A work
in progress edited by Daniel
Schugurensky
Department of Adult Education, Community Development and Counselling Psychology,
The Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT)
Some critics of school call for a transformation. Others call for
reformation. Still others call for a restoration. In his critique of schools,
Ivan Illich stands in near isolation. His is a call for deschooling. As a
historian and social critic, Ivan Illich has spent his lifetime questioning
such modern industrial certainties as development, medicine, health,
technology, and, in the case of Deschooling Society, education. Illich
first began to consider the problematic nature of compulsory schooling while an
administrator in both an adult education program and at the University of
Puerto Rico. While professional educators discussed the the need to increase
the compulsory school age within Puerto Rico, Illich began to question the
apparent discrepancies between schooling's promise and its actual outcomes.
Illich, recognizing that schooling in Puerto Rico was too costly to be provided
for all children, identified schooling as a system for producing dropouts -- a
system which gave more to those who had at the cost of those having little.
Schooling, contrary to its promise of serving equality and providing education,
instead promoted a class-based society as well as a society addicted to
progressive consumption. Continuing his contemplations on the numerous ills
afflicting modern society , Illich founded the Center for Intercultural
Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1961. While CIDOC functioned
primarily as a language school for American clergy who were involved in an
ongoing project of the United States to "develop" Latin America, it
also sought to problematize these clergy members' understanding of Western
"development" so they could come to understand its negative
implications and, hopefully, rethink their participation. At the same time,
CIDOC soon came to be an important international "think tank" of
scholars, historians, philosophers, and social critics. Such prominent thinkers
as Paulo Freire, Everett Reimer, Jonathan Kozol, Paul Goodman, and John Holt
shared their thoughts and writings during their stay at CIDOC, and it was here,
over the span of numerous discussions, that the essay "The Futility of
Schooling in Latin America" would later develop into the book Deschooling
Society.
In Deschooling Society, Illich demonstrates that schools function as
tools which are in fact counter-productive to their best intentions and that
their "successes" must be contemplated with human dignity and freedom
in mind. Schools, Illich shows, are successful in preparing individuals to
"fit" into a schooled society. Schools successfully prepare the
student to need treatments which can only be satisfied by institutions. By this
process, need and consumption, each of us finds our place in consumer society.
The ill of underconsumption is curable through further participation in
institutional life. The school successfully indoctrinates each student with the
belief in unlimited production and consumption via planned obsolescence. The
newest textbook, curriculum package, or teacher training program renders last
season's tools insufficient. Schooling successfully dulls the student's
imagination making it unlikely, even impossible, to imagine meaningful learning
experiences occurring in any other context. Learning requires an expert, a
program, a measurement, and a certificate. Learning happens via obligatory
attendance to an impersonal relationship in which one has authority over
another's interests. Schooling is the mechanism through which we learn to
accept the society, its institutions, and their rankings as they exist, as they
have always existed, and as they will continue to exist.
In the midst of this criticism, Ivan Illich demands that society be deschooled.
Falsely interpreted to mean the elimination of schools, Illich calls for the
disestablishment of school or the end to compulsory attendance schooling. He
states, "I've nothing against schools! I'm against compulsory schooling. I
know that schools always compound native privilege with new privilege. But only
when they become compulsory can they compound lack of native privilege with
added self-inflicted discrimination" (Cayley, 1992, p.68). His critique is
not focused on the school but rather institutionalized school which monopolizes
learning, instruction, and credentialing and creates a demand for something
which it can only provide to fewer and fewer people at greater and greater
public expense. Schooling, among others, is an institution which must be
delegitimized. The secular sovereignty exercised by schools must be exposed and
the methods with which it divides people into social classes and squelches
self-directed inquiry made obvious. In the institutional-school paradigm,
knowledge is a commodity and schools teach pupils to need the instruction which
can only be found in schools. According to Illich, "obligatory instruction
assumes the belief that man can do what God cannot, namely, manipulate others
for their own salvation" (1970, p.50). By deschooling society, schools
would continue to exist but their workings would be very different from those
operating at present. Deschooling could only occur given alternative social
arrangements and legal protections as well as a reconceptualization of what
constitutes learning in the heart of every deschooled person.
According to Illich, schools are the "reproductive organ of a consumer
society" (1970). Schools produce myths upon which an economic society
depends. Schooling is a ritual performed by participants who are made blind to
the discrepancy between the purpose for and the consequences of the ritual.
