Education Without School: How It Can Be Done
- From: rpautrey2 <rpautrey2@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:03:04 -0700 (PDT)
Volume 15, Number 12 · January 7, 1971
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10701
A Special Supplement: Education Without School: How It Can Be Done
By Ivan Illich
In a previous article[1] I discussed what is becoming a common
complaint about schools, one that is reflected, for example, in the
recent report of the Carnegie Commission: In school registered
students submit to certified teachers in order to obtain certificates
of their own; both are frustrated and both blame insufficient resources
—money, time, or buildings—for their mutual frustration.
Such criticism leads many people to ask whether it is possible to
conceive of a different style of learning. The same people,
paradoxically, when pressed to specify how they acquired what they
know and value, will readily admit that they learned it more often
outside than inside school. Their knowledge of facts, their
understanding of life and work came to them from friendship or love,
while viewing TV, or while reading, from examples of peers or the
challenge of a street encounter. Or they may have learned what they
know through the apprenticeship ritual for admission to a street gang
or the initiation to a hospital, newspaper city room, plumber's shop,
or insurance office. The alternative to dependence on schools is not
the use of public resources for some new device which "makes" people
learn; rather it is the creation of a new style of educational
relationship between man and his environment. To foster this style,
attitudes toward growing up, the tools available for learning, and the
quality and structure of daily life will have to change concurrently.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Attitudes are already changing. The proud dependence on school is
gone. Consumer resistance is increasing in the knowledge industry.
Many teachers and pupils, taxpayers and employers; economists and
policemen would prefer not to depend any longer on schools. What
prevents their frustration from shaping new institutions is a lack not
only of imagination but frequently also one of appropriate language
and of enlightened self-interest. They cannot visualize either a de-
schooled society or educational institutions in a society which
disestablishes school.
In this essay, I intend to show that the inverse of school is
possible: That we can depend on self-motivated learning instead of
employing teachers to bribe or compel the student to find time and the
will to learn; that we can provide the learner with new links to the
world instead of continuing to funnel all educational programs through
the teacher. I shall discuss some of the general characteristics which
distinguish schooling from learning and outline four major categories
of educational institutions which should appeal not only to many
individuals, but also to many existing interest groups.
An Objection: Who Can Be Served by Bridges to Nowhere?
We are used to considering schools as a variable, dependent on the
political and economic structure. If we can change the style of
political leadership, or promote the interests of one class or
another, or switch from private to public ownership of the means of
production, we assume the school system will change as well. The
educational institutions I will propose, however, are meant to serve a
society which does not now exist, although the current frustration
with schools is itself potentially a major force to set in motion
change toward new social arrangements. An obvious objection has been
raised to this approach: Why channel energy to build bridges to
nowhere, instead of marshaling it first to change not the schools but
the political and economic system?
This objection, however, underestimates the repressive political and
economic nature of the school system itself, as well as the political
potential inherent in a new educational style. In a basic sense,
schools have ceased to be dependent on the ideology professed by a
government or the organization of its market. Even the Chinese feel
they must adopt the basic international structure of schooling in
order to become a world power and a nation state. Control of society
is reserved everywhere to those who have consumed at least four units
of four years, each unit consisting of 500-1000 hours in the
classroom.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
School, as I suggested in my previous article, is the major component
of the system of consumer production which is becoming more complex
and specialized and bureaucratized. Schooling is necessary to produce
the habits and expectations of the managed consumer society.
Inevitably it produces institutional dependence and ranking in spite
of any effort by the teacher to teach the contrary. It is an illusion
that schools are only a dependent variable, an illusion which,
moreover, provides them, the reproductive organs of a consumer
society, with their immunity.
Even the piecemeal creation of new educational agencies which are the
inverse of school would therefore be an attack on the most sensitive
link of a pervasive phenomenon, which is organized by the state in all
countries. A political program which does not explicitly recognize the
need for de-schooling is not revolutionary; it is demagoguery calling
for more of the same. Any major political program of the Seventies
should be evaluated by this measure: How clearly does it state the
need for de-schooling—and how clearly does it provide guidelines for
the educational quality of the society for which it aims?
The struggle against domination by the world market and big power
politics might be beyond some poor communities or countries—but this
weakness is an added reason for emphasizing the importance of
liberating each society through a reversal of its educational
structure, a change which is not beyond any society's means.
General Characteristics of New Formal Educational Institutions
A good educational system should have three purposes: it should
provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at
any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know
to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally, furnish all
who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to
make their challenge known. Such a system would require the
application of constitutional guarantees to education. Learners should
not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum; or to
discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a
diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support—through a
regressive taxation—a huge professional apparatus of educators and
buildings which in fact restrict the public's chances for learning to
the services the profession is willing to put on the market. It should
use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free
press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.
Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to
everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that
secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and
that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual
with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified
packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New
educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose
must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look
into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot
get in the door. Moreover, such new institutions should be channels to
which the learner would have access without credentials or pedigree—
public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon
now become available.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I believe that no more than four—possibly even three—distinct
"channels" or learning exchanges could contain all the resources
needed for real learning. The child grows up in a world of things,
surrounded by people who serve as models for skills and values. He
finds peers who challenge him to argue, to compete, to cooperate, and
to understand; and if the child is lucky, he is exposed to
confrontation or criticism by an experienced elder who really cares.
Things, models, peers, and elders are four resources each of which
requires a different type of arrangement to ensure that everybody has
ample access to them.
I will use the word "network" to designate specific ways to provide
access to each of four sets of resources. The word is often used,
unfortunately, to designate the channels reserved to material selected
by others for indoctrination, instruction, and entertainment. But it
can also be used for the telephone or the postal service, which are
primarily accessible to individuals who want to send messages to one
another. What are needed are new networks, readily available to the
public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and
teaching.
To give an example: the same level of technology is used in TV and in
tape recorders. All Latin American countries now have introduced TV:
in Bolivia the government has financed a TV station, which was built
six years ago, and there are no more than 7,000 TV sets for four
million citizens. The money now tied up in TV installations throughout
Latin America could have provided every fifth adult with a tape
recorder. In addition, the money would have sufficed to provide an
almost unlimited library of prerecorded tapes, with outlets even in
remote villages, as well as an ample supply of empty tapes.
