This essays seeks to demonstrate my own understand of
“deschooling society” and begin to apply it to my own practice.
It is noted in ‘Deschooling Society’ that Fidel Castro said
‘by 1980 Cuba will be able to dissolve its university since all of life in Cuba
will be an educational experience.’ (Illich, 1973 p.15) This powerful sentiment
provides the basis for Illich’s dream of an educational system that truly
benefits society and individuals in their quest for self-actualization.
Abraham Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ states having the
opportunity for ‘self-actualisation’ as the ultimate in becoming a complete
human being. Self-actualisation involves ‘morality, creativity, spontaneity,
problem solving, lack of prejudice and acceptance of the facts.’ This essay
will show that modern ‘schooling’ achieves none of those things.
Illich starts his book by saying that the effect school has
on students is to ‘school them into confusing process and substance.’(p.09) He
expands on that by saying that this is the modern ‘institutionalization of
values.’(p.09) Modern school dehumanizes us by turning ‘non-material needs into
demands for commodities.’ (p.19) If the curriculum is a product and we are the
consumer, we are taught to expect profound rewards for the consumption of a
product. Or as Illich puts it, ‘neither learning nor justice is promoted by
schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with
certification.’ ‘Instruction is the choice of circumstances which facilitate
learning.’ (p.19) The difference between Illich’s model and the current state
of affairs is that actual ‘learning’ is reserved to those ‘whose every step in
learning fits previously approved measures of social control.’(p.19) This is
education as following instructions to put up an IKEA bookshelf. In a pre-packaged
process, although an incentive might be there, there is no encouragement to
develop and improve as the process is taking place and in fact it is
discouraged. This in turn eliminates creativity from the process.
Illich argues that the ‘modernization of poverty combines
the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency.’ In
comparison to modern poverty, classical poverty was ‘stable and less
disabling.’ American Law makes six to ten years of school obligatory and during
this time we are ‘schooled in a sense of inferiority towards the better
schooled’ which permits exploitation through ‘increasing allocation of public
funds for the education of a few and increasing acceptance of social control by
the many.’ This process of ‘schooling’ serves as a conditioning process for the
modern underclass, ‘disabling the poor from taking control of their own
learning’ (p.15) and ‘discourag[ing] other institutions from assuming
educational tasks.’ (p.15) According to
Illich’s research, ‘No country can be rich enough to afford a school system
that meets the same demands this system creates.’ (p.15) If good education is always associated
with better funding and [the poor] depend on school for advancement of
learning, the rich will always have the advantage. This is the ‘polarisation of
society’ and is discriminatory on the basis of household income.
A “major illusion on which the school system rests is that
most learning is the result of teaching.” (p.20) An example Illich gives is that
‘most people who learn a second language do so as a result of odd
circumstances’ (p.20) Paulo Freire discovered that ‘any adult can begin to read
in a matter of forty hours if the first words he deciphers are charged with
political meaning.’
I am going to break 3rd person to give a personal
account of how I engaged in an institution that gave me a far more profound
education than the capitalist school system. Two years ago I started working
for a festival in the summer. I wanted to contribute very much, as the festival
itself held many great memories for me and seemed like an opportunity to learn
new skills in the arts and develop a new network of creative friends. In the
time I worked for them I developed skills in mural painting, sculpture design,
event organising and construction using materials and tools I had never used
before. Not only that, but I was required to demonstrate my skills to others
who watched me working and were curious to my methods. It was logical to do
this and I was learning how to relate to people on a skill-sharing level. As
Illich puts it ‘education for all means education by all.’ (p.28) I did this under
pressure of a deadline, without so many legislative constraints and with the
desire to impress a group of people I respected and whose opinions and
knowledge intrigued me on a personal level. On educator Paulo Freire’s
theories, Illich states ‘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.’ (p.26) The politics
of working for this festival meant that we all wanted to achieve as highly as
possible, for the benefit of ourselves and the patrons of the festival. I
believe that the kind of educational network I was experiencing is a small localized
version of what Illich calls a ‘learning web.’ He says that ‘if we left the
initiative for meetings to the match seekers themselves, organizations which
nobody now classifies as educational would probably do the job much better,’
(p. 28) and in my experience he was right. In this experience I had what Maslow
defines as self-actualisation, I had the freedom to create and problem solve,
there was no strict timetabling and I could engage spontaneously with creative
projects and I was also making moral decisions within a new social network. The
above statement is only an estimation of the extent of the education I got
during this time, the actual result is far more profound and has been a part of
shaping me into the person I am today. On reshaping learning structures Illich
says ‘our present educational institutions are at the service of the teachers
goals. The relational structures we need are those which will enable them each
man to define him-self by learning and by contributing to the learning of
others.’ (p.72) The festival I worked for is an institution in itself with its
own set of values and systems. The politics of the situation dictated that
everyone was to work as hard as possible, within their own limits, to create a
show for 10,000 people and in the meantime I gained an education.
I had access to teachers to demonstrate skills to me in the
context of ‘charged political meaning,’ but this is uncommon. ‘Those using
skills which are in demand and do require a human teacher are discouraged from
sharing these skills with others. This is done either by teachers who
monopolize the licenses or by unions which protect their trade interests.’
