Re-Visiting Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society

"(L)earning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful society."

Ivan Illich was a Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic. His best known work, Deschooling Society, published in 1971, is a no holds barred critique of institutionalized, compulsory schooling, arguing that the overall effect is to alienate most children from their own learning.

"All over the world the school has an anti-education effect on society: school is recognized as the institution which specializes in education. The failures of school are taken by most people as proof that education is very costly, very complex, always arcane, and frequently (an) impossible task."

As a preschool teacher who has spent his entire career in play-based settings, I've always felt that my colleagues in more standard schools tend to complicate things. To be honest, when they talk about what they do to and with the children in the name of moving them through "the curriculum," I'm struck by a kind of despair. Learning, in my experience, is primarily a process of self-motivated individuals interacting with their environment and the people they find there. When I hear these educators talk about what they do to make learning happen, it sounds for all the world like the kind of micromanaging that causes adults to hate their jobs. Frankly, I couldn't handle the stress of believing that these children's futures depend on my ability to "teach" them all these things they aren't particularly interested in learning. 

“A . . . major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich counties, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.”

In my experience, "teaching" can only lead to learning when the learner is actively wondering about the questions being answered. Sadly, most of what we do in standard school is offer answers to questions that no child has ever asked . . . "for their own good." Without curiosity, educators are left with no alternative but manipulation through a system of punishments and rewards which are still not guarantees of learning, but rather, at best, of successful test taking.

Teaching and learning are very different things. They're not even on the same spectrum.

“Many students . . . intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor 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.”

Illich pulls no punches and it can be painful to read him, even for someone like me who has spent his career outside the currents of modern education. When Illich was writing, our kindergartens and preschools, and even, for the most part, our elementary schools, were far less school-ish than they are today. Recesses were long and frequent. Art, music, and stories stood at the center of the school day. Testing was rare and largely inconsequential. If the goal is real learning and real freedom, then we have definitely gone the wrong direction in the past several decades.

As a product of those types of schools, my memories are of the playground, of my friends, and of the crushes I had on my teachers. Yet even then, the best days were those when I awoke to remember that it was Saturday. I was not one of those kids who struggled in school, and I liked the playground, my friends, and my teachers, but I nevertheless preferred not going because I preferred freedom.

“Equal educational opportunity is, indeed, both a desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with obligatory schooling is to confuse salvation with the Church. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes future promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition.”

Like I said, reading Illich can be painful and he clearly has anarchist leanings (although he never used the word to describe himself). And when I consider all those well-meaning teachers who genuinely love the children in their care and want only what's best for them, I cringe at the comparison to things like the Inquisition. It's harsh. But the criticism is of the institution, not the people, and as people who love the children, who care about doing what is best for them, it behooves us to at least sit with criticisms like this.

“If society were to outgrow its age of childhood, it would have to become livable for the young. The present disjunction between an adult society which pretends to be humane and a school environment which mocks reality could no longer be maintained . . . The disestablishment of schools could also end the present discrimination against infants, adults, and the old in favor of children throughout their adolescence and youth . . . Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us the children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.” 

It's worth reflecting on. Few adults would willingly subject themselves to schooling, just as few children, if given the choice, would choose to spend their days there. We might have fond memories, but the reality of being managed to the point that you need permission to pee, is beyond the pale.

“The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical. The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil. When the schoolteacher fuses in his person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life. A teacher who combines these three powers contributes to the warping of the child much more than the laws which establish his legal or economic minority, or restrict his right to free assembly or abode.”

Those of us who work in play-based settings or schools (like those based on the democratic free school model of the Sudbury Valley School) that trust self-directed learning, have created bubbles in which the human instinct to educate itself is kept alive. It's not always joyful, of course, but the learning is always self-motivated. The reward is not a grade or a test score, but rather the satisfaction of having asked your own questions and found your own answers. As adults our role is not to micromanage, teach, or to act as jailers, but rather to use our experience to keep the children safe enough, to respond honestly to the questions they ask us, and to be a loving presence when they struggle.  

I recently received a message from the parent of a former student who I'd not heard from in over a decade. I remember him as the type of child that institutional schooling loves most. He taught himself to read by the time he was three. He was bright, curious, well-spoken, and motivated, the kind of kid who lands in "gifted" programs. I'm sure he tested well because he loved playing games. His mother told me that in high school he was feeling pressure and said, "'What's the point? Work hard to get good grades so you can get into a good school to work hard to get good grades so you can get a job that you hate' . . . He held on to the idea that work could, and maybe should, be about play. You played a big part in setting that mindset in motion."

He's just taken a gap year and is off to university in the fall to study acting.

“The American university has become the final stage of the most all-encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth . . . We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling.”

There was a time when I genuinely believed that if I simply made my case for play-based learning, the world would see the logic, not to mention the humanity, and rally around the project of reformation. That was the whole point of this blog in the first place. I was naive, of course, but the intervening decades have not made me cynical if only because I know that even if I was just their preschool teacher, they learned that it's not just okay, but essential to play, which is another way of saying to find their purpose and strive to be free.

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