@book{illich1971deschooling,
title={Deschooling Society},
author={Illich, I.},
isbn={9780060121396},
lccn={74138738},
series={Harrow books},
url={https://books.google.co.cr/books?id=02i7AAAAIAAJ},
year={1971},
publisher={Harper \& Row}
}
In openlibrary.
My highlights:
Universal education through schooling is not feasible. New educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.
The pupil is “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Rich and poor alike depend on schools and hospitals which guide their lives, form their world view, and define for them what is legitimate and what is not. Both view doctoring oneself as irresponsible, learning on one’s own as unreliable, and community organization, when not paid for by those in authority, as a form of aggression or subversion. The reliance on institutional treatment renders independent accomplishment suspect.
Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political, and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible. Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will. Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect. The increasing reliance on institutional care adds a new dimension to their helplessness: psychological impotence, the inability to fend for themselves. Only by channeling dollars away from the institutions which now treat health, education, and welfare can the further impoverishment resulting from their disabling side effects be stopped.
Most countries in Latin America have reached the “take-off” point toward economic development and competitive consumption, and thereby toward modernized poverty: their citizens have learned to think rich and live poor. Their fanaticism in favor of school makes it possible to exploit them doubly: it permits increasing allocation of public funds for the education of a few and increasing acceptance of social control by the many. The belief that universal schooling is absolutely necessary is most firmly held in those countries where the fewest people have been—and will be—served by schools. The Northern poor are being disabled by the same twelve-year treatment whose lack brands the Southern poor as hopelessly backward. Neither in North America nor in Latin America do the poor get equality from obligatory schools. But in both places the mere existence of school discourages and disables the poor from taking control of their own learning. The school has an anti-educational effect. Obligatory schooling inevitably polarizes a society; it also grades the nations of the world according to an international caste system.
Work, leisure, politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education.
We need a law forbidding discrimination in hiring, voting, or admission to centers of learning based on previous attendance at some curriculum. This guarantee would not exclude performance tests of competence for a function or role, but would remove the present absurd discrimination in favor of the person who learns a given skill with the largest expenditure of public funds or—what is equally likely—has been able to obtain a diploma which has no relation to any useful skill or job. Learning frequently is the result of instruction, but selection for a role or category in the job market increasingly depends on mere length of attendance.
Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives. There should be no obstacle for anyone at any time of his life to be able to choose instruction among hundreds of definable skills at public expense.
Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value of licenses. Certification constitutes a form of market manipulation and is plausible only to a schooled mind. School is inefficient in skill instruction especially because it is curricular. In most schools a program which is meant to improve one skill is chained always to another irrelevant task. History is tied to advancement in math, and class attendance to the right to use the playground.
Most skills can be acquired and improved by drills, because skill implies the mastery of definable and predictable behavior. Skill instruction can rely, therefore, on the simulation of circumstances in which the skill will be used. Education in the exploratory and creative use of skills, however, cannot rely on drills. Education can be the outcome of instruction, though instruction of a kind fundamentally opposed to drill. It relies on the relationship between partners who already have some of the keys which give access to memories stored in and by the community.
The educational guide or master is concerned with helping matching partners to meet so that learning can take place. At the most he helps the pupil to formulate his puzzlement since only a clear statement will give him the power to find his match, moved like him, at the moment, to explore the same issue in the same context.
In schools, including universities, most resources are spent to purchase the time and motivation of a limited number of people to take up predetermined problems in a ritually defined setting. The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern.
Until the last century, “children” of middle-class parents were made at home with the help of preceptors and private schools. Only with the advent of industrial society did the mass production of “childhood” become feasible and come within the reach of the masses. The school system is a modern phenomenon, as is the childhood it produces. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher. Pupils do most of their learning without, and often despite, their teachers.
Poor parents who want their children to go to school are less concerned about what they will learn than about the certificate and money they will earn. Middle-class parents commit their children to a teacher’s care to keep them from learning what the poor learn on the streets.
School, by its very nature, tends to make a total claim on the time and energies of its participants. This, in turn, makes the teacher into custodian, preacher, and therapist. He arbitrates the observance of rules and administers the intricate rubrics of initiation to life. Teacher-as-moralist substitutes for parents, God, or the state. He indoctrinates the pupil about what is right or wrong, not only in school but also in society at large. Teacher-as-therapist feels authorized to delve into the personal life of his pupil in order to help him grow as a person, this usually means that he persuades the pupil to submit to a domestication of his vision of truth and his sense of what is right. The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil. Under the authoritative eye of the teacher, several orders of value collapse into one. The distinctions between morality, legality, and personal worth are blurred and eventually eliminated.
The university graduate has been schooled for selective service among the rich of the world. With very rare exceptions, the university graduate from a poor country feels more comfortable with his North American and European colleagues than with his nonschooled compatriots, and all students are academically processed to be happy only in the company of fellow consumers of the products of the educational machine. The modern university confers the privilege of dissent on those who have been tested and classified as potential money-makers or power-holders.
In each country the amount of consumption by the college graduate sets the standard for all others.
The school system today performs the threefold function common to powerful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously the repository of society’s myth, the institutionalization of that myth’s contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality. Only disenchantment with and detachment from the central social ritual and reform of that ritual can bring about radical change. Only a generation which grows up without obligatory schools will be able to recreate the university.
Learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Once young people have allowed their imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to institutional planning of every sort. The institutionalized values school instills are quantified ones. But personal growth is not a measurable entity. It is growth in disciplined dissidence, which cannot be measured against any rod, or any curriculum, nor compared to someone else’s achievement.
