The word 'learning' has fallen in with a bad crowd: isolated cognitive skills, stockpiled knowledge, achievement by zero-sum competition, arbitrarily standardized measurement, access by aggression, confirmative action private tutoring, high tuition, neoliberal governance, more status than role, and all that correlated with race and class differentials and propagated, as Melville said of showoff intellects, with "the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always in themselves, more or less paltry and base". To loosen it from its present environment, this paper offers three ways of rethinking learning and social structure: one, learning is ubiquitous and should not be used as a generalizable source of social hierarchy; two, learning is an unnecessary abstraction that exists only by "paltry and base" psychometric manipulations that should not be a source of social hierarchy; and three, 'learning' is a contested term that must always report to considerations of how and when it is used and with what intentions and consequences. The third choice might offer relief from the "external arts and entrenchments" that have been disrupting our learning.
