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- Author: Ivan Illich
- Full Title: Deschooling Society
- Category: #books
- The discovery that most learning requires no teaching can be neither manipulated nor planned. Each of us is personally responsible for his or her own deschooling, and only we have the power to do it. No one can be excused if he fails to liberate himself from schooling.
- We are superstitiously convinced that good learning can and should be produced in us-and that we can produce it in others.
- All of today’s futuristic planners seek to make economically feasible what is technically possible while refusing to face the inevitable social consequence: the increased craving of all men for goods and services that will remain the privilege of a few.
- historical institutions can change color as they shift from facilitating activity to organizing production.
- jails, up until two centuries ago, served as a means of detaining men until they were sentenced, maimed, killed, or exiled, and were sometimes deliberately used as a form of torture.
- Social addiction, or escalation, consists in the tendency to prescribe increased treatment if smaller quantities have not yielded the desired results.
- Right-wing institutions, as we can see clearly in the case of schools, both invite compulsively repetitive use and frustrate alternative ways of achieving similar results.
- to sell the basic product is to hook society on the entire package.
- Of all “false utilities,” school is the most insidious. Highway systems produce only a demand for cars. Schools create a demand for the entire set of modern institutions which crowd the right end of the spectrum. A man who questioned the need for high. ways would be written off as a romantic; the man who questions the need for school is immediately attacked as either heartless or imperialist.
- By making men abdicate the responsibility for their own growth, school leads many to a kind of spiritual suicide.
- The left hand of society seems to wither, not because technology is less capable of increasing the range of human action, and providing time for the play of individual imagination and personal creativity, but because such use of technology does not increase the power of an elite which administers it.
- Making has always an end other than itself, action not; for good action itself is its end. Perfection in making is an art, perfection in acting is a virtue”.*
- Unemployment is the experience of the man who has succumbed to the Protestant ethic. Leisure, according to Weber, is necessary for man to be able to work. For Aristotle, work is necessary for man to have leisure.
- 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.
- The child grows up in a world of things, surrounded by people who serve as models for skills and values. He finds peers who challenge him to argue, to compete, to cooperate, and to understand; and if the child is lucky, he is exposed to confrontation or criticism by an experienced elder who really cares. Things, models, peers, and elders are four resources each of which requires a different type of arrangement to ensure that everybody has ample access to
- It must not start with the question, “What should someone learn?” but with the question, “What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?”
- Industrial design creates a world of things that resist insight into their nature, and schools shut the learner out of the world of things in their meaningful setting.
- Industry has surrounded people with artifacts whose inner workings only specialists are allowed to understand. The nonspecialist is discouraged from figuring out what makes a watch tick, or a telephone ring, or an electric typewriter work, by being warned that it will break if he tries. He can be told what makes a transistor radio work, but he cannot find out for himself. This type of design tends to reinforce a noninventive society in which the experts find it progressively easier to hide behind their expertise and beyond evaluation.
- School removes things from everyday use by labeling them educational tools.
- Using things only as part of a curriculum can have an even worse effect than just removing them from the general environment. It can corrupt the attitudes of pupils.
- Converging self-interests now conspire to stop a man from sharing his skill. The man who has the skill profits from its scarcity and not from its reproduction.
- Certification now tends to abridge the freedom of education by converting the civil right to share one’s knowledge into the privilege of academic freedom, now conferred only on the employees of a school.
- Local communities are valuable. They are also a vanishing reality as men progressively let service institutions define their circles of social relationship.
- On the other hand, what characterizes the true master-disciple relationship is its priceless character. Aristotle speaks of it as a “moral type of friendship, which is not on fixed terms: it makes a gift, or does whatever it does, as to a friend”. Thomas Aquinas says of this kind of teaching that inevitably it is an act of love and mercy. This kind of teaching is always a luxury for the teacher and a form of leisure (in Greek, “schole”) for him and his pupil: an activity meaningful for both, having no ulterior purpose.
- Hospitals render home care increasingly impossible - and then justify hospitalization as a benefit to the sick.
- We can recognize universal schooling as the culmination of a Promethean enterprise, and speak about the alternative as a world fit to live in for Epimethean man. While we can specify that the alternative to scholastic funnels is a world made transparent by true communication webs, and while we can specify very concretely how these could function, we can only expect the Epimethean nature of man to re-emerge; we can neither plan nor produce it.
- Hope, in its strong sense, means trusting faith in the goodness of nature, while expectation, as I will use it here, means reliance on results which are planned and controlled by man.
- Hope centers desire on a person from whom we await a gift. Expectation looks forward to satisfaction from a predictable process which will produce what we have the right to claim.
- If a moon vehicle can be designed, so can the demand to go to the moon.
- Man has developed the frustrating power to demand anything because he cannot visualize anything which an institution cannot do for him.
- They create needs faster than they can create satisfaction, and in the process of trying to meet the needs they generate, they consume the Earth. This is true for agriculture and manufacturing, and no less for medicine and education.
- world: a world in which all contacts between men, and between men and their world, are the result of foresight and manipulation. School has become the planned process which tools man for a planned world, the principal tool to trap man in man s trap. It is supposed to shape each man to an adequate level for playing a part in this world game. Inexorably we cultivate, treat, produce, and school the world out of existence.
- Surreptitiously, reliance on institutional process has replaced dependence on personal good will.
- The largest institutions compete most fiercely for resources which are not listed in any inventory: the air, the ocean, silence, sunlight, and health.
- Education which makes you need the product is included in the price of the product. School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
- Efforts to find a new balance in the global milieu depend on the deinstitutionalization of values.