How to Fix Education: A Handbook for Direct Action

By Glenn Wallis and TBD

What concrete actions might a change-minded teacher take? This is the question driving How to Fix Education.

An uncanny anticipation fills the halls of American higher education today. It is the sense that a reckoning is coming. Whether it is the case that higher education is in the teeth of a catastrophic crisis or only head

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warbler Press
• Release date: Mar 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734735338

Glenn Wallis

Glenn Wallis is the editor and translator of The Dhammapada and Basic Teachings of the Buddha (Random House) and the author of A Critique of Western Buddhism (Bloomsbury), An Anarchist's Manifesto, and How to Fix Education (Warbler Press). He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at several universities, including Brown University, and at the University of Georgia as a tenured professor. He is the founder and director of Incite Seminars in Philadelphia.

Book preview

1

Introduction

1.

If we assume the capture of the American university by the national economic dogma,¹ as Friedrich Nietzsche called education in the service of money-making careerism, what concrete actions might a change-minded teacher take? This is the question driving How to Fix Education.

---

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Anti-Education: On the Future of our Educational Institutions, translated by Damion Searls (New York: New York Review of Books, 2016), 16. Nietzsche glosses this dogma or doctrine as "a rapid education, so that you can start earning money quickly...Culture is tolerated only insofar as it serves the cause of earning money."

2.

My conclusion is that consequential action can indeed be taken; but unlike most texts on this topic, I am not advocating action at the macro level of administrative reform. Rather, by implementing certain pedagogical practices at the ostensible heart of the university—in the classroom—instructors can substantively reflect and enact larger-scale social changes that, I further argue, are desirable. The strategies I have in mind derive mainly from socialist and anarchist thought. They include the political theory of prefiguration; the concept of concrete utopia; the social theory of the spectacle, the pedagogical practice of unlearning; and the ethics of the worst necessary.

3.

My conclusion has its origins in a first-hand observation accumulated over twenty-some years of teaching in American higher education. The observation is that an uncanny anticipation fills university halls today. It is the sense that a reckoning is coming. Whether it is the case that the university is in ruins and higher education is in the teeth of a catastrophic crisis,² or only that we are potentially headed in that direction, many college professors and administrators can no longer stave off their suspicion that something is seriously amiss. Most higher ed reckoning scenarios revolve around the unsustainable capitalist economics of perpetual expansion and growth. Inexorably tied to the omnipresent ideology of neoliberalism, such growth has rendered higher education a mere vassal to its corporate masters. The manacles of the university’s capture are visible in the rise of the all-administrative institution and the subsequent enervation of the faculty; in the creation of a massive class of precariously underpaid instructional non-employees arrogantly referred to as adjuncts; in the intelligence-mocking usurpation of the culture of assessment and its attendant mode of surveillance; in the life-long burden of student debt, ad infinitum.

---

2 Aidan Seery, Éamonn Dunne (eds.), The Pedagogics of Unlearning (Brooklyn: punctum books, 2016).

4.

As crucial as such considerations are to an understanding of the situation, How to Fix Education focuses on the central pedagogical aspect. My aim is not an analysis of the current neoliberal corporation known as the university. My aim, rather, is to give thought to how we might actively and impactfully disrupt—upset, overturn, ignore, refuse—the process in the classroom. The logic behind this goal is that there is a direct line from the instructor’s management of the class—with its contractual syllabus, its smothering semester-long work plan, its threat of punishments (points deducted), its promise of rewards (a high grade), its ultimate payoff (credits), in short, its bullying infantilization of the student—to the acquiescent, if debased, capitalist subject who, on earning his or her degree, the student becomes. In the broadest sense, the conviction informing this call for classroom disruption has its roots in a venerable pedagogical tradition: the Kantian Enlightenment appeal to overturn self-induced forms of immaturity and stultification.

5.

My hope for How to Fix Education is that it will spark discussions among current instructors and administrators in higher education, particularly in the humanities. Graduate students in the humanities have become increasingly aware of the economic capture that I assume in my initial question. They, too, I hope, will receive How to Fix Education as a lively catalyst for direct action. I also hope it will be included in the broader conversation about the neoliberal university, the all-administrative university, the death of the humanities, the decline of the faculty, and the general sense that the university is a ticking time bomb, as a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education bluntly put