Still Deschooling Society

More thoughts on...

Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. Harper & Row: New York, 1970.

Criticizing American public schools is difficult for a few reasons.  First, many of us think of the public school system as a great equalizing institution, one which gives all Americans—regardless of family, social status, or wealth—an equal opportunity to succeed in life (which, as far as I can tell, means only to profit economically).  However, it is obvious—and has been for some time—that this is no longer true, if it was ever true in the first place.  As Illich writes,

Equal educational opportunity is, indeed, both a desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with obligatory schooling is to confuse salvation with the Church.  School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. (10)

One of the main problems of statements like this is that it seems to indict teachers.  And indeed the education reform debate as it is currently being waged singles out teachers as the primary influence on a student's educational success or failure.  This analysis is unfair to both teachers and students, for it places the weight of students' ultimate success or failure on teachers shoulders, presuming that students are in no significant way responsible for their own education or training.  Within the school structure we have now, one can quickly see why teachers so thoroughly influence their students—they serve not only as educators but as surrogate parents for their students as well.  As Illich argues, "School, by its very nature, tends to make a total claim on the time and energies of its participants.  This, in turn, makes the teacher into custodian, preacher, and therapist" (30).  Teachers are expected to attend to their students' every need, to treat class after class of students as if each child is their own.  This expectation is obviously unfair to teachers, burdening them with more responsibilities than they can possibly fulfill adequately.  But it is also unfair to students and parents, assuming that they have no educational responsibilities of their own and are to serve merely as passive recipients of institutional educational "treatments," to use Illich's terminology.

It seems to me that the failure of our public school system began when schools were seen not as outgrowths of communities but as institutions set apart from communities, the local expressions of an outside or overarching system of knowledge and expertise.  The moment schools are understood to be in some sort of inherent conflict with a community, to have priorities separate from the community in which they exist, their ability to educate students is compromised.  All this is to say that the relationship between a school and the community it serves is more important and complicated than many analyses recognize.  The easiest way to begin thinking about the importance of this relationship is to consider the problem of socio-economic status and educational performance.  Illich argues,

It should be obvious that even with schools of equal quality a poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one.  Even if they attend equal schools and begin at the same age, poor children lack most of the educational opportunities which are casually available to the middle-class child.  These advantages range from conversation and books in the home to vacation travel and a different sense of oneself, and apply, for the child who enjoys them, both in and out of school.  So the poorer student will generally fall behind so long as he depends on school for advancement or learning. (6)

One of Illich's points is that much learning happens outside of school.  In Deschooling Society, he argues that "[m]ost learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction" (12).  The implications of this idea aren't necessarily connected to socio-economic status.  What Illich's argument implies is that a student's educational success, and general cultural outlook or worldview, is primarily shaped not at school but at home.  Her expectations are shaped by the expectations and attitudes of her parents, guardians, or other important members of her family culture.  What ties this to economics is the fact that a family's attitudes and expectations often depend on its financial status.  The leisure time required to read, for example, depends in part on economic success—parents or guardians who work long hours have a much more difficult time emphasizing to their children the importance of literacy, much less actually modeling it for them.  In-home discussion of politics and other topics depends in large part on whether or not family members feel enfranchised, and a feeling of enfranchisement is pretty clearly connected to economic capacity—the ability to earn a living and support oneself and one's family.  Just as "[l]earning and the assignment of social roles are melted into schooling" (Illich 11), learning and social/cultural/economic/political expectations are blended in family life.  Children learn all sorts of things we don't necessarily want or expect them to learn; they quickly learn the lessons of class, are schooled in the type of expectations their economic status allows them to have. 

All this is to say that student performance—by which a school is judged a success or a failure—is in large part dependent on factors outside the school.  If a community is economically depressed—if children have parents who work long hours for low pay and have no time or energy to read or develop other "interests" or hobbies that emphasize the importance of curiosity and learning, if children are raised in economically and politically disenfranchised families—then the school that "serves" that community will tend to suffer from "low performance."  Schools are not isolated institutions, and learning cannot be isolated from students' cultural and physical environment.  At the outset of Deschooling Society, Illich explains that he chooses to critique the institution of school because its problems are representative of issues surrounding modern bureaucratic institutions generally:

I have chosen the school as my paradigm, and I therefore deal only indirectly with other bureaucratic agencies of the corporate state: the consumer-family, the party, the army, the church, the media.  My analysis of the hidden curriculum of school should make it evident that public education would profit from the deschooling of society, just as family life, politics, security, faith, and communication would profit from an analogous process. (2)

I would go even further and say that deschooling society will require us to deschool at the same time nearly all our modern institutions.  In short, real educational reform can't happen without reforming the corporate state as a whole.  As Illich notes, "[o]nly with the advent of industrial society did the mass production of "childhood" become feasible and come within the reach of the masses.  The school system is a modern phenomenon, as is the childhood it produces" (27).  In a similar way, school as we know it—both obligatory K-12 schools and "higher education" institutions—developed in tandem with the corporate state, and we can't effect any fundamental educational reform as long as we can say we live in a corporate state, as long as we acquiesce to the "expert management" of our lives by the increasingly indistinguishable large, intrusive corporate and government institutions that run our country.

