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Deschooling (more from the strangely cosmopolitan priest)

1st February 2009, 12:27 pm by Stan

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “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. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery. I will explain how this process of degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or “treatments.” I do this because I believe that most of the research now going on about the future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalization of values and that we must define conditions which would permit precisely the contrary to happen. We need research on the possible use of technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction and the emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by technocrats. We need counterfoil research to current futurology.

I want to raise the general question of the mutual definition of man’s nature and the nature of modern institutions which characterizes our world view and language. To do so, I have chosen the school as my paradigm, and I therefore deal only indirectly with other bureaucratic agencies of the corporate state: the consumer-family, the party, the army, the church, the media. My analysis of the hidden curriculum of school should make it evident that public education would profit from the deschooling of society, just as family life, politics, security, faith, and communication would profit from an analogous process.

FULL BOOK

Category: General  |  Comment (RSS)

14 Comments

  1. Michael Anderson:

    Am starting to read this…been printing things out lately to get away from the computer, but I agree with Illich on the basic principle right off the bat. My daughter made it through 12 years of public schooling in Eugene, OR, a rather “liberal” place, with her critical thinking skills intact, but it took some dour realism on my part to help it happen. It took me some years after high school to do the same. Another good source read on this is John Taylor Gatto’s “The Underground History Of American Education”. Evidently we here are influenced strongly by the Prussian German model of the 19th century.

    3 February 2009, 1:54 pm

  2. BuddhalovesPaine:

    Chapter 4, 2nd Paragraph, Illich says paraphrased, I believe that we must live a life of action rather than consumption. That certainly seems evident to me. Yet it also seems evident to me that few people on the planet see it that way. I concluded some time ago the only way to address the moral bankruptcy of the US in particular and the world in general, which the desire for an ever increasing level of wealth is part of, is for a small minority of fanatics to seize the instruments of indoctrination by force and deprogram people.
    Yet, if we try to convince the people that they have to expect less they will crucify us. First they will be unwilling to accept such a premise. Second they will think that the people who are trying to deprogram them are just trying to get them to accept less so that the people who have seized power can have more. To me this forces humanity in to a position that the only way forward is through technology. Yes I realize that it is technology that is destroying us, but, perhaps because I am not an original thinker, it seems to me that technology can be our only savior. It is both Satan and God.
    Is anyone watching that thinks that they are an original thinker? Do you have any ideas about incite a revolution in human thinking which will benefit humanity?

    3 February 2009, 4:26 pm

  3. BuddhalovesPaine:

    Point of clarification. When I say a small group of fanatics I mean in comparison with 300 million people.
    Now many people cringe at the word fanatic but what if I just substituted an r and deleted an a then we would have frantics. I hope that makes you feel better. Organisms that change to slow for their enviorment often become extinct. Yes organisms that change to fast can become extinct too. boo hoo hoo you have to choose between the two.

    3 February 2009, 4:51 pm

  4. Stan:

    Do you have any ideas about incite a revolution in human thinking which will benefit humanity?

    …seize the instruments of indoctrination by force and deprogram people.

    Breathe deeply. Into a bag if we have to. Let’s just chew on some ideas for a while; and when we get the chance, we do what we can, where we can, with whom we can.

    This is a blog. We are sitting at some point throughout the day at computers, typing and hopefully thinking. There are lots of blogs. This one has a meme bar at the top that is explained. We throw some thinking out there to try and make connections. We have no organization and no guns (thank God).

    Illich is telling us the same thing. Do what needs to be done where you can. His quip, “To hell with the future! It’s a [hu]man-eating idol!” is actually pretty apt here.

    Gatto is very good, btw.

    3 February 2009, 5:20 pm

  5. BuddhalovesPaine:

    I was just kidding about seizing the institutions of idioctrination with force to see if anyone was reading this blog. No my real plan is to create an French German Russian Canadian Mexican Alliance and persuade Benevolent Unique Death Defying Honorable Aliens (Buddhas for short) to airlift the Russian Army to British Columbia and the German Army to Manitoba and the French Army to Quebec and then invade the US. BTW adding that (thank God)
    to the sentence. “We have no organization and no guns.” was really clever disinformation. That will really make Wayne Chuckle chuckle.

