Beyond Education Lib/E: Radical Studying for Another World

A bold call to deromanticize education and reframe universities as terrains of struggle between alternative modes of studying and world-making Higher education is at an impasse. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo show that racism and sexism remain pervasive on campus, while student and faculty movements fight to reverse increased tuition, student debt, corporatization, and adjunctification. Commentators typically frame these issues as crises for an otherwise optimal mode of intellectual and professional development. In Beyond Education, Eli Meyerhoff instead sees this impasse as inherent to universities, as sites of intersecting political struggles over resources for studying. 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.

About the Author :
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. Timothy Andrés Pabon is an English- and Spanish-speaking voice-over artist who has worked extensively in advertising and audiobook narration. He has had acting roles on House of Cards and has also been a costar on HBO's acclaimed series The Wire opposite country music legend Steve Earl. As a stage actor, he has worked off-Broadway at the June Havoc Theatre, and his regional credits include Center Stage, the Shakespeare Theatre, Arena Stage, the Hippodrome, Olney Theatre, Rep Stage, and GALA Hispanic Theatre.

Review :
"Incisive and moving, Beyond Education is an eloquent manifesto for a new university, one made to the measure of a new world." -- "George Ciccariello-Maher, author of Decolonizing Dialectics" "Timothy Pabon narrates in a measured tone...His patient delivery of complex arguments helps clarify the author's core contention." -- "AudioFile"