Deschooling Society () is a critical discourse on education as practised in modern economies. It is a book that brought Ivan Illich to public attention. Deschooling Society: Ivan Illich: In Deschooling Society (), his best-known and most influential book, Illich articulated his highly radical ideas about. School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”.
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Yet, upon reading Illich, one is often shocked at the resonance of the problems in his time with those of today Illich’s basic premise is that school is a degrading institution wh Since the initial publication of descyooling Society” in there has been little change to the structure of public school and centralized ivaan, at least in the United States.
If the problem is the scope of people’s hope, imagination and work, then his solution is to take away the institutions, starting with schools. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
Review of Ivan Illich’s seminal Deschooling Society
After the emergence of institutions mankind discovered his ability to engineer his social world. Illich’s radical anarchist views first became widely known through a set of four books published during the early sDeschooling SocietyTools for ConvivialityEnergy and Equityand Medical Nemesis Education is the means by which these societies get sucked into the consumerist way of doing things.
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. Schools are addicted to the notion that it is possible to manipulate other people for their own good.
Deschooling Society Quotes by Ivan Illich
Want to Read saving…. Jan 12, Weathervane rated it really liked it Shelves: The book offers an excellent critique of modern educational practices and the folly of assuming that injecting greater resources into the educational system will lead to more learning, knowledge or education for that matter.
Nor should the public be forced to support, through a regressive taxation, a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which in fact restricts the public’s chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market. In the early 70’s he wrote book: Jan 26, Adriane Devries rated it really liked it Shelves: 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.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if charter school opponents led sessions at the WA Charters conference in May?
Deschooling Society Quotes
In terms of his wider critique of capitalism, I liked this deconstruction of the ideology of progress: Post was not sent – check your email addresses! He also critiques economics in how the state is restricting entry into certain professions in order to protect the individuals in the profession thereby creating a shortage and breeding inefficiency. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour 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.
This may change in the future, although the internet is not the totally free and independent network that Illich foresaw. The job market depends on making skills scarce and on keeping them scarce, either by proscribing their unauthorized use and transmission or by making things which can be operated and repaired only by those who have access to tools or information which are kept scarce.
Further, by taking resources and goodwill mass public schooling stifles efforts that might otherwise be made in the community. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: Primitive man was in awe of the forces of nature which he felt as having an awful necessity of their own. Illich links the progressive hierarchy of schools where every level is a pointless in itself but a hook to the next level think 80s video games with a wider social faith in progress and ever increasing product and demand; an economic nightmare with profound ecological consequences.
Given that it so ill-equips us to understand and of these conflicts I just mentioned. Things we take for granted were someone’s design at some point in history.
You might not swallow Deschooling wholesale, but Illich shines the light on so many of the unspoken I know I’m mixing metaphors here axioms of the educational systemalways a healthy endeavorand challenges us to either defend or discard.
Most people learn best by being “with it,” yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.
The role of schools is to produce ignorance rather than insight, to create credentials and envy of credentials rather than mastery, to suck up surplus labor and intellect in the Promethean furnace of a culture consuming itself. It is precisely this obsession with profit or economic growth for its own sake and efficiency which leads to the kind of school system which Illich urges us to abandon.
Overall, an excellent and necessary read that offers a basic theoretical groundwork to build alternatives for institutionalized education. I have often had this inner conflict in me. Universal education through schooling is not feasible.