    4 February 2009, 6:10 am

  6. BuddhalovesPaine:

    This article and the one preceding present very radical propositions and seem to defend them quite well.
    I am very disappointed that there have not been a flood of comments on these articles. Each paragraph offers something to comment on. Perhaps that is the problem. Maybe the readers are overwhelmed and do not know where to begin. One thing that jumps out at me is that if it was not stated that Illich was the writer I would swear that this education article was written by Milton Friedman or Murray Rothbard or Lew Rockwell for Reason magazine.
    It is too bad that only a very small percentage of the population will ever consider the points that Illich has made in these writings. If these ideas became widely popular on the left, and I am not sure that they should, it would be a very important point of agreement with the Ron Paul grouplet.
    My own schooling had one important benefit to me. It was one source of authority in which I was taught something different that what I was taught by my parents or the local religious authorities. That of course caused my to have to think about this discrepency and make up my own mind.
    The educational system proposed by Illich is very decentralized. Does anyone else have the perception that mankind seems to be always evolving towards greater and greater centralization? Not unknowingly because I can think of many examples of people trying to decentralize this or that institution.
    The Christian religion is an obvious example. The Catholics have a Pope who is the Central authority. The Orthodox have their Bishops. And many Christian denominations in the US are decentralized to the parish level. In many fields people talk about decentralization to improve flexibility (therefore effeciency) yet it seems all attempts at decentralization end up being only temporary measures. Is there perhaps a characteristic of human nature that makes this drift towards centralization difficult to avoid? Am I a fascist for even asking such a question?

    4 February 2009, 2:10 pm

  7. BuddhalovesPaine:

    I would very much like to know how Erich Fromm would have evaluated these writings. I am a big fan of his.

    4 February 2009, 2:12 pm

  8. Stan:

    What differentiates Illich, wildly, from libertarians are at least four things: (1) He began and ended his outlook from a confession of faith (as Barth would say, first faith, then understanding), (2) he did not support the notion that property is sacrosanct (on the contrary), (3) he was a collectivist, and (4) he did not endorse contracts (social, legal, sexual, or otherwise); he believed that authentic human bonds are convenents.

    He and Fromm were friends, but Fromm was shocked by Illich’s ideas about “education.” Illich did not endorse in either “education” or “systems-thinking,” even though he worked in universities. He said more than once that he felt most at home in the 12th Century, and he saw this as an historical pivot-point that led to modernism. He more or less claimed to be a socialist, though certianly not in the usual sense; and anarchist claimed him for a time. But he doesn’t pin down well in any of those categories, because he wouldn’t play along with the reductionism in them.

    A few quotes:

    …I think I would start a little bit too high if I began now to speak about Jesus’ absolute request that, if you come from the solid, middle-of-the-road, practicable Judaism into this little sect, you renounced the freedom to separate from your wife. You renounced an opportunity which the Jew had [in the parable of the Samaritan]. You renounced the need to belong to the “we” in order to fine your “I.” The place outside of Jerusalem, Golgotha, where the cross was put up, became the symbol of this renunciation. As in the Temptation, he renounced changing the world through power. Christians who imitate him soon discover that little practices of renunciation, of what I won’t do, even though it’s legitimate, are a necessary habit I have to form in order to practice freedom.

    What a beautiful, innocent world it was when people could still practice this renunciation by not eating chicken soup on Friday. I still remember that world. It made no sense in Europe during the Second World War when meat was rationed anyway, and I forgot about it. But when I came to New York, I found that people really were concerned about not eating meat on Friday. And, during the six weeks of Lent, they would give up something that was hard for them in order to learn how to give up other things. I remember my boss on the first days of the first Lent which I spent in the United States. When we sat down for breakfast, and he was grouchy as anything. And I asked him twice, Sir, did I do something wrong? No! Did I offend you? No! Do you feel badly? Yes, it’s Lent, and I’ve given up my cigar. Well, punishing me was a funny way of going about his renunciation, but I love to think of it because it reminds me of the things which, in the modern world, we can give up — not because we want a more beautiful life, but because we want to become more aware of how much we are attached to the world as it is and how much we can get along without it. These unnecessary tings have now multiplied to such an extent that you can’t easily give a social shape to them. Some people will give up writing letters on a computer — not because it’s bad, and not because they don’t like to have to answer letters at the speed of email. Others will give up the services of physicians or, as somebody whom I know has done, guaranteeing that each of his children will get a college degree.

    The certainty that you can do without is one of the most efficacious ways of convincing yourself, no matter where you stand on the intellectual or emotional ladder, that you are free. Self-imposed limits provide a basis and a preparation for discussion of what we can renounce as a group of friends or a neighborhood. I have seen it, and I can witness to it. For many people who suffer from great fears and a sense of impotence and depersonalization, renunciation provides a very simple way back to a self which stands above the constraints of the world.

