Deschooling Society

http://ournature.org/~novembre/illich/1970_deschooling.html

by whalliburton • 18 years ago

50 45 18 years ago

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

Alex39174• 18 years ago

This reminds me of Alfie Kohn's essay What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated?

whalliburton6• 18 years ago

http://www.westburyfriends.org/connections/welleducated.htm

brent• 18 years ago

Which reminds me of the Polya quote that "[m]athematics, you see, is not a spectator sport. To understand mathematics means to be able to do mathematics. And what does it mean [to be] doing mathematics? In the first place, it means to be able to solve mathematical problems."

stcredzero• 18 years ago

Most "Computer Literacy Classes" are great examples of the confusion of "process and substance."

netcan• 18 years ago

Down here (Australia) you hear "highly qualified" very often. It's used interchangeably with "highly skilled," which is the Governments' favourite phrase. Drives me bananas.

I've also lived in Ireland & heard this terminology used a bit.

many• 18 years ago

The terms "school" and "society" in the same breath always compel a random dissection. I will make sentence-per-sentence marks.

___ We are all involved in schooling, from both the side of production and that of consumption. ___

I don't believe that we can distinguish these sides anymore in western culture, nor can we believe that we are all involved together, in anything.

___ We are superstitiously convinced that good learning can and should be produced in us-and that we can produce it in others. ___

Superstitiously, yes, but not in others. Learning inherently differs from knowledge. It reins in the whole of one's own life experience into a worldview and ability to perceive through those of others. Knowledge is a commodity, cf. "the end of history," and schooling, as the nearest authority on anything, will tell you that it's worth it, the ends justify the means. The poet Rilke compares scholastic commencement to "slavery."

___ Our attempt to withdraw from the concept of school will reveal the resistance we find in ourselves when we try to renounce limitless consumption and the pervasive presumption that others can be manipulated for their own good. ___

For instance: "resistance" "try" "renounce" "pervasive" "presumtion" "manipulated". . . as an example, can you recall completing a year of primary, secondary, or post-secondary school without seeing at least three of your classmates held to systematic humiliation?

__ No one is fully exempt from the exploitation of others in the schooling process. ___

As is no one of us truly involved with everyone in the schooling of others.

___ School is both the largest and the most anonymous employer of all. Indeed, the school is the best example of a new kind of enterprise, succeeding the guild, the factory, and the corporation. ___

Its first and final claim to fame.

___ The multinational corporations which have dominated the economy are now being complemented, and may one day be replaced, by supernationally planned service agencies. These enterprises present their services in ways that make all men feel obliged to consume them. ___

Bet you can't eat just one. I don't like the stark ambiguity in the use of "supernationally." The connotation is dubious.

__ They are internationally standardized, redefining the value of their services periodically and everywhere at approximately the same rhythm. ___

Mozart for babies. Just do it.

Alex39174• 18 years ago

This is an interesting book. The thesis is basically that the way most of our public institutions are set up the government supplies the razor and the citizen buys the blades. This is bad because A) everyone pays for the razor but only the rich get the benefits because only they can afford the blades B) it forces everyone into the same "school" of education, healthcare, etc. "Deschooling society" is sort of a pun that refers to both public schools but also schools of thought.

Anyway the last time I submitted something from this book it was deleted. Not marked dead, actually deleted. But check out the section on learning webs, it's a cool vision of computer-mediated social networking from 1971.

DanielBMarkham• 18 years ago

Intellectual, provocative material. Certainly not flame bait.

I didn't have time to go through all of it. I'm assuming that the author doesn't claim to be Moses or start talking about armed revolution or anything radicalized. It looked like well-reasoned, but controversial opinions. Just the kind of stuff to sink your teeth in and practice your critical thinking skills.

So I voted it up.

Wonder why it was deleted last time? Did I miss something in my scan of the text?

whalliburton6• 18 years ago

Yes! Learning webs. Webs of all types.

I envision "the next big thing" as connecting needs with wants outside of the current economic and social structures, down to the smallest scale.

Teacher learns as much as the student.

Sue likes teaching cooking. Sally wants to learn and will bring food.

Grandma Bessy needs someone to help move a few things around the apartment and can pay $1. Joe is downstairs chilling on a stoop, could use a buck and likes helping people.

Will likes teaching programming and gets the bug for a little community hacking session. Scott and Joe and Sue and Larisa are dying to have a little mentoring and work on real cool problems, even if for a night.

