The act of study, abstracted from any of its particular modes, is “an activity in which people devote attention to the world” in such a way that it “modifies their capacities and dispositions for understanding the world” (p. 13). Eli Meyerhoff begins his contribution to moving us Beyond Education by denaturalizing the “mode of study” employed by modern institutions of education in which we are usually more or less submerged. Although we have long lived in a world shaped by the “global hegemony of education,” Meyerhoff shows that “elements of the education-based mode of study emerged contingently” in conjunction with early modern capitalism and “through ruling powers’ reactions to threats to their dominance” (p. 163). A central task of this book is to offer a critical genealogy of the education-based mode of study such that we might be better able to study otherwise.
A second task of Beyond Education is that of taking stock of the experience of working in higher education in the United States in the present. For many, this experience is shaped by the conflict of laboring for the ideal of education as an inclusive and egalitarian project in institutions that appear more to serve the consolidation of class power than to open doors for new co-participants in self-governance. This task of taking stock is as central to the book as that of critical genealogy, if much less well trodden in its techniques and narrative arc. Meyerhoff interviews graduate students, contingent faculty, and tenure-track faculty who experience this conflict through the strains of exploited academic labor, lack of support, and hostile, competitive environments. He also interviews Macalester and University of Minnesota students and Twin Cities community members who forged experimental community study organizations, because, among other reasons, they recognized the increasing racial and economic inequality not only in “access to” but also “success within” institutions of higher education (p. 163).
At first glance the cohort of those struggling within and against institutions of higher education for whom Beyond Education was written seems to overlap with those who identify with the undercommons approach to the university—those who are “of but not for the university” and who channel its resources to projects for those whom the university does not usually serve (p. 17; quoting Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, 2013). Yet at many points in the book, Meyerhoff addresses a more indefinite and perhaps broader audience. The book begins, for instance, with a vignette of Corey Menafee, the 38-year-old African American man who worked in Yale University’s Calhoun College dining hall and who one day “snapped at his university” (p. 2). While at work, Menafee took a broomstick and smashed a stained-glass window that depicted two enslaved peoples of African descent picking cotton (p. 3). His action, and Menafee himself to some extent after he undertook it, participated in a wave of activism around Yale’s historic and ongoing implication in white supremacy. On Meyerhoff’s telling, Menafee, alternative education activists, and some unknown number of academics share a sense of strain and impasse in relation to the university, despite their different positions in its structures of rewards and exploitation. What they share, however, does not appear to orient toward a project of sustained subversion within academia but rather toward a common potential to snap at it.
Snapping at the university means getting out of it. There are many strategies short of abandoning the university that Meyerhoff discusses, of which more shortly. The “snap” response—a broad refusal and indefinite opening—is the only positive program that one can offer that does not end up in partial accommodation to one or more features of the education-based mode of study. These features include a vertical imaginary and romantic narrative of upward ascent through levels of education, framed as a journey of individual self-realization and triumph over obstacles; the positioning of teachers as experts in the sense that they hold objective knowledge and use techniques to shape students, who should be obedient; and a separation between “students as producers and the means of studying;” and “an affective pedagogical economy of credit and debt” (p. 15). Most of the book traces these elements of the education-based mode of study from their development in early modern Europe to their adaptation in contemporary neoliberal education politics and policy in the United States.
Meyerhoff’s account of neoliberal education policy—the policing of students and entwinement of schools with carceral systems—frames these trends as following from the underside of liberal education’s self-justifying vertical and romantic narratives, rather than a divergence from its aims. Meyerhoff traces the emergence of the paired figures of the dropout and the juvenile delinquent in 1960 racial liberal projects that valorized obedient youth while stigmatizing youth protest (pp. 64–105). These racialized, criminalized figures morphed over the decades, but they continue to fuel the linked trends of privatization reforms, jumpstarted by disinvestment and takeover of under-resourced schools serving racial minorities, and increased policing in public schools. When education institutions are framed as places where good students ascend from the path of dropouts and delinquents, punitive relations toward marginalized groups are close at hand.
The romantic narratives that frame education help produce what Meyerhoff, drawing on Charles Mills’s account of white ignorance, calls an “epistemology of educated ignorance.” This “way of knowing” naturalizes the education-based mode of study such that it appears as the only possible way of studying and relating to others and to the world (p. 60). This dominant way of knowing is reproduced in politics when “the intertwined narratives of [talented youth vs. dropout] crisis and education suppress attention to the perspectives of people who are marginalized from education and who engage in resistance to education” (pp. 36–37). This way of knowing is reproduced at the level of interpersonal relations when authority figures attempt to control the bodies and emotions of students. Meyerhoff reads in Thomas Hobbes and John Locke a blueprint for producing an epistemology of educated ignorance in children through an affective economy of credit and debt. Envisioning the foundations of the “modern/colonial” project, these theorists tied education to the project of producing social hierarchies of obedient citizens and obedient servants. For Locke, training obedience entailed coercing students to suppress their emotions—such as “sorrow,” “insolence,” or “obstinacy”—through shaming, withholding praise, and physical punishment (p. 161). Whereas for Hobbes this coercive work was placed in the hands of the state, it is taken over by the private sphere in Locke’s blueprint. In either case, study directed by others and toward their aims comes at the cost of suppressing modes of attention and affection among “tutors,” “students,” “siblings,” and “meaner servants,” which, Meyerhoff shows, both theorists saw as a threat (p. 161).
Beyond Education shows that the ways of knowing and relating to the world and others enforced by the education-based mode of study are deeply engrained. However, scholars and activists, including Meyerhoff himself and the collaborators he addresses, might be well served by less severe self-critique (pp. 59–61, 174–75) in their attempts to experiment with alternatives, regroup, and try again. It is hard to reappropriate our capacities toward projects for the common good. The book gives a lucid account of the terrain on which many struggle to do so.
