Customer Reviews

Deschooling society (World perspectives, v. 44)

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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.

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.

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.

This book is on my list of "The Ten Best." It does more than brilliantly advocate a turn away from education as an institutional product. It speaks for the adoption of a whole new worldview.

Illich eshews the usual reformers' clichés about our need for more schools, more school funding, etc., etc. He is much more radical and deep than that. He sometimes quotes and is often categorized with "deconstructionist" philosophers such as Foucault. However Illich is a thousand times more accessible and grounded than Foucault. And if after reading Illich, you feel the need for even more grounded advice about the benefits of homeschooling, I highly recommend you read the works of John Holt, starting perhaps with his "How Children Learn" and "How Children Fail." Holt brings the philosophy of homeschooling down to the everyday and individual.

But Illich looks at the big picture - at how our lives have been hijacked by a consumer mentality. It's not that he's giving suggestions about how schools could be improved. It's not that he's advocating any adjustments to our current teaching methods at all, and he's certainly not giving directions on how to transplant the pedagogical tools of the school into the "safer" environment of the home. It's that he's against the whole IDEA of schools and teaching in the first place. But wait! Before you gasp and turn away, read further.

Perhaps the most telling summary of his global objection lies in his pages on how schooling converts verbs into nouns in our lives. The modern mandatory educational system is created by and in turn promotes a constant reification, a constant restructuring of every intangible human capacity into a tangible need - into a consumer demand for service to be supplied by some institutional provider. Now we all wait on deliverance of those goods and services. So instead of bouncing out into the world thinking, "Whee - what can I LEARN today?" - a typical child soon settles into the dry demand of, "I NEED an EDUCATION." The active doing of "to learn" becomes the passive wanting of schooling. In an exactly parallel way, the child's once exuberant cry of "Whee - where can I GO today?" has become the perennially pouty, "I NEED WHEELS." And our whole society has been shaped into the circular driveway of requiring and accommodating only that latter demand.

Many of Illich's suggestions for creating an alternate environment conducive to learning rather than to being taught - were not particularly realistic, especially in the 1970s when this book first became popular. For example, some the computer-facilitated "learning exchanges" he advocated were attempted, but usually soon degenerated into casual meet-markets. Today, with the much broader scope of computer networking, the possibilities for some true learning interchanges to take place through that medium are much better. However Illich's ideas about apprenticeships and the like may still be hard to implement in our world, where so much of people's imagination and energy remains invested in standard educational institutions.

But however practical or impractical Illich's solutions may prove to be - his posing of the problem has the capacity to expand your thinking into an alternate universe. Then you might want to go on to read his critiques of our transportation industry, and of our health care system in such books as "Medical Nemesis."

Ivan Illich, author of "Deschooling Society," presents a fairly radical view of education overhaul. I do not necessarily agree with all of his ideas, but I do support the foundation of his argument. The good thing about this book is that it has benefits for people who both agree and disagree with his philosophy. I think everybody who has been through the education system would agree that there is something, however big or small, fundamentally wrong with education. It was much the same in 1970 when Illich wrote this book. This book presents some problems that should be addressed whether with Illich's proposals or something else. A failing system should be fixed somehow and in someway. Illich just gives some fairly radical ways of doing so.

I do not agree with the "edu-credit cards" that Illich proposes, but it is an interesting idea. However, the "learning webs" are a great idea. These "skill exchanges" would not only provide the knowledge that people are seeking but also foster more social interaction and people would be forced to develop the social skills that seem to be less obvious and less important in the current age.

In summary, I think that "Deschooling Society" is a good work of literature that is a worthwhile read, especially for students in the field of education. I will remind you that it is radical, and many will probably not like this book because of the suggestions and implications Illich provides. However, the ideas are grounded and based on problematic areas of school and society. These areas deserve a second glance through this text or another.

....and the 'Important People' of the world refuse to listen to you, you *must* be telling the truth.

Illich died this month. Maybe someone will come along and champion some of his many ideas and causes. But some of the things he has been talking about--the structuring of education in this world is ineffective for actual learning, but is designed for the maintaining of class strata, and that the rich gets the best schooling because they pay for it (not saying that they are exceptionally talented or intellectual or anything more than mediocre) has been debated for years and will be debated for years. Subtexted to his arguments is that the rich needs the poor to help define themselves. And any time 'the institution'
gets fired up about improving the conditions for the mass culture, it end up achieving the opposite effect, as the reviewer below noted. To me, this is reminescent of those two dystopia novels we were forced to read in high school, "1984" and "Brave New World" (somewhere there's a great irony in my feeling this way).

Anyway, Illich, even though he was an academician, became a great human rights advocate and champion of the poor and downtrodden all around the world. This great work of his should be read by anyone who believes in truth and freedom.

