Ivan Illich’s 1971 strident critique of the institutionalization not only of learning but of society and its values as a whole.
His thesis, much compressed: Learning—which individuals naturally pursue and derive from their physical and social environments—has been supplanted and monopolized by schooling, which not only demands that individuals not only spend most of their time in artificial, authoritarian settings, learning topics specified by others, but also makes them obediant perpetuators of a prescriptive social order in which only authority-certified knowledge is legitimate, and one must always be seeking more. Illich proposes a return to a more naturalistic decentralized learning environment in which people learn things they care about, in authentic environments, from peers and “masters” in their communities. But his proposal isn’t a simple “return”: he suggests social and technological systems which can coordinate these learning networks more effectively and give people the autonomous agency they need to pursue what matters to them. He hopes this “deschooling” will not transform not only learning but also society itself, replacing modernity’s all-consuming systematization with human-scale networks of care.
The current search for educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.
We are all involvedin schooling, from both the side of production and that of consumption. We are superstitiously convinced that good learning can and should be produced in us—and that we can produce it in others. Our attempt to withdraw from the concept of school will reveal the resistance we find in ourselves when we try to renounce limitless consumption and the pervasive presumption that others can be manipulated for their own good. No one is fully exempt from the exploitation of others in the schooling process.
Note an important contrast from John Dewey, also generally viewed as a reformer:
These pacified in society are well described by Dewey, who wants us to “make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society, and permeate it with the spirit of art, history, and science.”
Both Illich and Dewey believe in learning in community, in a holistic approach to development. But Dewey seeks to construct isolated "enclaves" where this happens, in imitation of the real version. Illich wants to structure society so that learning happens in the real versions.
Our present educational institutions are at the service of the teacher’s goals. The relational structures we need are those which will enable each man to define himself by learning and by contributing to the learning of others.
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 those secrets.
The planning of new educational institutions…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?”