
Deschooling Society (1970) - minerjoe
https://davidtinapple.com/illich/1970_deschooling.html
======
minerjoe
"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."

~~~
throwawaygh
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.

~~~
deburo
Can you expand a bit more on conviviality, what is represents?

~~~
jimduk
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.

If you can get the BBC - this radio program (In our time) is a good
introduction.
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08c2ljg](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08c2ljg)

~~~
082349872349872
I appreciate how the french idea of _education_ includes _savoir vivre_.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23809211](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23809211)

One should be able to be convivial even with those who aren't companions.

------
motohagiography
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.

~~~
Ericson2314
> I think Illich's criticisms of car culture pushed him outside the Overton
> window of policy making.

Then or now? Cars being terrible and destroying society is not a fringe view
in many places.

~~~
doukdouk
No, but being "anti cars" is still extremely controversial, see for instance
the "Yellow Vests" in France.

~~~
Ericson2314
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.)

------
tmaly
"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.

~~~
guidoism
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.

~~~
pantaloony
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.

~~~
guidoism
I have to disagree with you on several points:

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.

~~~
pantaloony
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.

------
jonjacky
Steven Kell has noted the relevance of Illich's ideas to computing and
software:

[https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/srk21/research/talks/...](https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/srk21/research/talks/kell19de-
escalating-intro-script.txt)

"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."

[https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/srk21/research/talks/...](https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/srk21/research/talks/kell19software-
slides.pdf)

"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 ..."

------
snikeris
> 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.

~~~
throwawaygh
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...

------
kweinber
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.

~~~
throwaw4y-plate
That's basically Marx in a nutshell. Great diagnosis, impractical cure.

~~~
marnett
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?

~~~
redbar0n
I think he was referring to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto](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.

~~~
labelbias
The greatest managers of capitalism are authoritarian communists.

------
slowmovintarget
Written in 1970, still relevant.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich)

------
Jash_Keyo
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.

------
xhkkffbf
I've heard this called "Defund the thought police."

~~~
core-questions
We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control.

------
dang
A thread from 2008:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=285107](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=285107)

One interesting comment from last year:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21578620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21578620)

Illich related from last year:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21512587](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21512587)

------
korse
"Indeed, preventive concentration camps for predelinquents would be a logical
improvement over the school system."

Nice.

------
kazinator
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.

------
supernova87a
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.

~~~
alex_young
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.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling#Unschooling/Descho...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling#Unschooling/Deschooling_society)

~~~
supernova87a
I'll have to read more about that, thanks.

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.

------
Melting_Harps
John Taylor Gatto's work in this space is also worth noting:

[https://www.amazon.com/s?k=John+Taylor+Gatto&ref=nb_sb_noss](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=John+Taylor+Gatto&ref=nb_sb_noss)

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.

1: [https://gridalternatives.org/](https://gridalternatives.org/)

------
LatteLazy
"Schools, banks, government, vaccines, democracy, the apollo program? all
giant conspiracies" says angry man

------
deleuze
Read Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault.

~~~
throwawaygh
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".

~~~
Der_Einzige
"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...

~~~
voidhorse
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.

------
alexashka
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.

~~~
marnett
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.

~~~
alexashka
> 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.

