Head vs. Heart

I recently read Curtis White's, The Spirit of Disobedience, and while I find it somewhat disappointing overall, it has its stimulating moments.  The introduction is especially provocative, though it seems to me his analysis of Enlightenment-era moral philosophy is really just a rehashing of Alasdair MacIntyre's critique, in After Virtue, of what he calls the "Enlightenment project." (MacIntyre's critique may itself borrow from others—I'm not familiar enough with the field to know.  I suspect, though, that some aspects of it are pretty standard fare.)  White, however, makes an assertion near the end of his introduction that is particularly interesting.  He writes,

What both contemporary Christians and rational secularists have failed to understand is that justice is the heart of Western spirituality.  Not the messiah, not the personage of a wrathful God, not the Commandments, not the Cult of the Virgin, and not the mysteries of the Knights Templar.  The bottom line, if you will excuse me that expression, and what leftism of whatever stripe ignores at its own peril, is that this notion of justice on which every critique of authoritarianism depends is not demonstrable through any form of rational procedure.  The left's critique always presupposes what can only be called an intuitive understanding of the Good. [...] The tragedy is that in the present context the secular left believes that its advocacy of justice is independent of the spirit, and the Christian right believes its spirituality is functional in the absence of justice.  The truth is that there is no spirit in the absence of justice and no justice that is not first spiritual. (17)

As he makes evident in this quote and elsewhere, White is interested in connecting what are seen as two irreconcilable camps of Americans—those who believe in the spiritual, and those who trust the rational; those who live through their hearts, and those who live through their heads; those whose ideal society is religious, and those whose ideal society is secular.  In contemporary American cultural and political life, White asserts, we have a false dichotomy of reason vs. intuition.  He also claims that the tension between reason and intuition—or the rational and the spiritual—is one that is as old as our country.

While White doesn't provide much evidence to support this claim, I've been working through another text that clearly buoys it.  Philip Gura's recent work, American Transcendentalism, is a history of our country's transcendental movement that is notable for focusing not on the movement's most remembered and widely-read members—he doesn't beat us to death with Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, that is—but on the more overt social reformers of the group.  David Robinson, who reviewed Gura's text in the 2007 edition of American Literary Scholarship, writes, "Gura's narrative of emergence, division, and decline is accompanied by an interpretive emphasis that decenters Emerson and Thoreau and elevates such socially committed Transcendentalists as George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and Theodore Parker" (5).  Gura gives considerable attention to Ripley, Brownson, and Parker, because he traces the intellectual genealogy of the Transcendentalists by focusing primarily on its connection to Unitarianism—Ripley, Brownson, and Parker were all Unitarian ministers, though Brownson converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1840's.  (Emerson, of course, began his career as a Unitarian minister, though he rather quickly gave up his post and broke with the church.)

White, who is primarily interested in Thoreau, notes that he was the "inheritor through Ralph Waldo Emerson of European romanticism" (19).  This isn't exactly news, of course—most of us learn in high school that American Transcendentalism was heavily influenced by European romanticism.  Gura's emphasis, though, is on how that romantic influence made its way to New England in the first place, and so he focuses on early-American religious disputes and the 19th-century popularity among New Englanders—and particularly among Unitarians—of German biblical scholarship.  What is notable here—and what connects Gura's text to White's—is that the central religious dispute Gura highlights is nearly the same spirit vs. reason dispute lamented by White.  He writes,

The intellectual genealogy of Transcendentalism began in early-nineteenth-century New England among clergymen caught up in unresolved theological battles initiated more than half a century earlier, specifically between "New Light" supporters of the wide-spread religious revivals known as the Great Awakening and their "Old Light" opponents.  The pro-revivalists, epitomized by the great theologian Jonathan Edwards, stressed the necessity of an emotional conversion experience, a change of heart that realigned one's priorities from selfishness to selflessness.  The anti-revivalists, led by Boston clergyman Charles Chauncy, argued for the primacy of reason in religion and found the New Lights' emphasis on emotional religious experience—a "New Birth"—an insult to human intelligence.  To Chauncy and his supporters, religion was a matter of the head and not of the heart. (23)

