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 headed in that direction, many college professors, administrators, and students can no longer stave off their suspicion that something is seriously amiss.

In How to Fix Education, Glenn Wallis argues that consequential action can be taken immediately in the classroom to put the humanity back in “the humanities.” In this succinct handbook he provides the logic and layout of an approach for instructors who want to enact larger-scale social changes with or without institutional change at the macro level.

CONTENTS

 HOW TO FIX EDUCATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2. The Divided Pathway of the Humanities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

On the Right . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

3. Subject to the Spectacle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

4. Subject to Another World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

On the Left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

5. The Force of Prefiguration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

6. The Space of Concrete Utopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

7. The Pedagogy of Unlearning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

8. The Ethics of the Worst Necessary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

9. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

Glossary of Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64