Deschooling Society

By Ivan Illich

Schools have failed our individual needs, supporting false and misleading notions of 'progress' and development fostered by the belief that ever-increasing production, consumption and profit are proper yardsticks for measuring the quality of human life. Our universities have become recruiting centres for the personnel of the consumer society, certifying citizens for service, while at the same time disposing of those judged unfit for the competitive rat race. In this bold and provocative book, Illich suggests some radical and exciting reforms for the education system.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marion Boyars
• Release date: Jan 1, 1995
• ISBN: 9780714520704

Book preview

1

Why We Must Disestablish School

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.

In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery. I will explain how this process of degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or treatments. I do this because I believe that most of the research now going on about the future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalization of values and that we must define conditions which would permit precisely the contrary to happen. We need research on the possible use of technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction and the emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by technocrats. We need counterfoil research to current futurology.

I want to raise the general question of the mutual definition of man’s nature and the nature of modern institutions which characterizes our world view and language. To do so, I have chosen the school as my paradigm, and I therefore deal only indirectly with other bureaucratic agencies of the corporate state: the consumer-family, the party, the army, the church, the media. My analysis of the hidden curriculum of school should make it evident that public education would profit from the deschooling of society, just as family life, politics, security, faith, and communication would profit from an analogous process.

I begin my analysis, in this first essay, by trying to convey what the deschooling of a schooled society might mean. In this context, it should be easier to understand my choice of the five specific aspects relevant to this process with which I deal in the subsequent chapters.

Not only education but social reality itself has become schooled. It costs roughly the same to school both rich and poor in the same dependency. The yearly expenditure per pupil in the slums and in the rich suburbs of any one of twenty U.S. cities lies in the same range—and sometimes is favorable to the poor.* Rich and poor alike depend on schools and hospitals which guide their lives, form their world view, and define for them what is legitimate and what is not. Both view doctoring oneself as irresponsible, learning on one’s own as unreliable, and community organization, when not paid for by those in authority, as a form of aggression or subversion. For both groups the reliance on institutional treatment renders independent accomplishment suspect. The progressive underdevelopment of self-and community-reliance is even more typical in Westchester than it is in the northeast of Brazil. Everywhere not only education but society as a whole needs deschooling.

Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political, and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible. This monopoly is at the root of the modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Ten years ago in Mexico it was the normal thing to be born and to die in one’s own home and to be buried by one’s friends. Only the soul’s needs were taken care of by the institutional church. Now to begin and end life at home become signs either of poverty or of special privilege. Dying and death have come under the institutional management of doctors and undertakers.

Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will. Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect. In Mexico the poor are those who lack three years of schooling, and in New York they are those who lack twelve.

The poor have always been socially powerless. The increasing reliance on institutional care adds a new dimension to their helplessness: psychological impotence, the inability to fend for themselves. Peasants on the high plateau of the Andes are exploited by the landlord and the merchant—once they settle in Lima they are, in addition, dependent on political bosses, and disabled by their lack of schooling. Modernized poverty combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency. This modernization of poverty is a world-wide phenomenon, and lies at the root of contemporary underdevelopment. Of course it appears under different guises in rich and in poor countries.

It is probably most intensely felt in U.S. cities. Nowhere else is poverty treated at greater cost. Nowhere else does the treatment of poverty produce so much dependence, anger, frustration, and further demands. And nowhere else should it be so evident that poverty—once it has become modernized—has become resistant to treatment with dollars alone and requires an institutional revolution.

Today in the United States the black and even the migrant can aspire to a level of professional treatment which would have been unthinkable two generations ago, and which seems grotesque to most people in the Third World. For instance, the U.S. poor can count on a truant officer to return their children to school until they reach seventeen, or on a doctor to assign them to a hospital bed which costs sixty dollars per day—the equivalent of three months’ income for a majority of the people in the world. But such care only makes them dependent on more treatment, and renders them increasingly incapable of organizing their own lives around their own experiences and resources within their own communities.

The poor in the United States are in a unique position to speak about the predicament which threatens all the poor in a modernizing world. They are making the discovery that no amount of dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness of welfare institutions, once the professional hierarchies of these institutions have convinced society that their ministrations are morally necessary. The poor in the U.S. inner city can demonstrate from their own experience the fallacy on which social legislation in a schooled society is built.