Here, we clearly see that White is justified in claiming that the tension between the "rationalists" and the "spiritualists" is as old as our country itself.  This claim appears in his text's introduction, and what I find disappointing about the remainder of his book, is that he doesn't develop in any clear sense his apparent desire to reconcile those Americans who trust in reason with those Americans who trust in faith.  Instead, he spends most of the book discussing how difficult it is for Americans to "get outside of," so to speak, consumer culture, and thus keep from being implicated in its injustices, while at the same time remaking American culture in love, and what White refers to as, "Imagination."  I can see why White ultimately chose to focus on actions "disobedient" Americans can take to work against consumer culture, but, it seems to me, he could have written a greater book—and ultimately a more useful book—by focusing on what Americans can do to marry spirit and reason and create anew "the world in love," to borrow, as White characterizes it, Hegel's "strange and suggestive phrase" (18).

The Revolt of the Elites

[I ended up going a different direction with this project, but I thought I'd go ahead and post this work anyway, though it is incomplete.]


In the opening line of his book, The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch notes that much of his work "comes back in one way or another to the question of whether democracy has a future" (3).  When considering the debate surrounding American public schooling—what public schools should do, what they shouldn't do, and whether or not they should even exist—I can't help feeling as if it is to some extent the American public's way of addressing Lasch's subject.  Even more than politics, it seems to me, Americans use public schools, still widely viewed as our nation's most democratic, equalizing institutions, as the subject through which to argue about democracy.

I am primarily interested in approaching American education through the lens of Ivan Illich's, Deschooling Society, but I think Lasch's text is worth considering in tandem with Illich's.  Here then, I will examine a few chapters of Lasch's book, here and there comparing his thoughts to Illich's, but primarily thinking about his ideas in an isolated sort of way.  My own commentary will follow roughly the layout of Lasch's text, examining a few of the themes he lays out in his introduction that I think will be most useful in a larger discussion of Illich's, Deschooling.  These themes include equality, opportunity, and mobility (chapter 3), the democratization of self-esteem as opposed to the democratization of competence (chapters 3 & 4), the deterioration of public debate (chapters 6 & 9, roughly), and the problem of knowledge, opinion, and certainty (chapters 10, 12, and 13, roughly), though this last theme may fall somewhat beyond the realm of Illich's concern in Deschooling.

•    •    •

1. Opportunity

 

One of the most provocative themes of The Revolt of the Elites is the idea of opportunity in America.  The United States of America is sometimes referred to as "The Land of Opportunity," but what is this opportunity?  Lasch argues that it means something now that is quite different from what it meant up until the Civil War and perhaps a bit after.  "The [...] managerial and professional elites," he writes, 

[...] would like to believe that Americans have always equated opportunity with upward mobility. [...] But a careful look at the historical record shows that the promise of American life came to be identified with social mobility only when more hopeful interpretations of opportunity had begun to fade, that the concept of social mobility embodies a fairly recent and sadly impoverished understanding of the "American Dream," and that its ascendancy, in our own time, measures the recession of the dream and not its fulfillment. (50)

While some may argue that social mobility does not represent a "sadly impoverished understanding of the "American Dream,"" one certainly can not find fault in the time frame Lasch identifies—around 1950, and in the works of Lloyd Warner—for the appearance of "social mobility" in the American English lexicon.  While "social mobility" certainly appears before 1950, the phrase is not used quite the same as it is now.  The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the earliest use of "social mobility" in writing as dating to 1866 and having to do with horizontal labor mobility and labor expansion, not vertical class mobility.  The earliest example of "social mobility" being used in reference to vertical class movement appears in the American Journal of Sociology in 1900, explicitly referring to "mobility of type."  This instance still lacks the flavor of the phrase as it is now commonly used, but part of that is because we commonly employ a different phrase—"upward mobility" (or "upwardly mobile," in reference to a person or perhaps a neighborhood).  The first appearance of "upward mobility" again is found in the American Journal of Sociology in 1949, and its usage is the same as today.

