Against Mastery: Thinking in the Shadow of Neoliberal Times

Pavan Mano explores alternative ways intellectual depth, complexity and care can be developed and expressed in modern universities.

For almost anyone teaching in the humanities, the lamentation that university students – or, for that matter, all manner of young people – are uninterested in reading will be a familiar one. This is a subject close to my heart – I write from the perspective of someone whose intellectual formation is in literature, cultural studies, and the humanities more broadly. I also have a degree of investment in it professionally – reading texts and theory is central to the way I interpret and make sense of the world before us. It is the skill that the vast majority of work I do in the classroom is predicated upon – encouraging students to learn to read closely, engage with theory, and draw connections between the vocabulary on the page and the organization of their lives. Having said that, I am far less interested in whether students are indeed unbothered about reading and much more interested in the present conjuncture that has produced a set of circumstances where young people appear to be unconvinced about the value of reading. 

In some ways, the seeming unwillingness or inability of many students to read long texts is the logical outcome of the world they have grown up in and inhabit. They are ‘responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them. In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort’ (Malesic, 2024). To decry their conclusion that there is little point in undertaking an activity that has been socially and politically militated against, and seems to yield little to no dividends, would be to miss the point entirely. Both in that context, and in the context of imagining a kind of decolonial education, the more relevant question is perhaps how we might rethink the work we do in the classroom to persuade students that there remains value to reading at length, to thinking slowly and patiently, to living with complexity and resisting easy answers that can be expressed as snappy captions.

It is worth taking a step back here to remind ourselves of the larger context we are operating in with public and social infrastructure being rapidly eroded if not destroyed outright. This is certainly true in the United Kingdom where I am writing from, but it is also true in many other countries especially in the so-called first world. 

Healthcare and social care services are underfunded which means that getting a doctor’s appointment is harder, wait-times for a hospital bed are increasing, and more and more caring responsibilities are being displaced from the state onto the individual. Energy bills, rent, transport fares, and the costs of daily essentials are surging. The climate crisis generates a variety of storms, hurricanes, floods, and fires that political leaders either carefully ignore or comically suggest is “once in a generation” – perhaps accurate in the sense that there appears a good chance that there might not be a generation to come at this rate. This is before we get to universities who often double up as landlords, charging exorbitant rents on student accommodation on top of hefty tuition fees. 

The sum total of this means that plenty of young people enter classrooms today with a range of obligations – financial, emotional or otherwise – that makes it hard for them to focus on the things that students are meant to devote their energies to. Put differently, the time and energy available to the student who might otherwise want to undertake the kind of long reading, slow thinking and careful reflection that is particularly important in the humanities is being placed under considerable duress. There is plenty more that could be said about the conditions beyond the classroom. In this essay, however, I want to think about how young people experience thinking in the university classroom particularly in relation to the notion of decolonial education.

The phrase decolonising the curriculum has largely been emptied of substantive meaning by university leaders – such has been the capacious, reckless, and often quite random ways they have deployed it. It has been stripped of its material and structural demands particularly around the abolition of tuition fees, racialized labour divisions, pay, and awarding gaps and instead reoriented around quite banal notions of intercultural competence, offence and ‘culture wars’ (Gopal, 2021). In some shrewder institutions, these vacuous terms have come to constitute entire modules that are then proffered as a Unique Selling Point. Like an earworm, decolonising the curriculum shows up in so many “initiatives”, “reforms”, and “guidance documents”, conferences and keynote themes, meeting agenda items, marketing collateral, social media posts and “success stories” that it is basically an empty signifier – institutionally, at any rate.

The decolonial gesture ‘has been and continues to be neutralized through incorporation into the very structures of marketisation … that have come to define the university’ (Balani, 2022). In other words, universities will talk about it, say lots of aspirational and felicitous things about it but one should not make the mistake of assuming they will actually do anything about meaningfully decolonizing the curriculum. It is therefore all the more important, against this background, not to cede the ground to the institution entirely. I want to reflect on the narrow form of knowledge production that is rendered legible within the conventional university classroom and consider how expanding it might open some possibilities in the form of a decolonial education.

In her wonderful essay, ‘We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know’ (2016), Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ suggests that:

… a successful classroom happens when every member, including the teacher, abandons ego and terrified performances of mastery and instead can show up and say: I don’t get it. And I think the job of the professor – and in particular the teacher of theory – is to get the class to that point.

For the most part, however, this remains a minority view and the spectre of mastery continues to hover over many a classroom. Even if it is not explicitly communicated, the notion of mastery can function as the latent organizing principle in many curriculums. Universities are keen to stress the importance of things like classroom interaction and collaborative learning in publicity collateral yet ‘despite the focus on group work and discussion, on participatory pedagogies and the death of the lecture, Higher Education generally continues to reproduce what Paulo Freire (1970) refers to as the “banking model” of education’ (Balani, 2022). The underlying logic of most conventional curriculums is that there is a certain amount of material to be taught and after 10 weeks, students are asked to demonstrate how well they have understood the material – normally through an academic essay where grades hinge on the degree of mastery they can demonstrate.

