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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

I am cataloguing my books on LibraryThing during the early months of my retirement; hence, at the same time I’m cataloguing, I am weeding, especially professional books. Those that I retain, I discover, I am holding onto for sentimental reasons (those good memories I have and do not want to let go), for intellectual reasons (I still browse in the books or refer to them for ideas or for personal satisfaction), and for what I can only call spiritual reasons (that is, they speak to and for my identity as a human being, in other words, my spiritual being). Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1974) meets all three of these criteria. How well I remember its giving voice to my own emerging thought back in that heyday of the 1960s and 1970s. How much I enjoy going back now and rereading passages I had underlined then. How deeply Illich’s mythology of the Epimethean is inscribed in my spiritual being.

Illich believed that what churches through the years have done to the vision of Jesus, schools have done to education: they have institutionalized what was and should have been a natural, personal engagement of humankind. In his concluding sentences in this book, he says that we “need a name for those who value hope above expectations....for those who love people more than products.” Reinterpreting the mythos of Pandora’s box and of the brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus, he suggests that such people be called Epimethean.

The Promethean faith is that all things are possible and that everything possible can be achieved by engineering; that is, by planning processes that will lead inevitably to well-defined goals. So education has been redefined in terms of “behavioral objectives,” “planned outcomes,” and mandatory (“objective”) examinations. In passing such exams, No Child will be Left Behind. “Surreptitiously,” Illich maintains, “reliance on institutional process has replaced dependence on personal good will..... Man has become the plaything of scientists, engineers, and planners.” Or as he concludes elsewhere, our reliance on institutionalism has led to a new kind of subservience: “Surrounded by all-powerful tools, man is reduced to a tool of his tools.”

In our Promethean universe, all-powerful tools are exemplified in the gas-guzzling American automobile with all its “extras” promoted by Ford, General Motors and their peers. Other such “tools” include nuclear weapons, the Pentagon, the “pan-hygienic” world of medicine, the US military, and—yes, schools, or as we say in the US, “school systems.” Schools, to Illich, have become precisely that: systems. They succeed most undeniably in “producing” consumers with expanded appetites and bureaucrats with reduced personal imagination and independence. Hence, they well prepare youngsters for a corporate society in which commoners’ two most significant roles are (1) as avid consumers of products, services, entertainment, and ideas, manipulated by advertising and public promotion and (2) as docile workers serving in the lower echelons of industry, business, and government.

Here is just one of those underlined passages in this book that speaks to and for me still: “I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a life style which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a life style which only allows us to make and unmake, produce and consume—a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment.”

So what would education be like in Illich’s “de-schooled” society? The critical chapter (#6) is called “Learning Webs”—and this over thirty years ago, before webbing had taken on the dimensions and potential it enjoys today. A strong educational web would have three purposes: “[1] it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at anytime in their lives; [2] empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, [3] furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.” Even then, in 1974, he insisted, “Technology is available to develop either independence and learning or bureaucracy and teaching.”

He envisions four networks that provide our natural modes of learning: things, models, peers, and elders. Or to be a bit less succinct: (1) reference services to educational objects, such as libraries, laboratories, museums, theaters, work places, parks, nature conservatoria, and the like; (2) skill exchanges, which provide for modeling, apprenticeships, and other such relationships; (3) peer-matching, to provide “seminar” or “work-study” groups who “challenge [one another] to argue, to compete, to cooperate, and to understand”; and, finally, (4) references to individuals willing to act as mentors. Professional educators in such a network would not be conventional classroom teachers, but would “create and operate the kinds of educational exchanges or networks” he describes and guide or counsel learners and parents in the use of such networks. Such professionals would work more like museum guides or reference librarians than classroom teachers.

Ironically, technology and communications systems would facilitate such networks as those envisioned by Illich (and, in fact, virtual schools are springing up all over); however, education institutions (like school "systems") are opting for even greater bureaucratic rigidity and corporate control. Hence, even with the best of intentions, all children are being left behind. Illich was an activist and a visionary, a reformer and a prophet—both Promethean and Epimethean, if you will. How we need to hear his voice today.