Family Matters by David Guterson

Author:David Guterson [Guterson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

One can best discern what Illich is about in his 1970 book Deschoolirtg Society, a sophisticated tirade against all things modern weighed down by revolutionary political rhetoric and by an abstract approach to educational problems. For children of the sixties who themselves had children, Illich provided the philosophical basis for continuing the revolution into parenthood. In schools, he informs us, "all students are academically processed to be happy only in the company of fellow consumers of the products of the educational machine.... School," he adds elsewhere, "has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age." Illich struck a chord with disillusioned neo-Luddites who found in institutions such as schools the virus that had infected civilized humanity and that had to be destroyed before humanity could recover.

Deschooling Society advanced the point of view that institutions themselves are the problem—it doesn't seem to matter how they are shaped—and that the single best solution to our educational problems is to dismantle institutions of learning. The power of schools to regulate our lives, to define our learning, shape our purposes, dictate our standards, and determine our careers should be destroyed once and for all, says Illich; the result would be liberation of the individual from institutional tyranny, a more vigorous society, a deeper and richer cultural imagination, and an open community of learning. The message has some attractions worth pondering; the pedantic rhetoric does not. Illich was not listened to by many Americans and has not had the impact of, say, Marshall McLuhan or Buckminster Fuller (two notable deep thinkers from the same era), in part because he was incomprehensible, in part because his ideas for educational reform presupposed the sort of radical social change few Americans were inclined to make. Finally, too, Illich was more concerned with the society that would emerge when schools were abandoned than with education in its own right. He called for a cultural revolution in America that could only begin once schools were gone, but he remained both vague and unrealistic about the educational arrangements that would take their place.

Illich's contemporary, the educator John Holt, had already published four significant books by the time Deschooling Society appeared. In his fifth, Freedom and Beyond, Holt allied himself with Illich in calling for a deschooled society, but he said:

by a deschooled society we don't mean a society without any arrangements and resources for learning.... We don't even mean a society without any schools. Some things—languages, music, dance—may be better learned in a school than in any other way, or may even require a school.... But in a deschooled society, nobody would be compelled to go to school.... No one would be punished for not liking schools, not finding them good places to learn, and not learning there, or for wanting and trying to learn in other ways....In sum, a deschooled society would be a society in which everyone shall have the widest and freest possible choice to learn whatever he wants to learn, whether in school or in some altogether different way.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.