Escape education

Abstract

The aim of this short paper is to identify the conditions and political possibilities to escape education. We discuss the institutions of schooling and ‘higher education’ (universities, colleges, etc.). These institutions are commonly referred to as formalized learning spaces, and these spaces govern subjectivities through a variety of mechanisms, including pedagogies, curricula, syllabi, and assessments. We briefly review several authors’ views on formalized education. Then, we review the idea of escape as introduced in the epigraph. We take a moment to discuss escape in relation counterconduct (Foucault, 2007) and ‘fugitivity’ the state of being and becoming a fugitive (Harney & Moten, 2013). We discuss all of these ideas as ‘acts of refusal’ to the Modernist aspirations of hope that education utilizes to enact its neoliberal fantasies of reform (Ball, 2020; Clarke, 2020). We illustrate how hope and neoliberalism have combined into an attendant mode of “antiproduction” that ostensibly widens education’s own limits, rather than produce any appreciable improvements for students or society (Guattari, 1984). We argue that escape, fugitivity, and critique are all viable counter-praxes to the “autopoietic” processes of anti-production that education routinely expects, and through which the system widens its own limits (Luhmann, 1986). We conclude with an overly brief discussion of the dilemma that Claire Colebrook (2013, 2017) raises about the “risks of stupidity” for educational escapees and fugitives. What is at stake with different forms of educational escape is its ethical wager, risking what other forms of thinking and thought it portends and produces.