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas observed that the only way to establish an institution is to finance it. The corollary is also true. Only by channeling dollars away from the institutions which now treat health, education, and welfare can the further impoverishment resulting from their disabling side effects be stopped.

This must be kept in mind when we evaluate federal aid programs. As a case in point, between 1965 and 1968 over three billion dollars were spent in U.S. schools to offset the disadvantages of about six million children. The program is known as Title One. It is the most expensive compensatory program ever attempted anywhere in education, yet no significant improvement can be detected in the learning of these disadvantaged children. Compared with their classmates from middle-income homes, they have fallen further behind. Moreover, in the course of this program, professionals discovered an additional ten million children laboring under economic and educational handicaps. More reasons for claiming more federal funds are now at hand.

This total failure to improve the education of the poor despite more costly treatment can be explained in three ways:

Three billion dollars are insufficient to improve the performance of six million children by a measurable amount; or

The money was incompetently spent: different curricula, better administration, further concentration of the funds on the poor child, and more research are needed and would do the trick; or

Educational disadvantage cannot be cured by relying on education within the school.

The first is certainly true so long as the money has been spent through the school budget. The money indeed went to the schools which contained most of the disadvantaged children, but it was not spent on the poor children themselves. These children for whom the money was intended comprised only about half of those who were attending the schools that added the federal subsidies to their budgets. Thus the money was spent for custodial care, indoctrination and the selection of social roles, as well as education, all of which functions are inextricably mingled in the physical plants, curricula, teachers, administrators, and other key components of these schools, and, therefore, in their budgets.

The added funds enabled schools to cater disproportionately to the satisfaction of the relatively richer children who were disadvantaged by having to attend school in the company of the poor. At best a small fraction of each dollar intended to remedy a poor child’s disadvantages in learning could reach the child through the school budget.

It might be equally true that the money was incompetently spent. But even unusual incompetence cannot beat that of the school system. Schools by their very structure resist the concentration of privilege on those otherwise disadvantaged. Special curricula, separate classes, or longer hours only constitute more discrimination at a higher cost.

Taxpayers are not yet accustomed to permitting three billion dollars to vanish from HEW as if it were the Pentagon. The present Administration may believe that it can afford the wrath of educators. Middle-class Americans have nothing to lose if the program is cut. Poor parents think they do, but, even more, they are demanding control of the funds meant for their children. A logical way of cutting the budget and, one hopes, of increasing benefits is a system of tuition grants such as that proposed by Milton Friedman and others. Funds would be channeled to the beneficiary, enabling him to buy his share of the schooling of his choice. If such credit were limited to purchases which fit into a school curriculum, it would tend to provide greater equality of treatment, but would not thereby increase the equality of social claims.

It should be obvious that even with schools of equal quality a poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one. Even if they attend equal schools and begin at the same age, poor children lack most of the educational opportunities which are casually available to the middle-class child. These advantages range from conversation and books in the home to vacation travel and a different sense of oneself, and apply, for the child who enjoys them, both in and out of school. So the poorer student will generally fall behind so long as he depends on school for advancement or learning. The poor need funds to enable them to learn, not to get certified for the treatment of their alleged disproportionate deficiencies.

All this is true in poor nations as well as in rich ones, but there it appears under a different guise. Modernized poverty in poor nations affects more people more visibly but also—for the moment—more superficially. Two-thirds of all children in Latin America leave school before finishing the fifth grade, but these "desertores" are not therefore as badly off as they would be in the United States.

Few countries today remain victims of classical poverty, which was stable and less