This network of tape recorders, of course, would be radically
different from the present network of TV. It would provide opportunity
for free expression: literate and illiterate alike could record,
preserve, disseminate, and repeat their opinions. The present
investment in TV instead provides bureaucrats, whether politicians or
educators, with the power to sprinkle the continent with
institutionally produced programs which they—or their sponsors—decide
are good for or in demand by the people. Technology is available to
develop either independence and learning, or bureaucracy and
preaching.
Four Networks
The planning of new educational institutions ought not to begin with
the administrative goals of a principal or president, or with the
teaching goals of a professional educator, or with the learning goals
of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the
question, "What should someone learn?" but with the question, "What
kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with
in order to learn?"
Someone who wants to learn knows that he needs both information and
critical response to its use from somebody else. Information can be
stored in things and in persons. In a good educational system, access
to things ought to be available at the sole bidding of the learner,
while access to informants requires in addition others' consent.
Criticism can also come from two directions: from peers or from
elders, that is, from fellow learners whose immediate interests match
mine, or from those who will grant me a share in their superior
experience. Peers can be colleagues with whom to raise a question,
companions for playful and enjoyable (or arduous) reading or walking,
challengers at any type of game. Elders can be consultants on which
skill to learn, which method to use, what company to seek at a given
moment. They can be guides to the right questions to be raised among
peers and to the deficiency of answers they arrive at.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Educational resources are usually labeled according to educators'
curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four
different approaches which enable the student to gain access to any
educational resource which may help him to define and achieve his own
goals:
1.) Reference Services to Educational Objects—which facilitate access
to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things
can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental
agencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters;
others can be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but
made available to students as apprentices or on off-hours.
2.) Skill Exchanges—which permit persons to list their skills, the
conditions under which they are willing to serve as models for others
who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can be
reached.
3.) Peer Matching—a communication network which permits persons to
describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the
hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.
4.) Reference Services to Educators-at-large—who can be listed in a
directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals,
para-professionals, and free-lancers, along with conditions of access
to their services. Such educators, as we will see, could be chosen by
polling or consulting their former clients.
Reference Services to Educational Objects
Things are basic resources for learning. The quality of the
environment and the relationship of a person to it will determine how
much he learns incidentally. Formal learning requires special access
to ordinary things, on the one hand, or, on the other, easy and
dependable access to special things made for educational purposes. An
example of the former is the special right to operate or dismantle a
machine in a garage. An example of the latter is the general right to
use an abacus, a computer, a book, a botanical garden, or a machine
withdrawn from production and placed at the full disposal of students.
At present, attention is focused on the disparity between rich and
poor children in their access to things and in the manner in which
they can learn from them. OEO and other agencies, following this
approach, concentrate on equalizing chances, by trying to provide more
educational equipment for the poor. A more radical point of departure
would be to recognize that in the city rich and poor alike are
artificially kept away from most of the things that surround them.
Children born into the age of plastics and efficiency experts must
penetrate two barriers which obstruct their understanding: one built
into things, and the other around institutions. Industrial design
creates a world of things that resist insight into their nature, and
schools shut the learner out of the world of things in their
meaningful setting.
After a short visit to New York, a woman from a Mexican village told
me she was impressed by the fact that stores sold "only wares heavily
made up with cosmetics." I understood her to mean that industrial
products "speak" to their customers about their allurements and not
about their nature. Industry has surrounded people with artifacts
whose inner workings only specialists are allowed to understand. The
non-specialist is discouraged from figuring out what makes a watch
tick, or a telephone ring, or an electric typewriter work, by being
warned that it will break if he tries. He can be told what makes a
transistor radio work but he cannot find out for himself. This type of
design tends to reinforce a noninventive society in which the experts
find it progressively easier to hide behind their expertise and beyond
evaluation.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The man-made environment has become as inscrutable as nature is for
the primitive. At the same time, educational materials have been
monopolized by school. Simple educational objects have been
expensively packaged by the knowledge industry. They have become
specialized tools for professional educators, and their cost has been
inflated by forcing them to stimulate either environments or teachers.
The teacher is jealous of the textbook he defines as his professional
implement. The student may come to hate the lab because he associates
it with schoolwork. The administrator rationalizes his protective
attitude toward the library as a defense of costly public equipment
against those who would play with it rather than learn. In this
atmosphere, the student too often uses the map, the lab, the
encyclopedia, or the microscope at the rare moments when the
curriculum tells him to do so. Even the great classics become part of
"sophomore year" instead of marking a new turn in a person's life.
School removes things from everyday use by labeling them educational
tools.
If we are to de-school, both tendencies must be reversed. The general
physical environment must be made accessible, and those physical
learning resources which have been reduced to teaching instruments
become generally available for self-directed learning. Using things
merely as part of a curriculum can have an even worse effect than just
removing them: It can corrupt the attitudes of pupils.
Games are a case in point. I do not mean the "games" of the physical
education department (such as football and basketball), which the
schools use to raise income and prestige and in which they have make a
substantial capital investment. As the athletes themselves are well
aware, these enterprises, which take the form of warlike tournaments,
have undermined the playfulness of sports and are used to reinforce
the competitive nature of schools. Rather I have in mind the
educational games which can provide a unique way to penetrate formal
systems. Set-theory, linguistics, propositional logic, geometry,
physics, and even chemistry reveal themselves with little effort to
certain persons who play these games. A friend of mine went to a
Mexican market with a game called "Wff'n Proof," which consists of
some dice on which twelve logical symbols are imprinted. He showed
children which two or three combinations constituted a well-formed
sentence, and inductively within the first hour some onlookers also
grasped the principle. Within a few hours of playfully conducting
formal logical proofs, some children are capable of introducing others
to the fundamental proofs of propositional logic. The others just walk
away.
In fact, for some children such games are a special form of liberating
education, since they heighten their awareness of the fact that formal
systems are built on changeable axioms and that conceptual operations
have a game-like nature. They are also simple, cheap, and—to a large
extent—can be organized by the players themselves. Used outside the
curriculum such games provide an opportunity for identifying and
developing unusual talent, while the school psychologist will often
identify those who have such talent as in danger of becoming anti-
social, sick, or unbalanced. Within school, when used in the form of
tournaments, games are not only removed from the sphere of leisure;
they often become tools used to translate playfulness into
competition, a lack of abstract reasoning into a sign of inferiority.
