A few snips from Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society"

Mostly context free but I'm sharing 'em anyway, buy yourself a book

Yesterday I finished Ivan Illich’s book “Deschooling Society”. My copy has a particularly glorious cover design so I thought I’d share that with you.

Homeschoolers can especially rejoice here because it is, literally, a book that is against formalized schooling, and especially against the idea of forcing all children through it for twelve years. He also has some fascinating political ideas, such as the idea that we should ban discrimination on the basis of prior schooling - you could still require a competency test for a job, but you could not require a college degree or high school diploma or any such thing, in his ideal, because it should not matter where you learned the thing you learned. The book was written in 1970, which is before homeschooling really took off in America… it is interesting that, in 1970, he seems to think the cultural moment is ripe for such a movement but it is a “cause without a party”. I would guess he was pleased with the rather incredible rise in homeschooling in the ensuing decades.

It is not a book that is anti-learning, not at all, and the longest chapter (“Learning Webs”) talks about how to improve actual learning, and over all of life. It is a book that is against what learning becomes when it is institutionalized¹… and really, it’s a book about what happens to human life when everything becomes planned and institutionalized, with schools just a particularly salient example of the problem. As such it is perhaps my favorite Illich book yet and probably his best critique of the technocracy I’ve yet read despite being, nominally and mainly, a book about education.

Therefore I thought I’d share a few quotations from it with you, mostly without larger context and with minimal comment, but if you’re intrigued maybe you’ll scoop up a copy.

School defined

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.

I did enjoy that one, from near the end of the book.

The next four all somewhat revolve around the idea that learning is good and, really, most learning happens outside of schools. But institutionalized in schools, people become convinced that learning is this narrower thing delivered by institutional “treatment” by credentialed experts, that it has to be that way. In a parallel way, people become convinced that health is a thing delivered by institutional treatment (e.g. in hospitals), by credentialed experts (doctors), and that it has to be that way too.

School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

OK, Illich does also make you laugh.

Schools themselves pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction.

You can see in the above the problem that people start thinking “I want to learn, so I’d better sign up for a class”, as if there is no other way. But optimistically, I do think Illich would be pleased that the internet really has broken education free of institutions in a way that was not possible in 1970… even as our public schools do remain a realm of credentialed gatekeepers.

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets.

And finally,

School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.

Losing our humanity in the technocracy

And now some snips about my “favorite” topic, the inhumanity of the technocracy.

Contemporary man... attempts to create the world in his image, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it. We now must face the fact that man himself is at stake.

As James Poulos and others have said, perhaps the battle of our time is the battle to maintain our humanity in a “cyborg vivarium” in his phrasing, and in a world where everything is engineered and planned.

Surrounded by all-powerful tools, man is reduced to a tool of his tools. Each of the institutions meant to exorcise one of the primeval evils has become a fail-safe, self-sealing coffin for man. Man is trapped in the boxes he makes to contain the ills Pandora allowed to escape.

And generally,

Man has become the plaything of scientists, engineers, and planners.

You sure you wrote that in 1970 and not in COVID-world, Illich? And finally, and a little more specifically,

The contemporary ideal is a pan-hygienic world: a world in which all contacts between men, and between men and their world, are the result of foresight and manipulation.

Are you sure you wrote that in 1970 and not in COVID-world, Illich?

Schools as training into the technocratic worldview

Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent.

Yeah, but fortunately nobody today lives like they believe that is true… ahem.

But I appreciated the comment that, almost irrespective of the particular curriculum chosen, the school environment itself, with its structure and credentialed experts and grading, teaches students that institutionalism and bureaucracy are the way the world should be.

The institutionalized values school instills are quantified ones. School initiates young people into a world where everything can be measured, including their imaginations and, indeed, man himself.

I’ve said this before, but if you wanted to state what is perhaps problem #1 of the technocracy, it is “anything that can be measured matters, and anything that cannot be measured doesn’t matter”. This is why many of our objections to health orders, which appealed to important but not-easily-quantified aspects of human life, fell on deaf ears. The technocracy cannot even see your concern if it isn’t measurable.

And then, a couple snips more describing life under a technocratic system itself,

Man has become the engineer of his own messiah and promises the unlimited rewards of science to those who submit to progressive engineering for his reign.

And finally,

Repression will be seen as a missionary effort to hasten the coming of the mechanical messiah.

And finally, just for fun

To end on a lighthearted note… he proposes (in 1970!) a sort of computerized system whereby people could find others with similar interests (say they all want to discuss Moby Dick, or they all want to learn how to pour silver), so they could meet and learn from each other. The internet has rather made this particular dream come true. But wait, a computerized record of my interests and personal meetings could be abused! Oh, you should see social media, Illich.

The fact that a record of personal meetings could be obtained thus by the FBI is undeniable; that this should worry anybody in 1970 is only amusing to a free man, who willy-nilly contributes his share in order to drown snoopers in the irrelevancies they gather.

1. Somebody reading this is going to think, “wait a minute, aren’t you on the board of directors of a school?” Yes and… that’s fine, a book about the problems of institutionalized education may even be especially valuable for someone in that position, even if you don’t follow the author all the way to “abolish the schools”.