Instead of Education

Last edited March 29, 2008
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"The rich adopt novelties and become accustomed to their use. This sets a fashion which others imitate. Once the richer classes have adopted a certain way of living, producers have an incentive to improve the methods of manufacture so that soon it is possible for the poorer classes to follow suit. Thus luxury furthers progress. Innovation "is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public. The luxury today is the necessity of tomorrow." Luxury is the roadmaker of progress: it develops latent needs and makes people discontented. In so far as they think consistently, moralists who condemn luxury must recommend the comparatively desireless existence of the wild life roaming in the woods as the ultimate ideal of civilized life."

"The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders."

Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.

Science does not give us absolute and final certainty. It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought.

All this talk: the state should do this or that, ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously.

He who disdains the fall in infant mortality and the gradual disappearance of famines and plagues may cast the first stone upon the materialism of the economists.

No wonder that all who have had something new to offer humanity have had nothing good to say of the state or its laws.

The meaning of economic freedom is this: that the individual is in a position to choose the way in which he wants to integrate himself into the totality of society.

If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action

As society is only possible if everyone, while living his own life, at the same time helps others to live; if every individual is simultaneously means and end; if each individual's well-being is simultaneously the condition necessary to the well-being of others, it is evident that the contrast between I and thou, means and end, automatically is overcome.

(x) "We are a credential-mad, diploma-laden culture, slowly turning the world into a classroom [...]"

(3) "Not all persons will give he word "education" the meaning I give it here. Some may think of it, as I once described it, as "something a person gets for himself, not that which someone else gives or does to him." But I choose to define it here as most people do, something that some people do to others for their own good, molding and shaping them, and trying to make them learn what they think they ought to know."

(4) "Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas, and credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and "fans," driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve "education" but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and let people shape themselves."

(5) "The best and only really good place for do-ers would be a society that does not yet exist. In that society all people, of whatever age, sex, race, etc., could have work to do which was varied and interesting, which challenged and rewarded their skill and intelligence, which they could do well and take pride in doing well, over which they could exercise some control, and a few others. Beyond this, all people would feel--as very few people do now--that what they thought, wanted, said, and did would make a real difference in their lives and the lives of people around them. Their politics, like their work, would be meaningful. Their elected officials would be public servants, not petty kings and emperors. They would shape and control the society they lived in, instead of being shaped and controlled by it. In such a society no one would worry about "education." People would be busy doing interested things that mattered, and they would grow more informed, competent, and wise in doing them."

(7) @toread Allison Stallibrass's The Self-Respecting Child

(11) "I must repeat here what I have written before: The best learning community I have ever seen or been part of was not called, or meant to be, a learning community at all. It was a submarine--the USS Barbero--in World War II. We were not on it to "learn," but to help fight the war. Like millions of other people at the time, we did not talk or think about "learning"; we learned from the demanding work we did together, and we shared our experience and skill as widely as we could."

(14) "The Baby is not "Getting Ready""

(pg 24) - "No one is fired for hiding the truth from children, but many are fired for telling the truth."

(pg 31) - So what's the deal with Free Universities?

(66) - "The student, the do-er, can only learn a difficult action insofar as he can put the teacher inside himself. He must be student and teacher at the same time. He must, more and more, grade his own tasks, get his own feedback, make his own corrections, and develop his own criteria, standards, for doing these things. Only as he is able to depend less and less on the teacher outside, and use more and more the teacher inside, will he be able to do well what we wants
to do." [...] And so it must always be the first and central task of any teacher to help the student become independent of him, to learn to be his own teacher. The true teacher must always be trying to work himself out of a job."

(71) "The most valuable and indeed essential asset the student brings to any learning task is a willingness to adventure, to take risks. Without that, he can't learn anything. The teacher must not kill this spirit, but honor and strengthen it. Thus, one of the stupidest things the S-chools do is insist that children "comprehend" everything they read, and read only what they comprehend. [...] They are made to feel that not to "comprehend" is a kind of crime. They stop thinking of themselves as adventurers and explorers, and books as exciting territory to explore. They read only what they can be sure of, which means that it is dull, which means they will stop reading as soon as they can."

(77) "The workload of T-eachers in conventional S-chools is so heavy only because the S-chools and the T-eachers believe, and soon convince the children, that everything that is learned must be T-aught. So thte T-eachers must spend hundreds of hours trying to cope with and outwit the kind of children's evasived tactics I wrote about in How Children Fail. They make children anxious and dependent, and they say, rightly, how hard it is to deal with their anxiety and dependency."

(84) "We put things backwads. Physics is not going to lead the child to jet engines, but wondering about et planes will lead him to Physics. In fact, wondering about jet planes is Physics."

