From Dean: “All due respect to Ilya Repin, whose painting “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks” stuck with me through art school and immediately came to mind when I was illustrating for ‘Teach Like a (Historically Accurate) Pirate.’”