Reviews for Deschooling Society

[dypaloh · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Ivan Illich doesn’t mince words. So far as formal schooling goes, he argues for a society where school is not just out for summer, it’s out completely. In Deschooling Society he writes, “The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators…much as [did] the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition.” The Inquisition? Now that’s a concussive statement. Illich’s goal is to unshackle education from institutions. He doesn’t want government or other formal bodies deciding how to educate the populace. He protests that “only by channeling dollars away from the institutions which now treat…education…can the further impoverishment resulting from their disabling side effects be stopped.” How stop these disabling acts? Nothing less than a Bill of Rights of Education will do, with the first provision being “The state shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.” He’d also, we figure out, likely endorse banning educational methods based on the concept of “Childhood.” A related consequence is his idea of permitting “a boy of twelve to become a man fully responsible for his participation in the life of the community…[and] allowed to come of age.” Recalling that he’d been a parish priest, that statement can cause one to blanch.All this is assertive enough to get my attention. Does he deserve yours? It doesn’t help that the book’s first paragraph is bad enough to discourage any faith he won’t waste our time. And oh, that relentless rhetoric, with hardly a living being in sight. The author offers a torrent of pronouncements notable for the absence of opinions from young people. Illich is the man on the street corner expostulating with oratory that can seem like static because he won’t intrude on his argument testimony from the souls he seeks to save. It would help him, and us, a lot if they could testify. Interwoven in the argument is Illich’s strong conviction that school exists to serve the power elite. This is no secondary matter and motivates much of his distaste. In his hands, though, that subject becomes boring and distracts from the more interesting theme of revolutionizing education.In his final chapter, Illich verges on apocalyptic. It appears we now find ourselves in a kind of End Times in which “survival of the human race” will depend on rediscovery of “hope.” Hope, he clarifies, “means trusting faith in the goodness of nature” and it “centers desire on a person from whom we await a gift.” This hope Illich summons calls immediately to mind childhood’s trusting faith when looking to loving parents for help. It is an irony: Illich invokes such hope despite earlier insisting that “Growing up through childhood means being condemned to a process of inhuman conflict between self-awareness and the role imposed by a society.” But by whom is that role introduced? By one’s parents, for most. So it seems we are to achieve survival when the conditions associated with inhuman conflict tend to be at large. Still, despite how one might be driven away from Deschooling Society, the book has merits. His attitudes toward licensure, certification, and credentialing deserve notice. He understands the mania of how societies “create needs faster than they can create satisfaction.” And while his notion of “learning webs” isn’t introduced all that effectively, it is a prescient idea that the internet age makes realistic. Unless a reader is resistant to hearing others’ thoughts, the book will be a stimulus, even if only to wrestle with how to form objections. Naturally it would please Illich best if your wrestling is undertaken for some purpose other than completing a school or institutional assignment.A fascinating article illustrating a real-world educational alternative called “unschooling” was published in Outside magazine a few years ago. It is “We Don’t Need No Education,” by Ben Hewitt, and is online. There are living young people in it and their experiences speak to the possibility that education can be done without curriculum-bound schools or “home” schools. Check it out, along with Hewitt’s other writings on the subject, especially if Illich’s way of arguing cause you to lose interest not in his subject but in his book.

[p_s_patrick · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Deschooling Society is a collection of essays based around the author's idea that society might be better off without the formal schooling system that is prevalent in most industrialised countries. He supports this radical proposition by stating that the majority of learning is done outside of the formal educational system, and that school itself is therefore not necessary for education.A second strand to the argument is that industrialised nations have to rely too much on "pre-packaged" services, in which a service is consumed. As the whole of society revolves around consumer institutions, be these in healthcare, education, and retail, we treat these services as something we complacently consume and not as something we actively participate in. This is in contrast to historic or non-industrialised nations where learning is achieved when it is useful to the individual, for example during an apprenticeship for a certain means of livelihood, or learning from family elders. The instituton of school, the author claims, is maladjusted to the needs of the individual and seeks to teach everyone the same thing whether it is useful to them or not – thereby wasting vast resources of time and money. The very existence of schools and universities create a demand for their products, whether or not they are actually needed for practical reasons of imparting useful learning: because it looks bad if you are the one, in a competitive society, who hasn't completed school or obtained a degree. There is probably more than a little truth in this view.There is a lot of rhetoric and bold statement in this book, and not as much convincing argument in favour of the project of deschooling as the book could have benefited from. It is certainly a very interesting idea that modern society could be better served by alternative modes of education, however there is little here to make a convincing case that warrants the enthusiasm that the author has for this project. As with many people who criticise current systems, sensible alternative propositions are somewhat lacking, however one of the essays does go into some detail about new proposed methods of learning. Being written in the 70s when audio cassettes and sending things by post were the state of the art, some of the proposed alternative methods of learning have now been more or less realised in a more advanced form on the internet including forums for the discussion of special interests, "how to" videos on You-tube, and online learning courses.There is enough in this volume to prompt the reader to seriously consider the feasibility of a society in which the school system was disestablished, and this itself deserves some credit.

