stimulant

About a year after reading my first book calling for education reform — John Holt’s How Children Fail — I read Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. By that time, I’d also read all of John Holt’s books, and noted that philosophically, Holt had progressed from someone concerned with pedagogical reform to someone who wanted to the complete abolition of school as an institution. By 1976, when Holt published Instead of Education, he had arrived at the conclusion that school was a scourge to be eliminated, not reformed

It is clear now, as it was not at first, why Illich reacted with such horror to my saying that we should push the walls of the school building out further and further. That seemed at the time a good enough way to say that we should abolish the distinction between learning and the rest of life. Only later did I see the danger that he saw right away. Think again about the global schoolhouse, madhouse, prison. What are madhouses and prisons? They are institutions of compulsory treatment […] A global schoolhouse would be a world, which we seem to be moving toward, in which one group of people would have the right through our entire lives to subject the rest of us to various sorts of tests, and if we did not measure up, to require us to submit to various kinds of treatment, i.e. education, therapy, etc., until we did. A worse nightmare is hard to imagine.

I remember thinking that it was a shame that both Illich and Holt had come to rest at such radical ends, philosophically. I found myself lamenting their ostensibly inevitable marginalization.

Ironically, I now find myself increasingly drawn to much of their final rhetoric. I still feel that they became too attached to the ideal incarnation of their vision, ending up too intimidated by the prospect of attempting to incrementally change the current system to do as much good as I wished they had. This is a general problem in social reform: things are bad enough now that you can’t see a continuous path from here to where you want to go. And so Illich and Holt, each in their own ways, ended up creating bubbles within which they did wield enough influence to see microcosmic (if partial, and partially successful) incarnations of their visions.

Concerned that I was learning to overlook the same weaknesses that first troubled me upon reading Illich, I went back to his work and began rereading it. In doing so, I came upon this passage, from Deschooling Society:

The totally destructive and constantly progressive nature of obligatory instruction will fulfill its ultimate logic unless we begin to liberate ourselves right now from our pedagogical hubris, our belief that man can do what God cannot, namely, manipulate others for their own salvation.

Now, Illich catches a lot of misdirected flak as a “communist.” The spirit of this quote is a pretty staunch refutation of that. Sans the divine reference, compare the sentiment contained therein with the [in?]famous Randian motto:

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

This exemplifies one of the things that I find most refreshing about Illich’s work is its focus on empowerment, rather than its focus on the needs empowerment satisfies. In all his discussion of education reform, economic reform, health care reform, and so on, the focus is not on the needs that are being satisfied (the “need”¹ for education, the need for food and shelter, the need for medical care, …) but rather on the task of equipping people to satisfy these needs themselves, in their own communities. This theme is one of the most empowering ideas you can run across as someone interested in reform. My enthusiasm for the feasibility and possibility of actually revolutionizing education in my lifetime is made all the more ironic by the fact that ideologically, I’m now a much more sympathetic supporter of much of Illich’s rhetoric. I’ve come to different conclusions about what it means to pursue that vision, though. Unfortunately, there’s a surfeit of thought about what to change, and a dearth of thought about how to change it.

And so, I return, as always, to my confusion about how to change things.

1. Illich would roll over in his grave in hearing such an undifferentiated phrase, “the need for education” — as an institution, he feels there is no need for it, and that the manufacture of need is one of its most pernicious traits [↩]