Corner farmers market is nearing close and half the produce is about to be discarded. Community center has a nice kitchen and who wants fresh vegetable soup?

Connections and options that would never have occurred otherwise.

Throw in a recommendation engine and reviews of the participants.

Outsourcing on the micro scale.

Temporary autonomous zones.

Alex39174• 18 years ago

"Corner farmers market is nearing close and half the produce is about to be discarded. Community center has a nice kitchen and who wants fresh vegetable soup?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=67759

I'm pretty sure that I'm your future self :-P

omouse• 18 years ago

What's sad about what you're suggesting is that it's exactly how a proper community is supposed to function! You don't even need the Internet to whelp with this, a community center bulletin board will do as long as someone's around to do the leg work and make it the place to check first.

sigh. There is a problem with our society when we have to re-discover what it means to be in a community.

jyothi3• 18 years ago

I stumbled upon this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2005education_spending.PN...

Public spending on education in 2005 as a percentage of the top government (USA - $734,893,675,000)

Here is the worldbank report on how much every country top govt spends on education. (an old report but says it all) http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/...

mattchew• 18 years ago

The Onion article about the 6-year-old (currently sharing the front page) says it a little more succinctly. :)

I agree that we are an overschooled society. Unfortunately, the word "education" has magical properties in right-thinking conversation. You can't say you're against "education", you might as well say you want to grind up the poor and use them for food.

We're making progress at the edges, though. More homeschooling, more ways to educate yourself over the internet. Still plenty of room for new ideas from clever hackers, too. :)

flipbrad2• 18 years ago

a major factor in overschooled society, and its' warped perception of education, is an overreliance on diplomas. Would HN and the startup scene be remotely as fertile, exciting, open and (to an extent) meritocratic if investors refused to invest in teams lacking MBAs and advanced computer science degrees? In this book, Illich advocates the kind of 'anarchic' world we love the Internet for - an open world where new knowledge, new skills are just a Google away - exchanged and shared in an extremely informal gift economy (one that is forced, for better or for worse, on people trying to get financial gain from it - due to piracy). Where creativity and work is open to anyone (go read about him and then edit his wikipedia page - nothing would make him happier).

jyothi3• 18 years ago

Very nice article.

All the schools (at least what I have seen) today create literates and many are not even good at that.

Education is meant to give a pupil the strength, confidence and a value system to lead life. "A potter's son learnt pottery. That was true education."

Today, we want equal opportunity and choices, let us create an open education system where pupils can/be guided to choose anything they want to learn which would enable them to live better.

PS: Especially the Indian Education as Ramanujan rightly points out in his Biography "The indian education system was devised to create slaves". All over the world Indians, at least at high school level, are known to be smart at Math, it is a myth. They are better clerks. That is what it was meant to create then when the British Raj ruled here in India.

albertcardona2• 18 years ago

A book by John Taylor Gatto explains the origin of [modern] school. Briefly: during the industrial revolution in the 1800s, industrial owners realized children were "wasting" their time playing around. If instead they could be pre-trained to be better workers ... so they designed modern school and institutionalized it.

davidw3• 18 years ago

This seems to be one of those theories that sounds nice, but is in reality just someone's politics creeping into their view of history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education#History

I personally loathed school, was homeschooled for a year by my mother who was desperate to get me out of a shitty system, and am certainly no fan of said system, but this article and the debate here remind me why I'm not so enthusiastic about non-startup/hacker material: you guys' comments are, so far, on the whole, not terribly insightful on the subject.

I mean, it is a bad system in many ways, but so are other things like democracies and free markets. That doesn't mean they aren't the best that we currently have. Just look at places where people don't have the guarantee of an education, if you want an example of what things could be like. Tons of kids in Africa would love to have the "crappy" education that is on offer in the US or Europe, because it would be the beginnings of a way out of the poverty in which they live.

Can it be improved? Certainly, but "just git the dadburn gummint outta the way" is, to put it mildly, a bit simplistic for something that even folks like Friedman more or less concede is a merit good ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_good ).

It's easy to point out the (many) flaws in the current system, which probably wasn't that pleasant for many of us here. More difficult is coming up with something that could take its place, provide an educated populace, and best allocate people to the educational paths that would serve them best, and of course does all this in a way that is reasonably cost effective, all with a "clientèle" that may very well be quite immature in terms of making important decisions. This is no easy task.

sonink2• 18 years ago

I wouldnt really go so far to say that schools should be shut down because they do serve one good purpose - making friends (even though you could do that in other means), but its a good meeting point.

