Studying beyond education for a world beyond capitalism | ROAR Magazine

Sobre como a educação superior nos coloniza com um ideal romântico-liberal colonial, nos aliena de nossa capacidade de construir conhecimento, nos separa entre uns bons e os ruins e nos insere num esquema de débito e crédito (de nota), pelo autor de Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World.

The education romance is part of what I call “an epistemology of educated ignorance” — ways of knowing that suppress critical questions about education that would challenge one’s own position in the dominant system. The education romance provides an escape from engaging with the complex controversies in the impasse.

As an antidote, I contend that education is one possible mode of study among many alternatives. The elements of this mode of study include:

• An imagined vertical trajectory of individualized development framed through a romantic narrative;
• Students separated from the means of studying, having their relations to the means of studying mediated by teachers and administrators;
• An ideology of “education” for preparing people to participate in governance;
• A zero-point epistemology with knowledge seen as produced from a zero-point floating above the world rather than by particular bodies in particular places;
• A pedagogical mode of accounting with an affective economy of credits and debts that can take the form of graded exams;
• Dichotomous figures of educational waste and value, including the “dropout” and “graduate.”

The original Experimental College was founded at San Francisco State College in 1966. By appropriating money and spaces from the university for students to organize their own courses without tuition or grades, it allowed the Black Student Union there to create and experiment with the first Black Studies curriculum. This stoked their demand for a Black Studies Department, a major motivation for the Third World Students Strike that shut down the campus for five months in 1968-1969.