WHY DESCHOOLING SOCIETY IS IMPORTANT ?

 

NEERAJ MAHAJAN

This essay is inspired by the genius of Ivan Illich in his epic Deschooling society in its entirety.  Everyone should read him. You will find answers to most troubles you or modern societies are confronted with. His critic of institutionalizing Schools and their impact on society is so powerful that I changed the title and focus of my blog after reading it. The title why online Schools are a must changed to Why deschooling is important?  

What is the Problem with Schools?

Schools are a relatively modern phenomenon as is the childhood it produces. The US had its first in 1635 in Boston. In ancient societies such as Indian, the Aristocrats, the upper castes went to Gurukul to study Vedas, Statecraft, the art of war, character building, self-control as far as 500 years B.C. while the poor, lower castes studied at home or didn't school. The education was Free, philanthropic, and objective. It was followed by an obligatory Gurudakshina (any tangible benefit to the preceptor). 

In China, the first schools were established by the Xia dynasty in 2000 B.C. to train young boys in archery, rituals, etc. This was followed by Madarsas imparting religious education in the 6th century A.D. as Islam spread. The schools subserved the ruling & political classes ab initio. It was obligatory for them to attend while the ruled could be autodidacts.

With the advancement in welfare societies, this system collapsed.  Schooling was legislatively obligated to all kids in most nations. The no. of schooling years depends on which part of the world you live in. As a result, the schools in the last century have become Institutions that are controlling major facets of everyday lives and social imagination. So what's wrong with that? Well, everything, almost. Schools group people according to age and this grouping rests on three unquestioned premises viz:

CHILDREN LEARN IN SCHOOL

The above is the biggest flaw and deserves serious questioning. We have decided that children go to school, have no incomes, families of their own. We expect them to know their place, behave like children and tolerate their childish behavior. We, forget, however, that our present concept of childhood developed only recently in West Europe and America. Until the Second Vatican Council, each child was treated as an adult at the age of seven and capable of committing sins for which he could be punished by eternity in hell. In Hinduism, Janeyu ( sacred thread) is worn around the chest of Hindu boys at the same age making them accountable for their actions & reactions.

Towards the mid of the last century, middle-class parents began to spare their children the impact of this doctrine and their changed thinking now prevails in the practice of the State and the religion. This was accompanied by a surge in public schools where children started studying. Before that, till a  century ago, kids homeschooled or studied at private schools. It is only with the advent of industrial societies that the mass production of childhood became feasible and came within the reach of the masses.

To most kids schooling is a big burden, boring, prepackaged gig where they are obligated to go by society and study what they hate. They are unhappy playing a child after a certain age. And who has instilled this thought that they learn in school? The Institutions. It is the institutional wisdom that tells children learn in schools which, ironically, itself is the product of schools. Common sense tells us that only children can be taught in schools and therefore the institutions have a vested interest in the mass production of childhood. Only by segregating humans in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of the schoolteacher.

TEACHERS AND PUPILS

By definition children are pupils. The demand for the milieu of childhood creates an unlimited market for accredited teachers. School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching; And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

We have all learned most of what we know outside schools. Pupils do most of their learning without, and often despite, their teachers. Most tragically, the majority of men are taught their lessons by schools, even though they never go to school!

Increasingly, educational research demonstrates that children learn most of what teachers pretend to teach them from peer groups, from comics, from chance observations, randomness, and above all from mere participation in the ritual of school. Teachers, more often than not, obstruct such learning of subject matters as goes on in schools.

Pupils have never credited teachers for most of their learning whatever they may romanticize in retrospect as adults. Bright and dull alike, have always relied on rote, reading, and wit to pass their exams, motivated by the stick or by the carrot of a desired career. Schools create jobs for school teachers, no matter what their pupils learn from them.

FULL-TIME ATTENDANCE

The Institutional wisdom tells parents, pupils, and educators that the teacher if he is to teach, must exercise his authority in a sacred precinct. That is why full-time attendance is a must in a system with about 1000 gatherings in a year. By its very nature, schools, therefore, suck all the time and energies of their participants. As a consequence, the teacher turns into custodian, preacher, or moralist and therapist for the pupil. A dangerous cocktail!

As a Custodian, the teacher is like a judge; a master of ceremonies, rituals who administers the intricate rubrics of initiation to life. At his best, she sets the stage for the acquisition of some skill as schoolmasters always have. Without illusions of producing any profound learning, she drills her pupils in some basic routines.

As a moralist, the teacher substitutes for the parent in loco parentis, God, or the State. She indoctrinates pupils about what is right or wrong not only in school but also in society at large.

