Deschooling Society [Paperback]

Ivan Illich (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Harpercollins (July 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060910461
• ISBN-13: 978-0060910464
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,427,377 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

86 of 90 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deschooling blasts the contemporary idolatry of "education", July 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Deschooling Society (Open Forum) (Paperback)

This is a heartfelt series of essays that illuminate the nature of learning and the perverse consequences of professionally imposed schooling requirements. Far from the assumed engine of equality, modern schooling promotes inequality and social stratification. It's powerful and graded liturgy convinces the majority of people that their inferior status derives from a failure to consume sufficient quantities of expensive educational services. Illich links schooling and modern ideas of education to the belief in endless progress and the ultimate abolition of "Necessity." What starts out as a program in humanism ends up as a formula for the destruction of what it is to be human.

This is a book about aliveness.

62 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars These 120 pages will alter your perceptions, June 29, 2000

By 

"-nicole-" (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Deschooling Society (Open Forum) (Paperback)

I read this book 10 years ago and still find myself thinking about it.

If you're looking for material that will justify your worst suspicions as to the actual effectiveness of modern schooling while inspiring in you a desire for change, you're on the right track. But be warned. This book is far more than an essay on the failings of our educational system.

Education is merely the author's proving ground for one simple premise: it is the nature of the institution to produce the opposite of itself. This basic paradigm may be applied to any institutionalized need. You'll find yourself analyzing the role of healthcare in well-being, financial services in prosperity, the food industry in nutrition, and so on...

Find this book and buy it.

41 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deschool Your Mind., April 10, 2000

By 

David Culp - See all my reviews

This review is from: Deschooling society (World perspectives, v. 44) (Hardcover)

This is one of those books that will change the way you see the world and yourself. It's difficult for us who were "successful" in government schools to look back at the process objectively, to remember the wasted time, the cartoonish simplification of everything, and the process' lack of applicability to our lives. You may need this book to help you reconsider that which has become so large a part of your own feeling of self-worth. You will then see why it is almost impossible to discuss true school reform with people - they still have their blinders on.