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Ivan Illich By Carlotta 05/3/02 01:52:14 PM

Date: 05/3/02 01:52:14 PM
Name: Carlotta
Email: Veritati@aolcom
Subject: Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society is still a valuable read. The book's been around for many years, but some of the ideas sound new and definitely different from conventional ed. talk. It's interesting to read his work and compare it with what we are learning more about today from John Taylor Gatto's findings in the Underground History of American Education.

http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/illich/school

Carlotta

Re: Ivan Illich By Grace S. 05/4/02 01:05:01 AM

Date: 05/4/02 01:05:01 AM
Name: Grace S.
Email: gratiaetvirtustis@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: Ivan Illich
Carlotta,
Tjhanks for reminder on "Deschooling Society." How far have we come in 30 years? When society as a whole hasn't budged beyond Bacon's "Knowledge is power" (quantifiable knowledge), for sure Illich isn't out of date. Power to do what? Exploit nature and human nature? The questions we ask in learning shape what we'll know and what we'll do with knowledge. Not quoting verbatim, but I think it was Bacon who said scientists could "put nature on the rack and torture the answers out of her." Schools torture answers into us. Yet learning on one's own, without a "community of peers," is difficult.

I hope it's okay to cut and paste from Illich here.

FROM DESCHOOLING SOCIETY
If we do not challenge the assumption that valuable knowledge is a commodity which under certain circumstances may be forced into the consumer, society will be increasingly dominated by sinister pseudo schools and totalitarian managers of information. Pedagogical therapists will drug their pupils more in order to teach them better, and students will drug themselves more to gain relief from the pressures of teachers and the race for certificates. Increasingly larger numbers of bureaucrats will presume to pose as teachers. The language of the schoolman has already been coopted by the adman. Now the general and the policeman try to dignify their professions by masquerading as educators. In a schooled society, warmaking and civil repression find an educational rationale. Pedagogical warfare in the style of Vietnam will be increasingly justified as the only way of teaching people the superior value of unending progress.
Repression will be seen as a missionary effort to hasten the coming of the mechanical Messiah. More and more countries will resort to the pedagogical torture already implemented in Brazil and Greece. This pedagogical torture is not used to extract information or to satisfy the psychic needs of sadists. It relies on random terror to break the integrity of an entire population and make it plastic material for the teachings invented by technocrats. The totally destructive and constantly progressive nature of obligatory instruction will fulfill its ultimate logic unless we begin to liberate ourselves right now from our pedagogical hubris, our belief that man can do what God cannot, namely, manipulate others for their own salvation. --ILLICH

Replying to:

Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society is still a valuable read. The book's been around for many years, but some of the ideas sound new and definitely different from conventional ed. talk. It's interesting to read his work and compare it with what we are learning more about today from John Taylor Gatto's findings in the Underground History of American Education.

http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/illich/school

Carlotta
Re: Re: Ivan Illich By Daniel 05/29/02 08:10:53 PM

Date: 05/29/02 08:10:53 PM
Name: Daniel
Email: pnpmacknam@email.msn.com
Subject: Re: Re: Ivan Illich
Historians of Twentieth Century trade and technology say that the efficient wholesale transmission of techniques of mass-production to primitive cultures allows these cultures to quickly attain trade competitiveness with the advanced nations while also greatly removing the opportunity for these cultures to get the perspective on just what happens to a nation that puts its trust in the scientific management of people and infrasutructure in the name of economic prosperity. In many cases, ignorant "do-gooding" international entrepreneurs had come in to poor countries with miracle-working argriculture techniques, only to end up ruining the productive capacity of those lands for generations.

An analogous thing happens when a child is forced and/or bribed into taking on the menatal chores that are supposed to make him a highly competent and educated adult. The more he is lead to hope in this human-engineered miracle falsely called education and school, the more his mind is raped of its ability to produce anything without being force-fed.

From pg. 47:

"Under the authoritative eye of the teacher, several orders of value are collapsed into one. The distinction between morality, legality, and personal worth are blurred and eliminated. Each transgression is made to be felt as a multiple offense. The offender is expected to feel that he has broken a rule, that he has behaved immorally, and that he has let himself down."

From pg 155-56:

"Contemporary man...attempts to create a world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it. We must face the fact that man himself is a stake.

He can experience the poetic surprise of the unplanned only through his encounter with with "dirt", blunder, or failure: the orange peel in the gutter, the puddle in the street, the breakdown of order, program or machine are the only take-offs for creative fancy. "Goofing off" becomes the only poetry at hand."

Except for the increasing diet of slickly-made fantasy called movies/tv/"books".

From pg 129:

"The right to teach any skill should come under the protection of freedom of speech. Certification now tends to abridge the freedom of education by converting the civil right to share one's knowledge into a priviledge of academic freedom, now conferred only on the employees of school."

It's no wonder why we have all these mentor programs now. Many "teachers" function primarily as task masters, not as humans, while parents are often just fun-and-games/pressure people who provider food, shelter, and a college fund. I know people who were just like this as parents, and whose own parents had been just like this.
Replying to:

Carlotta,
Tjhanks for reminder on "Deschooling Society." How far have we come in 30 years? When society as a whole hasn't budged beyond Bacon's "Knowledge is power" (quantifiable knowledge), for sure Illich isn't out of date. Power to do what? Exploit nature and human nature? The questions we ask in learning shape what we'll know and what we'll do with knowledge. Not quoting verbatim, but I think it was Bacon who said scientists could "put nature on the rack and torture the answers out of her." Schools torture answers into us. Yet learning on one's own, without a "community of peers," is difficult.

I hope it's okay to cut and paste from Illich here.

FROM DESCHOOLING SOCIETY
If we do not challenge the assumption that valuable knowledge is a commodity which under certain circumstances may be forced into the consumer, society will be increasingly dominated by sinister pseudo schools and totalitarian managers of information. Pedagogical therapists will drug their pupils more in order to teach them better, and students will drug themselves more to gain relief from the pressures of teachers and the race for certificates. Increasingly larger numbers of bureaucrats will presume to pose as teachers. The language of the schoolman has already been coopted by the adman. Now the general and the policeman try to dignify their professions by masquerading as educators. In a schooled society, warmaking and civil repression find an educational rationale. Pedagogical warfare in the style of Vietnam will be increasingly justified as the only way of teaching people the superior value of unending progress.
Repression will be seen as a missionary effort to hasten the coming of the mechanical Messiah. More and more countries will resort to the pedagogical torture already implemented in Brazil and Greece. This pedagogical torture is not used to extract information or to satisfy the psychic needs of sadists. It relies on random terror to break the integrity of an entire population and make it plastic material for the teachings invented by technocrats. The totally destructive and constantly progressive nature of obligatory instruction will fulfill its ultimate logic unless we begin to liberate ourselves right now from our pedagogical hubris, our belief that man can do what God cannot, namely, manipulate others for their own salvation. --ILLICH
Replying to:

Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society is still a valuable read. The book's been around for many years, but some of the ideas sound new and definitely different from conventional ed. talk. It's interesting to read his work and compare it with what we are learning more about today from John Taylor Gatto's findings in the Underground History of American Education.

http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/illich/school

Carlotta