Beyond Education
This week, we’re reading the introduction to Eli Meyerhoff’s Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World.
Beyond Education grapples with the idea of education as a mode of study, one that has become the dominant way we envision studying and learning. By providing historical context and new frameworks, Meyerhoff shows how education is a mode of study bound up with a mode of world-making dominated by modernist, colonial, capitalist, statist, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal norms.
Meyerhoff pushes back against the “romance of education”, a narrative where the student is painted as a hero who overcomes obstacles and moves upward towards eventual mastery of material.
Resisting this hero narrative, Meyerhoff discusses: what are the problems of education, where did they come from, and what are the alternatives?
To begin our discussion, take five minutes for this free-writing activity. Free writing can be a great teaching tool for reflexive thinking about a topic. Here are some prompts to spur your thinking:
- What do education and study mean to you?
- Are they separate from politics? Do they intersect with politics? When & how?
- What has your path in education looked like?
We’ll then move into “choose your own adventure” breakout rooms. This style of breakout room allows us to pick a topic of our choosing — perhaps one we feel most comfortable with, excited or curious about, or one we do not quite understand. The “themes” of our breakout rooms were:
- Precarity/Security
- Capitalism
- Where do we learn?
- Surviving, thriving, resisting
In each breakout room, we ask everyone to reflect what actions can happen at individual to institutional levels to resist the “romance of education.”
At the close of discussion today, we invite everyone to engage with this optional homework, an exercise in situating the author. In the introduction to Beyond Education, Meyerhoff offers a reflection on his own journey through education, his positionality, the impasses he has encountered.
Try doing this yourself: How did you get to where you are in your place at the university? What has informed that journey? What impasses have shaped that journey? Have these impasses changed your relationship with your education/studying?