‘Schooling’
for Illich confuses teaching with learning, grades with education, diplomas
with competence, attendance with attainment. Schools are separated, unworldly places
that lead to psychological impotence and we become hooked on their role in
society to the extent that other institutions are discouraged from assuming
educational tasks.
Deschooling
We
are ‘schooled’ in institutions run by technocrats that take responsibility away
from otehrinstitutions for social responsibility and learning. . It is all
based on an illusion, he claims, the illusion that most learning is the result
of teaching. Most people acquire most of their knowledge outside of school.
Most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the
result of programmed instruction. Most learning is, in fact, a by-product of
some other activity defined as work or leisure.
He
attack schooling on three fronts:
1.
Age – grouping according to age
2.
Teachers and pupils – that learning is the result of teaching
3.
Full-time attendance – incarceration of the young
4.
Packaging instruction with accreditation
Adults
tend to romanticise their schooling, yet most, when pushed, recognise the
smothering atmosphere of the classroom and feeling of incarceration in school.
Even supporters of schools and schooling recognise that the school has remained
largely unchanged since Victorian times with their classrooms, desks, terms,
prefects, rituals, curricula, bells, corridors, timetables, prize givings and
reports. It will be all too familiar.
Educational diversity
By
deinstitutionalising education, making it non-compulsory, we can return to its
true, authentic value and improve quality. We need to break our diction to
traditional schooling and break its almost religious hold on our consciousness.
Fascinatingly, he related this obsession with compulsory schooling to the
religious idea of original sin, that we are born imperfect and have to atone.
It was not the abolition of schools that concerned him but the recognition that
a wider and more diverse landscape was needed. Illich sees alternatives in skills-centres,
educational credits and
Technology and
education
the
‘possible use of technology to create
institutions which serve personal, creative and autonomous interaction’.
Well before the age of the internet he foresaw its power in education and
knowledge he saw an alternative to schooling through a network or service which
gave each person the same opportunity to share his/her concern with others
motivated by the same concern. His core idea was that education for all means
education by all. He sees us providing the learner with new links to the world
instead of continuing to funnel all education through the teacher. In this
sense, the inverse of school is possible, recommending four types of
educational resource:
1.
Reference services to Educational Objects
2.
Skill exchanges
3.
Peer-matching
4.
Reference services to Educators-at-large
One
could argue that this is starting to happen with the advent of technology in
learning, through search, free content in Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg and Open
Educational Resources and social media.
University
His
critique of the University system is as fierce as that of schools. He sees them
as having betrayed their original values, becoming the ‘final stage of the most all-encompassing initiation rite the world has
ever seen’. In practice, it is here that students redouble their resistance
to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This,
along with unlimited opportunities for legitimised waste and the rising costs
makes them ripe for reform. University, he claims, creates skills shortages by
institutionalising professions such as nursing and teaching.
Once
exposed to intense ‘schooling’ it is very difficult to free oneself from school
and the expectations it sets. He is also right in noticing that this
re-emergence of values comes through in educational reform where he saw that the
solution to bad schooling is always more schooling. He also resists the idea of
turning our entire culture into a school through ‘lifelong learning’ and
attacks the ‘teacher-as-therapist’ culture. He is opposed to pushing out the
walls of the classroom until they envelop everything we do in our lives.
Conclusion
Although
disparaged by many educators and academics, unsurprisingly, as he attacks their
schooling institutions and outlook, Illich remains a huge influence on
educational thought. His critique of schools is regarded as extreme but intellectually
profound and related to the corrupt influence of institutionalisation, rather
than political ideology or oppression. Above all, his ideas for alternatives,
such as ‘learning webs’, were prescient.
Bibliography
Illich, Ivan (1973a) Deschooling Society,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Illich, Ivan (1973b) Celebration of Awareness. A call for
institutional revolution, Harmondsworth Penguin.
Illich, Ivan (1975a) Tools for
Conviviality, London: Fontana.
Illich, Ivan (1976) After Deschooling, What?,
London: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-operative.
Reimer, E. (1971) School is Dead. An
essay on alternatives in education, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Excellent
profile and summary of thought
Full text of Deschooling Society (a must read)
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