"Many students, especially those who are poor, 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.
In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery."
I loved Illich when I was in high school. I read all of his books, dug up old audio recordings, and even built a website hosting all of the hard-to-find stuff he wrote.
Reflecting on his work now, I think Illich's anti-institutionism was extreme and his alternatives are genuinely not compelling.
Deschooling Society's critique is powerful, and Learning Webs is literally exactly how I learned how to program. But, it's an entirely unworkable alternative for like 60% of students. If we deschooled, we would absolutely end up with a double-digit percentage of the population either illiterate, innumerate, or both.
If you're honest with yourself, Medical Nemesis is has some great passages but in it is also the germs of the anti-vaccination and natural healing movements.
His critiques are powerful but the answer is not deinstitutionalism. The answer is taking his Tools for Conviviality to heart when engaging with/through institutions.
Without conviviality, Learning Webs will become a "Platform" with blood-sucking silicon valley middle men taking a 20% cut on all education spending and gig worker teachers languishing away in poverty. Of course, Illich would just say SV platform capitalism is also an institution^1.
With convivality, even the most institutional institutions can become places for human flourishing (Illich spent his life in the Catholic church, after all!)
So, I love Illich's critique. And Illich was a genius, in the sense that he proposed online education 30 years before the internet was invented.
But deschooling isn't the answer.
Conviviality is.
--
[^1]: which is one of the reasons that Foucault is worth reading of Illich resonates -- Illich always sort of grounded out in a no-true-scottsman when you point out his alternatives don't work. Foucault provides a more robust theory by explaining how power and institutions relate to one another.
> If we deschooled, we would absolutely end up with a double-digit percentage of the population either illiterate, innumerate, or both.
This is already the case with our current schooling system; there double-digit percentages of school leavers who are functionally illiterate, and even more who are innumerate.
Not enough people understand this. It blew my mind when I first learned about illiteracy rates among Americans. And once you understand innumeracy you begin to understand just how vulnerable people are to coercion. And how people think that 1% fatality rates are no big deal.
The illiteracy rate in the US is really quite incredible, with the federal government reporting something like 20% of the population to be "low literacy"
Wow - I really thought the first gp in this thread must be wrong, and then researched the UK and we are similar - around 20 to 25 percent. Blows my mind - it appears the levels haven't changed much since the 40s in the UK - which shocked me.
Are there many people who think 1% fatality rate is no big deal? I haven't seen many. But of course the illiterate would not be commenting much online.
There are many who don't think COVID is a big deal, because it doesn't have anywhere close to a 1% fatality rate. But that's not quite the same thing.
Yes, I was referring to covid, but just an example. Initially experts thought thought 1% was correct for covid, AND people thought it was not a big deal.
Thankfully there have been reports that make us think the fatality rate is much less than 1%, but that doesn't change the fact that people though 1% was a tiny number.
Hence the need for numeracy. You need to be able to do a little bit of thinking for any given number, the context, etc. For example, think about all the people you know, and also how that 0.01 might not be a random sampling of the entire population, but "cluster" in certain cohorts like the elderly, and consider that 0.01 is the worst-case outcome, but in many situations more will still have really bad consequences.
Agreed both being very impressed by Illich, but it not being workable. I dimly recall The Alphabetisation of the Popular Mind arguing that possibly you shouldn't teach language. Maybe this has merit (on the lines of Lanier arguing the midi-fication of music is detrimental which is clearer), but is the analogy that musical notation shouldn't happen.
My Illich-worship hit a bump when talking to an Aussie English Phd who was much cleverer than me. After my first sentence she said "the problem with people who like Ivan Illich is they just want to talk about Illich". Touche
But well worth reading, and a convivial life is a good life.
> My Illich-worship hit a bump when talking to an Aussie English Phd who was much cleverer than me. After my first sentence she said "the problem with people who like Ivan Illich is they just want to talk about Illich". Touche
Because he was basically right, and not that many people are right (Rousseau was another one, Hobbes and Machiavelli too) so it's worth talking about those who are. Of course most of what he's saying is not "workable", but we tend to forget that the not being "workable" part is specific to a technological society like ours and thus maybe the "technological society" part is the problem itself.
Yes, if you want to keep nuclear power plants running you need a technocracy [1] that you need to have educated before the fact, but maybe we've been looking at all this the wrong way all the time and we don't actually need nuclear power plants and we don't need super-sonic flights.
The amount of calories we're able to extract from the earth is proportionate to the amount of energy we can produce. If we stop generating large amounts of energy, the population will shrink dramatically. If we keep generating it, the population will eventually grow to exceed carrying capacity.
It's the wrong level of abstraction. There is no answer.
Another take on conviviality is from its root - 'to live with'. Hannah Arendt (and I'm sure many others) argues that 'living with' other people, well, in a polity, where you inevitably have different views, is a key problem of modern life. If you are strong at sciences as a kid, it often takes you a while to understand this.
Illich reminds me a lot of Ayn Rand. Not so much for what they believe, but in the way that both of their worldviews appeal so much to sheltered but intelligent teenagers. If you have a very limited depth of understanding of the world and how complex it can be, they seem to have ALL the answers.
The danger of confusing process with substance is definitely an interesting point. Everyone can probably think of an example where that's happened.
But as someone who learned unix and some CS among other things in public schools in a way that would have been impossible out of anything provided at home I'm definitely reluctant to throw that institution entirely under the bus.
And in general I'd think that a forum full of people who make process for a living (software is arguably nothing but process) should understand that while systems are often full of blind spots that doesn't mean they're without their utility.
What's needed is to figure out how to make services/systems/institutions with value.
I think a more fundamental and seldom-agreed-upon question is what constitutes substance in the first place.
I would argue that it’s very rare to find an answer that is truly coherent in that it corresponds to reality, is internally consistent, and doesn’t devolve into absurdity (turtles all the way down, etc.). I only know of one, and it’s rooted in the Christian worldview.
This is echoed by Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America, published in 1977:
"The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared people. The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint—that of individual persons. We then begin to see the grotesquery—indeed, the impossibility—of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness.
The first, and best known, hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists—people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest, in preventing. More common, and more damaging, are the inventors, manufacturers, and salesmen of devices who have no concern for the possible effects of those devices. Specialization is thus seen to be a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility.
Even worse, a system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competences and responsibilities that were once personal and universal. Thus, the average—one is tempted to say, the ideal—American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturists and “agribusinessmen,” the problems of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators, the problems of conservation to conservationists, and so on. This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns: making money and entertaining himself. He earns money, typically, as a specialist, working an eight-hour day at a job for the quality or consequences of which somebody else—or, perhaps more typically, nobody else—will be responsible. And not surprisingly, since he can do so little else for himself, he is even unable to entertain himself, for there exists an enormous industry of exorbitantly expensive specialists whose purpose is to entertain him." [1]
It is makes lovely and invigorating fiction to imagine men who have learned to competently conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, butcher a hog, set a bone, and program a 1973-era computer. But life is short and any art takes long to learn to sufficient depth that you can solve dynamic complex problems.
How many more men would have died if Eisenhower had planned the D-day invasion without being able to delegate a huge number of urgent and important tasks like weather prediction to specialists like Meteorologist James Martin Stagg?
How easily could a hobbyist Cessna pilot land a passenger jet in the Hudson river?
You’re not looking at it radically enough. “How would a non-specialist survive in a specialized world?” is not the question the author seeks to answer. Rather, the question is “what would a non-specialized world look like?” and I think the answer is something resembling pre-agricultural society.
Wanted to call out that this would probably require most of us to never have existed. Specialization is more efficient at the macro level; this efficiency is why there are 7b humans instead of many fewer.
Yes and this gets into some very difficult questions of population ethics. What is the right amount of people for the world? Is it 7 billion or 70 billion or 700 billion? Or is it 700 million or just 70 million?
Increases in economic output, agricultural and industrial, make it possible for more people to survive. If further and further specialization lead to more and more efficiency with ever growing population, is there a point where we decide things have gotten worse? Or do we slide down the slippery slope into some hellish future dystopia with 700 trillion people, crammed into skyscrapers full of capsule apartments, subsisting on genetically engineered bio-protein sludge and pacified by neuro-electrical stimulation? Not far off from The Matrix.