What is limited in this formula, however, is the space afforded to the crucial act of making mistakes. Perhaps it is worth pointing out here that the act of grappling with theory, engaging it, interrogating it – however imperfectly – is intellectual work. Which helps open the possibility of a different pedagogical rationale that drifts away from mastery a little. Instead of succumbing to the seduction of dominating and mastering texts, then, one could think of education as cultivating the capacity to think with and alongside others. To engage and grapple with texts, take from them what is useful, to be patient and to understand that intellectual work can be complex are all valuable pedagogical objectives. And, in the context of the university, where students are assessed and awarded relative to the intellectual work they do, it is important to think about how different kinds of intellectual work can be recognized and rewarded. In other words, we are dealing with the question of form in relation to intellectual work.

The academy has never been agnostic over the question of what intellectual work ought to look like. Neither has it been shy of asserting itself, in a variety of ways, as the prime authority on intellectual work. But as Stuart Hall (2018) maintains:

I remind you that the academy is one of the places in which [intellectual life] takes root. It is not the only place, and I do plead with you not to overestimate its role or to get entrammeled in its internal rituals. Simply because one is on the site, you might be led to think that somehow, because you are there, you are therefore thinking. It does not absolutely follow, believe me! 

Indeed, it can be all too easy, when one hangs around the university, inhabiting its space and breathing its air, to get caught up in its various spells and its hierarchization of manners of thinking. And of course, one of the many parochialities of the academy is the academic essay. To be clear, there is value to the essay as a genre – we might as well deal with the red herring before going forward. The essay requires sustained engagement with an idea, thinking carefully and patiently about it, and in an intellectually rigorous manner. It demands developing and expressing a certain flow of thought that builds up to a larger argument and – crucially – brings the reader along. There is manifest value and virtue in this kind of long-form thinking – especially, perhaps, at this moment – not least because it is important to be able to work out complex questions patiently and develop a sense of history before forming an opinion.

Having said that, we should be alert to how this paradigmatic object of classroom assessment is increasingly approximating an academic journal article, and the way this move parallels the slow and steady reification of the journal article as the paradigmatic form of intellectual work in the academy. It is difficult to believe this is a coincidence. Instead, it ought to be understood as a reflection of the particular late-stage capitalist conjuncture we are entrapped in. More than ever, universities are pathologically obsessed with the metrics associated with the journal article – the impact factor, the citation score, the number of stars and so on. The institutional conviction that the journal article is the most worthy and legitimate form of intellectual work – coupled with a broader sociopolitical obsession with data positivism that provides a seemingly objective way of attaching value to that work – has seeped into how students are assessed almost by default via an essay that seeks to approximate the journal article.

But there is nothing particularly special about the journal article as a way of articulating thinking. It does not have a monopoly on what good intellectual work looks like. Bracketing for a moment that it is a very specific form of intellectual inquiry and has some pedagogical value – though almost certainly less than its ardent proponents would have us believe – we ought to acknowledge that there is nothing sacred about the article or essay as a technology of thinking. There are other ways intellectual depth, complexity and care can be developed and expressed. To be sure, the various qualitative aspects of education that the essay rewards – long-form thinking, dealing with complex questions patiently, sustained engagement – are important and worthy things to cultivate. But it is a little far-fetched that a specific kind of essay is the only way these ends can be achieved under the banner of intellectual rigour.

Are there ways we can devise forms of education and thinking that allow students to make mistakes, produce mis-readings, and even do some odd things with the texts now and again? Are there ways of showing learning which hold open the possibility of different forms of expression that might not be an essay? Are there ways of rewarding intellectual work that go beyond the demonstration of mastery? 

The answer to all these questions is certainly yes. If we are interested in thinking better – developing, strengthening and sharpening people’s capacities for thinking ambitiously – then we should find different ways to recognize and reward it institutionally. And this work begins with making some space in the classroom, where mistakes can both be corrected but also acknowledged as legitimate intellectual work that is part of the processes we understand as thinking and teaching and learning.

If doing this is difficult in practice, it is often because of the various encumbrances put in place by institutional leaders to militate against such changes – or at least make them difficult to undertake. There is good reason to be skeptical about universities and their capacity to function properly as spaces of thinking and teaching and learning. Most higher education institutions are led by a coterie of folks in such a thrall to neoliberal logics that Hayek would blush. In these times, it can seem as if the universities we work in have been entirely captured by market forces and profit imperatives. To a certain extent that is the case. But multiple things can be true at once. As Chandra Talpande Mohanty (2003) reminds us:

[The university] is one of the few remaining spaces in a rapidly privatized world that offers some semblance of a public arena for dialogue, engagement, and visioning of democracy and justice. Although these spaces are shrinking rapidly, dialogue, disagreement, and controversy are still possible and sanctioned in the academy.

For what it is worth, the university is (still) a contested space, there remains all to play for, and as Paul Gilroy reminds us, pessimism is a luxury we cannot afford at this point (O’Hagan, 2020). Providing an alternative to the various forms of managerial common sense that we are presented with in universities at this moment and building a community capable of contesting it is vital. Perhaps one of the ways to do this – in terms of education and work in the classroom – is to rethink the way students are asked to lay out their thinking and express the intellectual work they have undertaken. Not only will this help repudiate some of the more conservative and dull elements of the university, and build the capacity to think more adventurously and ambitiously, it will also articulate to the young people who enter our classrooms a different intellectual vision of what life could look like. After all, the only way to deal with an earworm is to change the music, play a different song, and dance to a different tune.

Pavan Mano is a Lecturer of Global Cultures in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at King’s College London. 

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