a case against learning

i used to want be a teacher- revolutionise the education system. 3 years in an iit, 4 hours before a paper, 100mg modafinil in my blood, 7 essays in my head that weren’t about molecular biology, 4 thirds of fragments of ideas forming a new essay between my fingers, & all i want now is for the education system to atleast just stop calling itself that.

whenever any new rule rolls out on campus as they have steadily- and more bizzarely- in the last few months, there’s a pattern of mild disunity among both the student community as a whole & also within each student’s individual ‘opinion’ about the rule. this is very blink and you’ll miss it shit, because the general consensus is that we want the new admin in shreds. but really, there’s no other way to explain how much we’re letting slide- every lie, every excuse, every skipped meeting, every complaint, & promised revolt. it seems as though somewhere, we think we understand- that maybe if we tilt, & squint, & look at the situation from just the right angle, maybe we’re wrong about our dissent. maybe we’re just righteous and lazy and selfish. because this is not the way a people in confident consensus reacts to an objective irrationality. what we’re seeing is not just fear or powerlessness because that is not true of numbers, spirit or administrative structure. we’re paralyzed in a fundamental insecurity. we’re imperceptibly sinking in a doubt.

this essay is partially an attempt to bridge that doubt. to restore your faith in your rationale & the admin’s irrationality. but it is also, as most exercises in reasoning with ‘power’ turn out, an attempt to locate ourselves on campuses. to find the coordinates and vectors that have brought us to this point on our wormholed & mothbitten educational map, and where we want to be going, if we do indeed want at all.

1. Degrees & Contracts

when the administration demands attendance or transparent pouches in exam halls the precise crime is the refusal of our right to negotiate the terms of our living.

there’s always a small but vocal majority of both individuals & voices in our heads claiming ‘if this is what you came here to do, you might as well do this.’ that ‘cheating is bad’ even if we aren’t talking about how it affects relative grading. is the institute not free to dictate the terms of the degree it has promised us? is that not the contract? we learn the course & they certify?

honestly, i’m confused what the course is.

we don’t enter a contract with the university as much as we are what’s on the contract- a contract between the institute and the industry, predicated by their arbitrary valuation of what counts as ‘course’, or in other words- employable skill, & in more stubborn words- exploitable labour.

we could try, in our negotiation, to question the objective employability value in their discussion. but this assumes our place on the table in the discussion, when in fact only QS rankings, inertia, and badly approximated market forces determine this value.

so what is this course to us then? an alien system of what sums to the value of hidden numbers.

this doesn’t have to even be as abstract as i’m making it out to be. purely statistically, the number of us engineers in discipline A that actually engineer in discipline A are a handful of bob the builders (to rob from a beautiful poem). even this, bootlicking a second approximation of market forces, questions the immaterial yet somehow valuable state of our degrees.

so then, at this contradiction, we come to a reckoning with our own values- our relationship with education.

2. Security & Knowledge

‘learning’ has historically defended education as a righteous institution. even as education is corrupted by industry & insecurity & certificates, the alleged purity of learning, curiosity, & the pursuit of knowledge imply that education is valuable in spite of its pollutions.

the basic contest of this essay is this- education is not valuable in spite of its pollutions. it is only valuable for these pollutions.

learning does not simply defend but disguise the goals of education. institutionalised learning, as we observe, has only one function- the transfer of knowledge. from brahmin to bourgeoise- your degree is a certification of what you gatekeep from the world. the teacher decides what knowledge counts as knowledge & transfers to you in specific secret technical words that you regurgitate in a quarantined exam hall what they deem the definition of your discipline. & your employer wants your special secret knowledge even as he doesn’t specifically need that. even as he knows anyone could pick up the job in a week.

so we don’t learn the trade, we learn an unrelated, secret set of symbols that magically make us worthy of the job. the goal of education is to make the job seem worth fighting for- to manufacture competition.

what we actually learn, as living humans wheezing to keep up within this machine, is that certain knowledge can grant us certain security. everything else is uncertain.

this learning comes through iterative exploration of what is fundamentally ‘alien’ terrain. no inherently humane rationale or value system could help you intuit it. you must confront the absurdity of exploitative reason to learn it. this is one example of a feature of the ‘natural’, spontaneous learning our bodies do that directly contradicts the learning education pretends to enable. curiosity, discovery & the discomfort of the unknown are all diametrically opposite to the supposed ‘security’ promised by education. learning can’t be a passing down of objective knowledge about the world. that is not learning. that is simply a tool in how to get by in a fucked up world.

3. Power & Truth

so here, it seems, we stare at our reasons for being here right in the eyes, the mask of learning and elite academic hegemony ripped off- security.

this then enables us then to think beyond the first rhetorics disabling our resistance to new, arbitrary rules. we forgo the value the industry and institute bestow on our degree and demand our personal contract with the institution. one that recognises our need for security & the authorities gatekeeping it. here, defined on our own values, we reclaim our right to negotiate.

if we can coherently place ourselves here, & only here, ( & not be swayed by the rhetorics of learning) & find our desires for what they really are, we will find ourselves infinitely more capable to act on them. we stare at the stakes in the face & fight ruthlessly for our right to cheat, bunk, & fail our way to the security we’re unjustly denied.

i think i still want to start a school. where children are enabled to figure & teach each other & me how to navigate the fucked up world we live in, finding their truths & powers with them so they can always act coherently & bravely. i was conflicted for a while between revolutionising pedagogy and bridging education equity & i’m beginning now to see they’re the same thing. education equity as simply equal opportunity is empty and exclusionary until active improvements to pedagogy ensure everyone at the start line reaches the end goal they came for in the first place- security, a certain place in the world. not a gated heaven that neoliberal logic only opens to the ‘worthy’ but a meeting of needs that all disabled & disempowered children deserve. somewhere safe, so the uncertainty of learning can be afforded, & the joy of a discovery is preserved somewhere, beyond the ontological capture of objective knowledge & value.