Apart from there being a 'right answer', there does appear to be an answer for how many people we will be: the world population is expected to level off at 11 billion or so as global birthrates drop off (mainly as most countries catch up to a transition a few have already gone through). Without substantial changes to our society it seems it will stay there or slowly decline.
And once we get there, there will be some very tough questions about how to ensure the rate of economic growth that we’ve come to expect to ensure a sustainable quality of life for people.
Perhaps there will be breakthroughs in preventing aging, automation etc. that will allow for sustainable living then? Maybe. It’s an interesting question.
OTOH, we could also simply descend into nuclear war and reset civilization.
Your line of questioning goes against the intent of the critique. Which is: while perhaps (but not always) good for the institution and the societal whole, the gains from specialization are at the cost of individual wholeness.
Questioning how shifting the focus from society to the individual would harm the larger whole seems to skirt around the discussion.
Was the unidimensional valor given for Stagg’s meteorological accomplishments a worthy reward for a lifetime of hyper-specialization?
And to the, in my opinion more important, flipside: how does the psyche heal when, perhaps for reasons entirely outside of an individuals’ control, the specialized-man fails the one task they spent a lifetime training for. What happens when you define a man by one function and in the critical moment they fail?
This seems like a majorly contrived line of reasoning to me.
A person does not spend their entire lives training to succeed at one particular task on one particular day. The career of a specialist will comprise decades worth of accomplishments and failures, both big and small.
Such a career will also be only one portion of a persons life. If a person were to derive their entire reason for existing from their career, then they’re going to have a shallow and unfulfilling life. No matter whether they specialize or not, or whether they’re successful or not.
The critique that specialists lack the broader contextual knowledge/skills required to apply their speciality also seems invalid to me. Such people are simply skilled ICs, who are instructed on how to apply their skills by others. A highly skilled programmer may not know what programs to write, or what problems they should try and solve. But that’s fine if they work with a skilled product manager who can tell them what to do. Why would it be necessary for all of the roles required to solve a problem to be performed by a single person?
A world without specialists would simply be a world where nothing that requires specialist skills/knowledge can be accomplished. Aside from the obvious problems that would cause, I don’t see how that would actually solve any of the problems that are purportedly being attributed to specialization.
I think these are excellent things to keep in mind, but the vast majority of real life is not D-Day or crash landing in the Hudson. I'd go so far as to say that most people hardly ever even spend any time solving "dynamic complex problems." People being really, really good at stuff is important, but I don't think it follows that everyone should only do one thing.
I have a hunch that Eisenhower himself was probably a person who could do most of the things on that list.
Sure, people should indeed become "sorta good" at multiple skills. In practice, they do. Many people know how to doodle or play charades or tell stories or sing sea-shanties. Otherwise, hobbyist Cessna pilots would not exist -- nor the word "hobby". In real life, statements like "he is even unable to entertain himself" are pretty false.
> the vast majority of real life is not D-Day or crash landing in the Hudson
Sure, but a significant portion of life is spent interacting with the results of other people's work. When you get into a car, would you rather that its microcontrollers were programmed by someone who
A: Felt continually distressed and defeated that he had not thoroughly mastered sailing, animal husbandry, military history, rhetoric, first aid, copy-editing, painting, masonry, carpentry, and several other skills.
B: Felt fulfilled that the only domains in which he had deep knowledge were microcontroller programming, cooking seafood to his wife's taste, and the emotional/medical meanings of their child's sounds -- yet that they had merely a hobbyists' knowledge of hiking, sketching, kites, anime, and the history of flight.
Because I'd rather a world with more of B and less of A.
> I have a hunch that Eisenhower himself was probably a person who could do most of the things on that list.
Further supporting your point, that is perhaps why they are called “Generals”, IE: they have mastered enough areas that they are now generalists able to approach many subject areas and problem sets.
Wiki says: "The term general is used in two ways: as the generic title for all grades of general officer and as a specific rank. It originates in the 16th century, as a shortening of captain general, which rank was taken from Middle French capitaine général. The adjective general had been affixed to officer designations since the late medieval period to indicate relative superiority or an extended jurisdiction." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_officer
- conn a ship: It mentions no naval career. It does mention fishing, so there is a decent probability that he could handle a canoe. But if that is the standard for "conn a ship", then this whole argument is basically just "people should have hobbies" which...okay sure. And they already do.
- design a building: No mention of this. He attended West Point, which is also an engineering school, but that is very weak evidence. I went to MIT and the only building design I've ever done is that of a shed. Again, people should have hobbies.
- write a sonnet: Google searches for "poetry by Dwight D Eisenhower", "Ike sonnet", "Eisenhower Sonnet", and "Sonnet by Eisenhower" do not turn up anything. Maybe he wrote poetry to his wife, but we have no evidence of it. Again, people should have hobbies.
- balance accounts: I'm happy to just assume this to be true as part of his career's focus in being able to organize troops.
- butcher a hog: His father worked as a railroad mechanic and then at a creamery. They were not wealthy. There's no mention of his working in agriculture. He did like hunting, so its totally plausable that he could dress a deer. But he didn't work on a farm or in a slaughterhouse or meat-packing plant. Why would someone who owned pigs waste the meat/time/money to teach someone how to slaughter them as even a hobby?
- set a bone: Plausable, but I see a number of sports-related leg injuries.
- program a 1973-era computer: He died in 1969
I could go and try to research this more thoroughly, but it is hard to prove a negative and time is a global variable.
> But what is the real-life practical alternative?
> But life is short and any art takes long to learn to sufficient depth that you can solve dynamic complex problems.
In the time I spent playing DOTA my brother learned Chinese AND learned enough about programming to get his first programming gig paying about $80k/year.
While it can take a long time, even a lifetime, to master a field you can get to a competent level surprisingly quickly.
It always pains me greatly to read writers from times past about social issues whose voice rings distinctly true today still. Because it means that understanding the problem is completely uncorrelated to being able to do anything about it.
Under the creakingly ancient system the conservative holds to, man is a wolf to other men. Under the shiny new system the progressive touts, it's exactly the opposite.
(I hope you are either a masochist or don't read many social writers from times past. The Code of Hammurabi indicates social issues 3'700 years ago are similar to those of our day.)
That whole argument is a massive straw-man in service of a libertarian attack on the funding of social institutions like hospitals and schools.
I would hope that for consistency, Illich on principle refused to take treatment from Germany's health care system, populated by medical professionals who are the product of the
education system he so detested.
There is a lot to be critiqued with the way that medicine and education are practiced and paid for, but to enjoy the benefits of both, while laying fault at the feet of institutionalized medicine and education while ignoring the context both operate borders on hypocrisy.
I agree. And it's such an easy target. Everybody hate schools.
But the fact of the matter is that public schools were one of the prominent factors in reducing poverty around the world.
As in any institution, it may calcify and be corrupted. But that's just how systems are, injecting the right amount of innovation usually takes care of that. No need to throw the baby with the water, and rethink the whole paradigm. I think that usually the commodditization of social services is what actually kills these systems. They become a race to the bottom, where marketing gets to be more important than substance and genuine interest in quality.
Illich wasn't against school per-se. He was against compulsory school, centralized pedagogy, and other attributes of a "modern" (ala 1970s) schooling system in Western social democracies.
He was particularly concerned with how the tenants of modernism affected developing nations (where he lived for much of his life) by pushing traditional methods into forced obsolescence in favor of ever-increasing reliance on social institutions.
His views on policy may or may not be on point (he seems most comfortable in the area of principle and theory), but the conceptual core that relates his views on education to his views on cars and medicine merits consideration.
He similarly wasn't against scientific medicine, but he thought the medical bureaucracy had outgrown its utility: that advances in specialized medicine were too expensive and served to prop up artificially unhealthy lives.
A strong line of his argument is that past a tipping point of size/power, institutions will create the needs they serve. We create these artificial environments where it's hard for most people to thrive and then we create social institutions to compensate: a social prosthetic.
The result in Illich's view is increasing passivity and helplessness: a petulant society composed of a disempowered citizenry.
The argument no-doubt merits a balancing counter-argument, but I find it compelling and it goes deeper than a simplistic dismissal of school.
