Authors Mark Bray (Anarchist Education and the Modern School) and Eli Meyerhoff (Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World) discuss the historical context and enduring legacies of Francisco Ferrer's Modern School and expand the conversation to discuss potential avenues and limitations of liberatory studying -- within, against, and beyond education institutions and capitalist society.

Mark Bray is a historian of Modern European History, a political organizer, and the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook and Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street. He is currently a Lecturer at Dartmouth College.

Mark's forthcoming Anarchist Education and the Modern School is the first historical reader to gather together Francisco Ferrer's writings on rationalist education, revolutionary violence, and the general strike (most translated into English for the first time) and put them into conversation with the letters, speeches, and articles of his comrades, collaborators, and critics to show that the truth about the founder of the Modern School was far more complex than most of his friends or enemies realized.

Eli Meyerhoff is a political theorist and independent researcher in Durham, organizes for prison abolition with Inside-Outside Alliance, and works at Duke University's Social Movements Lab. He has been an instructor at Duke and the University of Minnesota, and he used to organize in Minnesota with a free, anarchistic university called the Experimental College of the Twin Cities. He is on the editorial collective of an open-access journal, Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics.

Eli's forthcoming book, Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World, claims that to understand our current political impasse, we need to unsubscribe from the romance of education. Toward this end, the book argues that education is only one possible mode of study among many others, shows how education’s different elements emerged historically from political struggles, and highlights contemporary examples of alternative, radical modes of studying.