    And such renunciation is especially necessary in the world in which we live. Tyranny of old was exercised over people who still knew how to subsist. They could lose their means of subsistence, and be enslaved, but they could not be made needy. With the beginning of capitalist production in the spinning and weaving shops of the Medicis, a new type of human being was being engendered: needy man, who has to organize a society, the principle function of which is to satisfy human needs. And needs are much more cruel than tyrants.

    ***

    A little while ago, I spoke about Father John Considine, the Maryknoll priest who convinced John XXIII to enlist the Church in the Alliance for Progress. The idea of these missioners was to help these poor people, and to help meant to provide those people with means, with tools, that they didn’t have — with electricity, penicillin, decent legal devices, instrumentally conceived knowledge. This was taken for granted. It’s as difficult to put an epistemic parenthesis around concepts like instrument, tool, device, technique, as it is to put a parenthesis around norms or rules in ethics. As soon as we speak about conscience, someone will invoke norms according to which a conscious man ought to act. As soon as we speak about help, as a result of my love for you, my benevolence towards you, we will think about empowering you by providing you with some device or technique… [T]he very idea of the tool as a special type of causality has an historical beginning, that the idea of the tool takes mature shape in Scholasticism in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Almost absurdly, but correctly, we then spoke about the discovery that angels who are pure spirits require tools, which are planets, in order to act as God’s governors in the ordering of the world. We can consider time between the century in which I am so much at home, the twelfth century, and today, by speaking of it as the epoch of technique, or tool-making — “tool” being something that incorporates, materializes, or formalizes a human intention, and can be picked up, or not picked up, by a person who wants to pursue the goal that corresponds to this intention. It is marked by the omnipresence of instruments: eyes are instruments for seeing like cameras, concepts are epistemic devices, laws are tools for the ordering of society.

    ***

    Excerpt from David Cayley’s Introduction to Rivers North of the Future – The Testament of Ivan Illich:

    …Illich makes a … convincing evisceration of the myth of the secular when he claims that contemporary Western societies are in no sense post-Christian but rather constitute a perverted form of Christianity. He shows … that a whole constellation of modern notions, most too obvious even to raise a question in most minds, are distortions of Christian originals — from “the citizen” on whose shoulders the state rests to the services which are its raison d’etre, from the planetary “life” that right-thinking people want to conserve to the technology that threatens it. And he further claims that these notions would have been unthinkable without their Christian originals. They owe their very existence, in other words, to the ancestry which they distort, deny, and conceal.

    Illich, with admitted trepidation, calls this view “apocalyptic.” His hesitancy is understandable, since this word, as it is now used, tends to evoke fundamentalist fantasies of divine vengeance or the gruesome cataclysms that have become a staple of popular cinema. But Illich uses the word in its literal meaning of “uncovering” or “revelation.” For him, the contemporary world reveals an evil that can only be grasped when it is understood as an imposture, or simulation, of the Samaritan’s unforseen and unforseeable response to the man in the ditch. Evil, traditionally, was an absence, a forgetfulness of the good. Illich points to a new kind of evil that appears only when the good is replaced by “measurable values” and transmogrified into an “institutional output”. (quotation marks added for emphasis)

    4 February 2009, 7:58 pm

  9. Michael Anderson:

    Tnanks, Stan….just making a living can take up an awful lot of time (even if you enjoy it), so I think “….when we get the chance, we do what we can, where we can, with whom we can…” is a good operative statement. I’ll run with that for the near future. I believe we all have a place…like each piece of a good Afro-Cuban band…to make that multi-variegated “groove” happen. Maybe that’s a sloppy analogy, but apply your own (smile).

    5 February 2009, 8:58 am

  10. Kim Sky:

    To Practice Renunciation,

    Wow do we ever have a plethora of stuff, things, gobble de gook that we can renounce. The link to the video below has continued to haunt me since first seeing it. And more recently living with relatives where I am learning just what the “american way of life” is . . .

    An example of a foreclosed house and what is left behind.
    http://www.kcet.org/socal/2008/09/foreclosure-alley.html

    Chao.

