The Future of Education

Instrumentalist higher education capitulates to industry demands: unchecked growth and speed; managerial interventions; superficial metrics replacing professional judgment and experience. Slow pedagogies derived from Slow Food and adjacent movements present possible alternatives modeling a form of real utopianism [1]; I will discuss their implementation in three U.S.-based undergraduate courses: slow reading, slow writing, and slow looking, placing these courses in the genealogy of Freirean and related critical pedagogies[2]. Higher education’s crisis requires critical challenges to the jobs training that has supplanted broader learning and civic engagement, a debased conception of human potential putting production and economic value over all else, a triumph of capital’s hegemony that has nearly become a totalizing inevitability. U.S. higher education’s fundamental purpose has become preparing bodies for the workforce rather than preparing minds for engagement with other minds in the world. Utopian praxis in the form of slow pedagogies explicitly introduces a conceptual framework organized around principles of slowness, pleasure, community, and care with alternative assignments and products: essays, stories, graphic, and even sculptural works by students. Engaging with texts as readers and writers in a setting that runs counter to their long experience of timed essays, research papers, and examinations illuminates the many ways in which their lives are organized around managerial and capital needs rather than human growth and development and creates conditions of possibility for their further exploration.