In "Deschooling Society" Ivan Illich debunks the many myths of schooling - including that most learning is a result of teaching - stating that a majority of people acquire most of their insight, knowledge, and skill outside of school. Advocating educational freedom over obligatory graded curriculums, Illiich maintains that the social and psychological destruction inherent in obligatory schooling is an illustration of the destruction implicit in all international institutions which now dictate the kinds of goods, services, and welfare available to satisfy basic human needs. Illich maintains that the deschooling of society is merely part of a larger quest for the reestablishment of society's control over their community and environment. "Deschooling Society" is a monumental literary achievement, inspiring and profound in its message of humanitarian social activism.

Illich's goal was society not schools. He saw schools as perpetuating the status quo. This, and his other books, promotied living a convivial life. This is, one in harmonious collaboation with other people. Schooling, whether state, free, or home schooling, removes young peole from their families, their community, society and nature. Illich was for living convivially and simply in the "vernacular." That is with friends, community and the actual world that surrounds you and with the natural abilities with which you are endowed.
That is the kind of life promoted today by the book "Creating Learning Communities," Ron Miller, ed.

Based on a few real insights on the problems with the educational system (the value of "progress" through grades instead of the value of learning), Illich takes his argument to its logical - which is not to say sensible - extreme. The book starts off with some persuasive, intuitive and troubling thoughts that any reasonable person who has spent a few years in the educational system should wholeheartedly agree with. But after throwing around some jargon and unsubstantiated facts, the author recommends throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The entire book seems to be based on the idea that since reform would be difficult, long, and expensive, it should not be undertaken at all. Instead, some sort of technologically-enhanced medievalism is advocated. Illich seems to believe that by giving people an option not to educate themselves (or, perhaps more accurately, the option when, where, and how to educate themselves) we will somehow overcome the current economic and political inequaliites that fall so disturbingly along the lines of educational "achievement". The book is worth reading if for no other reason than to witness how something so seemingly unassailable as "school" can be criticized and demonized. As for a model of HOW to revolutionize education, in my opinion, the reader is better off looking elsewhere.

Since the initial publication of "Deschooling Society" in 1971 there has been little change to school and centralized institutions, at least in the United States. Illich's pessimistic message on the future school and institutional forces did little to create any change in society. Yet, upon reading Illich, one is often shocked at the resonance of the problems in his time and of Illich's predictions with that of today.

Illich's basic premise is that school is a degrading institution which acts as a god of knowledge and which prepares a belief into the student of the efficiency and legitimacy of centralized bureaucratic institutions based on an approved certification by the state. Illich sees "Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent. Everywhere this same curriculum instills in the pupil the myth that increased production will provide a better life. And everywhere it develops the habit of self-defeating consumption of services and alienating production, the tolerance for institutional dependence and the recognition of institutional rankings." Illich states that in a new society "It must not start with the question `What should someone learn?' but with the question `What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?". Illich doesn't just attack schools, he feels though that schools are at the heart of the problem of an institutionalized society as it prepares us for everything else.

Illich's solutions to the modern school and institutions are to abolish them and bring them back into the control of people. Illich's "deschooled" society would consist of numerous community organized programs where people are allowed to learn what they desire, and where "An entirely new elite would be produced, an elite of those who earned their education by sharing it". Illich's overall solution is more complex than this and it unfortunately does raise many questions of sustainability and effectiveness, but I assume it can just be used as a template of a future society. While in response to other institutions he often bashes technology and how he feels it has been manipulated by the state. With this it might seem that Illich is anti-technology, but no, he merely argues for bringing it back into the hands of the people. He states "We need research on the possible use of technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative and autonomous interaction and emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by technocrats".

His greatest prophecy of today's is the school's growing inefficiency to make students learn despite growing costs; Illich saw in his time that "Everywhere in the world school costs have risen faster than enrollments and faster than the GNP; everywhere expenditures on school fall even further behind the expectations of parents, teachers and pupils". This seems very true in the United States where the costs of education (particularly higher education) have shot up since the 70s and yet the United States is drastically lagging behind the world in reading, mathematics and science skills. While a country like Finland, which has taken educational reforms reducing the authoritarian nature of schools is right at the top. In Illich's time Nixon formed a committee focusing on education costs which he attacked stating "The President's Committee for the study of school finance should ask not how to support or trim such increasing costs, but how they can be avoided". And here his commentary can also be connected to the rising cost of health care, as both education and health care are rising to ridiculous rates and policy makers are not looking at the cause of these enormous rates; Republicans are simply saying we must cut and Democrats are saying we must continue to fund. He also critiques economics in how the state is restricting entry into certain professions in order to protect the individuals in the profession thereby creating a shortage and breeding inefficiency. One way he saw this was through the "diminishing number of nurses in the United States owing to the rapid increase of four year B.S. programs in nursing" as opposed to two or three year programs.

In all Illich's work is stunningly relevant today as we are possibly facing a crisis point in near future in terms of the quality and cost of education and healthcare, and as our society is only getting more centralized into the control of bureaucrats and out of the hands of people. It would be nice if today policy makers could get a hold of Illich today and really try to bring power back to the people.