An exercise which is liberating for some character types becomes a
strait-jacket for others.
The control of school over educational equipment has still another
effect. It increases enormously the cost of such cheap materials. Once
their use is restricted to scheduled hours, professionals are paid to
supervise their acquisition, storage, and use. Then students vent
their anger against the school on the equipment, which must be
purchased once again.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paralleling the untouchability of teaching tools is the
impenetrability of modern junk. In the Thirties, any self-respecting
boy knew how to repair an automobile, but now car makers multiply
wires and withhold manuals from everyone except specialized mechanics.
In a former era, an old radio contained enough coils and condensers to
build a transmitter that would make all the neighborhood radios scream
in feedback. Transistor radios are more portable, but nobody dares to
take them apart. To change this in the highly industrialized countries
will be immensely difficult; but at least in the Third World, we must
insist on built-in educational qualities.
To illustrate my point, let me present a model: By spending $10
million it would be possible to connect 40,000 hamlets in a country
like Peru with a spiderweb of six-foot wide trails and maintain these,
and, in addition, provide the country with 200,000 three-wheeled
mechanical donkeys—five on the average for each hamlet. Few poor
countries of this size spend less than this yearly on cars and roads,
both of which are now mainly restricted to the rich and their
employees, while poor people remain trapped in their villages. Each of
these simple but durable little vehicles would cost $125—half of which
would pay for transmission and a six horsepower motor. A "donkey"
could make 20 mph, and it can carry loads of 850 pounds (that is, most
things besides trunks and steel beams which are ordinarily moved).
The political appeal of such a transportation system to a peasantry is
obvious. Equally obvious is the reason why those who hold power—and
thereby automatically have a car—are not interested in spending money
on trails and in clogging roads with engine-driven donkeys. The
universal donkey could work only if a country's leaders were willing
to impose a national speed limit of, say, 25 miles an hour and adapt
its public institutions to this. The model could not work if conceived
only as a stop-gap.
This is not the place to elaborate on the political, social, economic,
financial, and technical feasibility of this model.[2] I only wish to
indicate that educational considerations may be of prime importance
when choosing such an alternative to capital-intensive transport. By
raising the unit cost per donkey by some 20 percent it would become
possible to plan the production of all its parts in such a manner
that, as far as possible, each future owner would spend a month or two
making and understanding his machine, and would be able to repair it.
With this additional cost it would also be possible to decentralize
production into dispersed plants. The added benefits would result not
only from including educational costs in the construction process.
Even more significantly, a durable motor which practically anyone
could learn to repair and which could be used as a plough and pump by
somebody who understood it would provide much higher educational
benefits than the inscrutable engines of the advanced countries.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not only the junk but also the supposedly public places of the modern
city have become impenetrable. In American society, children are
excluded from most things and places on the grounds that they are
private. But even in societies which have declared an end to private
property, children are kept away from the same places and things
because they are considered the special domain of professionals and
dangerous to the uninitiated. Since the last generation the railroad
yard has become as inaccessible as the fire station. Yet with a little
ingenuity, it should not be difficult to provide for safety in such
places. To de-school the artifacts of education will require making
the artifacts and processes available—and recognizing their
educational value. Certainly, some workers would find it inconvenient
to be accessible to learners; but this inconvenience must be balanced
against the educational gains.
Private cars could be banned from Manhattan. Five years ago, it was
unthinkable. Now, certain New York streets are closed off at odd
hours, and this trend will probably continue. Indeed most cross-
streets should be closed to automotive traffic and parking should be
forbidden everywhere. In a city opened up to people, teaching
materials which are now locked up in storerooms and laboratories could
be dispersed into independently operated storefront depots which
children and adults could visit without the danger of being run over.
If the goals of learning were no longer dominated by schools and
schoolteachers, the market for learners would be much more various and
the definition of "educational artifacts" would be less restrictive.
There could be tool shops, libraries, laboratories, and gaming rooms.
Photolabs and offset presses would allow neighborhood newspapers to
flourish. Some storefront learning centers could contain viewing
booths for closed-circuit television, others could feature office
equipment for use and for repair. The jukebox or the record player
would be commonplace, with some specializing in classical music,
others in international folk tunes, others in jazz. Film clubs would
compete with each other and with commercial television. Museum outlets
could be networks for circulating exhibits of works of art, both old
and new, originals and reproductions, perhaps administered by the
various metropolitan museums.
The professional personnel needed for this network would be much more
like custodians, museum guides, or reference librarians than like
teachers. From the corner biology store, they could refer their
clients to the shell collection in the museum or indicate the next
showing of biology videotapes in a certain viewing booth. They could
furnish guides for pest control, diet, and other kinds of preventive
medicine. They could refer those who needed advice to "elders" who
could provide it.
Two distinct approaches can be taken to financing a network of
"learning objects." A community could determine a maximum budget for
this purpose and arrange for all parts of the network to be open to
all visitors at reasonable hours. Or the community could decide to
provide citizens with limited entitlements, according to their age
group, which would give them special access to certain materials which
are both costly and scarce, while leaving other, simpler materials
available to everyone.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Finding resources for material made specifically for education is only
one—and perhaps the least costly—aspect in building an educational
world. The money now spent on the sacred paraphernalia of the school
ritual can be freed to provide all citizens with greater access to the
real life of the city. Special tax incentives could be granted to
those who employed children between the ages of eight and fourteen for
a couple of hours each day if the conditions of employment were humane
ones. We should return to the tradition of the bar-mitzvah or
confirmation. By this I mean we should first restrict, and later
eliminate, the disenfranchisement of the young and permit a boy of
twelve to become a man fully responsible for his participation in the
life of the community. Many "school age" people know more about their
neighborhood than social workers or councilmen. Of course, they also
ask more embarrassing questions and propose solutions which threaten
the bureaucracy. They should be allowed to come of age so that they
could put their knowledge and fact-finding ability to work in the
service of a popular government.
