Deschooling

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Books; schooling on 4 May 2005.

“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 endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions that 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.”

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

What Illich was criticising was the way schools (and other similar public agencies) turn us into slavish consumers who must depend on professional producers (whether government bureaucrats or corporations) to tell us what’s good or right for us. When homeschoolers take responsibility for their own education, they are resisting what he called “approved measures of social control.” You could say homeschooling is a form of deschooling in practice, because we see education as a lifelong commitment to formal and incidental learning utilising new approaches that foster life values, not dead knowledge.

I would take that to mean values that express love for God in heart, soul, mind, and strength – and love for our neighbour as we love ourselves.

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