| Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World Subjects: Education Higher -- Aims and objectives -- United States; Education Higher -- Economic aspects -- United States; Education Higher -- Political aspects -- United States; Capitalism and education -- United States; Alternative education -- United States; A bold call to deromanticize education and reframe universities as terrains of struggle between alternative modes of studying and world-making
Meyerhoff argues that the predominant mode of study, education, is only one among many alternatives and that it must be deromanticized in order to recognize it as a colonial-capitalist institution. He traces how key elements of education--the vertical trajectory of individualized development, its role in preparing people to participate in governance through a pedagogical mode of accounting, and dichotomous figures of educational waste (the "dropout") and value (the "graduate")--emerged from histories of struggles in opposition to alternative modes of study bound up with different modes of world-making. Through interviews with participants in contemporary university struggles and embedded research with an anarchist free university, Beyond Education paves new avenues for achieving the aims of an "alter-university" movement to put novel modes of study into practice. Taking inspiration from Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Indigenous resurgence projects, it charts a new course for movements within, against, and beyond the university as we know it. Eli Meyerhoff is a visiting scholar in Duke University's John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and program coordinator of the Social Movements Lab. He earned a PhD in political science from the University of Minnesota. |