There's a recording of a teacher asking how to infuse lessons from deschooling into her classroom and his response is basically "you can't". He's actually a bit rude about it tbh.
Illich was opposed to schooling. He would have said he was in favor of "education". Nailing down what that would mean on the scale of a society, aside from learning webs, is a bit elusive.
I think Illich provided a fantastic prognosis of certain problems but didn't develop workable solutions.
Most critical theory doesn’t come with a proposed set of workable solutions or policy suggestions. It is important to separate the expectation and allow critique to be just that.
Anyhow, the first step to a solving a problem is identifying it; they need not be atomic operations.
That would be fine if the quote didn't include this bit:
"...and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question."
That's where he veers into making a policy recommendation (defunding social institutions), and where he is no longer engaging in critical theory but in pushing a particular policy agenda, therefore opening his critique (some of which I'd even agree with) to practical criticism from people with more skin in the game.
Critique is not helpful if you don't know anything about the feasibility of alternative approaches. "I want a pony!" is not a worthwhile critique of anything, it's merely a fallacy.
While I’ve added the critique to my reading list, I have yet to finish. I cannot speak to your claim the Illich’s critique is based on what he so desires (“I want a pony”), as opposed to describing a phenomenon of individual emptiness as a side-effect of Western institutions.
I agree if his long-form critique takes the structure you claim, it is of poor quality because claiming desires in not critical of anything.
However, I do disagree with your claim the critique alone is not helpful. A harsh, well formed critique is typically the very first pillar in driving change. Expecting identification and resolution in the same piece is asking too much.
I would argue to say that a critique being invalidated because it somehow must include both framing and describing a phenomenon as well as suggesting changes, each weighted by their feasibility in remedying the systemic woes, is much more fallacious.
It's actually a pretty good time to rethink everything. The modern school was designed when most adults were illiterate, books were expensive, and we needed to train the population to work in our factories or join the military. Schools did a good job at that.
But times are different.
1. Most adults are literate — When kids have questions about letters or words while they are teaching themselves to read they have a huge supply of adults and older children to get help from.
2. Books are so cheap to produce that we literally throw them away when we are done and the internet has provided the material for a lifetime of education for what is essentially free — And formats (like 3blue1brown animations that couldn't have been imagined a century ago).
3. We don't need to train the population to be obedient for factories or the military. Society can continue without so many people pretending to work. Let them continue to educated themselves until they discover something that benefits the rest of society.
> 1. Most adults are literate — When kids have questions about letters or words while they are teaching themselves to read they have a huge supply of adults and older children to get help from.
I had first grader during corona lock down and I can tell you that ability to read/write does not imply ability to help the kid to learn to read and write. This part about kids learning to read by themselves and by asking question of adults around of, frankly, complete nonsense for wast majority of kids.
Not sure to what extent we need to rethink primary education, vs refining it. Your points 1 and 2 are true _because_ the education system has excelled at increasing the knowledge of the average person.
It's actually a pretty good time to rethink everything. The modern school was designed when most adults were illiterate, books were expensive, and we needed to train the population to work in our factories or join the military. Schools did a good job at that.
Is this a historical reality that schools are built for factory style education? Citation is needed.
> I agree. And it's such an easy target. Everybody hate schools.
This is not true. I dont hate schools. My kids dont hate schools. My friends did not hated schools and my kids friends dont hate schools. There are people, both adults and kids who hate school, of course. And then there are very crappy schools. Speaking to my collegues, they dont hate schools and only two hated school as a kid. And even these do like their kids schools, but they took more care about what is going on there (like they put more effort into selection of school).
But I think that people HN are heavily biased against the schools, the way no other forum or social group I encountered is.
You are right, Of course I exggarated. But for a significant chunk of people I school is something you don't like. It's significant enough to be a cultural trope[0]. This makes it an easy target, and a useful hook to get support for any anti social institution criticism.
> But for a significant chunk of people I school is something you don't like.
That is much milder sentiment through and I think the difference matters. And significant chunk of people perceives school positively or neutrally.
> This makes it an easy target, and a useful hook to get support for any anti social institution criticism.
My problem is that while I see this a lot on HN, I don't see it anywhere else. Including in people who loudly criticize this or that aspect of education or school. The positive attitude toward school is unrepresented on HN, despite being present in real life and in studies that measure attitudes.
Similarly, the people on HN are way more pushing homeschooling then anyone else I know ... including people on forums for stay at home moms or general mom forums (who would be in position to do it and tend to be biased more toward family/children interests). Reading HN, one would believe that the only reason to not homeschool is that you cant afford one parent at home. And that those parents are unhappy for having kids in school and that those kids are unhappy. That sentiment is not present among people who are actually at home and could theoretically homeschool if they were inclined to.
The whole thing seems to me political ideological. Some people here want everyone to hate the school, but it does not make it so.
I agree with your critique in the first paragraph, but I disagree with your second.
You can criticize a system while still participating in it; just because you think there should be a better system doesn't mean that the current system is worse than nothing.
I dislike the US health care system, and think we should move from private insurance to a single payer model. However, I still currently have private insurance and participate in the system, because I need healthcare and my only choice right now is private insurance.
> You can criticize a system while still participating in it
I agree with this wholeheartedly, but Illich called for the abolishment of social institutions altogether, not the improvement of them.
I'm quite suspicious of such calls for abolishing institutions rather than reforming them - whether from the right or left - because they are often just cloaked attempts to replace those institutions with their own preferred "purer" institutions. In the case of Illich, his preferred institutions would seem to be somewhat connected to his religious work as a priest.
> dislike the US health care system, and think we should move from private insurance to a single payer model
Single-payer/Medicare-for-all is just advocating for reform of the health care system by removal of the pathologies of private insurance, not the abolishment of shared risk pools altogether. It's an evolution of the current system, not the destruction of it.
> I would hope that for consistency, Illich on principle refused to take treatment
If memory serves Illich tolerated (and perhaps died from?) a prominent tumor on his face which he refused to have treated.
(That I would remember him as an exception in part makes your point.)
Apparent confirmation: "His charisma, brilliance and spirituality were clear to anyone who encountered him; these qualities sustained him in a heroic level of activity over the last 10 years in the context of terrible suffering caused by a disfiguring cancer." From the Guardian:
Yep, while the general shortcoming of the population described is true, it's not schools fault.
Humans are not infinitely malleable, in fact, most are not malleable by much. To blame the shortcoming of biological human on institution that tries to correct them (but largely fails to achieve the high bar he's aiming for) is idiotic.
No, because none of them are calling for the abolishment of the country they live in. They are calling for its improvement, just as many of their reasonable opponents do.
Abolition (abolishing something) can be an improvement, except when it's not.
From one point of view, those reasonable anarchists and marxists are only seeking to "improve" the US. From the other point of view they are trying to abolish it. You're forced to pick a side. Jacobin calls for revolution demand binary outcomes. It's exactly analogous to Illych proposing that education can only be improved by abolishing educational institutions. There's no middle ground.
> Abolition (abolishing something) can be an improvement, except when it's not.
You're shifting your argument. Both AOC and Omar are Democratic Socialists (in same vein as the traditionally dominant parties of Northern Europe), not anarchists or marxists. Neither is calling for the abolishment of the US or its governmental institutions, but rather for its growing wealth and income inequality to be addressed. If anything, the loudest voices for abolishment of state institutions today are coming from the right.
I'm sticking to the issue of consistency and honesty which you introduced and I'm avoiding all substance and value judgements in keeping with the dialectical style of the forum. The analogy was intended to help you understand why Illych is not somehow inconsistent or hypocritical.
It's not inconsistent of Illych to try to dismantle a system that (you claim) he benefited from. The Jacobin progressives in the US are not inconsistent to try to dismantle the foundations of their host system through the procedures of that system. You would have to limit your observations to prima facie statements to argue that they are not intellectually dishonest crypto-marxists (BLM excluded). Illych and BLM are perhaps more intellectually honest than AOC and Omar. ++good for them.
and Northern European Democratic socialist parties are neither traditional or dominant unless you only look at the very immediate past and future.
