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.