Deschooling Society

....and the 'Important People' of the world refuse to listen to you, you *must* be telling the truth.Illich died this month. Maybe someone will come along and champion some of his many ideas and causes. But some of the things he has been talking about--the structuring of education in this world is ineffective for actual learning, but is designed for the maintaining of class strata, and that the rich gets the best schooling because they pay for it (not saying that they are exceptionally talented or intellectual or anything more than mediocre) has been debated for years and will be debated for years. Subtexted to his arguments is that the rich needs the poor to help define themselves. And any time 'the institution'gets fired up about improving the conditions for the mass culture, it end up achieving the opposite effect, as the reviewer below noted. To me, this is reminescent of those two dystopia novels we were forced to read in high school, "1984" and "Brave New World" (somewhere there's a great irony in my feeling this way).Anyway, Illich, even though he was an academician, became a great human rights advocate and champion of the poor and downtrodden all around the world. This great work of his should be read by anyone who believes in truth and freedom.

I read this book 10 years ago and still find myself thinking about it. If you're looking for material that will justify your worst suspicions as to the actual effectiveness of modern schooling while inspiring in you a desire for change, you're on the right track. But be warned. This book is far more than an essay on the failings of our educational system. Education is merely the author's proving ground for one simple premise: it is the nature of the institution to produce the opposite of itself. This basic paradigm may be applied to any institutionalized need. You'll find yourself analyzing the role of healthcare in well-being, financial services in prosperity, the food industry in nutrition, and so on...Find this book and buy it.

In "Deschooling Society" Ivan Illich debunks the many myths of schooling - including that most learning is a result of teaching - stating that a majority of people acquire most of their insight, knowledge, and skill outside of school. Advocating educational freedom over obligatory graded curriculums, Illiich maintains that the social and psychological destruction inherent in obligatory schooling is an illustration of the destruction implicit in all international institutions which now dictate the kinds of goods, services, and welfare available to satisfy basic human needs. Illich maintains that the deschooling of society is merely part of a larger quest for the reestablishment of society's control over their community and environment. "Deschooling Society" is a monumental literary achievement, inspiring and profound in its message of humanitarian social activism.

This is a heartfelt series of essays that illuminate the nature of learning and the perverse consequences of professionally imposed schooling requirements. Far from the assumed engine of equality, modern schooling promotes inequality and social stratification. It's powerful and graded liturgy convinces the majority of people that their inferior status derives from a failure to consume sufficient quantities of expensive educational services. Illich links schooling and modern ideas of education to the belief in endless progress and the ultimate abolition of "Necessity." What starts out as a program in humanism ends up as a formula for the destruction of what it is to be human.This is a book about aliveness.