On and off over the last few years, I’ve undertaken the task of applying to grad school, only to drop it. There’s been all sorts of reasons behind the latter. A diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa (progressive untreatable blindness) is certainly first and foremost among the recent ones; but the exposing of the rot at the core of the higher education system has been more of an influence than I’ve heretofore admitted. The number of universities that turned on their own students for protesting the violence of the Israeli state and their complicity in it is astounding — even more so the vindictiveness involved — made even worse by the spineless folding of most of those self-same universities to Trumpian decrees against “DEI” and “wokeness”.

All of this makes the optimism of David Orr’s transcribed speech “What is Education For?” originally delivered in 1990, almost painful. But the cynicism I’ve been harboring towards institutional learning for years doesn’t feel openly challenged by Orr’s speech. Rather the opposite; Orr’s gripes with the University as a place, symbol, and system are strikingly similar to me, especially for a speech given five years before I was even born. He talks about the destruction of the environment that has changed shape since 1990 but is still ongoing — and says, “It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs.” Even before we get into the myths Orr wants to debunk, we’re facing down one we’re still fighting today. How can I feel comfortable going back into higher education when I’m all too aware that Epstein was an educated man and that 42 percent of educated white men still voted for Trump the second time around? Many sources like to laud this as ‘at least more of them didn’t’; I’m more distressed by the idea that 42 percent of white men with university degrees, who watched him fail at everything the first time around, still put him back in power. It’s exactly the question Orr is asking, even if he didn’t know he was 34 years early to it.

The six myths that Orr presents are, all of them, perfectly on point. Part of why I’m so impressed, to be honest, is that a speech this anti-capitalist and anti-colonial was ever given on an American college campus; it’s a sign of just how far right the Overton window has been pushed. Of these myths, though, the ones that strike me the most are these: ‘ignorance is a solvable problem’ and ‘knowledge, and by implication human goodness, is increasing’.

The first I see in a thousand forms. Socially, it’s always painful to watch someone offer up more and more information to an ignorant person, thinking that they just need to be educated, they just need to be shown the error of their ways — It doesn’t matter if they’re ignorant on facts, emotional harm, or concrete damage. The notable trend in Nobel Prize winners being racist, bigoted or just kooky outside of their disciplines (or sometimes within them) is part of this, too. Acquiring knowledge of facts, figures and numbers does not come hand in hand with any knowledge of the human condition or righteousness — but on top of that, it opens up new ways to be ignorant. Scientific racism and medical racism only became possible because of the advances in those fields in the first places — it’s those advances that lend the illusion of reality to otherwise obviously-bullshit claims like “Black people feel less pain”.

This is also why Orr identifying the “inevitable increase of knowledge” as a myth feels so freeing. There’s an XKCD comic about the joy of encountering someone who doesn’t know something and — rather than mocking them for not knowing it — being thrilled to get to show it to them. I keep meaning to get it on a t-shirt. But XKCD and Randall Munroe, just like many forms of “nerd culture”, prioritize specific types of knowledge. (Munroe more than most, but the astrophysicist is allowed.) Older millenials and Gen X joke about losing the knowledge of what a floppy disk or a VHS is; more seriously, there are coding languages that we are perilously close to no longer being able to use, and those languages hold up entire branches of our infrastructure. And that’s only for modern technology as we understand it. One of my special interests is cooking; how many people in the first world squeeze their own orange juice, make their own breads, twist their own rope? When a shoe breaks, do you have the slightest idea what to do with it? When a seam rips in your clothing, do you fix it or throw it out?

The answers you give to those questions will be informed by a lot of things — gender, age, race — but first and foremost, by class. And class also determines, far more than it should, whether or not university is even an option for you. The issue, however, is that university has been pushed for the last 20-30 years (at least) as the only route to a future; and so our trades are dying out, our practical skills are fading, and now things like glassblowers are in short supply, which — oops! Turns out we need those to make our medical equipment. The total sum of knowledge in the world isn’t increasing — it’s just shifted towards what the upper class considers to be ‘worthy’. God save us all from the business majors.

Where I differ, at least in some ways, from Orr is in the six principles. The principles he offers are excellent, but optimistic; I’d like to bring attention in particular to this section– “Students hear about global responsibility while being educated in institutions that often invest their financial weight in the most irresponsible things… Students learn, without anyone ever saying it, that they are helpless to overcome the frightening gap between ideals and reality.” On one hand, the Palestine and BLM protests had not yet happened at the time of this speech. The idea of pushing universities to greater action in line with their stated values may then seem strange — Except that none of this is new. The Anti-Apartheid movement had been ongoing (in fact, Mandela was released the same year as this speech) and the student protests of the 1960s are famous for very, very good reason. Orr is calling, ultimately, for reform of the institution. Good — and I can’t blame him. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I have enough faith left in the idea of the institution for that.

Instead, I take these six principles out of the context of the institution itself and reframed for the itinerant, nomadic student.

