Deschooling Society
Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society is, in many ways, a disappointing book. The problem is not just that it’s outdated. The problem is that the flashes of insight that impressed me at the beginning of the book were reduced to a trickle midway through and that, while I appreciated a lot of Illich’s critique of compulsory government schooling, his own suggestions for a “deschooled” society struck me as quixotic and utopian, bordering on ludicrous.
That said, there was stuff I appreciated, stuff that (even if you don’t agree with it) makes you say “Huh! I need to think about that some more,” beginning with the opening paragraph:
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 (1).
September 21st, 2011 at 5:03 pm
I met Ivan Illich way back in 1986 before he died. I hadn’t heard of him at the time(I was a dumb freshman in college), but he struck me as a very interesting guy. He didn’t believe in doctors though, and that led to a bit of an early death for him, but hey, we all have to go sometime.