I feel like the concept of deschooling was written without taking into mind the actual humans behind the curtains. The idea of removing schools in favor of self-guided education seems like a good idea at first, but ignores the numerous factors that would make it hard for a lot of people to actually do so on their own.
For example most of my middle and high school life was spent being severely depressed due to various life circumstances. School was more or less a routine affair that allowed me to disconnect briefly from my home life and without that escape I likely would've simply stopped learning altogether.
"And above all, I believed Sambo and Flip when they told me they were my benefactors. ... from Sambo's point of view I was a good speculation. He sank money in me, and ... I won him scholarships when the time came ... But it is difficult for a child to realize that a school is primarily a commercial venture. A child believes that the school exists to educate ... Flip and Sambo had chosen to befriend me, and their friendship included canings, reproaches and humiliations, which were good for me and saved me from an office stool. That was their version, and I believed in it. It was therefore clear that I owed them a vast debt of gratitude. But I was not grateful, as I very well knew. ... But it is wicked, is it not, to hate your benefactors?"
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.”
~ Robert Anson Heinlein
Yeah, I call BS. I don't know any insect with more than half a dozen specialized roles. Mankind surpassed that before we built pyramids.
Just think about how many unique professions are required before your daily job even starts to make sense. Someone is being paid to monitor a tank of fluorine compound so that it can be used to etch silicon wafers.
I don't think he's saying that a single species of insect will have specialists in many different roles. I think he's saying that there are millions of species of insects and each species usually specializes in one thing so that they can survive in a specific environmental niche.
I don't think specialization by humans is bad, but I agree that specialization can go too far sometimes. If the person being paid to monitor a tank of fluorine loses the ability to do their own laundry or hold a conversation because they are spending so much of their time developing fluorine tank monitoring skills it's kind of a waste. Part of the human experience is learning and doing lots of different things. Even if our economy rewards hyper-specialization that doesn't mean that a person's entire life has to be focused on their hyper-specialized job.
That's the whole point though: you don't need "to monitor a tank of fluorine compound so that it can be used to etch silicon wafers" if you're computing with clockwork or fluidics. (I'm not knocking silicon, just pointing out that there are alternatives.)
Also, humans are the only species that can run a marathon, swim a lake, and climb a tree. We are generalists.
Diversification is a huge luxury, which you can afford if you are worth over a 100 mil and focus your life on being diversified. Even then it's questionable whether you are able to bring it all together ala DaVinci, Alexander, Caesar, etc. Seems we are past that point in history.
Anyone ever figure out if even Heinlein himself accomplished those skills? Because, frankly, it makes a nice trope or whatever, but I question the literal seriousness Heinlein had when he wrote that. Perhaps as an early prototype of The World's Most Interesting Man, but not to be taken as a literal bucket list.
As an engineer and military officer that made a career of writing, was active in real estate and silver mining and politics, knowing not a single other thing about him, I assume (and I am, admittedly, erring a little on the side of generosity in my assumptions, but my goal is to aim for "is it plausible?" not "did he definitely?"):
-to change a diaper
-plan an invasion (navy officer)
-butcher a hog
-conn a ship (navy, engineer)
-design a building (engineer)
-write a sonnet (writer)
-balance accounts (numerate)
-build a wall (engineer)
-set a bone
-comfort the dying
-take orders (officer)
-give orders (officer)
-cooperate (officer)
-act alone (probably)
-solve equations (engineer)
-analyze a new problem (engineer)
-pitch manure
-program a computer (engineer)
-cook a tasty meal
-fight efficiently (officer)
-die gallantly (officer)
15 / 21 ain't bad, and the remainder aren't implausible either. A little googling suggests he was born in 1907 in Missouri, so he probably gets butchering a hog and pitching manure. Cooking a tasty meal is a fairly low bar for any functioning human to meet - that's 18/21.
He didn't have kids, so I'm not willing to grant him diaper-changing without a reason to. I can't find any medic training, so I won't give him setting a bone. And I'm not sure anyone knows how to comfort the dying.
18/21 is quite plausible. The remaining three are possible.
For goodness' sake, why is that important outside of the military?
> -butcher a hog
Irrelevant to most people.
> -conn a ship
So? Are we in the navy or maritime service? A gent in Montana has no need of this,
> -design a building
Design, engineer, or build?
> -write a sonnet
Popular for schoolchildren. Says little. Interpretation of sonnets says more.
> -balance accounts
I'll give heinlein that.
> -build a wall
So?
> -set a bone
Useful enough, sure.
> -comfort the dying
Yeah, that's good.
> -take orders
Still not in the military
> -give orders
Still not in the military
> -cooperate
Sure!
-act alone
Sure!
-solve equations
What kind of equation? Arithmetic, algebra, calculus, analysis?
> -analyze a new problem
What kind of analysis? This is extremely specialized.
> -pitch manure
If manure matters in your life, otherwise: so what
> -program a computer
Useful to me, but not relevant to most people
> -cook a tasty meal
Sure.
> -fight efficiently
Still not in the military.
> -die gallantly
Baloney. The Great War should have cured him of this dream.
"Heinlein really likes the military" is my take away. Most of his vaunted list is deeply irrelevant to outright obnoxious to me. It's like reading a "bet you couldn't solve these problems 1850s kids had to solve" thing. Anchored in the past and a different priority system.
Should you be able to provide first aid, cook well, and work with others? Yes. Do reading, riting, and rithmatic? Yeah, sure. That's kind of what the point of the school system is for.
Honestly. No one will know everything, and no one should strive to be ignorant, misanthropic, and uncultured. I could size up my life and write a similar list, but it'd only be a reflection of my priorities in life.
> - to change a diaper
> Ok? What if one never intends to have kids.
Then...one should still have that skill. I mean, I didn't have kids until my 40s and the only decade of my life where I didn't apply that skill was the first.
> -plan an invasion
> For goodness' sake, why is that important outside of the military?
It's not, but Heinlein—and while some of the list might be more Long-the-character than Heinlein though the broad outline is clearly Heinlein, including at least the outline of the military focus of not the particular examples—(hardly uniquely in US history, one might note—this was a common belief among the founders) viewed military service, including leadership, as something one should be prepared to assume at need (whether on behalf of or against one’s government, as dictated by the need) not a profession for a distinct and isolated caste whose skills the rest of society could afford to neglect, and viewed the contrary view as incompatible with liberty. (I imagine that, had our adulthooda overlapped, as they didn't quite, I'd have been pretty far from Heinlein politically. But on this point, we could agree.)
> The Great War should have cured him of this dream.
That someone should be prepared to die gallantly at need does not imply that the Great War (or war generally) is particularly the occasion where such death was most likely to be called for. Certainly while Heinlein clearly believed it was possible that that could occur, one could hardly read his body of work without recognizing that he saw that possibility outside of war and, likewise saw much, if not most, death in war as pointless and unnecessary.
> Anchored in the past and a different priority system.
It may have been written a half century ago by someone whose formative years were a century ago, but I don't see anything particularly dated about it. It may speak to a different set of ideals than you hold, but I don't know why it is surprising or irritating that disagreement on that level exists.
The point is that we should have the ability to be self-reliant and shouldn’t rely on school or government to set the agenda for what’s important to learn. Make your own list. Step outside the bounds of what your job is and learn some other skills. Build a deck, drift a car, deploy containers in k8s, make jam, grow a garden, fight city hall, etc. The list is irrelevant just make one.
> Because, frankly, it makes a nice trope or whatever, but I question the literal seriousness Heinlein had when he wrote that.
I wouldn't take anything Heinlein put in Lazarus Long’s—or any other fictional character’s—mouth as representing his simple literal view unless Heinlein also said it directly in a nonfictional context.
You're not far off talking about "The World's Most Interesting Man". It's a quote from Time Enough for Love, which is about Lazarus Long, a genetically modified human who lives for 2000 years.
Also consider that it's not as impressive a list as it rhetorically seems. If you spit into a crowd of people at least 30 years old, you'll probably hit a person who has done at least 10 of them, maybe more.
I grew up reading books espousing this type of stuff, but the older I got, the more I realized how much of a pipe dream it is. As a kid, you think you can master everything, as an adult, you realize how much maintenance each of these skills take. So even if you "learn to fight" or "program a computer" well once, it will quickly fade if not maintained...for an hour or two a day. You can see how that short-circuits the list quickly.
