Ivan Illich & Deschooling

My father's mentor is discussed at some length in today's LRC: "A Turbulent Priest in the Global Village: Ivan Illich, 1926-2002", by Richard Wall.

The article includes the opening paragraph of Illich's great book, Deschooling Society:

"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 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 those ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question."

After finally reading Illich's book a few years ago, I told my father that I agreed with half the title: I'm for Illich's sense of Deschooling and against Illich's sense of Society. I don't believe anything needs to be consciously changed -- redesigned -- about education. Just get coercion out of it, and let alternatives compete openly. Like so much of the New Left, Illich was very good at describing the symptoms but way off in prescribing solutions. He sees an inherent problem in the growth of institutions, whereas I see the problems of institutions resulting from state intervention. Yes, schools make us dumb, but education hasn't been free (free-like-speech, not free-like-beer) since the 19th century, and that only applied to pre-University education. The University system has never been free. It was cartelized from the beginning.

A good collection of short essays on deschooling is the book, Deschooling our Lives, which includes Illich's chapter from which the above quotation is taken. I review Deschooling our Lives at BlackCrayon:

Summary:

There's a difference between being educated and being schooled.

Review:

It is not in any institution's interest to promote independence from that institution.

What do we want our children to learn? What are schools teaching them instead?

Editor Matt Hern has gathered a diverse collection of short, very readable essays on educational alternatives to schooling. Authors include Anarchist-, Deschooling-, and Unschooling icons, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Illich and John Holt, as well as the more recent analysis of Grace Llewellyn, author of The Teenage Liberation Handbook, and of retired, award-winning public school teacher, John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing us Down and many other essays against compulsory schooling.

By far, the most recently-informed and most damning chapter on compulsory schooling, is Gatto's essay, "The Public School Nightmare: Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought?".