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Rating: “Education is the fundamental initiation ritual of today's global civilization; deschooling should be the premise of any movement for the liberation of man!” (Ivan Illich)
First read during the tumultuous high school years, intrigued by the apparent irony of the title, "Deschooling Society" is a book that is almost unknown today but contains a message of frighteningly current importance despite almost 40 years since its publication. The author, one of the most important free thinkers of the 20th century, in this essay of a hundred pages or so, offers a sharp and deep analysis of the complex world of the educational institution, here understood not as a beneficiary of the individual's growth and culture but as an institution set for quite different purposes: indoctrination, economic speculation, and social control, which has managed to instill in modern man that type of psychological impotence that dangerously confuses teaching and knowledge for what are actually indoctrination and mere acquisition of diplomas.
From Wikipedia: "the school, in Illich's opinion, serves particularist interests (especially economic) and ends up performing functions of social control. As an institution that primarily has roles of social selection and custody, it ends up being essentially anti-educational and produces a series of evils such as indoctrination, competition, respect for appearances, and rituals."
Got the concept?
If the topic still seems a bit convoluted, I'll try to give an example. Every individual's life is made up of deadlines, contracts, goals to achieve, or failures to overcome. Elementary, middle, high school, university, specialization, master, internship, fixed-term contract, and when things go (very) well, work: achieving a stable and intellectually healthy life does not at all mean a free, independent, varied education, but rather a constant and inevitable subjugation to the school/work system that obliges, without too many pretenses (and with the excuse of educating), to dedicate an entire life to the acquisition of titles, certificates, diplomas, and degrees practically become indispensable in every field and perfectly work to select and discriminate the user apparatus.
Because "acquisition of titles" mainly means money circulation: millions of hours of lessons for as many billions of subjects in an exponential increase, tons of books, increasingly inaccessible and expensive methods and insights, years and years of practice that could be condensed into more concrete and free (and therefore more formative) experiences, spent only to complete very long and anything but impartial study paths, delivering to students a view of reality that is increasingly detached and confused.
This, in summary, is the author's thesis (again from Wikipedia): "The school effectively serves to create and defend the social myth, given that every graduate has been indoctrinated to serve among the world’s wealthy (the privilege of dissent is not granted to those who are not already examined and cataloged in advance as persons potentially occupying positions of power). It today performs the triple function that was always the prerogative of the most powerful churches in history. It is both the repository of the myth of society, the institutionalization of the contradictions of the myth, and the place of the ritual that reproduces and masks the discrepancies between myth and reality. The school indoctrinates its students by creating the following myths in their minds: -The myth of institutionalized values is inculcated by teaching that a valid education results from attendance; that the value of learning increases in proportion to input, to the amount of knowledge imparted, and, finally, that this value can be measured and documented by grades and degrees. -The myth of the measurement of values emerges from the institutionalized values that the school inculcates as measured values. The school initiates students into a world where everything is measurable, including their imagination and even themselves. -The myth of ready-made values is found in the fact that the school system sells a prepackaged and indisputable course of study (how true is this point?) -The myth of self-perpetuating progress reveals that the expenses to induce students to remain in school increase wildly as they advance in their studies and teach them the value of escalation, the American way of doing things."
In short, I, who have been teaching guitar for more than three years without having studied music in a conservatory, can never become a "real" musician until I get a diploma, just as the girl who is an expert in photography but works as a bartender and can’t afford the advanced Photoshop course or the certificate to work in a studio: individual dynamics are nullified for an elitist cultural selection, invisible precisely because it’s institutionalized. And what might be the solutions to this scenario? This is what the author proposes: a free and autonomous exchange of information through a free and accessible system, managed and updated by the very individuals who are its direct users, in a word, the Internet. Almost 30 years ahead of its explosive entry into mass culture, the author with this "Deschooling Society" is the first to postulate the advent of what is the only technology today capable of providing virtually limitless access to information and quality, where geo/political boundaries and economic elitism practically disappear.
On the internet, it is possible to find everything for everyone, from sites where you can download any type of musical content for a fee to millions of others (illegal) where everything is possible at zero cost, including movies, books, newspaper articles of every political or ideological color; once we were forced to use a phone, now there is Skype; before I had to buy an encyclopedia, now there is Wikipedia or even Nonciclopedia if I want to have a laugh; once there were school periodicals, now there are Blogs, where everyone can write practically everything they want and be followed all over the world; if you are a musician there is Last FM, Myspace, if you want to meet new people (or simply annihilate your social life) there are Facebook, Twitter, Netlog, Second Life; if I want to discover new realities I don’t spend four euros on Rolling Stone, I take a stroll on Debaser and maybe write something there myself, so that you can share this experience, whether you like it or not is irrelevant.
The implications of all this are nothing short of shocking, but even more so is reading that there are so-called "intellectuals" like the aforementioned Ivan Illich, who understood all this almost 40 years ago, obviously proposed and analyzed with a language and terminology very distant from today's reality. In conclusion, I practically recommend everyone to read this essay, and to stay in line with the writer's philosophy, here is where it can be downloaded for free. It is curious to note that the page on Wikipedia.it is marked as "non-neutral." I wonder why...
Post Scriptum: I recommend those interested in the contents of Illich's book to read the essays "The Technocratic School Reform" and "Stochastic Mystification of Nature" on the blog debernardi.splinder.it
Bye!
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