Rohan Roberts | 10 June 2018
“Illich’s profound analysis of modern Western societies through the fulcrum of the ‘manipulative institution’ is as significant an analysis as that of Marx.” – The New Observer
“Not acid, speed, or junk, but school is the most destructive drug in America today. This is the theme of Ivan Illich, a man with a truly Dostoyevskian flair for revolutionary thinking. We’re so stoned on school, he says, that we can’t think for ourselves anymore.” – The New York Times
It is an unfortunate reality that nine out of ten teachers and educationists have neither heard of Ivan Illich nor read his book: Deschooling Society. Published in 1971, this radical and profound book is a magnificently cerebral exposition on the shortcomings of schools and offers a critical discourse on institutionalised education in modern economies. The book is controversial, subversive, intellectual, and a tour-de-force in every sense.
The first chapter, Why We Must Disestablish School is a ferocious indictment of traditional educational institutions that seek to promote the status quo and convince us that we need society as it is today:
“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 endeavour 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.”
One of the many points Illich makes is that more education does not necessarily translate into more good. Unfortunately, most – if not all – modern economies have reached a point where “School” is thought of as something that is indispensable. We have raised generations of people (parents, educators, students, bureaucrats) to believe that without schools and conventional education society will collapse. Illich makes a compelling case to “deschool” society, wean our citizens off institutionalized, factory-style, pointless education, and start thinking of alternatives.
We need to see schools as a manifestation of a ritual. And, like most rituals, it is blind and based on tradition. School is now a modern-day religion that offers the futile promise of easy salvation. “Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But, this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.”
Illich was an Austro-Croation priest, but also a philosopher and critic of various institutions of Western culture. The Guardian describes him as a polymath and polemicist whose greatest contribution was as an archaeologist of ideas, rather than an ideologue. His charisma, spirituality, brilliance, and sincerity were obvious to everyone who knew him, as was his stern, no-nonsense demeanour. His controversial views on education, society, the law, medicine, and economics brought him into conflict not just with “experts” of all stripes but with the powerful Roman Catholic Church as well.
However, “experts” were often the target of Illich’s piercing insight and critical review. In Deschooling Society Illich says, “A major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. 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.” He goes on to drive the point that it is patently false that learning is the result of teaching. On the contrary, the teacher in a modern school performs three roles: as custodian of societies’ rituals, as therapist, and as preacher.
Of course, these roles are more outdated than ever today – in an age of ubiquitous information and smartphones. Illich was prescient in more ways than one. He also points out, “School appropriates the money, men, and goodwill available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. 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.”
Illich’s views are more relevant today than ever before. What we have at the moment are superficial Band-Aids on the surface of a profoundly traumatic wound on the flesh of human society. Children are being betrayed and the future of our species is up for grabs. There is a lot of talk of change. But there is very little sense of urgency.
What is desperately required is to empty the education bucket, overhaul the system, and take bold, dramatic, and drastic steps. We have been indoctrinated to believe the notion that only schools can offer education and that skills and knowledge acquisition are only reliable if it is done formally in a traditional school. In the words of Ken Robinson “Schools kill creativity.” And in the words of Ivan Illich, “Schools pervert the natural inclination to learn.”
Tony Wagner, the Innovation Expert in residence at Harvard and bestselling author, points out that what we need is not more education, but a different kind of education. For the sake of our children and for the future of our species, we have to start looking for alternatives to schools to educate our kids.
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A few salient and thought-provoking quotes from the book:
“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
“Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being “with it,” yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.”
“School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.”
“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. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.”
“The machine-like behaviour of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people, in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed.”
“Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.”
“School prepares people for the alienating institutionalization of life, by teaching the necessity of being taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to develop independently; they no longer find it attractive to relate to each other, and the surprises that life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition are closed.”
“The American university has become the final stage of the most all-encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them.”
“A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. 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.”
“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.”
“School appropriates the money, men, and goodwill available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. 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.”