Once you start digging deep enough into problems to make a difference there is not enough hours in the day to be more than a dilettante in a more than a limited set of topics.
One does need some general skills, some of those listed above, but you'll definitly need first aid skills like stopping bleeding before learning how to set a bone. School is about the only place that systematically teaches general skills to everyone, not just people with paretns with enough time, skills and energy to do so or hire someone to do that for them.
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them
You wish they knew but they don't. The kids, especially the poor ones, want worksheets, not problems. They want to pass but not learn. They want a degree without the competence. They want a job without possibility of advancement and if you don't provide that they resent you because you are in the way.
> The kids, especially the poor ones, want worksheets, not problems.
No, they want out, for both right and wrong reasons, or they want school as a refuge from an even worse home situation, or they want and seek out problems beyond the worksheets, and learn how to extract value from a flawed system. Or...well, lots of other things, kids, even poor ones, not being homogenous, but “thet want worksheets, not problems” is pretty rare. Wanting to pass but not learn is maybe sometimes an epiphenomenon of other motivations (school as refuge plus adverse consequences at both school and home for not passing, for instance.)
> They want a job without possibility of advancement
No one specifically wants wants that, though many see “possibility of advancement” as illusionary for people of their background.
You're describing the Nth generation in a hopeless environment, not children in general. This is an encultured attitude, not an innate one. Illich's point, and one born out by learning research is that the desire to learn, to gain knowledge and mastery for its own sake - is innate to such an extent that it can actually be diminished by extrinsic rewards. All children share this.
Complete agreement about the hopeless environment. My point was that the enculturation works extremely reliably. I have not met a single student who questioned or rejected the culture. It is dejecting, and you despise the kids for that.
> I have not met a single student who questioned or rejected the culture.
Both as a student myself and later as a long-term sub in a high school for a while in a poor district, I met lots of students who rejected whatever you might want to (rightly or wrongly) characterize as “the culture”, including many who adapted to what they saw as the incentives in the system while still rejecting the culture and attitudes they perceived as setting those incentives.
>This is an encultured attitude, not an innate one
The only encultured attitude I see here is the modern western delusion that the average child (or person) intrinsically wants to make the substantial, multi year effort required to learn complex subjects.
The vast majority of people do not enjoy learning. No one wants to spend their time on math problems (outside of a tiny minority).
This is also tied to the nonsensical idea that we are all equally capable of everything; the ability to learn (both in general and by specific subject) is randomly distributed and probably normally so like many biological processes. That itself ensures that given equal curiosity, not all children will make the varied effort required to learn.
Illich's concept of a "Radical Monopoly," is also immensely relevant to internet platforms.
Radical monopoly is a concept defined by philosopher and author Ivan Illich in his 1973 book, "Tools for Conviviality," and revisited in his later work, which describes how a technology or service becomes so exceptionally dominant that even with multiple providers, its users are excluded from society without access to the product. His initial example is the effect of cars on societies, where the car itself shaped cities by its needs, so much so that people without cars become excluded from participation in cities. A radical monopoly is when the dominance of one type of product supersedes dominance by any one brand.
Social media as a technology in the forms of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter could be seen as a radical monopoly for reputation, as is Linkedin for employment, colleges for education, etc.
I think Illich's criticisms of car culture pushed him outside the Overton window of policy making, but his radical monopoly concept is a useful critical tool for reasoning about tech and ethics. A counter argument could use the example that the discovery of fire created a radical monopoly on heat, and therefore it's so general as to be applied arbitrarily to anything you don't like. However, being able to think about the consequences of a new radical monopoly might have on some aspect of human experience is useful for anticipating policy options in response to dynamic technology development.
Fire can be produced by nearly anyone with a bare minimum level of competence and coordination required (flint and steel, two sticks and a string, various other methods). A car or college education cannot be provided by a person to themselves. They are reliant both on the thing to participate in society, and on society in order to obtain the thing.
Yes it's controversial, but that controversy is not evenly distributed: there many places one can be openly anti-car and still get elected. (And that's not even counting proportional representation giving voice to minority views.)
It's a fringe view in most of them. Sure, quite a few people in many places don't drive or feel the need to, but I suspect if you asked the population at large what they thought of cars as an concept/invention/technology, they'd be at worst neutral to them, and often see the positive side.
I know for sure that most people around here either drive or want to, and that many peope consider it unthinkable to not do so.
The anti car ideaology is something that seems far more common on Hacker News and certain online forums than it is in the real world/offline.
It's common in certain cities. More in Europe than US. But more among US urban politicians than perhaps even their constituents (which is why the GP about public policy is silly).
US major cities I'd wager is like even split between politicians that like cars, politicians that dislike cars but are too scared to do anything about it, and politicians that dislike cars and aren't scared.
Here's to hoping we get more Ada Colau and less Bill de Blasio.
His essay on (in part) cars drove (haha) me to run the numbers and despite being fairly conservative with how much closer-together my city would be without car infrastructure (esp. parking lots and massive, useless “green space” setbacks and margins to keep roads at a tolerable distance from people) and despite my being somewhat thrifty on car spending and having a relatively short commute—sure enough, I was right around break-even for time savings vs. a bike in a hypothetical very-few-cars version of my city.
It's crazy for most of us to imagine, but huge modern populations in Europe have been doing this for thousands of years. Dense urban cores without cars is how cities were designed to work.
It's amazingly great to get around in these places, there are shops accommodating every need you can imagine in all parts of the urban core, and it reduces a lot of friction when considering to go out for something spontaneous.
"Classroom attendance removes children from the everyday world of Western culture and plunges them into an environment far more primitive, magical, and deadly serious."
I know it was written in 1970, but back then a family could still have one person working a good job on just a high school diploma. Today, grade school serves the primary purpose as a daycare for the kids so both parents can work.
Families these days can still do it but they don’t because they are led to believe in paying for convenience and get into a cycle that turns everything in their life into something the market provides. The insidious thing is that once you get into debt it is very difficult to break this cycle.
This is very true. I know families where one parent stays home and others where both parents work. What surprised me is that there is no correlation between household income and whether or not one parent stays home (at least not in my admittedly small sample).
It’s hard to do unless one parent is comfortable with, capable of, and willing to spend years facilitating homeschooling (property near good schools is expensive). Then it’s still incredibly expensive in lost wages (and greater income insecurity/risk, which is even worse in the US due to how healthcare and retirement works, plus it probably ties the other partner to secure corporate jobs for healthcare if nothing else, and so limits upside available from riskier moves) compared with other options, unless you have several kids and the stay-at-home parent had fairly low earning potential.
One parent staying at home is not synonymous with homeschooling, and there are certainly parts of the country where affordable housing and reasonably average public schools coexist.
1. Schools are ranked by test scores mostly, which is 99% dependent on the education and income of the parents. Even then housing near schools with excellent test scores isn't expensive except in the most expensive cities in the US.
2. I totally agree about the healthcare system though it has become a lot better since ACA. Healthcare is still disgustingly expensive but at least you can still get it and if you have a normal middle income in a family with a couple kids then healthcare is essentially free.
3. Requiring two incomes is much riskier than just one. Of course living from one income and saving the other is the best, but most people don't do that, and it's harder to do if you are both working since it costs so much money to work. Not working is cheaper. Take a look at Elizabeth Warren’s book, The Two-Income Trap. It explains this paradox much better than I could.
1. Unless all the stuff about how important peers are to future success is BS then it’s still a very good thing to have your kid in good schools, even if the schools are mostly good because of who’s there rather than instruction quality.
2. Yeah ACA definitely helps, but it certainly seems like yet another program with aid cutoffs far too low, leading to a largish doldrums income zone of paying a lot for “coverage” with no subsidy, but still having enormous risk exposure and high copays discouraging normal care. Maybe some day our HC system will not suck.
3. A society with normalized single-worker households might spend less, but one operates on the norms and market(s) one finds oneself in. And anyway even income covering 90% of expenses (with things like savings and retirement temporarily cut to zero) is better than income covering 0% of expenses, so I still think two incomes is more secure even if earnings are very unequal or expenses are higher than they would be with one income.
