Deschooling Society

From UoWiki

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.

'Deschooling Society' is one of Ivan Illich's best known books. Central to his thinking was the idea that technologies pass a threshold beyond which they defeat their original object. In 'Energy and Equity', for example, he calculated that - once you factor in the amount of time spent earning the money to pay for it - travelling by car is little faster than walking and a lot slower than using a bike. He saw compulsory formal education as useless at transmitting knowledge but very good at training us to be dependent on institutions and corporations.

His proposals for 'learning networks', made over thirty years ago, anticipate much in the wiki concept and other modes of virtual learning.

Full text of book here
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