Until recently the dangers of school were easily underestimated in
comparison with the dangers of an apprenticeship in the police force,
the fire department, or the entertainment industry. It was easy to
justify schools at least as a means to protect youth. Often this
argument no longer holds. I recently visited a Methodist church in
Harlem occupied by a group of armed Young Lords in protest against the
death of Julio Rodan, a Puerto Rican youth found hanged in his prison
cell. I knew the leaders of the group who had spent a semester in
Cuernavaca. When I wondered why one of them, Juan, was not among them
I was told that he had "gone back on heroin and to the State
University."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Planning, incentives, and legislation can be used to unlock the
educational potential within our society's huge investment in plants
and equipment. Full access to educational objects will not exist so
long as business firms are allowed to combine the legal protections
which the Bill of Rights reserves to the privacy of individuals with
the economic power conferred upon them by their millions of customers
and thousands of employees, stockholders, and suppliers. Much of the
world's know-how and most of its productive processes and equipment
are locked within the walls of business firms, away from their
customers, employees, and stockholders, as well as from the general
public, whose laws and facilities allow them to function. Money now
spent on advertising in capitalist countries could be redirected
toward education in and by General Electric, NBC-TV, or Budweiser
beer. That is, the plants and offices should be reorganized so that
their daily operations can be more accessible to the public in ways
that will make learning possible; and indeed ways might be found to
pay the companies for the learning people acquire from them.
An even more valuable body of scientific objects and data may be
withheld from general access—and even from qualified scientists—under
the guise of national security. Until recently science was the one
forum which functioned like an anarchist's dream. Each man capable of
doing research had more or less the same opportunity of access to its
tools and to a hearing of the community of peers. Now
bureaucratization and organization have placed much of science beyond
public reach. Indeed, what used to be an international network of
scientific information has been splintered into an arena of competing
teams. The members as well as the artifacts of the scientific
community have been locked into national and corporate programs
oriented toward practical achievement, to the radical impoverishment
of the men who support these nations and corporations.
In a world which is controlled and owned by nations and corporations,
only limited access to educational objects will ever be possible. But
increased access to those objects which can be shared for educational
purposes may enlighten us enough to help us to break through these
ultimate political barriers. Public schools transfer control over the
educational uses of objects from private to professional hands. The
institutional inversion of schools could empower the individual to
reclaim the right to use them for education. A truly public kind of
ownership might begin to emerge if private or corporate control over
the educational aspect of "things" were brought to the vanishing
point.
Skill Exchanges
A guitar teacher, unlike a guitar, can be neither classified in a
museum nor owned by the public nor rented from an educational
warehouse. Teachers of skills belong to a different class of resources
from objects needed to learn a skill. This is not to say that they are
indispensable in every case. I can not only rent a guitar, but also
taped guitar lessons and illustrated chord charts—and with these
things I can teach myself to play the guitar. Indeed, this arrangement
might have advantages—if the available tapes are better than the
available teachers. Or if the only time I have for learning the guitar
is late at night or if the tunes I wish to play are unknown in my
country. Or I might be shy and prefer to fumble along in privacy.
Skill teachers must be listed and contacted through a different kind
of channel from that of things. A thing is available at the bidding of
the user—or could be—whereas a person formally becomes a skill
resource only when he consents to do so, and he can also restrict
time, place, and method as he chooses.
Skill teachers must also be distinguished from peers, from whom one
would learn. Peers who wish to pursue a common inquiry must start from
common interests and abilities; they get together to exercise or
improve a skill they share: basketball, dancing, constructing a
campsite, or discussing the next election. The first transmission of a
skill, on the other hand, involves bringing together someone who has
the skill and someone who does not have it and wants to acquire it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A "skill model" is a person who possesses a skill and is willing to
demonstrate its practice. A demonstration of this kind is frequently a
necessary resource for a potential learner. Modern inventions permit
us to incorporate demonstration into tape, film, or chart; yet one
would hope personal demonstration will remain in wide demand,
especially in communication skills. Some 10,000 adults have learned
Spanish at our Center at Cuernavaca—mostly highly motivated persons
who wanted to acquire near-native fluency in a second language. When
they are faced with a choice between carefully programmed instruction
in a lab, or drill-sessions with two other students and a native
speaker following a rigid routine, most choose the second.
For most widely shared skills, a person who demonstrates the skill is
the only human resource we ever need or get. Whether in speaking or
driving, in cooking or in the use of communication equipment, we are
often barely conscious of formal instruction and learning, especially
after our first experience of the materials in question. I see no
reason why other complex skills, such as the mechanical aspects of
surgery and playing the fiddle, of reading or the use of directories
and catalogues, could not be learned in the same way.
A well-motivated student who does not labor under a specific handicap
often needs no further human assistance than can be provided by
someone who can demonstrate on demand how to do what the learner wants
to learn to do. The demand made of skilled people that before
demonstrating their skill they be certified as pedagogues is a result
of the insistence that people learn either what they do not want to
know, or that all people—even those with a special handicap—learn
certain things, at a given moment in their lives, and preferably under
specified circumstances.
What makes skills scarce on the present educational market is the
institutional requirement that those who can demonstrate them may not
do so unless they are given public trust, through a certificate. We
insist that those who help others acquire a skill should also know how
to diagnose learning difficulties and be able to motivate people to
aspire to learn skills. In short, we demand that they be pedagogues.
People who can demonstrate skills will be plentiful as soon as we
learn to recognize them outside the teaching profession.
Where princelings are being taught, the parents' insistence that the
teacher and the person with skills be combined in one person is
understandable, if no longer defensible. But for all parents to aspire
to have Aristotle for their Alexander is obviously self-defeating. The
person who can both inspire students and demonstrate a technique is so
rare, and so hard to recognize, that even princelings more often get a
sophist than a true philosopher.
A demand for scarce skills can be quickly filled even if there are
only small numbers of people to demonstrate them; but such people must
be easily available. During the Forties, radio repairmen, most of them
with no schooling in their work, were no more than two years behind
radios in penetrating the interior of Latin America. There they stayed
until transistor radios, which are cheap to purchase and impossible to
repair, put them out of business. Technical schools now fail to
accomplish what repairmen of equally useful, more durable radios could
do as a matter of course.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Converging self-interests now conspire to stop a man from sharing his
skill. The man who has the skill profits from its scarcity and not
from its reproduction. The teacher who specializes in transmitting the
skill profits from the artisan's unwillingness to launch his own
apprentice into the field. The public is indoctrinated to believe that
skills are valuable and reliable only if they are the result of formal
schooling. The job market depends on making skills scarce and on
keeping them scarce, either by proscribing their unauthorized use and
transmission or by making things which can be operated and repaired
only by those who have access to tools or information which are kept
scarce.