[edit] oh I should add to #1 that in my cheap city if you use bad schools as the baseline, OK-school areas are about 1.5-2x the price for a similar house, and good-school areas are another 25-30% above the OK-schools price. Not considering the city proper, since housing prices there are weird and anyone with money and a house there doesn’t send their kids to those public schools, ever.
> It's also true that the most predictable factor when it comes to student performance in school is household income.
Assuming you mean predictive rather than predictable, the most predictive factor from what I've seen is parental educational attainment, not income or (to respond to a sibling comment) IQ.
As someone who absolutely want work and thus needs the kids somewhere during the day, the whole "school is just daycare" is crap.
My kids were at home and I worked during covid and the hell they learn more now that they are back in school. And while I still am working from home and they were actually quite cool during day, the learning effects of school are massive and massively appreciated - by both kids and me.
It would be easier and cheaper to have them in non school daycare. We don't do that, because primary reason for schools is not actually daycares.
It’s true only because you and your kids weren’t prepared and didn’t have time to think through the situation. Trying to replicate school at home is a recipe for disaster. Instead, think about what an education means to you and what you want your kids to be when they are 18 or so. Then design your years and days around that. Nobody can fault you for the result of the pandemic homeschooling experiment. Nobody was prepared. And you were trying to work from home at the same time. This last semester has pretty much just been a pause for most people.
But ... my kids did not ended badly. It was no catastrophe. There is no blame on me.
I just found that teachers know what they do better and that school is giving my kids more then I assumed before.
I could put in a lot of effort to design and plan years and days around education. But it would be awful lot of work for not much benefit. While the schools can be improved in a lot ot ways, they are much less failures then some people love to make them be.
Also, I know what it is like to be stay at home mom, I simply don't want that. It is profoundly unhappy situation for me and consequently imperfect for whole familly. I don't want it for myself and my kids don't deserved depressed stay at home me.
Failure isn't a word that I would use to describe schools — They do an excellent job of doing what they are supposed to do. Like Illich says, a single model isn't work for everyone, but let's keep the models that work for the people who want them.
For what I'm looking for traditional school is a tremendous waste of time and energy. Primary school skills don't actually need to be taught in anyway that resembles teaching. They just sort of happen naturally when you go about the business of playing and interacting with other people and engaging with society. So, my kids can do the stuff they want during the day. It doesn't take really any effort on our part as parents, other than being around them all day, which — to be honest — sucks. But for us it's a tradeoff that's worth it.
I wish we had something like the Sudbury School where we lived. There's just not enough people — Except in a few pockets around the country — That want something different for their children.
My kids did not learned to read nor write just by interacting with world. Nor basic math.
I would have to consciously manipulate them into situations for them to "naturally" learn that. Same for stuff like vocabulary, foreign language, about nature or space. Or anything history. Or general what to do when accident happen that they learn in a school too. Naturally by playing they don't learn any of that unless I consciously set up situations.
My gut feeling is that this falls apart if you try to work in the current Western work culture and rent or pay a mortgage in the current land ownership culture (especially in a major city). The kind, pace and quality of work you would do whilst simultaneously homeschooling doesn’t mesh with the current work culture. I’m fairly sure that if you could successfully homeschool whilst working, you’d have to work/produce more on local problems; have a more blended work-life balance (mixing work and non-work more freely); deadlines likely would have to be longer; you’d probably want to priorities craft and quality over mass distribution.
I find these ideas appealing, but I think you need to rip the innards out of capitalism to achieve it.
I think if we had enough effort put into it like we mobilized with the Manhattan project, we could create some amazing supplemental online material.
We have incredible technology and a good understanding of psychology. Why could we not apply some Hollywood approach to creating amazing lessons that are engaging and fun to watch?
Our undestanding of psychology is not all that great.
But what we know is that kids are social emotional animals. The relationship with teacher and other kids matter a lot. Interactions matter a lot. Own activity matter a lot.
There are fun and engaging lessons to watch, if you know where to look. The above is missing.
I hate to be that guy, but who would pay for it? The barebones and dull textbooks we have now came about because their publishers chase government money.
I'm even less hopeful there's a profit from selling to individuals or homeschool groups.
The U.S. spends upwards of half a trillion dollars per year on K-12 education (an average of $215,000 per 30 students). That doesn't include college or what parents spend out of pocket on private schools, homeschooling, tutoring, etc. I think there's plenty of money to be made by someone with a great idea and high quality execution.
Yes, the quality of education varies substantially from district to district, or even building to building, and is highly reliant on geography and local income in the United States.
> Today, grade school serves the primary purpose as a daycare for the kids so both parents can work.
I have not found this to be the case. I'm not a professional educator. I'm not going to do as good a job at educating my kids as an experienced teacher. Looking at what our kids are learning, I'm impressed by the curriculum, which at least in our district has kept up with changes in day to day life and professional expectations.
This is oft-repeated, but in my opinion, the question isn't whether you are a better educator than a professional educator, the question is can you teach your child better than a professional educator can teach 30? The answer may still be no, but I don't think it's nearly as clear cut.
My wife and I supplement our kids education at home. It is my opinion that kids are capable of a lot more. The school is catering to the lowest common denominator.
I totally agree that kids are capable of more than adults think they are most of the time. Districts are incentivized to increase standardized test scores, from what I have seen this has forced some level of change, ranging from bringing in additional educators at the class level to work with groups at different levels, to using web applications that will assess and create individualized curriculum.
today, many families find themselves in a position where they 'have to' work.
It could be 'lifestyle inflation' but it could also be the deeper specialization - and certain jobs needing that, but these skills erode before the worker is able to adapt to the next wave.
> Today, grade school serves the primary purpose as a daycare for the kids so both parents can work.
The current pandemic has exposed this fact undeniably and you can see a lot of educators are unhappy about that.
A number of friends in the legal profession have told me that's why private elementary schools have been much quicker to reduce or refund tuition. Colleges can make the argument they're providing "education" regardless of physical location, while most legal experts will argue that a private elementary school cannot continue to demand full tuition when a significant portion of their value proposition is childcare.
You can learn, but it is just not the same. My daughter is doing her piano lessons over zoom now. If she was not able to read sheet music, it would not work.
"Ivan Illich was a 20th-century philosopher whose work recurringly examines the counterproductivity of modern social institutions. ... I encountered Illich's writing entirely by chance, but was immediately struck by how directly his words transferred to described what I saw as the plight of software."
"Software Against Humanity? An Illichian perspective on the industrial era of software
... (Ivan Illich) observed that (institutions he criticised were) poor at (their) stated ends... the means and ends had become confused! (those institutions) can still be self-sustaining, can still claim advances by (their) own criteria ..."
> In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery.
> Ivan Dominic Illich (/ɪˈvɑːn ˈɪlɪtʃ/; 4 September 1926 – 2 December 2002) was a Roman Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic.
I wonder if his experience as a priest informed his commentary here.
Religions start from exceptional individuals who divine spiritual truth. They develop followers who recognize said truth. Over time, followers ossify into a church, which can be thought of as an institutionalization of spiritual values.
His ministry work in Puerto Rico was particularly influential on his thinking about schooling and institutions more broadly. The famous "students instinctively know..." quote that's currently top-voted on this article is referring to the Puerto Rican youth he worked with as part of his work at Centro Intercultural de Documentación. I can't remember where I learned this; it might have been in one of his other books (perhaps Tools for Conviviality?) or in one of the audio recordings of him lecturing.
It's kind of hard to read the last chapter of Deschooling without noticing he's an Italian priest...
This is an instance of having very compelling writing that describes a problem eloquently.... and then proposes solutions that are disastrous and make things even worse.
Educating humanity is difficult. Every solution has its flaws. Giving up on it is worse than every flawed solution, however.
"Giving up" is not a good summary of what Illich proposes. In fact, it can be argued that what we are doing right now is giving up on education. Education != Schooling. Education is a life-long process. Everybody loves to learn and loves education. This is true even for the "dumbest" most anti-intellectual people you know, you are just looking at learning and education through a very narrow lens. You don't need to force people to learn.
Not everybody loves to be forced to be sitting in a school classroom for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week. And not everybody want to memorize state capitals.
Making a bunch of casual statements that are neither necessarily scientific, nor factual, nor founded - but in an elegant manner, does not make them true.