So if equating opportunity with social mobility only gained its current meaning in the middle of the 20th century, how was opportunity understood before then?  Lasch argues that what we might call the whole language of capitalism carried much different meaning than it does today.  He points out that in "the language of nineteenth-century producerism, "labor" and "capital" did not mean what they mean to us.  The term "capitalist" was reserved for those who, producing nothing, lived off speculative profits, while the "laboring class," as a Democratic party broadside explained, referred to "the producers of wealth; the yeomanry who till the soil; mechanics, manufacturers, operatives, traders, whose labor sustains the state"" (57).  Such a wide conception of the "laboring class" was essential to American culture in the nineteenth century, as it served to separate American society from those in Europe.  Lasch goes on to argue that, in Europe, "the laboring classes allegedly lived on the verge of destitution, but it was not only their poverty that staggered Americans but their exclusion from civic life, from the world of learning and culture—from all the influences that stimulate intellectual curiosity and broaden people's intellectual horizons."  This, Lasch asserts, is the key to understanding the older meaning of "opportunity" prior to the twentieth century: in the nineteenth century, "[f]oreign observers noted, often with disapproval, that ordinary Americans had opinions on every imaginable subject and that few of them seemed to have any sense of their proper place, but it was this very lack of deference, as Americans saw it, that defined a democratic society—not the chance to rise in the social scale so much as the complete absence of a scale that clearly distinguished commoners from gentlemen" (58 emphasis mine).

Lasch recognizes, of course, that nineteenth-century American society was far from classless, but he argues that the idea of a classless society was taken seriously—it was more than an idea, it was an ideal.  But while the ideal of a classless society carried weight throughout the nineteenth century, reality moved in the opposite direction after the industrial revolution.  As Lasch points out, in the second half of the nineteenth century, claims that America is a classless society begin to sound awfully hollow: 

It is hard to avoid the feeling that Americans had come to rely far too heavily on self-serving comparison with Europe, and later with the South under slavery, in their attempt to uphold an idealized image of the laboring classes under capitalism, classes ostensibly free but increasingly subject to the degrading effects of wage labor. [... T]he evils introduced by industrialism into the northern United States could not be disposed of by citing greater evils elsewhere in the world. (62-3)

I think it is also important to note here that nineteenth-century Americans distinguished between labor and wage labor, the former being much more desirable than the latter.  It was the ascendancy of wage labor that startled and disturbed so many Americans, and rightly so.  As long as the American frontier existed, there was at least the hope that a wage laborer could earn a little bit of money and, if he and his family were willing to travel far enough, purchase some land on which their labor would be their own.  But once the frontier closed, wage labor became a serious problem, and, as Lasch notes, it "is significant that "social mobility" entered the academic vocabulary around this time, in the context of uneasiness about the closing of the frontier."  This understanding is reflected in Brownson's, The Laboring Classes, in which he notes,

The wilderness has receded, and already the new lands are beyond the reach of the mere laborer, and the employer has him at his mercy.  If the present relation subsist, we see nothing better for him in reserve than what he now possesses, but something altogether worse.  We are not ignorant of the fact that men born poor become wealthy, and that men born to wealth become poor; but this fact does not necessarily diminish the numbers of the poor, nor augment the numbers of the rich. [...] [O]ne fact is certain, no man born poor has ever by his wages, as a simple operative, risen to the class of the wealthy. [...] The simple market wages for ordinary labor, has never been adequate to raise him from poverty to wealth. (12-3)

 In retrospect, it seems inevitable that this would happen; once horizontal mobility becomes impossible, or at least no longer carries its attendant hope for property ownership, vertical mobility becomes the new preoccupation.  At the same time, Lasch argues, the appearance of "social mobility" in academic language signals class reification in America: "More than any other development, the closing of the frontier forced Americans to reckon with the proletarianization of labor, the growing gulf between wealth and poverty, and the tendency of each to become hereditary" (73).  In other words, Americans could no longer "confuse the ideal with the reality" (64).

•    •    •

2. Democratized Competence vs. Democratized Self-Esteem

If a shift in the American understanding of "opportunity"—from intellectual, civic opportunity to "social mobility"—coincides with the foreshortening of actual opportunity, it seems worth considering how this shift influenced the creation of American public schools.  After all, an emphasis on opportunity as a chance for civic engagement and intellectual freedom invites a different sort of education than that invited by mere social mobility, the former asking of Americans a liberal learning and the latter promoting only that learning which would serve to increase one's wealth.  It is also worth noting that the former understanding of opportunity worked against class stratification, its emphasis on intellectual and civic competence having little to do with money, while the present understanding actually encourages class stratification, both by fostering a preoccupation with money and by assuming that, though one may rise out of it, a lower class will always exist.

