Why Would Anyone Want to Deschool Society

We forgot that we merely instantiate practices that, for better or worse, come to shape our very hearts. The effect, to sum up the claim of Ivan Illich in “Deschooling Society,” of compulsory schooling is to make the student an empty receptacle, only containing the meaning of his institutional compulsion. For some, this means being able to chant the 50 states of our union, or perhaps major chemical reactions, but for many, this means the more behavioral elements: get up at 7am, before the second bell rings be in your desk, and make sure you get on your teacher’s good side. If this sounds like the office job most Americans then take up after their graduation, but substitute “teacher” for “boss,” you are starting to see the picture. Rather than schooling educating children, that is, leading them in the nature of truth and reality, schooling simply schools children, that is, it is only basic social conditioning.

Ivan Illich claims that the school today has become society’s major mythopoetic institution, much like the Catholic Church during medieval culture. With mandatory attendance for eight hours every weekday for every child of age for three seasons of the year, the school has achieved a supremacy only dreamed of by the Church’s most zealous clergyman. Yet despite its saturation in the culture, people are becoming more polarized than ever about its value.

There are largely two categories: those who agree with its edicts and ethos, and those who reject its hegemony.

For the sake of education, I reject its hegemony.

Despite its best intentions, compulsory schooling has become the greatest enemy to education. It has fundamentally detached itself from the basic idea that education is a liberal process of freeing the student from illusion, pretension and unfounded assumptions. This is due to its evolution from the schooling of the 19th century Prussian State: compulsory schooling is always brainwashing, because it has no interest in the student and his or her integrity, interests or passions.

The basic claim that it is better for a child to receive an education than not is undeniable. The fundamental claim I make, and that Ivan Illich does as well, is that compulsory schooling is not how to do it.

“Deschooling Society” begins with the idea that a man’s right to education is most endangered by his compulsion to schooling. Making the liberal act of education compulsory compromises every student and equivocates brainwashing with truth, when it could not be further from that. Further, we have devalued the familial and communal bonds that could provide a student with purpose and meaning, which could have lead to either an insightful study or a useful vocation.

The practice of schooling, rather than providing students with knowledge, has institutionalized knowledge. The student and family, essentially, is disarmed and devalued. Anything they have learned outside of the classroom and anything that is not applicable in the classroom is, usually, anathema. It is a caged environment in which the teacher is viewed as the only legitimate authority and the student is seen as in woeful need of “instruction.” The insight that there may be light beyond the cage of the classroom and the allure of professional authority is seen, at best, as impractical, and at worst, dangerous.

The disarming of the authority of the student, that is, the human being, in determining matters of truth is severe and dangerous.  Rather than making each student strict discerners of truth, which would involve appreciating the special insight of the student, a teacher, for example, is merely forced to conform to a curriculum in which, usually, they only have a strictly professional interest. That is, their free time would never include anything in the curriculum. The lack of anything actually interesting or important to the teacher is felt during their communication to the student. Therefore, there is next to nothing in it that is interesting and important to the student, either. Despite this, the student is expected to complete assignments and homework about the curriculum, that, again, the teacher has next to no interest in and does not consider important. Thus, the student who attends school to be “educated,” is actually led through a series of hoops and jumps in which no one is actually interested in or involved and everyone can only say that they are doing what they are doing because that is what they do.

Compulsory schooling is an empty social institution that only confirms the professional and impersonal norms of our culture. It presupposes the relegation of its participants, students and teachers, and therefore does not really educate them in anything interesting at all.