Hall of Fame

Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

Ivan Illich is famous in educational theory for his seminal text Deschooling Society. ‘Schooling’ for Illich confuses teaching with learning, grades with education, diplomas with competence, attendance with attainment. Schools are unworldly and lead 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.

Deschooling

It is all based on an illusion, he claims, 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.

His attack on schooling is 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

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, prize givings and reports. It will be all too familiar.

Educational exchange

Illich 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. 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

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.

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 we revile modern schools then proceed to propose new schools. 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.

Conclusion

Ivan Illich has had a huge influence on educational thought. I say ‘thought’, because his ideas are only now beginning to bear fruit. His critique of schools is as applicable today and some of his solutions, 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.

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
Excellent profile and summary of thought

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich
Encyclopedia article

http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html
Full text of Deschooling Society