    5 February 2009, 10:21 am

  11. Curt:

    I am disturbed. I am very troubled by two things at the moment. The first is education. Modern society is caught in a catch 22. Some are opposed to standardized testing. They say that standardized tests do not test anything other than someone’s ability to take a standardized test. That does make some sense to me. As a person who did not do great but did usually do above average, at least be US standards, on standardized tests I can say that I often looked at a question and said to myself, I think that B is the correct answer but based on the way the question is asked I think that the test writer is steering me to C. I think that C is what the test writer thinks the correct answer is. I will answer C. Well it seemed to work for me. On the other hand the US does worse than Europe on International Standardized Tests. That seems to be some at least anecdotal evidence that there is some sense to standardized tests. Yet I supposed that an American patriot that supports standardized testing could say that Americans score lower only because there are not more questions on the tests like in the picture above is the man holding a 9mm Luger or a 9mm Beretta. Or perhaps you are in a crowded hallway firing with a 15 shot pistol at a target 10 meters away. Should you, A. fire at center of mass, or B. assume that the target is wearing body armor and fire for the head. Since I was born and raised in America I could come up with far more tasteless examples but since I live in Europe in won’t.
    Furthermore when it comes to education tests are not the only thing that can be standardized. Students can either be divided up by their apparent abilities or they can all get the same lessons regardless of how well they can absorb the material. It seems to me that no matter what choice a modern society makes it will be a bad choice. If a society chooses for diversity in education then some people will be much better prepared to compete in that society than others. Children will not be getting an equal chance at success. On the other hand if all the children have to sit in the same lessons the very smart and those who are slower may tune out. Furthermore, I have heard that there is a problem that not every child learns in the same manor. Some are visually oriented and some are oral learners and so on. So what are the chances that in a mass education system where children change teachers every year that the system can detect such differences. If on the other hand we leave children with the same teacher for several years what happens if it is a bad fit? Disturbing.

    25 February 2010, 9:15 am

  12. Curt:

    I watched this short 11 minute presentation from the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA) Animate yesterday. It had more disturbing news about modern education.
    It repeated the idea that I mentioned above that once upon a time, in the (g)olden days, when I went to school mass schooling was actually a benifit for some children.
    But this presentation pointed out a change that has occured in the environment since I went to school. That is video games. Since children spend a lot of time today on video games thier minds have been shaped by a highly stimulating environment that they get to INTERACT WITH. Children interact in the sense that they get to create much of of the game. So this RSA presentation emphasized school now seems just incrediblee dull to many more chldren today than when I was there. I remember that in junior high and high school the teachers often asked questions to get the students involved. The success of this tactic varied greatly. After all a verb is a verb and not a nown, and a Math question has one answer. Yet in the social studies area a social policy is a good policy to some a bad policy to others. A local custom in a far away land is a stupid silly superstitous custom to some and a senseable understanding of the local environment to others. There were more chances for interaction in social study classes. Yet such classes really did not get many students interested because most could not see the relevance of what it was that they were learning about for their lives. I know someone who thinks that making social studies boring was a devious deliberate plan thought up by the wealthy to make sure that those in the lower classes never started to ask questions about really relevant social economic issues. I think that such a view might be a bit paranoid but it quite a coincidence of how well it worked out for the rich.

    28 November 2010, 9:14 am

  13. Stan:

    see the new post on schools (:

    28 November 2010, 3:37 pm

  14. m.c.:

    A couple of points about modern education & standardized testing. Street Smarts & Emotional IQ may or may not reveal themselves on a high school or college GPAs. Ronald Reagan and George Bush Jr. probably suckered people their whole life. I also forget the term for learning what is not explicitly instructed(there’s a term for it) Partly a fancy way of saying pattern recognition.
    I bet there is a fairly thin line between an average or above high school student who gets an appointment to a military academy & one who enlists right out of high school. Self confidence might be one area of difference. A stable and supportive home life might be another, organizational skills might be another, the above Street Smarts & Emotional IQ a fourth, going to the Guidance Counselor’s office and finding out the deadlines, calling their member of congresses office and making sure their packet was received in the mail. The second lieutentant & the private firstclass/corporal aren’t that different between the ears.

    Standardized testing: In HS I paid some money and took a 6 week night SAT Prep course. Most of it was time management, vocabulary flash card drills, and basic algebra & geometry memory excercises. I had not studied for the PSAT and had done rather poorly, wondering if I could get excepted to any 4-year college. Talking with classmates afterwards who were better in math & science classes anyway who scored lower than me, I felt slightly guilty. I wasn’t completely idiotic( I graduated in the top 15-20% of a pretty good Washington D.C. public high school.)

    What’s the old joke. It’s not how smart you are its what you do with what you got. On my tombstone, it won’t say “He invented some toxic chemical or other that causes cancer or something.”

    28 November 2010, 5:39 pm

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