Who is Afraid of Education?

Pedagogical sleight of hand tricks to tame an anti-intellectual world.

The elimination of the U.S. Department of Education has long been a cherished goal for many Republicans — so ingrained, in fact, that during Rick Perry’s infamous 2011 debate gaffe, when he forgot the names of the three federal agencies he planned to abolish, the one he could remember was education. The irony, of course, is that he might have benefited from a stronger one.

I first began thinking seriously about the neoliberal assault on education in the U.S. when I met education sociologist Christopher Robbins in London in 2008. We were both speaking at a conference organized by the Hayward Gallery titled “Deschooling Society,” named after the famous book by Ivan Illich. That year, Robbins published his book Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling, drawing from Freire, Giroux, bell hooks, and others. Robbins’s core critique can be summarized in this quote:

“Neoliberal educational reform discards any pretense that schools exist to cultivate democratic citizens or to promote social justice; instead, it promotes a system in which schools serve as mechanisms for sorting, disciplining, and preparing youth for a life of market compliance and state surveillance.”

More importantly, Robbins argues convincingly that the radical educational critiques of the 1960s and 70s—including those of Illich, which challenged the industrial education complex for perpetuating patriarchal, capitalist values and enforcing conformity—were ultimately co-opted by the right. What began as a call to liberate education from bureaucratic and ideological control was repurposed to justify dismantling the public system altogether, paving the way for for-profit education. This process, which began in earnest in the 1990s and early 2000s with the rise of charter schools, vouchers, and private education enterprises, has reached a culmination point with the effective elimination of the U.S. Department of Education. The circle now closes with a renewed assault—this time targeting higher education—fueled by class resentment against so-called “woke” intellectualism and cloaked in the very language of liberation once used to critique the system.

Because market-driven education discourages dissent, we are left with a system accessible only to a privileged few—one that punishes ambiguity, rewards conformity, and prioritizes “customer satisfaction” over critical inquiry. As a result, the content delivered is often sanitized and intellectually timid, avoiding uncomfortable historical truths such as slavery. This cultural shift is not unique to the United States. Last week in Mexico City, for instance, the theorist and writer Irmgard Emmelhainz—an outspoken critic of Zionism—was recently dismissed from the University Centro after students expressed discomfort over films she included that addressed the Palestinian cause. The university informed her that she would not be offered further classes due to a “restructuring of the academic plan,” illustrating how institutional anxieties over discomfort now function as veiled censorship.

While all this is deeply concerning, we must recognize that we are living in a political moment where reason, facts, and logic often prove powerless to change minds. What I have been thinking most about, in this context, is fear—fear of learning, fear of knowledge: epistemophobia.

What we are facing is not an outright and proud embrace of stupidity (as we sometimes cynically conclude), but the rejection of a way of thinking that feels alienating, elitist, or destabilizing—a psychological defense against perceived threats to identity, certainty, belonging, or self-worth. It thrives on insecurity, authoritarian thinking, and the need to simplify a complex world.

In a world where education is being flattened by an anti-intellectual impulse—where nuance is replaced by slogans, and complexity is treated as a threat—our role as artists is not to retreat into compliant abstraction or aestheticized ambiguity. Rather, it is to insist on complexity as a form of resistance: to craft spaces where contradictions are held, where ambiguity is generative, and where meaning resists simplification. This is not complexity for its own sake, nor elitist obscurity, but a provocative nuance that unsettles consensus, invites reflection, and restores depth to a cultural landscape that is being aggressively leveled. In doing so, we reaffirm the radical potential of art—not as decoration for a disenchanted world, but as a tool to re-enchant thought itself.

The good news is that epistemophobia is treatable, and artistic or performative educational practice can help. While I have no magic solution, I have learned a few things from museum education that, in my view, can support artists, educators, and curators alike.

First, it’s important to remember that the demand for simplicity stems from a fragile emotional space—often activated when we are challenged by uncomfortable ideas. Embarrassing or confronting someone rarely works—it often leads to greater alienation. Nor does it help to condescendingly listen while allowing outrageous or uninformed opinions to go unchallenged.

What is often required in gallery-based experiments that engage controversial or emotionally charged topics is a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand. The first step is to bypass defensiveness and lower emotional stakes—often by inviting participants to share personal stories, thereby shifting the focus from abstract positions to lived experience. Once that trust is established, one can introduce a gentle rupture of expectations—perhaps through a game, a thought experiment, or a role-switching prompt. I have employed variations of Boal’s invisible theater, asking participants to speak from someone else’s point of view. This strategy generates a moment of productive disorientation, allowing participants to temporarily suspend ideological reflexes and approach the issue from a less ego-bound perspective. Rather than defending a fixed belief, they are invited to inhabit a situation. In this space, reflection becomes more likely—not from personal pride or tribal identification, but from a narrative distance that opens the door to ethical and analytical insight.

We become better analysts of reality when we are not monologuing ourselves into righteousness, but instead narrating the complexities of action from multiple vantage points. A prompt like, “What might the artist’s mother say about this work?” can serve as a simple but powerful reframing device. As I often say in educator trainings, the goal is not to indoctrinate or “convert” a participant to my views, but to demonstrate that things are rarely as simple as they appear. Even if someone remains emotionally attached to their original opinion, if they walk away less certain, more reflective, or aware of the act of thinking itself, I feel the work has succeeded.

One of the advantages of art making—and of the relatively unregulated cultural spaces it often occupies—is that it can function as covert informal education: it can shift perspectives, challenge assumptions, and (as much as I resist the term) serve as an engine of knowledge production.

That said, I must emphasize: these are survival strategies, not substitutes for robust institutional support. In a climate where public education is being systematically eroded and dismantled, no amount of facilitation skill or conceptual sleight of hand will be enough.

We must therefore fight on two fronts: to defend and rebuild public education as a democratic right, and to affirm the capacity of art making to generate insight, complexity, and conviction. Otherwise, we may well find ourselves living out the warning offered by Hannah Arendt in The Crisis in Education (1954):

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”