10 Provocative Quotes from Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society"
Ivan Illich’s groundbreaking book Deschooling Society (1971)
offers a radical critique of the institutionalization of education
within modern societies. Illich believed that we wrongly identify
education with schooling, since most of our education happens outside of
the school environment. He advocated restructuring education to provide
people with multiple opportunities for learning outside of school.
“What are needed,” he wrote, “are new networks, readily available to the
public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and
teaching.”
Here are 10 thought-provoking quotes that will give you an idea of what the book is about:
1) “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."