1. All education is environmental education. As part of this, too, all education is social education; Orr also talks about how everything is connected, albeit with a repeated focus on the environment. With the rise of ecofascism and greenwashing, however, I feel it’s more important than ever to stress the people behind each science. When learning about cancer, one should also learn about Henrietta Lacks, and about patent rights, and about Black history, and about medical racism and medical misogyny; they’re all deeply interconnected. So, too, should the study of osteology and forensic archaeology be in partnership with a learning and understanding of Indigenous history — a connection that doesn’t become obvious until one learns about the number of Indigenous bodies displayed, stolen, or turned into medical props without the knowledge or consent of their families and ancestors.
2. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one’s person. As an avowed hater of virtue ethics, I admittedly have mixed feelings here, especially with the active invocation of the Greeks (“The Greeks knew better” — did they? I have some quarrels with them.) But the sentiment is nevertheless a good one. I don’t believe that the uneducated person is unformed, but I do believe that an unformed person can — if done so with intention — improve themselves through education, no matter what the field, simply by making the choice and effort to learn, question, and expand their horizons.
3. Knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world. As an unwilling bearer of some truly terrible kinds of knowledge, I take this one particularly to heart. If I must be traumatized by knowing these things, I will at least use them responsibly — and if I can have that viewpoint, I think anybody should, about any level of education. This also ties to my beliefs as a contractualist — that we are all responsible for each other — and as such, I am duty-bound by the process of learning to use it in a way that benefits the common good, not just myself. In terms of my actual skillset, this comes out in odd ways sometimes; for example, I’m frequently writing to MPs and other politicians because I have a gift for rhetoric and polite guilt-tripping. (Blame the British school system for that one.)
4. We cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities. What does it mean to criminalize sex work? Does age-gating social media actually make anybody safer? Who benefits when porn is taken offline? A lot of these recent decisions were made by people who believed themselves arbiters of knowledge — who firmly believe, for example, that sex workers are victims of trafficking and that making it illegal thereby (somehow) helps them. But if you listen to sex workers, both those who have been trafficked and those who haven’t, the responses are fairly clear that the criminalization of sex work is the least helpful action. This applies in a thousand ways, even to things that we’d rather not acknowledge as leftists; for example, poaching is seen as an ultimate evil, and I’m not out here to defend it as some secretly good action. But why does poaching happen? In some countries, poachers are linked to the cartels; in other countries, though, they’re largely poor people trying to pay bills or trying to keep protected animals off their land. Does that excuse the poaching of endangered animals? Well, no, but we’re not talking about moral absolutes or excuses here; we’re talking about knowledge. Why do people do crime? Can you say you have a knowledge about crime if you don’t understand how Black, Brown, trans and queer lives and bodies are overpoliced?
5. Examples speak louder than words. I don’t fully understand why Blake is invoked here, so I’ve reworded this one slightly to embody what I think is the most important part. Orr also focuses on university institutions being ‘good examples’ for students, and I think that’s unfortunately a lost cause at this point in time — instead, I think this should be a call to action to embody the principles we want to see in the world. Simple enough, but hard in practice. I am often very hard on myself about trying to avoid hypocrisy, and in a world that actively penalizes thoughtfulness and ethical choices, it’s all the more difficult. A few years back, a noted figure in online activism was revealed to be employed at a private military contractor. While my opinions on the topic are complex and involve getting into more details than I think is fair to the person in question, what I remember most strikingly is another activist saying out loud that it would not have been such a big deal had they been open about it from the start — and had they not given the impression, through their activism and chosen topics, that they would consider this unacceptable for others. It’s not that the sentiment surprised me; but it was nice to see someone voice that the hypocrisy was, in and of itself, a large part of the problem.
6. The way learning occurs is as important as what you learn. Orr positions this as being about courses, and once again, I want to take it out of an institutional context. Most of us have encountered the idea of ‘learning styles’ in one way or another; fewer, perhaps, have applied it to neurodivergence or talents as a rejection of the school system altogether. I failed linguistics when taken as a course. When inspired by the idea of creating a conlang (constructed language) in a specific cultural context for a fantasy world, I picked up massive amounts of material very, very quickly; the same occurred with botany, a field I previously held only a passing interest in and now can quote a surprising amount of. Another friend of mine believed themself to be ‘unteachable’ when it came to essay structures — and was startled to find themself much more able to concentrate when the five-paragraph essay was reframed as being about fandom meta. (Point, proof, support works just as well for arguing for headcanons.) Orr also places this in an environmental context, and I think primary and secondary schools have been rising to this challenge; I was taken on field trips to local wildlife reserves to learn about wildlife instead of learning about it solely in a classroom, although I’ve learned that Ottawa is…odd in many respects.

None of my reticence should be taken as a rejection of or condemnation of those who still choose to engage with the post-secondary school system, although I think even those people should be reading and engaging with these points. But between the locking of JSTOR, the price-gouging of textbooks, and the increasing disinterest of universities in serving their students — not to mention the whittling away of OSAP and other grants in my home province — it should serve as no surprise that I want to bring academia out into the world. Seize the means of production, so to speak.