There are 3 or so Billion people living in civilisation, oddly enough, have somewhat similar education systems.
With some degree of variation, there doesn't seem to be any magic, other than the things we know are going to work.
And yes, we know a good chunk of it is just daycare and that's ok too.
It is a hallmark of left-wing political thought to have excellent, valid critiques of real problems, and then on top of such an excellent foundation, provide solutions that involve only deconstruction, tearing-down, revolution, and other such feel-good, troop-rallying calls to action - and no actual plan for what to do once we get to the far side.
The identified problems remain, as do all of the original problems that the outgoing system has solved. The aeons of tradition that have built up to the current solution will have to simply be rediscovered the hard way, perhaps with different window-dressing, but ultimately not that far off from their previous incarnation, especially if the deconstruction happens by those who haven't truly learned the lessons about what went well and what went badly before.
Sometimes this comes about because the wishful solutions we want to apply don't work; sometimes because reality is messier than we want to admit, and the solutions are messier still. Child discipline, for example, may always end up being harsher than we as gentle, respectful people would like it to be, particularly for unruly children. Institutions may always be slower to react and improve than we would like.
Much like in software, a full rewrite is often only a pathway to a new set of problems, compared to a refactoring that could solve the known set of problems that remain without losing any existing value.
Is there a particular “cure” that was recommended by Marx/Engels for addressing their observations on the relationship between capital and labor in mid-19th century industrialist England that you found specifically impractical for the time?
I think he was referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto Perhaps specifically: "In the last paragraph of the Manifesto, the authors call for a 'forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions', which served as a call for communist revolutions around the world." And we know how those went.
I read Deschooling Society after taking a job at a school that is modeled after The Sudbury Valley School in MA. I agree with the critique about the design and function of school in our society, and think that democratic self directed education is a viable starting point for a future educative system. At the school I work at, we have created a democratic community that is focused on learning as opposed to teaching. Kids are able to learn whatever they would like without interference or coercion. The rules and limitations are decided by the community according to democratic principles. It is the best example of a functional educational environment whose goal is true education that I have encountered so far.
I would also recommend people check out "Energy and Equity", I was impressed and influenced by the assertion that energy consumption is an important window to understanding class and society. The idea that we could have chosen to increase all human's speed to 20mph, but have instead allowed a small minority to travel at 70 mph, and an even smaller minority to travel at nearly 600 mph, has deeply influenced my view of structural inequality and violence.
If we take the long-term historic perspective, society has been mostly de-schooled throughout history. Going to school was a privilege for the children of the haves; the have-nots didn't go to school, and that was one factor which kept them that way, generation over generation.
Deschooling will never happen across all social strata; the privileged will keep sending kids to school no matter what.
Only a complete idiot would fall for this hippie bullshit and not send his kids to school.
The anti-intellectual movements in America in the 1960's likely did in fact contribute to a kind of deschooling of the lower classes, resulting in ever larger economic inequalities fifty years later.
My god, when I read stuff like this (and some comments here), I think -- only someone who grew up in a society which benefitted from all the supposed ills of education and useful institutions could even have the luxury to write or seriously believe something like this.
This is like saying that because of a small percentage of (yes, I agree) non-ideal outcomes, one should dismantle the entire system that has gotten us to the state we are in today -- which is, to remind many people, a stable, more materially prosperous, more-free-of-conflict time than any in our past. I hesitate to point out some parallels to our current social movements, for fear of being branded a counter-revolutionary.
More people are educated and out of poverty right now than any time previously in history. You would seek to destroy the system that has gotten you here, because some of its imperfections are showing by the very nature of the progress it has produced? Many people around the world would love to have the curse of educational systems that grind down your spirit by providing you textbooks, materials, teachers, computers, and corporate faceless healthcare systems that cruelly save you from life-threatening diseases.
How quickly we let the great become normal and disappointing.
We should fix things that are going wrong, and that expose and remedy the flaws in how the system was designed. It's true that in any system, unintended side effects and people seeking to gain from it start to emerge. And that should be fixed.
But, often the people who lack proper perspective on all that a system has produced (at hard toil and accomplishment of their predecessors) -- usually those who are young and those who have nothing to lose -- are too willing to destroy something that has given them the luxury of thinking it should be destroyed.
A lot of it is that we focus on a single outcome from the education system and that is the workforce outcome.
The problem is that the workforce outcome is based on competition as only so many are needed, so the best are chosen and the rest... We only need so many doctors and you can have all the schools you want for it and pre-med, but the number of people getting sick is not increasing. Education does not increase demand for highly paid occupations.
We blame the education system for those who don't get into med school ending up in debt when that is just a mathematical reality. We aren't considering all the other benefits of just having a well educated populace.
Deschooling has a lot of material to consume, and the term is pretty strong sounding, so I don't think it's surprising, but your conclusion that Illich wants to "dismantle the entire system" is far from most readings of his work.
Wikipedia [0] has a good summary of the idea IRT schooling in general - it's basically a philosophical position that people are better at learning when they actually have interest in a given subject, and that humans are also instinctive learners. Forcing people to consume curriculum without interest actually contributes to phobia of a subject.
There are many successful people who have been educated using the principles of deschooling. It's not about rejecting education at all.
I will say the idea of "teaching to the test" which this sounds like, is of course not a good approach. But not everyone can have a Socrates as teacher. All the more so when we refuse to fund schools as they should be. And not everyone is a Plato and can handle an inspirational deschooled approach.
Either way, we should fund it correctly. As others have said, we pay now, or we pay later. I prefer to pay now. It's cheaper.
> small percentage of (yes, I agree) non-ideal outcomes
I think you are drastically underestimating the prevalence of non-ideal outcomes. I guess it depends on your definition of non-ideal, but if you think something like “reinforce class and racial boundaries” is non-ideal then surely you would agree the non-ideal outcomes are extremely prevalent?
Sorry, I don't agree. In fact, I think I'm quite objectively estimating the effects of our institutions. I think you're the one stating drastic estimations.
I would say that our education system is helping to free people to move across class and wealth lines far more than keeping people where they are. The amount of social mobility in the US ranks with the best of many countries.
Of course, tons of studies show this (mobility) has been slowly decreasing over time since the 1950s, etc. But you make it sound like the system is rigged in the exact opposite way, which is the problem with the many popular positions on the topic. But popular does not mean objectively correct.
The problem with what you want (I don't know you, I'm using your stated words as example of a certain position right now) is that you want a small number of bad overall outcome cases (or increasing number of cases) to justify any steps towards any institution even tangentially related to the perceived problem.
Even if the institution contributes only a small part of the outcome's determinants. Even if by dismantling the institution, you wouldn't be sure whether the outcome would be different. But you want to try, right? Just to see if it does something? Without proof.
I don't want you to have that nuclear option. I'm willing to work towards solutions to make things better, but I don't believe in the extent of systemwide conspiratorial reinforcement of class/racial boundaries that you believe causes these outcomes.
If I did, I'd be out protesting right along side you. But I'm willing to have my mind changed by better information.
Study after study has shown that the US actually has some of the lowest social mobility in the developed world, and its poor educational systems and strictly rationed access to high quality learning environments are a direct contributor to that.
Part of the reason is because education is a political football. From school boards up to the presidency, everyone has an axe to grind.
Ironically - because there's so little awareness among the public of how empirical research works, and in some quarters there's a strong bias against facts and evidence - almost no one knows how to make it sharp and effective again.
It's only relatively lower if you look at relative rank, and of course if all of Scandinavia is at the top of the list, we appear low. But on actual score, the difference is not as large as it seems.
And aside from that, are we willing to go the route of Scandinavia to achieve what they have? I doubt even a simple majority of us want that.
The countries higher up the list did not rejected schools nor institutions. In fact, they have less homeschooling then us have (not that it has relation to anything).
> Even if the institution contributes only a small part of the outcome's determinants. Even if by dismantling the institution, you wouldn't be sure whether the outcome would be different. But you want to try, right? Just to see if it does something? Without proof.
> I don't want you to have that nuclear option. I'm willing to work towards solutions to make things better, but I don't believe in the extent of systemwide conspiratorial reinforcement of class/racial boundaries that you believe causes these outcomes.