Lasch argues that the nineteenth-century ideal of a classless society meant 

not only the absence of hereditary privilege and legally recognized distinctions of rank but a refusal to tolerate the separation of learning and labor.  The concept of a laboring class was objectionable to Americans because it implied not only the institutionalization of wage labor but the abandonment of what many of them took to be the central promise of American life: the democratization of intelligence. (64)

Industrialization and the attendant growth of wage labor was problematic, then, not only because it tended to fix classes, but also because it worked against democratized intelligence, separating learning and labor.  Here, Lasch brings in the writing of Orestes Brownson, which is notable for the degree to which his critical arguments prefigure those of Illich in Deschooling Society.  Lasch notes that Brownson, in 1840, "was almost alone in his contention that industrialization had fostered the class divisions Americans feared, [but he] combined his trenchant analysis of wage labor with a seemingly arbitrary and irrelevant attack on priesthood" (64-5).  Brownson's line of argument is puzzling to many, for, as Lasch notes, just as he appears to be on the verge of anticipating the conclusions of Marx, he "veers off in an unexpected direction.  Instead of attributing inequality to the appropriation of surplus value by the dominant class, he blames it on the power exercised by "sacerdotal corporations" over the life of the mind" (65).  

In terms of the separation of learning and labor, Brownson's observations clearly anticipate Illich's.  In Deschooling Society, Illich argues that a "major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching," asserting that "most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.  Most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction" (12).  Likewise, in his response to the Second Annual Report of the [Mass.] Board of Education, Brownson notes,

Educated, in some sense, all our children are, and will be, whether we will or not.  Education, such as it is, is ever going on.  Our children are educated in the streets, by the influence of their associates, in the fields and on the hill sides, by the influences of surrounding scenery and overshadowing skies, in the bosom of the family, by the love and gentleness, or wrath and fretfulness of parents, by the passions or affections they see manifested, the conversations to which they listen, and above all by the general pursuits, habits, and moral tone of the community. [...] The real question for us to ask is not, Shall our children be educated? but, To what end shall they be educated, and by what means?  What is the kind of education needed, and how shall it be furnished? (394)

While both Illich and Brownson point out the fact that education is casual and ongoing, they both also recognize that learning can benefit from planned instruction.  The question, for Brownson, is to what end that planned instruction should be aimed.  His preoccupation with ends, it seems to me, would cause him to find the current structure of American education extremely lacking, both at the secondary and higher educational level.  He writes, "The system of education, which doth not take my child from the cradle, and train him up to go forth into the world a man, in the deep significance of that term, to comprehend the end for which he was made, and the surest and speediest means of attaining to it, is defective, and can never answer the legitimate purposes of education" (Second Annual Report 394 my emphasis).  Even so, I am not sure he would be especially surprised by what it is our structure of education emphasizes.  As he goes on to note,

Individual education is divided then into general education and special, — my education as a man, and my education as a doctor, lawyer, minister, artisan, artist, agriculturalist, or merchant.  Special education appears to be that which we at present are most anxious to make provision for.  Few people think of anything beyond it.  The popular doctrine, we believe, is that we should be educated in special reference to what is to be our place in society and our pursuit in life.  We think more of education as a means for fitting us for a livelihood, than for anything else.  The tendency has long been to sink the man in what are merely his accidents, to qualify him for a profession or pursuit, rather than to be a man. (Second Annual Report 395-6)

The frequency with which so-called "Special" education is the focus of community educational endeavors is problematic for Brownson not because he is concerned with what we might call "self-fulfillment," "self-actualization," or "spiritual fulfillment," but because he sees an overemphasis on occupational education as detrimental to democracy itself.  According to the ideal of American democracy, he asserts,

professions and pursuits are merely the accidents of individual life.  Behind them we recognize Humanity, as paramount to them all.  Here man, in theory at least, is man, not the mere artisan, farmer, trader, or learned professor.  Professions and pursuits may be changed according to judgment, will, or caprice, as circumstances permit, or render necessary or advisable.  Consequently here we want an education for that which is permanent in man, which contemplates him as back of all the accidents of life, and which shall be equally valuable to him, whatever be the mutations which go on around him, the means he may choose or be compelled to adopt to obtain a livelihood. (Second Annual Report 396)

The implication here seems obvious—an education for that which is "permanent in man" is the sort of education that binds one person to another, connecting all citizens no matter what their occupation or economic state.  What is permanent is one's status as human, and so, for Brownson, what is most important in education is that which allows individuals to realize and exercise their humanity.