The big thing that needs to go from schools is structure and the focus on 'success'..

Essentially the fact that people from similar age groups are considered equal - have to take the same courses - for the same amount of time - subject to the same exams - and imparted an extremely flawed relative ranking system is all horribly wrong.

In the real world the harder part is creating that structure - learning from open markets, finding out what you want to do and from that figuring out the courses you want to take - the people you want to learn from - the peers you want to work with.

And success is not about getting good grades but more about taking your own path which gets you your own happiness and the ones you care about.

jyothi3• 18 years ago

I like the latter part of your comment. Reminds of jobs stanford speech. 'You've got to find what you love'

"The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting." That created beautiful typefaces later on PCs :)

bokonist5• 18 years ago

I wouldnt really go so far to say that schools should be shut down because they do serve one good purpose - making friends (even though you could do that in other means), but its a good meeting point.

One of the worst aspects of government institutions is that we become dependent on them. We then no longer remember how life could have existed without them. Before the age of the university, young people would meet interesting other people through fraternal associations, clubs, coffee houses, and pubs. In these societies you could find a rousing chess game, talk politics, start a charitable activity or even purchase group health insurance. The University of Pennsylvania, was originally founded by Ben Franklin as society for his friends to promote their mutual intellectual advancement. The cost was nearly free. The idea that we need government to subsidize "making friends", that finding a group of intellectual peers requires spending $50K a year in tuition, is preposterous.

flipbrad2• 18 years ago

like many 'order out of chaos' systems, government tends to be a self-reinforcing system, unfortunately, leading to ever increasing ordering of its environment. the only way it can apparently beat the second law of thermodynamics is to consume ever more resources out of its substrate. your body is the same way - it gets bigger and maintains itself, but has to eat.

as kevin kelly argued 10-15 years ago - death is an essential component of healthy, evolving ecosystems.

adrianwaj2• 18 years ago

There is a Noachide law to "Set up courts and bring offenders to justice." This is a biblical law for Jews and Non-Jews alike, and it makes sense: even the most righteous, well-behaved and respected people will have disagreements with each other, and in a society with no government, implanting conflict-resolution, law-giving and judgement institutions would be a very good justification and first step to establishing one.

As long as a legal and judicial system is not abused to the detriment of the society for which it serves, this aspect of government is very useful.

sonink2• 18 years ago

yep ..makes sense.

Hexstream• 18 years ago

"Essentially the fact that people from similar age groups are considered equal - have to take the same courses - for the same amount of time - subject to the same exams - and imparted an extremely flawed relative ranking system is all horribly wrong."

More and more I realize "one size fits all" is never true.

bokonist5• 18 years ago

For those interested in a historical take on how the universities essentially became a state church, I highly recommend the blog Unqualified Reservations. This post is an excellent overview: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/05/ol7-ugl...

martian• 18 years ago

During my last year of high school, I remember asking the college guidance counselors if there were other alternatives to going to college.

They told me my only other choice was to join the military.

Clearly something needs to change.

brandnewlow• 18 years ago

Is there a startup opportunity for a service that takes applications and places students in apprenticeships, internships and specialized training in fields they show aptitude in? Like a headhunter for high school kids. Companies pay a finders fee to the startup, the startup team is responsible for only passing along great candidates.

I'm a former Ivy League admissions officer. I could see a few people from that world wanting to be a part of something like that. I read 2000 applications while I was there and many, many of those kids could have benefited from an alternative route...there just wasn't one.

brentr• 18 years ago

I've thought about alternative routes, and my mind continually drifts back to one idea: let capitalists run the education systems on a local scale. The key part that I have not figured out is the motivation for enterprising individuals to start their own schools while maintaining an environment that is cheap enough to allow even the lowest of the low-income groups to send a relatively bright child to the school.

KevBurnsJr• 18 years ago

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/6_year_old_stares_down_...

Maascamp• 18 years ago

Since he did so much schooling himself (the only reason he could even write this article and do the necessary research to be taken seriously is because of school) it's hard to take him seriously

whalliburton6• 18 years ago

Hmm. So you would take the opinion of a car mechanic that has never driven a car?

His 'necessary research' was a period of traveling, observing, and critically attempting to understand these issues, not some 'Education Reform 101: Introduction to Critical Thought' lecture course.

icky• 18 years ago

Au contraire. If someone says that doing something or going somewhere is a waste of time, I'd be much more inclined to listen if he had actually done so himself.

Deschooling Society

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