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1970Ivan Illich publishes Deschooling SocietySome critics of school call for a transformation. Others call for reformation. Still others call for arestoration. In his critique of schools, Ivan Illich stands in near isolation. His is a call for deschooling. As a historian and social critic, Ivan Illich has spent his lifetime questioning suchmodern industrial certainties as development, medicine, health, technology, and, in the case of Deschooling Society, education. Illich first began to consider the problematic nature of compulsory schooling while an administrator in both an adult education program and at theUniversity of Puerto Rico. While professional educators discussed the the need to increase thecompulsory school age within Puerto Rico, Illich began to question the apparent discrepanciesbetween schooling's promise and its actual outcomes. Illich, recognizing that schooling in PuertoRico was too costly to be provided for all children, identified schooling as a system for producingdropouts -- a system which gave more to those who had at the cost of those having little.Schooling, contrary to its promise of serving equality and providing education, instead promoted aclass-based society as well as a society addicted to progressive consumption. Continuing hiscontemplations on the numerous ills afflicting modern society , Illich founded the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1961. While CIDOC functionedprimarily as a language school for American clergy who were involved in an ongoing project of the United States to develop Latin America, it also sought to problematize these clergymembers' understanding of Western development so they could come to understand itsnegative implications and, hopefully, rethink their participation. At the same time, CIDOC sooncame to be an important international think tank of scholars, historians, philosophers, and socialcritics. Such prominent thinkers as Paulo Freire, Everett Reimer, Jonathan Kozol, Paul Goodman,and John Holt shared their thoughts and writings during their stay at CIDOC, and it was here,over the span of numerous discussions, that the essay The Futility of Schooling in LatinAmerica would later develop into the book Deschooling Society.In Deschooling Society, Illich demonstrates that schools function as tools which are in factcounter-productive to their best intentions and that their successes must be contemplated withhuman dignity and freedom in mind. Schools, Illich shows, are successful in preparing individualsto fit into a schooled society. Schools successfully prepare the student to need treatments whichcan only be satisfied by institutions. By this process, need and consumption, each of us finds our place in consumer society. The ill of underconsumption is curable through further participation ininstitutional life. The school successfully indoctrinates each student with the belief in unlimitedproduction and consumption via planned obsolescence. The newest textbook, curriculumpackage, or teacher training program renders last season's tools insufficient. Schoolingsuccessfully dulls the student's imagination making it unlikely, even impossible, to imaginemeaningful learning experiences occurring in any other context. Learning requires an expert, aprogram, a measurement, and a certificate. Learning happens via obligatory attendance to animpersonal relationship in which one has authority over another's interests. Schooling is themechanism through which we learn to accept the society, its institutions, and their rankings asthey exist, as they have always existed, and as they will continue to exist.In the midst of this criticism, Ivan Illich demands that society be deschooled. Falsely interpreted tomean the elimination of schools, Illich calls for the disestablishment of school or the end tocompulsory attendance schooling. He states, I've nothing against schools! I'm againstcompulsory schooling. I know that schools always compound native privilege with new privilege.But only when they become compulsory can they compound lack of native privilege with addedself-inflicted discrimination (Cayley, 1992, p.68). His critique is not focused on the school butrather institutionalized school which monopolizes learning, instruction, and credentialing andcreates a demand for something which it can only provide to fewer and fewer people at greater and greater public expense. Schooling, among others, is an institution which must bedelegitimized. The secular sovereignty exercised by schools must be exposed and the methodswith which it divides people into social classes and squelches self-directed inquiry made obvious.In the institutional-school paradigm, knowledge is a commodity and schools teach pupils to needthe instruction which can only be found in schools. According to Illich, obligatory instruction assumes the belief that man can do what God cannot, namely, manipulate others for their ownsalvation (1970, p.50). By deschooling society, schools would continue to exist but their workingswould be very different from those operating at present. Deschooling could only occur givenalternative social arrangements and legal protections as well as a reconceptualization of whatconstitutes learning in the heart of every deschooled person.According to Illich, schools are the reproductive organ of a consumer society (1970). Schoolsproduce