Schools thus produce shortages of skilled persons. A good example is
the diminishing number of nurses in the United States, owing to the
rapid increase of four-year B.S. programs in nursing. Women from
poorer families, who would formerly have enrolled in a two- or three-
year program, now stay out of the nursing profession altogether.
Insisting on the certification of teachers is another way of keeping
skills scarce. If nurses were encouraged to train nurses, and if
nurses were employed on the basis of their proven skill at giving
injections, filling out charts, and giving medicine, there would soon
be no lack of trained nurses. Certification now tends to abridge the
freedom of education by converting the civil right to share one's
knowledge into the privilege of academic freedom, now conferred only
on the employees of a school. To guarantee access to an effective
exchange of skills, we need legislation which generalizes academic
freedom. The right to teach any skill should come under the protection
of freedom of speech. Once restrictions on teaching are removed, they
will quickly be removed from learning as well.
The teacher of skills needs some inducement to grant his services to a
pupil. There are at least two simple ways to begin to channel public
funds to non-certified teachers. One way would be to institutionalize
the skill exchange by creating free skill centers open to the public.
Such centers could and should be established in industrialized areas,
at least for those skills which are fundamental prerequisites for
entering certain apprenticeships—such skills as reading, typing,
keeping accounts, foreign languages, computer programming and number
manipulation, reading special languages such as that of electrical
circuits, manipulation of certain machinery, etc. Another approach
would be to give certain groups within the population educational
currency good for attendance at skill centers where other clients
would have to pay commercial rates.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A much more radical approach would be to create a "bank" for skill
exchange. Each citizen would be given a basic credit with which to
acquire fundamental skills. Beyond that minimum, further credits would
go to those who earn them by teaching, whether they serve as models in
organized skill centers or do so privately at home or on the
playground. Only those who have taught others for an equivalent amount
of time would have a claim on the time of more advanced teachers. An
entirely new elite would be promoted, an elite of those who earn their
education by sharing it.
Should parents have the right to earn skill-credit for their children?
Since such an arrangement would give further advantage to the
privileged classes, it might be offset by granting a larger credit to
the underprivileged. The operation of a skill exchange would depend on
the existence of agencies which would facilitate the development of
directory information and assure its free and inexpensive use. Such an
agency might also provide supplementary services of testing and
certification and might help to enforce the legislation required to
break up and prevent monopolistic practices.
Fundamentally, the freedom of a universal skill exchange must be
guaranteed by laws which prevent discrimination only on the basis of
tested skills and not on the basis of educational pedigree. Such a
guarantee inevitably requires public control over tests which may be
used to qualify persons for the job market. Otherwise, it would be
possible to surreptitiously reintroduce complex batteries of tests at
the work place itself which would serve for social selection. Much
could be done to make skill testing objective, e.g., allowing only the
operation of specific machines or systems to be tested. Tests of
typing (measured according to speed, number of errors, and whether or
not the typist can work from dictation), operation of an accounting
system or of a hydraulic crane, driving, coding into COBOL, etc., can
easily be made objective.
In fact, many of the true skills which are of practical importance can
be so tested. And for the purposes of manpower-management a test of a
current skill level is much more useful than the information that a
person—twenty years ago—satisfied his teacher in a curriculum where
typing, stenography, and accounting were taught. The very need for
official skill testing can, of course, be questioned: I personally
believe that freedom from undue hurt to a man's reputation through
labeling is better guaranteed by restricting than by forbidding tests
of competence.
Peer Matching
At their worst, schools gather classmates into the same room and
subject them to the same sequence of treatment in math, citizenship,
and spelling. At their best, they permit each student to choose one of
a limited number of courses. In any case, groups of peers form around
the goals of teachers. A desirable educational system would let each
person specify the activity for which he seeks a peer.
School does offer children an opportunity to escape their homes and
meet new friends. But, at the same time, this process indoctrinates
children with the idea that they should select their friends from
among those with whom they are put together. Providing the young from
their earliest age with invitations to meet, evaluate, and seek out
others would prepare them for a lifelong interest in seeking new
partners for new endeavors.
A good chess player is always glad to find a close match, and one
novice to find another. Clubs serve their purpose. People who want to
discuss specific books or articles would probably pay to find
discussion partners. People who want to play games, go on excursions,
build fish tanks, or motorize bicycles will go to considerable lengths
to find peers. The reward for their efforts is finding those peers.
Good schools try to bring out the common interests of their students
registered in the same program. The inverse of school would be an
institution which increases the chances that persons who at a given
moment share the same specific interest could meet—no matter what else
they have in common.
Skill teaching does not provide equal benefits for both parties, as
does the matching of peers. The teacher of skills, as I have pointed
out, must usually be offered some incentive beyond the rewards of
teaching. Skill teaching is a matter of repeating drills over and is,
in fact, all the more dreary for those pupils who need it most. A
skill exchange needs currency or credits or other tangible incentives
in order to operate, even if the exchange itself were to generate a
currency of its own. A peer-matching system requires no such
incentives, but only a communications network.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tapes, retrieval-systems, programmed instruction, and reproduction of
shapes and sounds tend to reduce the need for recourse to human
teachers of many skills; they increase the efficiency of teachers and
the number of skills one can pick up in a lifetime. Parallel to this
runs an increased need to meet people interested in enjoying the newly
acquired skill. A student who has picked up Greek before her vacation
would like to discuss in Greek Cretan politics when she returns. A
Mexican in New York wants to find other readers of the paper Siempre—
or of "Los Asachados," the most popular political cartoons. Somebody
else wants to meet peers who—like himself—would like to increase
interest in the work of James Baldwin or of Bolivar.
The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user
would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity
for which he seeks a peer. A computer would send him back the names
and addresses of all those who have inserted the same description. It
is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad
scale for publicly valued activity.
In its most rudimentary form, communication between client and
computer could be done by return mail. In big cities, typewriter
terminals could provide instantaneous responses. The only way to
retrieve a name and address from the computer would be to list an
activity for which a peer is sought. People using the system would
become known only to their potential peers.
A complement to the computer could be a network of bulletin boards and
classified newspaper ads, listing the activities for which the
computer could not produce a match. No names would have to be given.