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...

Doors

Last fall I visited Monticello for the first time. My wife had been before, but I had never gone despite living in Virginia nearly all my life. I was, of course, impressed by all the usual things—Jefferson's entryway clock and his water collection system, for example—but I was particularly taken with some of the doors I saw. A little over two years ago, my wife and I bought our first house, a craftsman style bungalow from 1930, and one of my favorite features of the house is its heavy frame-and-panel doors. As with most old homes, ours sags, the floors and doorways gently sloping toward the center of the house. Some of the doors sag as well, their mortise and tenon joints having lost some of their tightness as their wood has dried and shrunk somewhat in the last 80 years. Many of the doors I saw at Monticello, however, have no noticeable sag at all, a remarkable fact considering how much older they are than my own house's doors.

I was so surprised by the excellent shape of Jefferson's doors that I asked our tour guide whether or not they had been replaced or restored at some point, but they haven't been. Inspecting them closer, I was able to discern at least one reason they continue to maintain their squareness: each door is constructed with through-tenons. Older mortise and tenon joints rely on physical tightness and simple pin or wedge mechanisms as opposed to glue for their strength, and I can see how well-crafted doors made a couple hundred years ago might remain in fine shape with the most basic care and maintenance. It certainly helps that these doors reside inside Jefferson’s home, where their tenons’ end grain hasn’t been exposed to the elements.

While the look of frame-and-panel construction has persisted, the actual construction method itself is frequently abandoned in order to maximize efficiency. The kitchen cabinet doors in my house, for example, are not original, and while they appear to be frame and panel, they are not. They are, of course, constructed with a wooden frame, but its pieces are not joined with mortises and tenons but routed grooves and glue. Its panel, which is pressboard rather than hard wood, doesn’t float in a groove cut into the frame but is stapled into a rabbet on the back side of it. This sort of construction won’t last, and it isn’t lasting. Our cabinets appear to have been installed at some point in the 1980’s, and they are horribly dilapidated.

I am pleased, however, that the frame-and-panel style remains popular. I grew up in a house with hollow-core wood doors, plywood kitchen cabinets (that, it should be noted, are in much better shape than my own), and narrow wood molding. While none of these things are inherently bad, of course, they don’t offer much in the way of texture—the doors, bedroom, bathroom, closet, and cabinet—are simple, flat planes, while the molding’s diminutive size lets it practically disappear into the wall. Frame-and-panel doors have texture; their design and construction is visually pleasing. Moreover, they are weightier, making their opening and shutting more satisfying than that of light, hollow doors, much the way heavy silverware is more satisfying to use than light silverware. Heavier doors don’t rattle so much—their weight allows for little play in the hinges, making their opening and closing smoother. Thicker molding is also more visually pleasing, adding texture to the walls, windows, and doorways. In fact, I’m not sure there’s any more pleasing interior than one at least partially covered in wood paneling (this kind, not this kind).

One drawback of this sort of design and construction is the wood involved. My childhood home's doors, cabinets, and molding use much less wood than the doors and craftsman-style molding in my current home. On the other hand, my doors will easily outlast most hollow core doors—they can't be ruined by a stray foot or knee, for example. My kitchen cabinets are similarly constructed with obsolescence in mind, their 25 or 30 years of use having nearly ruined them. Furthermore, most of their materials cannot be easily reused; cabinets and doors made of solid wood can be readily salvaged (reused or dismantled for their lumber), but press board and fiberboard are nearly useless apart from the piece of furniture for which they were molded. To me, one of the most appealing features of frame-and-panel doors is their durability. They are built to last; they are meant to endure. This sort of construction implies an intent to stay put, to stay placed, to remain devoted to a particular piece of property, to a particular community, and to a particular life, and these are implications I can feel good about.