[tajuddinabd-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What Ivan Illich try to convey, in a bigger picture is, the school nowadays is the institution organized around expectations, which means it tends to becoming a manipulative institutions. The last chapter about Epimethean Man is telling everything about this. These kind of institutions might seek to eliminate the disappointment, pain, and unpredictability of life, but in the process they will always ironically prevent us from being fully human.

So, the Epimethean Man, whose derived from Epimetheus's legendary story married with Pandora, is conveying what the real educational institutions should be. It should be organized around hope, even it is necessarily vague, on the other hand, because such institutions treat humans as ends, seeking, despite inevitable disappointments, to allow us to act freely and, from time to time, perhaps realize our own transcendent potential.

[ecw0647 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ivan Illich is one of our more interesting social critics. Schooled as a priest he became anathema to both the left and the right of the Catholic Church. He was Vice Rector pf the Catholic University of Ponce in Puerto Rico when he was ordered to leave by the Bishop. He went to Mexico where he founded the Center for Intercultural Documentation. In 1967 he was summoned before the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to undergo a modern form of the medieval inquisition. One of the reasons for their distaste of his ideas was his reluctance to promote the Pope's strong move to help the underdeveloped countries. Illich was against the so-called development of underdeveloped countries arguing it was a "war on subsistence". At the time when he railed against it (the mid-sixties), it deeply offended the conventional wisdom. "Rich nations," he wrote, " now benevolently impose a straitjacket of traffic jams, hospital confinements and classrooms on the poor nations and by international agreement call this 'development.'" Development disabled their ability to seek alternatives and created "under-development as a form of consciousness" which occurs with " the translation of thirst into the need for a Coke."

In Deschooling Society [Illich:] identified schooling as the fundamental ritual of a consumer society. Schole, the Greek word from which ours derives, means leisure, and true learning, according to Illich, can only be the leisured pursuit of free people. The claim that a liberal society can be built on a compulsory and coercive ritual is therefore paradoxical. By designing and packaging knowledge, schools generate the belief that knowledge must be acquired in graded and certified sequences. And this monopoly of schools over the very definition of education, Illich argued, not only inhibits alternatives but also leads to lifelong dependence on other service monopolies. By the early seventeenth century a new consensus began to arise: the idea that man was born incompetent for society and remained so unless he was provided with 'education'. Education came to mean the inverse of vital competence. It came to mean a process rather than the plain knowledge of the facts and the ability to use tools which shape a man's concrete life. Education became an intangible commodity that had to be produced for the benefit of all, and imparted to them in the manner in which the visible Church formerly imparted invisible grace. Justification in the sight of society became the first necessity for a man born in original stupidity, analogous to original sin.

In the early 70's he wrote book:Tools for Conviviality|253076] in which he argued that being anti-growth would merely stabilize "at the highest levels of endurable output." He disliked the term 'technology' because of the confusion it caused, preferring to use the word 'tools'. The hammer, highways, the health-care system are all examples of tools. All tools go through a metamorphosis. First they are productive, then they become counter-productive and they become ends rather than means. For example, automobiles expanded our mobility but we have now become their prisoner. Some tools do not dictate how they must be used. Libraries, the telephone, bicycles can be used freely whereas a high-speed transportation system "compels our allegiance by adjusting time and space to its own dimensions." He liked austerity, as defined by Aquinas, "a virtue which does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those which are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness." Austerity, according to Illich, is the only "alternative to intensified surveillance and management by technocratic elites."

The Rio de Janeiro "Earth Summit" of 1992 represents the logical outcome of the failure to master tools. It was not about finding a better life that is simple in means and rich in ends; "it is about the equitable division of pollution optimums under the aegis of global monitoring." The idea of conservation must become intrinsic to the dignity of human nature and not just a requirement for survival. Illich was also critical of the power of dominant professions. In contrast to the old liberal professions like law and medicine, new professions have sprung up that have become protection rackets, licensed monopolies licensed to serve clients with services they insist must be recognized. "Grave-diggers did not become members of a profession by calling themselves morticians, by obtaining college credentials, by raising their incomes, or by getting rid of the odor attached to their trade by electing themselves president of the Lions Club. Morticians formed a profession, a dominant and disabling one, when they acquired the muscle to have the police stop your burial if you are not embalmed and boxed by them."

