Thread by @EliMeye

As a USC alum who had a full ride thanks to my (not faked) SATs, I might defend a myth of meritocracy in light of #CollegeScam. But nah.

Why assume education must be defended?

Unpopular opinion: education is & always has been a tool for perpetuating the class system.
[THREAD]

Rather than defending higher education, let’s take an abolitionist approach to university studies.

Education is one possible mode of study among many alternatives.

Education’s elements emerged as reactions to people's struggles bound up with alternative modes of study.

Education’s vertical trajectory of individualized development emerged with the institution of ascending levels in schools, associated with the Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life in 13th century Lower Germany.

Splitting schools into ascending levels—and narrating an ideology of ‘spiritual ascent’ for an individualized ‘self’—gave schoolmasters means for managing their crisis of disorder with an increasing number of students in their schools, in the context of the Black plague.

Along with the colonial dispossession of land, plundering of colonized peoples’ labor, and patriarchal repression of rebellious women, the institution of school levels spread throughout Europe as part of “primitive accumulation,” or the creation of capitalism’s preconditions.

The English term, "education," emerged and spread in 1530s England when people’s rebellions pushed King Henry VIII’s regime into a crisis of legitimacy. The King’s advisors were accused of being seen as illegitimate because they were not of noble birth.

They found a narrative solution by appealing to ‘education’—saying that they had been ‘educated’ in contrast with their critics—coupled with a constellation of binary figures, such as ‘idle’ people with ‘bad education’ as opposed to ‘hard-working’ people with ‘good education.’

John Locke framed the Others of modernity--the poor, women, slaves, and natives--in opposition with the figure of the ‘self’ formed through education. He prescribed education for shaping the self’s experiences in ways conducive for self-governance.

Locke called on the teacher to manage the student’s self-formation with modernist/colonial narratives and a household-based emotional economy—including shame, pride, fear, and anxiety—that creates a pedagogical system of credits and debts.

Locke’s pedagogical mode of accounting gives teachers educational tools for suppressing subversive collaborations across class, gender, age, and race. This mode of accounting later becomes institutionalized in schools in the early 19th century with graded exams.

Rather than assuming the necessity of the education-based mode of study, genealogies of its elements can show its historical contingency, revealing how it emerged in association with the capitalist, colonial mode of world-making. This can open our imaginations to alternatives.

Let’s deromanticize education and reframe universities as terrains of struggle between alternative modes of studying and world-making.
#CollegeScam

This has been my book in twelve tweets
#BeyondEducation coming August 2019 with @UMinnPress