You don't need to give someone the nuclear option, but it's important to recognize that there are clear race/class biases (not conspiracies), in the educational system in order to, as you say, work toward solutions to make things better:
Yes. I found that drawing a basic structure of the way that the water cycle works, and then how the water gets to our house, and where it goes afterward made a big difference for my 7yo to understand. Especially if you start to attach ballpark numbers for how many people are involved in the process just to get you water.
The rich will continue to educate their children, as they have done from the beginning, for the obvious reason that "knowledge is power". So yes, let's deschool. O-K.
And why throw in the fear towel so quickly in context of today's shitshow? Have the conviction of your beliefs. To paraphrase the previous actor turned president, "One person's counter-revolutionary is another person's Revolutionary". Got that, comrade?
I think there is a large collection of evidence showing that education does not bring prosperity. It's prosperity that brings education. The importance of education is exaggerated.
I honestly could not be more happy that COVID is displacing Education once and for all and making it compete with the ED-Tech solutions, some from many from HN regulars. Because prior to that, it was always known how superior the product could be if adoption were possible, but now that its happening it really is hard to grasp how fast it started to disrupt the Industry and how quick students are to adapt to it. Granted, there are growing pains, but I just finished my exams and required readings for my Supply Chain course(s) for the rest of the month this weekend and most of today, something entirely impossible in the traditional model.
I wish I had the patience to have stayed in the few Honor classes I was forced to sit in when I was in HS, if only because so many here have said that this model is actually more apt to what is being promoted, which favours autodidacts. Instead, I got impatient at the idea of mandatory attendance and class participation, because I was already attending University level STEM lectures by my Junior Year in HS of my own volition (MOOCS/ED-tech weren't a thing, nor was wide access to broadband or wifi for that matter back then) and felt it was a waste of my time entirely.
Still, I'm glad there are more options for children to opt out and still have a solid trajectory for some profession instead of being seen as a delinquent, degenerate, or misfit as I was accused of despite still holding a 3.6 GPA and only showing up for the exams/quiz days. I tried my best to try and defund the school I felt was holding me in a mind prison, and that got me in a lot of trouble and almost delayed my graduation date because despite having had the grades the administration felt it was imperative I show up daily and on time, something I didn't agree with and would become entirely optional in University where I had become more focused as I divested out of the HS model and took my Education into my own hands at the age of 16.
The sooner we can decouple from the formal Education paradigm, the better we will be as a Society and can explore for more efficient modes of professional Education and training, and this includes the University model which is starting to eat itself alive the further COVID delays classes on campus.
Extinction Rebellion and it's large collective of School Striking Youth are an affirmation that this was bound to happen, but it should also not be forgotten that these kids are also not lost causes, but are instead highly motivated environmentalists just seeking alternative ways to finding solutions to the dire consequences they face and should be trained in professions and positions that suit their aims.
I'd love to be able to teach some of them Ag/Plant Science for regenerative and sustainable farms, and have them in turn be able to get an opportunity to undergo the same apprenticeship model I followed and eventually manage a farm of their own to help offset the CO2 emission and undertake carbon sequestering/negative business models. I'd probably also sign them up for Grid Alternatives, which taught me how Solar Panel installation and grid hookups were being done in the US, whereas I only knew how to do it in the EU. Grid Alternatives [1] is also an amazing non-profit that helps low income families offset the expenses of Solar Panel installation and helps them integrate into their own community.
If we had UBI I could probably also teach a few kids the basics on how to cook properly and help some of them be the dedicated culinary staff that helps feed the staff on site installing the panels.
It doesn't look like he is criticizing welfare per se, but the fact that the welfare system is built in a way to punish the poor even more. Or even the health system, which treats the poor but puts them in huge debt. The critique seems to be on the institutions that only serve the present structures of power.
To be honest, it's hard to disagree with him on this, even being in favour of welfare and/or socialized healthcare systems.
Foucault's distinctly french and distinctly intellectual. The two are definitely touching the same elephant, and if you like Foucault you'll probably find something in Illich, but Illich appeals to a less intellectual and more American (religious?) audience that would turned off by -- or simply never get past the first page of -- Foucault.
Religious fundamentalist homeschoolers will read Illich and get something out of it, but would probably not have the patience/reading comprehension level to engage with Foucault. Or, if they did, would burn it.
So, both have their place.
That said, I wish Foucault had provided a more thorough treatment of schooling, though. I think his reaction to schooling was something like "yeah that's so transparently a factory floor look-alike and so transparently training compliant factory workers that I'm not even sure it's worth saying much else".
"intellectual" sounding but certainly not actually "intellectual".
Foucault's explanation for why leprosy disappeared from Europe is pure psudoscience, along with the entirety of psychoanalysis (which he accepted at least partially). I don't like scholars who take the likes of Lacan as being serious instead of charlatans
Foucault had some good ideas in works like Discipline and Punish or A history of Sexuality but filtering between the noise and signal is extremely tough with him...
While that’s a fair assessment, (even philosophers that idolized and refined Foucault’s methods (see Ian Hacking) point out his loose handling of historical fact) that’s not really why people read Foucault and to ignore the entire edifice of his thought because of such mistakes would be the very definition of missing the point.
In my opinion, it is not so much the concrete historical subjects of Focualt’s work that are valuable, but rather his approach at developing a mode of critique founded on historicity and his reminding us in a very general and strong sense that our present is determined by a complex of historical events that don’t actually fit into the neat and tidy bundled up narratives histories present (since this is usually the objective of writing history) but that things are far less coherent and far more like structural emergent phenomenon than they are the effects some historical will (a la Hegel) or the interests of “great men”. Not to mention he does what any great philosopher should do which is make us recognize the concepts we take for granted thanks to years of idioms and cliches being drilled into our heads are not so simple after all (his analysis of power). I think it is the task of every philosopher worth salt to de-hypostatize concepts.
This is why critiques that take issue with Foucault for “forgetting the subject” are taken more seriously and have more ground to stand on than any shallow dismissals on account of a few factual flubs.
> "intellectual" sounding but certainly not actually "intellectual"
Sure. I was sort of intending to use the word in a way that didn't even make a distinction between those two things; i.e., I was using "intellectual" to refer more to the writing's style and tone than its substance :)
"Intellectual" doesn't necessarily mean "scientific" or even "correct". Maybe "academic" would be a better word for what I'm trying to get at.
Totally, and French intellectuals don't usually go over well with the average reader of HN. But, if anyone finds the discussion in this comment section resonates strongly with them, just reading about Foucault's ideas would be a good place to start. Why limit ourselves to school. :) This is fertile ground for thought and I'm glad to see discussion here.
> I wish Foucault had provided a more thorough treatment of schooling, though
Agreed. I think most schools were just broadly more authoritarian when he was writing. There's certainly more room to discuss the ways in which schooling has changed as we've shifted from the factory to service and knowledge economies.
I wish people would think about the format they use to present their ideas more.
If you're presenting arguments based on empirical evidence and logic, you are building a directed graph. Using long-winded prose to represent it is the wrong data structure, which makes working with it (comprehending and contemplating its merits) difficult.
Is there a movement, say Informational Philosophy, that embodies your thought on this? I find it interesting, but philosophers have typically used long form prose to build up their logical theories and arguments.
Your argument seems to be that language is not conducive to our brains forming the graph-like relationships the prose builds up. I do not know have an intimate enough understanding of linguistics to understand if modern theories support this view.
> Is there a movement, say Informational Philosophy, that embodies your thought on this?
Not that I'm aware of.
This is one of few thoughts I consider novel and not yet implemented anywhere.
> Your argument seems to be that language is not conducive to our brains forming the graph-like relationships the prose builds up
Right. A picture is worth a thousand words. There is a hierarchy of beliefs everyone holds in their head to make sense of the world and yet nobody is drawing diagrams to represent them.
If I ever make enough money for a 10 year sabbatical, I'll take a stab at this problem.
That’s effectively what Wittgenstein was saying in the Tractatus, only to turn around and repudiate all of it in the Philosophical Investigations—at the end of the day, logical systems based on the manipulations of symbols are one thing while the messy reality of being human and living is quite another.
In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery."