Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: Rethinking Deschooling

Feeling, dare I say, a natural sense of disequilibrium after teaching last semester, I decided to break out my copy of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society (1970) and reflecting on both my own experience and the thoughts of a renowned subversive, social activist.

Illich's work is designed to challenge our collective thinking about schools, schooling, teaching, and learning. And that it does--by the metric ton. What the text offers is a phenomenological assessment of what has become of schooling in an industrialized, post-modern world -- a world where time is money, efficiency trumps creativity, and teaching is confused with learning.

In an attempt to present a few slices of Illich's thinking and to present a handful of challenges to your perceptions of teaching and learning, I thought I would select a few excerpts for your consideration. While these passages are pulled out of context, they are meant as starting points for further discussion and represent aspects of Illich's arguments as a whole.


Schooling as perpetuation of social ills

School makes alienation preparatory to life, thus depriving education of reality and work of creativity. School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition. p. 47.

For Illich, it appears schools are perpetuating social problems as opposed to being a solution to them. Why do I still feel like many schools are still operating against social needs as opposed to solving them? Is the institution of schooling itself? Is it the teachers, the administrators, the curricula? Is it the world we live in? Or a combination of all of the above? Where should we begin rebuilding schools?


Commodification of knowledge pt. I

Our options are clear enough. Either we continue to believe that institutionalized learning is a product which justifies unlimited investment or we rediscover that legislation and planning and investment, if they have any place in formal education, should be used mostly to tear down the barriers that now impede opportunities for learning, which can only be a personal activity. p 49

Do we expect medical doctors to see 20 patients at one time and to diagnose and treat everyone equally? Is this what's happening in our schools? I know this argument has been made before, but it still feels relevant here. Why aren't teachers' colleges educating teachers to work with students as individuals as opposed to students as classes? Is efficiency still the most important factor a teacher should know?


Commodification of knowledge pt. II

If we do not challenge the assumption that valuable knowledge is a commodity which under certain circumstances may be forced into the consumer, society will be increasingly dominated by sinister pseudo schools and totalitarian managers of information. Pedagogical therapists will drug their pupils more in order to teach them better, and students will drug themselves more to gain relief from the pressures of teachers and the race for certificates.  p 49-50.

Did students have attention deficit problems 50 years ago? Is this deficit genetic or man-made? Who should decide what constitutes a meaningful education? Who should decide when we know enough to be ready for the "real world?"

 

Assessment

School has become a social problem; it is being attacked on all sides, and citizens and their governments sponsor unconventional experiments all over the world. They resort to unusual statistical devices in order to keep faith and save face. p. 49.

Clearly schools need to be able to offer meaningful forms of assessment and feedback to students, parents, teachers, principals, and so on. How can schools do this in a way that is meaningful for students rather than based on standards that truthfully may or may not apply?


Schooling and creativity

People who have been schooled down to size let unmeasured experience slip out of their hands. To them, what cannot be measured becomes secondary, threatening. They do not have to be robbed of their creativity. Under instruction, they have unlearned to "do" their thing or "be" themselves, and value only what has been made or could be made. p.40.

This passage reminds me of the work of Ken Robinson. Are schools focusing too much on the acquisition of factual knowledge while ignoring the individual needs and creativity of each student?


Is schooling really a Faustian bargain?

I have reserved providing passages from the end of Illich's text for the sake of reflecting on the questions above for a while. While Illich does offer a few solutions to the concepts annotated above, I find the questions more important right now than any answers. I believe that asking questions are more important at this stage; they permit us a chance to begin framing the priorities, the real challenges that face us directly. The answers we come up with will ultimately be contextual -- the one size fits all solution has not worked thus far, so why should we believe it will work in the future?


I encourage you to read (or re-read) Illich and to post your thoughts online. Together our collective thinking will surely ignite each other into finding ways to make schools a place more connected to what we as a society need as opposed to the way things were.

[Aside: Illich's work also provides a nice pretext to the notion of connectivism. He states that, "The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern." An example of such can be found on Manitoba's connectivism course and this Wikiversity page.]


Reference:
Illich, I. (1970). Deschooling society. New York: Harper & Row.

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