Book review
Deschooling society
By Ivan Illich
Review by Donald Clark, Epic
Ivan Illich is a perfect example of how an immigrant
can bring fresh intellectual ideas. Born in Vienna, he moved to
the US in 1951 and thereafter had a huge influence on educational
thought. I say ‘thought’, because his ideas, as expressed
in this book, sound as fresh as they did thirty five years ago when
they were first published, yet are only now beginning to bear fruit.
Every educational report of note in the last few decades contains
echoes of Illichian values and ideas.
‘Schooling’ for Illich confuses teaching with learning,
grades with education, diplomas with competence, attendance with
attainment. It is unworldly and leads to psychological impotence.
We become hooked on school to the extent that other institutions
are discouraged from assuming educational tasks. Schooling seems
to teach us to accept, not our strengths but our alleged deficiencies.
Despite the enormous sums of money poured into formal ‘schooling’
the results in terms of even basic literacy and numeracy are strangely
disappointing. 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.
This is the charge laid out in the best first chapter of any book
I have ever read on education. Although this attack on schooling
has now become commonplace, we owe a huge debt to Illich as he was
the first to really articulate and popularise these ideas.
Chapter two continues with a blistering attack on some fundamentals:
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.
Adults tend to romanticise their schooling, yet most, when pushed,
recognise the smothering atmosphere of the classroom. Even the greatest
fan of schools and schooling will recognise that the school has
remained largely unchanged since Victorian times. Walk into a school
today and you’ll recognise the classrooms, desks, terms, prefects,
rituals, curricula, bells, corridors, timetables, prizegivings and
reports. It will be all too familiar.
Ok, it sounds like good polemic, but there’s much more than
this. I really do love the book for its prophetic tone. In the first
chapter he sees skills-centres, educational credits and 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. That’s exactly what you’re doing
now. His core idea was that education for all means education by
all.
Chapter six is actually called learning webs! How brilliant. He
sees us providing the learner with new links to the world instead
of continuing to funnel all education through the teacher. How sensible.
In this sense, the inverse of school is possible. He gets very specific
here recommending four types of educational resource, many of which
sound remarkably modern:
1. Reference services to Educational Objects
2. Skill exchanges
3. Peer-matching
4. Reference services to Educators-at-large
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 (he doesn’t pull his punches) and the
rising costs makes them ripe for reform.
The message that really sticks with me, and has since I read this
book twenty years ago, was that once exposed to intense ‘schooling’
it is very difficult to free oneself from school and the expectations
it sets. It took me years to become a really independent learner,
and even now I feel held back by those old ‘schoolhouse’
values. Like some old Calvinist I still sometimes yearn for the
pedagogical torture of obligatory instruction. He is also right
in noticing that this re-emergence of values comes through in educational
reform where we revile modern schools then proceed to propose new
schools. How often have we seen this happen!
He also resists the idea of turning our entire culture into a school
through ‘lifelong learning’ and attacks the teacher-as-therapist
culture. Let us not push out the walls of the classroom until they
envelop everything we do in our lives.
The prose is exhilarating, and even if you disagree with the arguments,
it’s thought provoking in the extreme. You cannot, I repeat
cannot, engage in the ‘schooling’ debate, without having
read this short classic. It seems to have been written only yesterday.
The following is a transcript of Illich's personal introduction
to the book.
Introduction
I owe my interest in public education to Everett Reimer. Until
we first met in Puerto Rico in 1958, I had never questioned the
value of extending obligatory schooling to all people. Together
we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is
curtailed by the obligation to attend school. The essays given at
CIDOC and gathered in this book grew out of memoranda which I submitted
to him, and which we discussed during 1970, the thirteenth year
of our dialogue. The last chapter contains my afterthoughts on a
conversation with Erich Fromm on Bachofen's Mutterrecht.
Since 1967 Reimer and I have met regularly at the Center for Intercultural
Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Valentine Borremans,
the director of the Center, also joined our dialogue, and constantly
urged me to test our thinking against the realities of Latin America
and Africa. This book reflects her conviction that the ethos, not
just the institutions, of society ought to be "deschooled."
Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would
be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative
institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new
attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation
of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor
finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until
it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education.
The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed
into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs
which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment
of his living into one of learning, sharing,
xx DESCHOOLING SOCIETY
and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who
conduct such counterfoil research on education--and also to those
who seek alternatives to other established service industries.
On Wednesday mornings, during the spring and summer of 1970, I
submitted the various parts of this book to the participants in
our CIDOC programs in Cuernavaca. Dozens of them made suggestions
or provided criticisms. Many will recognize their ideas in these
pages, especially Paulo Freire, Peter Berger, and JosŽ Maria
Bulnes, as well as Joseph Fitzpatrick, John Holt, Angel Quintero,
Layman Allen, Fred Goodman, Gerhard Ladner, Didier Piveteau, Joel
Spring, Augusto Salazar Bondy, and Dennis Sullivan. Among my critics,
Paul Goodman most radically obliged me to revise my thinking. Robert
Silvers provided me with brilliant editorial assistance on Chapters
1, 3, and 6, which have appeared in The New York Review of Books.
Reimer and I have decided to publish separate views of our joint
research. He is working on a comprehensive and documented exposition,
which will be subjected to several months of further critical appraisal
and be published late in 1971 by Doubleday & Company. Dennis
Sullivan, who acted as secretary at the meetings between Reimer
and myself, is preparing a book for publication in the spring of
1972 which will place my argument in the context of current debate
about public schooling in the United States. I offer this volume
of essays now in the hope that it will provoke additional critical
contributions to the sessions of a seminar on "Alternatives
in Education" planned at CIDOC in Cuernavaca for 1972 and 1973.
I intend to discuss some perplexing issues which are raised once
we embrace the hypothesis that society can be deschooled; to search
for criteria which may help us distinguish institutions which merit
development because they support learning in a deschooled milieu;
and to clarify those personal goals which would foster the advent
of an Age of Leisure (schole) as opposed to an economy dominated
by service industries.
IVAN ILLICH
CIDOC
Cuernavaca, Mexico
November, 1970
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