As a therapist or a Doctor, the teacher feels authorized to delve into the persona life of her pupil to help him grow as a person. When this function is exercised in conjunction with the above two roles, the pupil is persuaded to submit to the domestication of her version of the truth and her sense of what is right or wrong. 

This is highly paradoxical in a liberal society as it robs the pupils of their freedom in their dealings with the teacher. The larger-than-life persona of a schoolteacher perverts the fundamental process which should prepare pupils for life. By feeling entitled to pry into the personal life of their pupil, the teachers deny them the safeguards which are routine for adults in a modern asylum-- madhouse, monastery, or jail.

Under the authoritative eye of the teacher, several orders of value collapse into one. The distinctions between morality, legality, and personal worth are blurred and eventually eliminated. A pupil who adroitly obtains assistance on an exam is told he is an outlaw, morally corrupt, and personally worthless.

Full-time attendance, therefore, consummates the job of implementing the hidden curriculum of educational establishment of ritualizing schools. Even the best teachers cant protect their pupils from its adverse effects. Needless to say, this only magnifies discrimination and guilt against the have-nots.

RITUALISATION OF PROGRESS

The old universities were a place of the academic quest, serendipitous and ebullient discussions. It use to be a liberated zone for discovery and discussion of ideas both new and old. The masters and the students gathered to study classics of other masters, now long dead, that gave new perspectives to the fallacies of the present day. It was cohort-based, peer-to-peer learning. This community in the modern multiversity has fled to the fringes where it meets in discrete places.

The modern university has now become a hotbed of politics; a place where students go to maximize their ROI ( Return on Investment), play a zero-sum game, cement their initiation into a consumer society and create a hefty price tag on their heads. The universities have jettisoned their focus on learning and concentrate, instead, on the process through which the so-called research and instruction are produced.  Though, they allow a unique privilege to some to criticize the whole of society, impunity, information, peer access but only those who have already been schooled in their formational years.

As to the schools, they have subsumed the functions of the Church/religion throughout history. They are functioning on three premises viz:

1. As the repository of society's myth

2. The Institutionalisation of that myths contradictions and

3. The locus of the ritual that reproduces and veils the disparities between myths and realities.

While both schooling and university allow criticism against institutional perversions and criticism of the myth, the central ritual of obligatory schooling goes largely unchallenged. No change is possible unless we realize that most learning is despite schooling. Ony a generation that grows up without obligatory public schooling can reform the society and recreate our educational systems. Otherwise, we cant go beyond consumer society and schools as super-spreaders of the myth of unending consumption shall continue to run amock. The imagination of generations will continue to be smothered by planning,  institutional manipulation. The transfer of learning from self to institution will guarantee social regression, discourage autodidacts especially once it is accepted as an obligation.

THE MYTH OF INSTITUTIONALIZED VALUES

Schools initiate the myth of unending consumption. This modern myth is grounded in the belief that process inevitably produces something of value and therefore production produces demand. In Third world countries like India an army of unemployed technocrats, PHDs roam the streets with little or no work. They are a victim of the above myth. They became engineers because the private colleges offered it to them for a hefty price. But they did not have the ability to be a good engineer. They paid dearly for trusting a pervert institutional system they believed could add value to their careers.

Learning is an activity that least needs manipulation by others and is process independent. In the age of the internet, learning has been democratized. The time has come to deschool the society and demystify schools and universities as repositories of values.

The Myth Of Measurement of Values

The institutionalized values school insists are quantifiable by initiating pupils into a world where everything can be measured. Imaginations and indeed the man himself! In a schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumers index. Rankings are a way of life and anything that cant be measured, can't be created.

But, is personal growth a measurable entity aka report cards, mark sheets, etc? Not at all in my opinion. Rather it is a journey, increase in self-awareness, challenging the myths, belief in the randomness of things et al. It is not measurable against any predecided boring curriculum nor someone else's achievements. Learning is all about emulating others in their imaginative endeavors and taking risks to bring the desired changes in society. This is what IVAN ILLICH calls IMMESAURABLE RECREATION.

The Myth of Packaging Values

Schools sell curriculum by bundling the goods made according to the same process and having the same structure as other merchandise. Curriculum production for most schools begins with allegedly scientific research on whose basis educational engineers predict future demand and tools for the assembly line, within the limit set by the budgets and taboos. The distributor teacher delivers the finished product to the consumer pupil, whose reactions are carefully studied and charted to provide research data for the preparation of the next model which may be ungraded, student-designed, team-taught, visually aided, or issue centered.