(p.23)
“School appropriates
the money, men and goodwill available for education and in addition discourages
other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics,
city living and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge
they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education.” – (Page
16)
In this powerful quote from Illich, he explains that school
assumes the responsibility for education the masses and in doing so it acquires
approval from the masses as a positive institution within society. However, the
negative effects of this are that other institutions are absolved from the
responsibility of educating those who they involve. Why spend time and money on
education when necessary education happens at school? People are employed based
on curriculum vitae of relevant skills to that institution. When Illich
suggests that other institutions, such as working environments, could themselves
be the means to education he suggests that if those institutions acknowledged that
they had a responsibility to educate, the education of its employees would be
far more profound. If curriculum vitae provided evidence of key interests,
rather than institutional achievements, those institutions could employ people
safe in the knowledge that those people would be willing to engage and learn in
the environment that they worked in. Relevant skill shares and ‘learning webs’
could be set up with other relevant institutions. Take for example, a network
of cafes that offered different foods and cultural experiences, swapping their
staff in order to educate them in different methods of cooking and customer
service.
“An insistence on
skill drill alone could be a disaster; equal emphasis must be placed on other
kinds of learning. But if schools are the wrong places for learning a skill,
they are even worse places for getting an education. School does both tasks
badly, partly because it does not distinguish between them. School is inefficient
in skill instruction especially because it is curricular. In most schools a
programme which is meant to improve one skill is chained always to another
irrelevant task.” (Page 24)
While skill learning is important, enjoyable and key for 'self actualisation' for someone
who appreciates the relevance of those skills to their situation for political
or practical reasons, it is not the only form of learning relevant to an
education. Schools rarely offer skills drills today as it is impractical in
terms of delivering the curriculum which requires them to make its students
jump through metaphorical hoops in order to progress to the next level of the
schooling ladder. This process goes against the 'self actualisation' process as it feels meaningless. It has become a skill in itself to pass exams that test a
student’s knowledge of only the curriculum. When the results of 2011’s GCSE
results, BBC news was widely debating why student grades were going up and one
suggestion was simply that teachers were getting better at teaching students
how to pass exams.
On the myth of packaging values Illich states;
“School sells
curriculum.” It starts with “alleged
scientific research, on whose basis educational engineers predict future demand
and tools for the assembly line, with-in the limits set by budgets and taboos.
The distributor – teacher delivers the finished product to the consumer – pupil
whose reactions are carefully studied and charted to provide research data for
the preparation of the next model, which may be ‘ungraded’, ‘student –
designed’, ‘team – taught’, ‘visually – aided’ or ‘issue – centred’”. - The
curriculum is a “commodity whose
‘balanced appeal’ makes it marketable to a sufficiently large number to justify
the cost of production.” (Page 46 / 47)
In the above quote, Illich discusses a school system within
a capitalist society. That being a society where selling a product is part of
its key value system. School must have a product to sell. That product is the
curriculum. This curriculum is engineered by scientists working within the
educational system and within that systems prescribed values and budget. If the
teacher is the distributer of the product, then the student in the consumer. As
people widely acknowledge that education is indeed a personal process, terms
like ‘student – designed’ are used to sell the product to a ‘sufficiently large
number to justify the cost of production.’ Education is widely regarded as a
personal process. This should be enough to oppose the idea that selling
"education" as a pre-defined product is just not an appropriate process to
facilitate the education of the masses, however clever and manipulative the
advertising behind the product is.
Today equal educational opportunity is regarded as a core
value of our society. However, Illich argues that ‘to equate this with
obligatory schooling is to confuse salvation with the church’ and that ‘instead
of equalizing chances, school has monopolized their distribution.’ He goes on
to say that ‘laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of prior schooling
must be enacted.’ But even with laws such as the Equality Act 2010 which
protects those with learning disabilities against discrimination, we still
discriminate on the grounds of prior ‘schooling.’ It could be argued that those
without prior schooling would not have the literary or mathematical skills to
attend a university course and keep their head above water, but this is not the
point. Illich calls for an educational revolution involving the not-so-radical
ideal of society facilitating access to learning resources and educational
dialogue.
With the rise of social networking websites such as Facebook
and Twitter, we are more and more able to instantly connect with each other,
but the majority are reduced to using it for vague entertainment purposes while
advertises fill our minds with images of people that we should look like and
products that we should desire. When Illich talks about ‘a network or service
which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with
others motivated by the same concern,’ (p.26) he begins talking about
classified adverts in newspapers and telephone services, but a present day
service like Facebook could do this job more efficiently if its ideals weren’t
rooted in production and consumption. There are services like “LinkedIn”
(www.linkedin.com) and “Giant Hydra” (www.gianthydra.com)
but again these are catering to advertising agencies. On the Mass Hydra website
it states that ‘its system allows advertisers and ad agencies access to a
global pool of creative professionals,’ stating its designed usage. This
pre-packaged, directed, ‘mass collaboration unit’ could be a mass education
unit used to form critical judgement by free networking and skill sharing, but
while we school people into valuing a ‘pre-packaged process’ over
‘self-actualisation’ and education this will not happen.
We cannot expect an institution to teach us how to de-school
ourselves. As Illich says; “each of us is personally responsible for our own
deschooling, and only we have the power to do it.” (p.54)
Bibliography:
Illich, Ivan (1973a) Deschooling Society, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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