Young people are prealienated by schools that isolate them while they pretend to be both producers and consumers of their own knowledge, which is conceived of as a commodity put on the market in school. They are made to feel guilty if they do not behave according to the predictions of consumer research by getting the grades and certificates that will place them in the job category they have been led to expect. If we add those engaged in full-time teaching to those in full-time attendance, we realize that this so-called superstructure has become society’s major employer. Today most human labor is engaged in the production of demands that can be satisfied by industry which makes intensive use of capital. Most of this is done in school.
Each of us is personally responsible for his or her own deschooling, and only we have the power to do it. School is not yet organized for self-protection as effectively as a nation-state, or even a large corporation. Liberation from the grip of schools could be bloodless.
Now the general and the policeman try to dignify their professions by masquerading as educators. In a schooled society, warmaking and civil repression find an educational rationale. Pedagogical warfare in the style of Vietnam will be increasingly justified as the only way of teaching people the superior value of unending progress.
All of today’s futuristic planners seek to make economically feasible what is technically possible while refusing to face the inevitable social consequence: the increased craving of all men for goods and services that will remain the privilege of a few. Only economies on a scale approaching race suicide would render modern warfare economically efficient.
Only recently have we begun to claim that locking people up in cages will have a beneficial effect on their character and behavior. Jail increases both the quality and the quantity of criminals, that, in fact, it often creates them out of mere nonconformists. Fewer people, however, seem to understand that mental hospitals, nursing homes, and orphan asylums do much the same thing.
The school-made graduates then create a demand for other conspicuous utilities, such as industrial power, paved highways, modern hospitals, and airports, and these in turn create a market for the goods made for rich countries and, after a while, the tendency to import obsolescent factories to produce them.
A durable-goods economy is precisely the contrary of an economy based on planned obsolescence. A durable-goods economy means a constraint on the bill of goods. Goods would have to be such that they provided the maximum opportunity to “do” something with them: items made for self-assembly, self-help, reuse, and repair. The complement to a durable, repairable, and reusable bill of goods is not an increase of institutionally produced services, but rather an institutional framework which constantly educates to action, participation, and self-help.
Under the impact of intense urbanization, children became a natural resource to be molded by the schools and fed into the industrial machine. The pacification of the new generation within specially engineered enclaves which will seduce them into the dream world of their elders. The syntactic alternative to it is an educational network or web for the autonomous assembly of resources under the personal control of each learner.
Freedom is reduced to a selection among packaged commodities. This reorientation toward personal surprise rather than institutionally engineered values will be disruptive of the established order until we dissociate the increasing availability of technological tools which facilitate encounter from the increasing control of the technocrat of what happens when people meet.
The alternative to dependence on schools is not the use of public resources for some new device which “makes” people learn; rather it is the creation of a new style of educational relationship between human and their environment.
Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent. The myth that increased production will provide a better life develops the habit of self-defeating consumption of services and alienating production, the tolerance for institutional dependence, and the recognition of institutional rankings.
A political program which does not explicitly recognize the need for deschooling is not revolutionary; it is demagoguery calling for more of the same.
Good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.
Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. New institutions should be channels to which the learner would have access without credentials or pedigree—public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon would become available. Things, models, peers, and elders are four resources each of which requires a different type of arrangement to ensure that everybody has ample access to it. “What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?"
In a good educational system access to things ought to be available at the sole bidding of the learner, while access to informants requires, in addition, others’ consent. Criticism can also come from two directions: from peers or from elders, that is, from fellow learners whose immediate interests match mine, or from those who will grant me a share in their superior experience. Most of these resources are plentiful. But they are neither conventionally perceived as educational resources, nor is access to them for learning purposes easy, especially for the poor. New relational structures which are deliberately set up to facilitate access to these resources for the use of anybody who is motivated to seek them for his education.
In the city rich and poor alike are artificially kept away from most of the things that surround them. Industrial design creates a world of things that resist insight into their nature, and schools shut the learner out of the world of things in their meaningful setting. In this atmosphere the student too often uses the map, the lab, the encyclopedia, or the microscope only at the rare moments when the curriculum tells him to do so. Educational games which can provide a unique way to penetrate formal systems. Within school, when used in the form of tournaments, games are not only removed from the sphere of leisure; they often become tools used to translate playfulness into competition, a lack of abstract reasoning into a sign of inferiority.
Children are excluded from most things and places on the grounds that they are private. The special domain of professionals and dangerous to the uninitiated. To deschool the artifacts of education will require making the artifacts and processes available—and recognizing their educational value. The money now spent on the sacred paraphernalia of the school ritual could be freed to provide all citizens with greater access to the real life of the city.
The job market depends on making skills scarce and on keeping them scarce, either by proscribing their unauthorized use and transmission or by making things which can be operated and repaired only by those who have access to tools or information which are kept scarce. Schools thus produce shortages of skilled persons.
Providing the young from their earliest age with invitations to meet, evaluate, and seek out others would prepare them for a lifelong interest in seeking new partners for new endeavors. Three types of special educational competence should, in fact, be distinguished: one to create and operate the kinds of educational exchanges or networks outlined here; another to guide students and parents in the use of these networks; and a third to act as primus inter pares in undertaking difficult intellectual exploratory journeys. Network builders and administrators would have to demonstrate genius at keeping themselves, and others, out of people’s way, at facilitating encounters among students, skill models, educational leaders, and educational objects.
The deschooling of society will blur the distinctions between economics, education, and politics on which the stability of the present world order and the stability of nations now rest.
More highlights: https://archive.org/download/elopio-highlights/2024-09-19-22-31-28-Deschooling%20Society.md