It was also in Puerto Rico that Illich came into contact with the first of the great secular bureaucracies whose pretensions he would make a career of puncturing, the school system. He sat on the board that governed the island's entire educational establishment and was soon engaged in a full-scale effort to understand what schools do. He came to the conclusion that compulsory education in Puerto Rico constituted "structured injustice." By "putting into parentheses their claim to educate," lie was able to see that schools focused aspiration on a mirage. In Puerto Rico, at the time Illich began studying the question in the late 1950s, children we' already required by law to have more schooling than the the state could afford to give them. The worst aspect of this Illich was that people also learned to blame themselves for failing to achieve the impossible. "Schooling," he concluded, "served ... to compound the native poverty of half the children with a new interiorized sense of guilt for not having made it" " you look around the globe at the most lethal conflicts convulsing the world, not one of them turns on race. Think about it. English vs. Irish, Croatians, Moslems, Bosnians and Serbs , Irakis vs. Kurds; the combatants are racially indistinguishable. The conflicts turn on difference of religion or ideology and the one thing we' learned very clearly, is that people of one race are fully capable of murderously exploiting people of the same race. Why do we get this so wrong in the United States, Why do we equate skin color with culture in the multicultural rubric, given what I just said. Given that it so ill-equips us to understand and of these conflicts I just mentioned. The answer is obvious. This is the only western country, to have abducted and plunger into its mists millions of enslaved people from Africa. . . . And blacks out of that dispossession had to create out of nothing an identity, plunged into this society yet kept viciously apart from it and the very rigidity of segregation actually gave some firm moral footholds because at least you knew what you were up against and black survival tools from black religion to jazz. . . cultural survival tools are among the richest treasures that this country has ever produced. The black quest to belong is the greatest example of unrequited love anywhere in the world."

[palaverofbirds · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Didn't think I'd find myself in such agreement with Illich. Basically, what he's saying is that when you attempt to organize education from a top-down bureaucracy, lead by authoritarian teachers, organized into standardized cirricula, sanctified by abstract diplomas and certification and strictly confined by age.... the results are less than spectacular. Illich's counter-proposal, in short, is open-learning based on peer-to-peer networking (remarkably predicting of a world where people are linked via computers years and years before personal pcs and the internet come about) and the disestablishment of degrees and certification as qualifications. While I didn't find everything he said to be utopian, and even the author admits to flaws in his proposals, he does, however, point out that the status quo is hardly benevolent and working, and that alternatives shouldn't therefore be dismissed because of flaws, but on the weight of their benefits to pitfalls.

[wyvernfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An interesting look at school and the loading we give that idea. Argues that schooling should be a lifelong concept and that our existing education fails people.And I agree, somewhat.I sometimes wonder about my English Teachers statement that I needed to read more books and when she was told that I read a lot, said that I needed to read more, better books and what she would think today with my ecclectic mix of fiction and non-fiction. I also wonder what many of my classmates did with their reading in later years, I know many people who don't read and regard my reading as eccentric.Some of Illich's ideas about the use of computers has happened but I think that while some people would benefit from an ability to move in early years from school to work and apprenticeship; many people could be forced into the wrong career and end up miserable.While some would benefit from dipping in and out of education, modern education also fulfils the role of childminding service for the masses.

[owen1218 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Illich presents an excellent case for the elimination of the school system. But like many authors of this period, he does not present us with a solution. Rather, he provides detailed examples of alternative approaches to education, without giving us much of a clue about how they could actually be attained, particularly when he notes the protections provided the school system by the larger political order. It is a sort of magical optimism, that good ideas will necessarily crowd out bad ones. I did enjoy the book, but much more as he criticizes schools rather than spending time fantasizing about potential futures.Related works: John Holt's Instead of Education, and Neil Postman's Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

[wirkman_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

An amazing nutball book by a mind so utopian he does not see the limits of his purview. I have friends who admire Illich. I cannot. The first paragraph contains obvious whoppers, either in terms of untruth (the first sentence), or in bad writing (the rest of the sentences).This is one radical classic that I find so radical as to be idiotic.