Educators can justify more expensive curricula on the basis of their observation that learning difficulties rise proportionately with the cost of the curriculum; an application of Parkinson's' Law. Many healthy students find themselves manipulated due to the fundamental approach common to all schools -- the authoritarian idea that one person's judgment should determine what and when another pupil must learn.

THE MYTH OF SELF PERPETUATING PROGRESS

Even when accompanied by declining returns in learning, rising per capita instructional costs paradoxically increase the value of the pupil in her own eyes and in the marketplace. At almost any cost, school pushes the pupil up to the level of competitive curricular consumption into progress to even higher levels. Expenditure to motivate the student to stay on in school skyrocket as he climbs the pyramid; often disguised as development fees, auditorium, cricket ground, or even a trip to NASA for the meritorious ones. If nothing else, the school teaches the value of escalation, the extravagant, the American way of doing things.

Schools program hunger for progressive intake of instruction but even if hunger leads to steady absorption it is never fully satisfying. Each subject comes prepackaged with the instruction to go on consuming one offering after another and last year's wrapping is always obsolete for this year's consumer. The textbook and the uniform racket builds on this demand. Educational reformers encourage needless consumption by promising the latest and the best for each generation and the gullible public is fleeced into demanding what they offer. This open-ended consumption disguised as eternal progress can never lead to learning and maturity.

RITUAL GAME & THE NEW WORLD RELIGION

The British Historian Arnold Toynbee has theorized about the rise and fall of civilizations. He said " the decadence of a great culture is usually accompanied by the rise of a new world church which extends hope to the domestic proletariat while serving the needs of a new warrior class '. Schools and colleges are the new churches of our decaying culture. No institution can better veil from its participants the deep discrepancy between the myth of social principles and social reality in today's world. It is classic, scientific, secular, pluralistic, perennial, a piece of the modern world that is beyond reproach. Any age can go to school as it closes its doors to none without first offering her the one last chance at remedial, adult, and continuing education. Anybody who misses out is proclaimed guilty, uncouth and an outcast. As Max Weber examined the social effects of the belief that Salvation belonged to those who accumulated wealth, we can now observe that grace is reserved for those who accumulate maximum years in school. The rest suffer in hell!

 THE COMING KINGDOM: THE UNIVERSALIZATION OF    EXPECTATIONS

The school combines the expectations of the consumer expressed in its claims with the producer's belief expressed in its ritual. It is a liturgical expression of a worldwide Cargo Cult that swept Melanesia in the forties wherein the islanders believed if they put on a black tie over their naked torsos, Jesus would arrive in a streamer bearing an icebox, pair of trousers, and a sewing machine for each believer!

School fuses the growth in humiliating dependence on a master with the growth in the illusion of omnipotence so typical of the pupil that he wants to educate the entire world. Its purpose is to celebrate the myth of an earthly paradise of never-ending consumption; the only hope for the wretched and the dispossessed!

THE NEW ALIENATION AND LACK OF EXPECTATION

Not only is the school world's latest new world religion, but it is also the world's fastest-growing labor market. The engineering of consumers has become the economy's principal growth sector.  And as the production cost decreased in rich nations, it was accompanied by increasing concentration of both capital and labor in the vast enterprise of equipping man for disciplined consumption; faster than even the expenditure for defense in the US for example. Third world India produces millions of Engineers and grads in its teaching factories with no takers for the vast majority of its produce!

Schools give unlimited opportunities for legitimized waste so long as its destructiveness goes unrecognized and the cost of palliatives goes up!

Just as the Alienation was a direct consequence of work becoming wage labor during the industrial revolution, Schools prepare for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their independence, dreams and shun serendipity which life never ceases to offer when it is not predetermined by institutional definition. And as school is the major controller of the nation's population, it ensures that most fit into some kind of institution. Deschooling is, therefore, at the root of any movement for human liberation.

THE REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL OF DESCHOOLING

What will happen if obligatory schooling is abolished through legislation? The stakes for society are very high if a significant minority loses faith in schooling. This can endanger the survival not only of the economic order built on the coproduction of goods and demands but equally of the political order built on the nation-state in to which students are delivered by the school. Vested interests will rebel and try to subvert any change. Millions of jobs can be lost along with the demand collapse in the economy. Seems a utopia.

But the cohort-based schools are already disrupting the education industry. Internet is the main catalyst in encouraging such peer-to-peer learning courses. Pedagogues like Seth Godin with their ALT MBA courses priced at a fraction of a traditional MBA are causing a ruckus in the US. Many universities are on the verge of shutting down their shops. There is a ray of hope. IVAN ILLICH would be happy to see the change.

many thnx for reading me

wanabi stoic