Interested readers would then introduce their names into the system. A
publicly supported peer-match network might be the only way to
guarantee the right of free assembly and to train people in the
exercise of this most fundamental civic activity.
The right of free assembly has been politically recognized and
culturally accepted. We should now understand that this right is
curtailed by laws that make some forms of assembly obligatory. This is
especially the case with institutions which conscript according to age-
group, class, or sex, and which are very time-consuming. The army is
one example. School is an even more outrageous one.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To de-school means to abolish the power of one person to oblige
another person to attend a meeting. It also means recognizing the
right of any person, of any age or sex, to call a meeting. This right
has been drastically diminished by the institutionalization of
meetings. "Meeting" originally referred to the result of an
individual's act of gathering. Now it refers to the institutional
product of some agency.
The ability of service institutions to acquire clients has far
outgrown the ability of individuals to be heard independently of
institutional media, which respond to individuals only if they are
salable news. Peer-matching facilities should be available for
individuals who want to bring people together as easily as the village
bell called the villagers to council. School buildings—of doubtful
value for conversion to other uses—could often serve this purpose.
The school system, in fact, may soon face a problem which churches
have faced before: what to do with surplus space emptied by the
defection of the faithful. Schools are as difficult to sell as
temples. One way to provide for their continued use would be to give
over the space to people from the neighborhood. Each could state what
he would do in the classroom and when—and a bulletin board would bring
the available programs to the attention of the inquirers. Access to
"class" would be free—or purchased with educational vouchers. The
"teacher" could even be paid according to the number of pupils whom he
could attract for any full two-hour period. I can imagine that very
young leaders and great educators would be the two types most
prominent in such a system. The same approach could be taken toward
higher education. Students could be furnished with educational
vouchers which entitle them for ten hours yearly private consultation
with the teacher of their choice—and, for the rest of their learning,
depend on the library, the peer-matching network, and apprenticeships.
We must, of course, recognize the probability that such public
matching devices would be abused for exploitative and immoral
purposes, just as the telephone and the mails have been so abused. As
with those networks, there must be some protection. I have proposed
elsewhere[3] a matching system which would allow only pertinent
printed information, plus the name and address of the inquirer to be
used. Such a system would be virtually fool-proof against abuse. Other
arrangements could allow the addition of any book, film, TV program,
or other item quoted from a special catalogue. Concern with the
dangers should not make us lose sight of the far greater benefits.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some who share my concern for free speech and assembly will argue that
peer-matching is an artificial means of bringing people together and
would not be used by the poor—who most need it. Some people get
genuinely agitated when mention is made of creating ad-hoc encounters
which are not rooted in the life of a local community. Others react
when mention is made of using a computer to sort and match client-
identified interests. People cannot be drawn together in such an
impersonal manner, they say. Common inquiry must be rooted in a
history of shared experience at many levels, and must grow out of this
experience—or in the development of neighborhood institutions, for
example.
I sympathize with these objections, but I think they miss my point as
well as their own. In the first place, the return to neighborhood life
as the primary center of creative expression might actually work
against the reestablishment of neighborhoods as political units.
Centering demands on the neighborhood may, in fact, neglect an
important liberating aspect of urban life—the ability of a person to
participate simultaneously in several peer groups. Also, there is an
important sense in which people who have never lived together in a
physical community may have occasionally far more experiences to share
than those who have known each other from childhood. The great
religions have always recognized the importance of far-off encounters
and the faithful have always found freedom through them: pilgrimage,
monasticism, the mutual support of temples and sanctuaries reflect
this awareness. Peer-matching could significantly help in making
explicit the many potential but suppressed communities of the city.
Local communities are valuable. They are also a vanishing reality as
men progressively let service institutions define their circles of
social relationship. Milton Kotler in his recent book[4] has shown
that the imperialism of "downtown" deprives the neighborhood of its
political significance. The protectionist attempt to resurrect the
neighborhood as a cultural unit only supports this bureaucratic
imperialism. Far from artificially removing men from their local
contexts to join abstract groupings, peer-matching should encourage
the restoration of local life to cities from which it is now
disappearing. A man who recovers his initiative to call his fellows
into meaningful conversation may cease to settle for being separated
from them by office protocol or suburban etiquette. Having once seen
that doing things together depends on deciding to do so, men may even
insist that their local communities become more open to creative
political exchange.
We must recognize that city life tends to become immensely costly as
city-dwellers must be taught to rely for every one of their needs on
complex institutional services. It is extremely expensive to keep it
even minimally livable. Peer-matching in the city could be a first
step toward breaking down the dependence of citizens on bureaucratic
civic services.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It would also be an essential step to providing new means of
establishing public trust. In a schooled society we have come to rely
more and more on the professional judgment of educators on the effect
of their own work in order to decide whom we can or cannot trust: we
go to the doctor, lawyer, or psychologist because we trust that
anybody with the amount of specialized educational treatment by other
colleagues deserves our confidence.
In a de-schooled society professionals could no longer claim the trust
of their clients on the basis of their curricular pedigree, or ensure
their standing by simply, referring their clients to other
professionals who approve of their schooling. Instead of placing trust
in professionals it should be possible, at any time, for any potential
client to consult with other experienced clients of a professional
about their satisfaction with him by means of another peer network
easily set up by computer, or by a number of other means. Such
networks can be seen as public utilities which permit students to
choose their teachers or patients their healers.
Professional Educators
As citizens have new choices, new chances for learning, their
willingness to seek leadership should increase. We may expect that
they will experience more deeply both their own independence and their
need for guidance. As they are liberated from manipulation by others,
they learn to profit from the discipline others have acquired in a
lifetime. De-schooling education should increase—rather than stifle—
the search for men with practical wisdom who are willing to sustain
the newcomer on his educational adventure. As teachers abandon their
claim to be superior informants or skill-models, their claim to
superior wisdom will begin to ring true.
With an increasing demand for teachers, their supply should also
increase. As the schoolmaster vanishes, the conditions arise which
should bring forth the vocation of the independent educator. This may
seem almost a contradiction in terms, so thoroughly have schools and
teachers become complementary. Yet this is exactly what the
development of the first three educational exchanges would tend to
produce—and what would be required to permit their full exploitation—
for parents and other "natural educators" need guidance, individual
learners need assistance, and the networks need people to operate
them.