(85) "But to the extent that you do share some of my experience, then by talking about my experience, by throwing a light on part of it, I may reveal to you something in your experience that you had not seen before, or help you to see it in a new way, to make, in David Hawkins's words, "transitions and consolidations." "

(87) "I began to think about a textbook which would work not just for one class but all classes, all students. But it can't be done."

(91) @toread: Productive Thinking, Bill Wertheimer

(92) @toread: "A Short Course in Just Writing," Bill Bernhardt

(107) "The students who come to CIDOC, and think that its rules and methods contradict what Illich (and I) have said about schools, have had many years of schooling in which they as students had unlimited obligations to teachers who had no obligations to them at all. Edgar Friedenberg has written often and well about this. The student owes the school and the teacher everything and can be penalized if he does not deliver; the school and the teacher owe the student nothing. As someone else put it, "There are very severe penalties for being a bad student but no penalties at all for being a bad teacher." The students quite rightly reject this arrangement. But in its place they sometimes want to put its opposite, in which the teacher has infinite obligations to the student and the students in return no obligations at all. This was the idea behind quite a few free schools, colleges, universities, etc. The teacher is expected to be infinitely available, and to respond with utmost sympathy and understanding to all the needs of the studens. But he cannot make any demands on them. Their needs count, his don't."

(108) "On my second or third visit to CIDOC, he told me a perplexing story. He said that after one of his talks in the US someone in the audience bgan to criticize him sharply for not having made clear something he had been trying to say. After a while Illich interrupted him, and said with great force, "Please sit down! I am not your teacher!" He told me this as if it were important that I understand it, and as if understanding it would make clear what in a larger sense he was saying about education and teaching. But it was still some time before I began to see what he meant."

(109) "One of Illich's deepest criticisms of S-chools and S-choolpeople is that they do not even know or admit the distinction between what can be taught and what cannot, what is not learned by being "taught."

(111) It is clear now, as it was not at first, why Illich reacted with such horror to my saying that we should push the walls of the school building out further and further. That seemed at the time a good enough way to say that we should abolish the distinction between learning and the rest of life. Only later did I see the danger that he saw right away. Think again about the global schoolhouse, madhouse, prison. What are madhouses and prisons? They are institutions of compulsory treatment. They are places in which one group of people do things to another group of people, without their consent, because still another group think that this would be good for them. Prisons, at leas those that believe in "rehabilitation," which most prisoners fear and hate, are places in which one group says to another, "We are going to keep control of your life, and do things to you, whatever we want, and for as long as we want, until we think you measure up." In the same way the doctors in mental hospitals say to the patients, "We are going to keep treating you, with drugs, restraint, shock, surgery--whatever we want--until we think you measure up, i.e., have recovered, are sane." We might note in passing that, except in the case of some highly contagious diseases, people still have a right to be medically sick without going to a doctor or hospital. They may choose to try to treat or cure themselves, But no so the mentally ill.

S-chool is just this sort of compulsory-treatment institution."

(118) @toread We Have to Call It School

(129) "A young boy, new to the school, full of ciolence and anger, one of a small group that the children themselvs (some of whom had once been the same)) call "The Terrorists." Flailing about with some sort of cardboard box, he hit a ten-year-old dgirl in the eye, hard enough so that it really hurt, and ran off, hardly noting what he had done. She put her hands over her eye, and bent over in pain. Other children and at least one of the teachers saw this. The people near her asked if she was al right, and gave her sympathy and comfort. Otherwise, nothing happened! In almost any other school I have ever seen the girl would have set up an outcry, other children would have told the tacher and demanded he do somethign about it, and the small child wouldd probably have been dragged back to apologize, and perhaps, to be punished. Here the adults, the children, even the girl who was hurt, all felt that this wild small child had not hurt the girl on purpose."

"[The teachers] can do things, make things, fix things. This is important to children; they like to do things, and are enormously interested in and attracted to adults who can do things. Much of the great natural authority of these teachers comes from their competence. And many of the problems of American open or free or alternative schools arise from the fact that their teachers often have too little competence."

(131) @toread What's Happened to Teacher

(131) "Like average people in most modern countries, [most American teachers] don't know much and they can't do much--and what they know or can do, they don't talk about or do in school. In short, they are not people that curious, active, and healthy children would choose to spend much time with."

(132) "Kids have no quarrel with the world."

(135) @tosee Children's Community in Ann Arbor, Michigan

(135) @torad This Magazine Is About Schools & This Book Is About Schools

(139) "In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Carnegie Foundation paid for an immense and careful study, using a very large sample of pupils and schools, and covering the time span of eight years, to see whether old-fashioned, rote-memorizing ways of instruction, or more open, flexible, interest-oriented ways were more effective. By every measure which the schools themselves thought important, they found that children taught in the latter ways performed significantly better in both school and college."

(141) @toread Charles Silberman's Crisis

(144) @toread Carl Weinberg's Education is a Great Big Shuck