Despite the advertised purpose of promoting social equality and democratic
participation, schooling is "the ritual of a society committed to progress
and development" (Cayley, 1992, p. 67). In his thesis titled, Deschooling
Society, Ivan Illich promulgates four myths created by the school ritual; 1)
the myth of unending consumption, 2) the myth of measurement of values, 3) the
myth of packaging values, and 4) the myth of self-perpetuating progress. In the
first myth, schools teach us that learning is the result of an instructional
process that produces something of value. What is learned is that only the
curricularized instructional process in which knowledge is divided into
discreet bundles of information dispensed by certificated experts under
compulsory attendance can produce valued outcomes. The payoff for a greater
investment of time and money is more knowledge and additional diplomas.
"The existence of schools produces the demand for schooling" (Illich,
1970, pp.38-39). The second myth inculcates consumers with the understanding
that only that which is quantifiable is justifiable. Only measured experiences
possess worth. Only distinct quanta of subject matter which are measurable
constitute learning. With this myth, "people who submit to the standards
of others for the measure of their own personal growth soon apply the same
ruler to themselves. They no longer have to be put in their place, but put
themselves into their assigned slots, squeeze themselves into the niche which
they have been taught to seek, and, in the very process, put their fellows into
their places, too, until everybody and everything fits" (Illich, 1970,
p.40). Myth number three, packaging values, is the accepted belief in
educational research conducted by experts to determine what and when another (or
masses of others) should learn. "The result of the curriculum production
process looks like any other modern staple. It is a bundle of planned meanings,
of packaged values, a commodity whose 'balanced appeal' makes it marketable to
a sufficiently large number to justify the cost of production. Consumer-pupils
are taught to make their desires conform to marketable values. Thus 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" (Illich, 1970, p.41).
Finally, the fourth myth, self-perpetuating progress, promotes the need for
ever increasing quantities of schooling at ever increasing costs. With increased
expenditures, the student improves his or her own value in his or her own view
and in the view of the market, though not necessarily increasing his or her
learning. The increasingly large expenditures on gymnasiums, state-of-the-art
dining/entertainment/living facilities, and curriculum resources entice
student-consumers to consume more while industry requires particular
educational accouterments for a declining job market grown increasingly
competitive. As the creator, propagator, and protector of these four
educational myths, schools retain their sacred positions as the purveyor of
"secular salvation" (Gabbard, 1993). Despite the argument that
schools have become counterproductive in their service to fewer and fewer
clients and in the face of increasing public expenditures yielding
insignificant increases in standardized measurements, the school institution
stands as an immutable public shrine whose foundation holds firm amidst
tremors, shifts, and quakes.
In a deschooled society, individuals choose for themselves action-oriented
lives, rather than lives constrained by the parameters of consumption.
Individuals participate in learning "webs" in which each is a teacher
and also a learner. Relationships among people are convivial and promote self
and community reliance rather than addictions to institutions and to their
product, consumption addiction. The need is for relational structures, for
goods which are engineered for durability rather than obsolescence, and for
"access to institutions that increase the opportunity and desirability of
human interaction" (Illich, 1970, p.63). In a deschooled society, the
worlds of work, leisure, politics, family and community life are the classrooms
and their secret and protected spaces made more accessible. Learning, therefore,
occurs in and of the world and individuals define themselves by their own
learning and the learning that they contribute to others. Illich writes,
"I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a
life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a life style
which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other,
rather than maintaining a lifestyle which allows us to make and unmake, produce
and consume ... a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to
the depletion and pollution of the environment" (1970, p.52). By creating
and defining lives free of the predetermination of institutions, individuals
are opened to the surprises found within friendship, vocation, and critical and
emancipatory participation in the world.
Sources:
Cayley, David (1992). Ivan Illich in Conversation. Concord, Ontario: Anansi Press.
Illich, Ivan (1970). Deschooling Society. New York: Harper and Row.
Prepared by Dana Stuchul and Alison Kreider (UCLA)
Citation: Stuchul, Dana & Alison Kreider (1997). 1970 Ivan Illich Publishes Deschooling Society. In Daniel Schugurensky (Ed.), History of Education: Selected Moments of the 20th Century [online]. Available: http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~daniel_schugurensky/assignment1/1970illich.html (date accessed).
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