Parents need guidance in guiding their children on the road that leads
to responsible educational independence. Learners need experienced
leadership when they encounter rough terrain. These two needs are
quite distinct: the first is a need for pedagogy, the second for
intellectual leadership in all other fields of knowledge. The first
calls for knowledge of human learning and of educational resources,
the second for wisdom based on experience in any kind of exploration.
Both kinds of experience are indispensable for effective educational
endeavor. Schools package these functions into one role—and render the
independent exercise of any of them if not disreputable at least
suspect.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Three types of special educational competence should in fact be
distinguished: one to create and operate the kinds of educational
exchanges or networks outlined here; another to guide students and
parents in the use of these networks; and a third to act as primus
inter pares in undertaking difficult intellectual exploratory
journeys. Only the former two can be conceived of as branches of an
independent profession: educational administrators or pedagogical
counselors. To design and operate the networks I have been describing
would not require many people, but it would require people with the
most profound understanding of education and administration, in a
perspective quite different from and even opposed to that of schools.
While an independent educational profession of this kind would welcome
many people whom the schools exclude, it would also exclude many whom
the schools qualify. The establishment and operation of educational
networks would require some designers and administrators, but not in
the numbers or of the type required by the administration of schools.
Student discipline, public relations, hiring, supervising, and firing
teachers would have neither place nor counterpart in the networks I
have been describing. Neither would curriculum-making, text-book
purchasing, the maintenance of grounds and facilities or the
supervision of interscholastic athletic competition. Nor would child
custody, lesson planning, and record keeping, which now take up so
much of the time of teachers, figure in the operation of educational
networks. Instead the operation of networks would require some of the
skills and attitudes now expected from the staff of a museum, a
library, an executive employment agency, or a maître d'hôtel.
Today's educational administrators are concerned with controlling
teachers and students to the satisfaction of others—trustees,
legislatures, and corporate executives. Network builders and
administrators would have to demonstrate genius at keeping themselves,
and others, out of people's way, at facilitating encounters of
students, skill models, educational leaders, and educational objects.
Many persons now attracted to teaching are profoundly authoritarian
and would not be able to assume this task: building educational
exchanges would mean making it easy for people—especially the young—to
pursue goals which might contradict the ideals of the traffic manager
who makes the pursuit possible. Pedagogues, in an unschooled world,
would also come into their own, and be able to do what frustrated
teachers pretend to pursue today.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If the networks I have described can emerge, the educational path of
each student would be his own to follow, and only in retrospect would
it take on the features of a recognizable program. The wise student
would periodically seek professional advice: assistance to set a new
goal, insight into difficulties encountered, choice between possible
methods. Even now, most persons would admit that the important
services their teachers have rendered them are such advice or counsel,
given at a chance meeting or in a tutorial.
While network administrators would concentrate primarily on the
building and maintenance of roads providing access to resources, the
pedagogue would help the student to find the path which for him could
lead fastest to his goal. If a student wants to learn spoken Cantonese
from a Chinese neighbor, the pedagogue would be available to judge
their proficiency, and to help them select the textbook and methods
most suitable to their talents, character, and the time available for
study. He can counsel the would-be airplane mechanic on finding the
best places for apprenticeship. He can recommend books to somebody who
wants to find challenging peers to discuss African history. Like the
network administrator, the pedagogical counselor conceives of himself
as a professional educator. Access to either could be gained by
individuals through the use of educational vouchers.
The role of the educational initiator or leader, the master or "true"
leader, is somewhat more elusive than that of the professional
administrator or pedagogue. This is so because leadership is itself
hard to define. In practice, an individual is a leader if people
follow his initiative, and become apprentices in his progressive
discoveries. It is hard to amplify this definition except in the light
of personal values or preference. Frequently, this involves a
prophetic vision of entirely new standards—quite understandable today—
in which present "wrong" will turn out to be "right." In a society
which would honor the right to call assemblies through peer-matching,
the ability to take educational initiative on a specific subject would
be as wide as access to learning itself. But, of course, there is a
vast difference between the initiative taken by someone to call a
fruitful meeting to discuss this article, and the ability of someone
to provide leadership in the systematic exploration of its
implications.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Leadership also does not depend on being right. As Thomas Kuhn points
out, in a period of constantly changing paradigms most of the very
distinguished leaders are bound to be proven wrong by the test of
hindsight. Intellectual leadership does depend on superior
intellectual discipline and imagination, and the willingness to
associate with others in their exercise. A learner, for example, may
think that there is an analogy between the US antislavery movement or
the Cuban Revolution and what is happening in Harlem. The educator who
is himself a historian can show him how to appreciate the flaws in
such an analogy. He may retrace his own steps as a historian. He may
invite the learner to participate in his own research. In both cases
he will apprentice his pupil in a critical art—which is rare in school—
and which money or other favors cannot buy.
The relationship of master and disciple is not restricted to
intellectual discipline. It has its counterpart in the arts, in
physics, in religion, in psychoanalysis, and in pedagogy. It fits
mountainclimbing, silverworking and politics, cabinetmaking and
personnel administration. What is common to all true master-pupil
relationships is the awareness both share that their relationship is
literally priceless—and in very different ways a privilege for both.
Charlatans, demagogues, clowns, proselytizers, corrupt masters and
simoniacal priests, tricksters, miracle-workers, and messiahs have
proven capable of assuming leadership roles and thus show the dangers
of any dependence of a disciple on the master. Different societies
have taken different measures to defend themselves against these
counterfeit teachers. Indians relied on caste-lineage, eastern Jews on
the spiritual lineage of rabbis, high periods of Christianity on an
exemplary life of monastic virtue, other periods on hierarchical
orders. Our society relies on certification by schools. It is doubtful
that this procedure provides a better screening, but if it should be
claimed that it does, then the counterclaim can be made that it does
so at the cost of making discipleship almost vanish.
In practice, there will always be a fuzzy line between the teacher of
skills and the educational leaders identified above, and there are no
practical reasons why access to some leaders could not be gained by
discovering the "master" in the drill-teacher who introduces students
to his discipline.
