How Can We Move Beyond Education?

This book invites readers to imagine and create kinds of studying that are not anchored in the conventional academic world of universities but are instead created out of and for "alternative modes of study and worldmaking" (200). Following Harney and Moten's powerful portrait of thinking together in the undercommons,¹ Eli Meyerhoff defines study as "an activity in which people devote attention to the world" (13). The modes of attention that recruit us, or at least permit us to enter their domain, can change us: as Meyerhoff comments, "sustained attention modifies [our] capacities and dispositions for understanding the world" (13). He rightly points out that critics of higher education tend to confine their analyses to identifying problems or crises within the university, to be addressed by the prevailing tools universities have at their disposal, including academic freedom, tenure, assessment, planning, recruitment, and so forth. But these tools perpetuate the very hierarchies and dispossessions that Meyerhoff contests, so he calls instead for an "abolition university" that develops practices of studying "within, against, and beyond the university as we know it" (204).

The strength of this book is its critical tracing of the histories and the political consequences of various academic practices and institutions. Chapter one explores the framing of the language of "crisis" in higher education, finding three recurrent narrative strategies at work: a romantic story of heroic individuals overcoming obstacles to move up the educational ladder; a nostalgic story lamenting the erosion of past virtues; and a consumer guide coaching the hapless student in becoming a self-maximizing entrepreneur in the educational market place. Each of these stories manifests what Meyerhoff calls "educated ignorance," a state of structured non-understanding similar to Josiah Royce's useful concept of "viciously acquired naiveté." Educated ignorance obscures the institutionalized effects of racism, capitalism, and colonialism while diverting attention away from robust alternative perspectives and practices. Chapter two takes apart the dominant narrative of the school "dropout problem," showing how the usual account makes the kids who don't finish high school to be the problem, not the schools themselves or the entire system that produces schools. This chapter showcases Meyerhoff's skills of narrative analysis to good effect, revealing the educational establishment's campaign to create the ominous figure of the dropout as "a crisis management tool for liberal-capitalist modernity" (89). Chapter three builds on Sylvia Federicci's analysis of gendered primitive accumulation of capital and Glen Coulthard's account of colonial dispossession by bringing in Meyerhoff's own analysis of education's vertical imaginary. This imaginary is anchored in an idealized individual pursuing "spiritual assent up levels of schools" (109), and an accompanying assault on competing worlds, such as the fascinating Beguinages, communities of women in thirteenth—sixteenth-century Lower Germany, whose mode of life created and was created by a mode of study not confined by ecclesiastical orthodoxy. Chapter four investigates the emergence of the term "education" in England in the 1530s, showing the resonance of "bad education" with idleness, femininity, and darkness, and "good education" with hard work, masculinity, and light. Meyerhoff charts the production of tools of accounting—earning "credit," moving "up," or being held "back"—that concretize a vertical imaginary of progress and loss. He always circles back around to his main argument, which is the various ways in which dominant frames of understanding education divert attention from, and thus perpetuate ignorance about, both the structural constraints of those frames and the alternatives to them.

The major weakness of this book, as I see it, is that the radical worlds that could and at times have given rise to the kind of studying he seeks are largely missing. Meyerhoff promises to "engage with the hidden histories of alternative modes of study" (6), and he accomplishes this goal with his explorations of the Beguinages, but otherwise he spends most of his time explaining how the educational system that dominates US society has become so flawed. This is important ground but it is...