Deschooling Society

All the information that will be used here is based on the book, Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich; to begin with, I would like to share with you a few quotations that I find crucial to grasp what will be discussed later.

 Why we must disestablish school?

•  The pupil is schooled to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with competence and fluency with the ability to say something new.
• Modernization of Poverty: citizens learn to think rich and live poor. Laws make six to ten years of schooling obligatory. Not only in Argentina but also in Mexico or Brazil the average citizen defines an adequate education by North American standards, even though the chance of getting such prolonged schooling is limited to a tiny minority.
• Welfare bureaucracies set standards of what is valuable and feasible. This monopoly is at the root of modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definiton of poverty. For instance, ten years ago (the book was first published in 1971) it was normal to be born and to die in one's home, now it is either a sign of poverty or privilege. These standards lead to a consumer society, so you are poor if you fall behind a level of consumption and the poor have always been socially powerless.
• Equal obligatory schooling must be recognized as at least economically unfeasible. In Latin America the amount of public money spent on each graduate student is between 350 and 1500 times the amount spent on the median citizen.
• Obligatory schooling inevitably polarizes a society. It should be obvious that even with schools of equal quality a poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one. Even if they attend equal schools and begin at the same age, poor children lack most of the educational opportunities which are casually available to the middle class. These advantages range from conversation and books in home to vacation, travel and a different sense of oneself.
• Equal education opportunity is indeed, both a desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with obligatory schooling is to confuse salvation with the church. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.