On the other hand, what characterizes the true master-disciple
relationship is its priceless character. Aristotle speaks of it as a
"moral type of friendship, which is not on fixed terms: it makes a
gift, or does whatever it does, as to a friend." Thomas Aquinas says
of this kind of teaching that inevitably it is an act of love and
mercy. This kind of teaching is always a luxury for the teacher and a
form of leisure (in Greek, "scholé") for him and his pupil: an
activity meaningful for both—having no ulterior purpose.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To rely for true intellectual leadership on the desire of gifted
people to provide it is obviously necessary even in our society, but
it could not be made into a policy now. We must first construct a
society in which personal acts themselves reacquire a value higher
than that of making things and manipulating people.[5] In such a
society exploratory, inventive, creative teaching would logically be
counted among the most desirable forms of leisurely "unemployment."
But we do not have to wait until the advent of utopia. Even now one of
the most important consequences of de-schooling and the establishment
of peer-matching facilities would be the initiative which "masters"
could take to assemble congenial disciples. It would also—as we have
seen—provide ample opportunity for potential disciples to share
information or to select a master.
Schools are not the only institutions which pervert professions by
packaging roles. Hospitals render home-care increasingly impossible—
and then justify hospitalization as a benefit to the sick. At the same
time the doctor's legitimacy and ability to work increasingly come to
depend on his association with a hospital, even though he is still
less totally dependent on it than are teachers on schools. The same
could be said about courts which overcrowd their calendars as new
transactions acquire legal solemnity—and thus delay justice. Or it
could be said about churches, which succeed in making a captive
profession out of a free vocation. The result in each case is scarce
service at higher cost; and greater income to the less competent
members of the profession.
So long as the older professions monopolize, superior income and
prestige it is difficult to reform them. The profession of the
schoolteacher should be easier to reform, and not only because it is
of more recent origin. The educational profession now claims a
comprehensive monopoly; it claims the exclusive competence to
apprentice not only its own novices but those of other professions as
well. This overexpansion renders it vulnerable to any profession which
would reclaim the right to teach its own apprentices. Schoolteachers
are overwhelmingly badly paid and frustrated by the tight control of
the school system. The most enterprising and gifted among them would
probably find more congenial work, more independence, and even higher
incomes by specializing as skill models, network administrators, or
guidance specialists.
Finally, the dependence of the registered student on the certified
teacher can be broken more easily than his dependence on other
professionals—for instance, that of a hospitalized patient on his
doctor. If schools ceased to be compulsory, teachers who find their
satisfaction in the exercise of pedagogical authority in the classroom
would be left only with pupils who are attracted by their style. The
disestablishment of our present professional structure could begin
with the dropping out of the schoolteacher.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The disestablishment of schools will inevitably happen—and it will
happen surprisingly fast. It cannot be retarded very much longer and
it is hardly necessary to vigorously promote it, for this is being
done now. What is worthwhile is to try to orient it in a hopeful
direction, for it could take place in two diametrically opposed ways.
The first would be the expansion of the mandate of the pedagogue and
his increasing control over society even outside school. With the best
of intentions and simply by expanding the rhetoric now used in school,
the present crisis in the schools could provide educators with an
excuse to use all the networks of contemporary society to funnel their
messages to us—for our own good. De-schooling, which we cannot stop,
could mean the advent of a "brave new world" dominated by well-
intentioned administrators of programmed instruction.
On the other hand, the growing awareness on the part of governments,
as well as of employers, taxpayers, enlightened pedagogues, and school
administrators, that graded curricular teaching for certification has
become harmful could offer large masses of people an extraordinary
opportunity: that of preserving the right of equal access to the tools
both of learning and of sharing with others what they know or believe.
But this would require that the educational revolution be guided by
certain goals.
1.) To liberate access to things by abolishing the control which
persons and institutions now exercise over their educational values.
2.) To liberate the sharing of skills by guaranteeing freedom to teach
or exercise them on request.
3.) To liberate the critical and creative resources of people by
returning to individual persons the ability to call and hold meetings:
an ability now increasingly monopolized by institutions which claim to
speak for the people.
4.) To liberate the individual from the obligation to shape his
expectations to the services offered by any established profession—by
providing him with the opportunity to draw on the experience of his
peers and to entrust himself to the teacher, guide, adviser, or healer
of his choice.
Inevitably de-schooling of society blurs the distinctions between
economics, education, and politics on which the stability of the
present world order and the stability of nations now rests.
In addition to the tentative conclusions of the Carnegie Commission
reports, the last year has brought forth a series of important
documents which show that responsible people are becoming aware of the
fact that schooling for certification cannot continue to be counted
upon as the central educational device of a modern society. Julius
Nyere of Tanzania has announced plans to integrate education with the
life of the village. In Canada, the Wright Commission on post-
secondary education has reported that no known system of formal
education could provide equal opportunities for the citizens of
Ontario. The president of Peru has accepted the recommendation of his
commission on education, which proposes to abolish free schools in
favor of free educational opportunities provided throughout life. In
fact he is reported to have insisted that this program proceed slowly
at first in order to keep teachers in school and out of the way of
true educators.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What has happened is that some of the boldest and most imaginative
public leaders find their insights into school failures matching those
of radical free spirits (for example, Paul Goodman) who only a few
years ago were seen as "anarchic." More programmatic radicals, on the
other hand, often simply seek to obtain control over schools and other
teaching media and thus only strengthen the certification system.
The alternative to social control through the schools is the voluntary
participation in society through networks which provide access to all
its resources for learning. In fact these networks now exist, but they
are rarely used for educational purposes. The crisis of schooling, if
it is to have any positive consequence, will inevitably lead to their
incorporation into the educational process.
Email to a friend
Notes
[1] "Schooling: The Ritual of Progress," NYR, December 3, 1970.
[2] Documentation on the construction, testing, and use of such
machines is now in preparation at CIDOC.
[3] "Why We Must Abolish Schooling," NYR, July 2, 1970.
[4] Neighborhood Governments: The Local Foundations of Political Life,
Bobbs-Merrill, 1969.
[5] For a fuller discussion of these distinctions, see my forthcoming
book, De-Schooling Society.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10701
.
- Prev by Date: The Psychology Of Guilt
- Next by Date: Carry Out Random Acts Of Kindness Every Day
- Previous by thread: The Psychology Of Guilt
- Next by thread: Carry Out Random Acts Of Kindness Every Day
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