Deschooling Society

Some extended thoughts on Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society.  

• Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Print.

Illich's ideas are far reaching, his thoughts for reform comprehensive.  It strikes me that the problems with the modern structure of school that Illich identifies are ones that are expressed—in spirit if not exactly in content—by many presently disaffected Americans, especially those commonly referred to as "Tea Partiers."  Illich decries institutional grading, ranking, and certification structures which produce so-called "experts," and which give rise to the meritocratic elite class that is regularly criticized by, for example, Glenn Beck and his followers.

To the extent that Tea Partiers and those like them express frustration with the institutionalized management of modern American life, Illich would support them, though he would likely take issue with some of the forms in which they express that frustration.  At the outset of Deschooling Society, Illich writes,

I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence [...] this process of degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or "treatments." (1)

Illich sounds especially like a Tea Partier/libertarian when he continues, "I believe that most of the research now going on about the future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalization of values and that we must define conditions which would permit precisely the contrary to happen" (2).   In other words, Illich states that his concern is for the increased management of modern life, the seeming constant progress toward a human existence totally administered by experts.  In popular terminology, he is for personal freedom, personal responsibility, and personal initiative.  This would seem to align him squarely in the conservative camp, especially considering that Deschooling Society is an argument against the public school structure (unchanged in any significant way since the book's publication in 1970).  It would be easy to view Illich this way, to react to his arguments against beloved liberal institutions in a knee-jerk manner, either completely writing him off or wholeheartedly embracing him without looking into his argument very thoroughly.  To do so, however, would be to miss the point of his book, would be to misunderstand him in the same way so many like him are misunderstood.

Though on the surface Illich's ideas appear quite similar to those expressed by Tea Partiers and other anti-establishment conservatives, they are different in one very important way.  This difference can be made quite clear through the lens of health care, a favorite conservative topic during the past election thanks to the reform bill passed by congress last year.  Those who oppose the new legislation often present arguments that resemble Illich's argument against institutionalized care, or "treatments."  Institutionalized, centralized health care reduces an individual's options, which can easily be interpreted as a reduction in individual freedom.  This was the great fear some expressed in response to the idea of a single-payer, nationalized health plan, the fear that all individual choice would disappear, that American citizens would be told what doctors to see and what procedures would be allowed.  The easy, though not particularly effective, argument against this line of reasoning is that this over-management, this rationing of health care, already exists in for-profit form.  American health insurance companies restrict their clients in terms of what doctors they can see and what procedures will be covered.  This counter-argument fails, of course, because it is an argument that assumes a person's health must be managed by professionals—it is an argument about the structure of management, not whether such management is needed in the first place.  Even if it seems irrational to some, I can certainly understand how some Americans would rather keep the problematic health care management structure we have now than accept a totally new, untested system of management.  Better the evil you know than the one you don't know.  

While Illich would recognize and perhaps at a certain level sympathize with the standard liberal argument in favor of health care reform—in favor of centralized, national health care—he would (and does at points, though not at length in this text) argue that the underlying problem is the fact that the idea of health is now defined by the institutional structure that manages it.  We have our minds and bodies serviced in the same way we have our cars serviced—by experts at certified service stations.  In the same way that service stations ultimately argue against the personal acquisition of the knowledge and skill required to care for a car, our health care structure ultimately argues against the acquisition of the knowledge and skill required for individuals to care for themselves in very basic ways.  As Illich would point out, the problem with our health care industry is that it is an industry.  It is a structure which both promotes a certain definition of health and the "treatments" one must receive to attain that "health."  The health care debate is crippled by an ignorance of, or an unwillingness to recognize, the fact that the parameters of the debate have been set according to institutionalized values, values which, according to Illich's argument in Deschooling Society, we first learn about and accept through the process of school.

I'm reminded of a man—let's call him Leonard—my wife and I know who once had a problem with shoes.  Leonard's problem was that every pair of shoes he tried hurt his feet.  He went through multiple shoe pairs and always had the same experience—the shoes would "feel good" at first, but after wearing them all day, his feet would hurt.  His response to this was to return pair after pair, regarding them all as failures, as shoes that didn't "work."  This issue, of course, is that Leonard had accepted institutional ideas—in this case the values communicated, either explicitly or implicitly, through shoe companies and their advertisements—about what a shoe should and should not do.  After so many tries, it should have become obvious to him that his feet hurt at the end of the day not because his shoes were inadequate but because he had been on his feet all day.  In short, feet get tired.  No shoe can completely eliminate such fatigue; it can only postpone it.  Leonard had an expectation problem, not a shoe problem.

Illich's argument in Deschooling Society is that society has an expectation problem born of institutional values.  School, as well as other bureaucratic institutions, teaches individuals to have certain expectations of the world, expectations which, like Leonard's, are ultimately unrealistic and serve only to frustrate us and make us unsatisfied.  More on this later...