myths upon which an economic society depends. Schooling is a ritual performed byparticipants who are made blind to the discrepancy between the purpose for and theconsequences of the ritual. Despite the advertised purpose of promoting social equality anddemocratic participation, schooling is the ritual of a society committed to progress anddevelopment (Cayley, 1992, p. 67). In his thesis titled, Deschooling Society, Ivan Illichpromulgates four myths created by the school ritual; 1) the myth of unending consumption, 2) themyth of measurement of values, 3) the myth of packaging values, and 4) the myth of self-perpetuating progress. In the first myth, schools teach us that learning is the result of aninstructional process that produces something of value. What is learned is that only thecurricularized instructional process in which knowledge is divided into discreet bundles of information dispensed by certificated experts under compulsory attendance can produce valuedoutcomes. The payoff for a greater investment of time and money is more knowledge andadditional diplomas. The existence of schools produces the demand for schooling (Illich, 1970,pp.38-39). The second myth inculcates consumers with the understanding that only that which isquantifiable is justifiable. Only measured experiences possess worth. Only distinct quanta of subject matter which are measurable constitute learning. With this myth, people who submit tothe standards of others for the measure of their own personal growth soon apply the same ruler to themselves. They no longer have to be put in their place, but put themselves into their assigned slots, squeeze themselves into the niche which they have been taught to seek, and, inthe very process, put their fellows into their places, too, until everybody and everything fits (Illich,1970, p.40). Myth number three, packaging values, is the accepted belief in educational researchconducted by experts to determine what and when another (or masses of others) should learn. The result of the curriculum production process looks like any other modern staple. It is a bundleof planned meanings, of packaged values, a commodity whose 'balanced appeal' makes itmarketable to a sufficiently large number to justify the cost of production. Consumer-pupils aretaught to make their desires conform to marketable values. Thus they are made to feel guilty if they do not behave according to the predictions of consumer research by getting the grades andcertificates that will place them in the job category they have been led to expect (Illich, 1970,p.41). Finally, the fourth myth, self-perpetuating progress, promotes the need for ever increasingquantities of schooling at ever increasing costs. With increased expenditures, the studentimproves his or her own value in his or her own view and in the view of the market, though notnecessarily increasing his or her learning. The increasingly large expenditures on gymnasiums,state-of-the-art dining/entertainment/living facilities, and curriculum resources entice student-consumers to consume more while industry requires particular educational accouterments for adeclining job market grown increasingly competitive. As the creator, propagator, and protector of these four educational myths, schools retain their sacred positions as the purveyor of secular salvation (Gabbard, 1993). Despite the argument that schools have become counterproductive intheir service to fewer and fewer clients and in the face of increasing public expenditures yieldinginsignificant increases in standardized measurements, the school institution stands as animmutable public shrine whose foundation holds firm amidst tremors, shifts, and quakes.In a deschooled society, individuals choose for themselves action-oriented lives, rather than livesconstrained by the parameters of consumption. Individuals participate in learning webs in whicheach is a teacher and also a learner. Relationships among people are convivial and promote self and community reliance rather than addictions to institutions and to their product, consumptionaddiction. The need is for relational structures, for goods which are engineered for durabilityrather than obsolescence, and for access to institutions that increase the opportunity anddesirability of human interaction (Illich, 1970, p.63). In a deschooled society, the worlds of work,leisure, politics, family and community life are the classrooms and their secret and protected spaces made more accessible. Learning, therefore, occurs in and of the world and individualsdefine themselves by their own learning and the learning that they contribute to others. Illichwrites, I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a life style which will enable us to be spontaneous,independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which allows us to makeand unmake, produce and consume ... a style of life which is merely a way station on the road tothe depletion and pollution of the environment (1970, p.52). By creating and defining lives free of the predetermination of institutions, individuals are opened to the surprises found withinfriendship, vocation, and critical and emancipatory participation in the world.Sources:Cayley, David (1992). Ivan Illich in Conversation. Concord, Ontario: Anansi Press.Illich, Ivan (1970). Deschooling Society. New York: Harper and Row.Prepared by Dana Stuchul and Alison Kreider (UCLA)
