Excerpts and Notes

Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich

A reading of this book caused me to realize that the level of indoctrination in our society is greater than I imagined. It goes a long way towards explaining why we keep doing dumb things. In many respects, we were much more realistic about our predicament at the time that this book was written in 1970. (An online version of the book can be found here.)

Some excerpts:

Creative, exploratory learning requires peers currently puzzled about the same terms or problems. Large universities make the futile attempt to match them by multiplying their courses, and they generally fail since they are bound to curriculum [I originally spelled this as "curriculam"; Freudian slip?; how about curriculame?], course structure, and bureaucratic administration. In schools, including universities, most resources are spent to purchase the time and motivation of a limited number of people to take up predetermined problems in a ritually defined setting. The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern. [p.19]

Education [in the village or medieval town] did not compete for time with either work or leisure. Almost all education was complex, lifelong, and unplanned. [p.22]

...Having a monopoly on both the resources for learning and the investiture of social roles, the university coopts the discoverer and the potential dissenter. [p.34]

The ability of the university to fix consumer goals is something new. In many countries the university acquired this power only in the sixties, as the delusion of equal access to public education began to spread. Before that the university protected an individual's freedom of speech, but did not automatically convert his knowledge into wealth. To be a scholar in the Middle Ages meant to be poor, even a beggar. By virtue of his calling the medieval scholar learned Latin, became on outsider worthy of the scorn as well as the esteem of peasant and prince, burgher and cleric....The old university was a liberated zone for discovery and the discussion of ideas both new and old.... the university was then a community of academic quest and endemic unrest....The structural purpose of the modern university has little to do with the traditional quest....The modern university has forfeited its chance to provide a simple setting for encounters which are both autonomous and anarchic, focused yet unplanned and ebullient, and has chosen instead to mange the process by which so-called research and instruction are produced. [p.35-36]

Perhaps it's time to bring it back?

School initiates, too, the Myth of Unending Consumption. This modern myth is grounded in the belief that process inevitably produces something of value and, therefore, production necessarily produces demand. School teaches us that instruction produces learning. The existence of schools produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need school, all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other specialized institutions. Once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, all nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect. In school we are taught that valuable learning is the result of attendance; that the value of learning increases with the amount of learning; and, finally, that this value can be measured and documented by grades and certificates.

In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.

Once a man or woman has accepted the need for school, he or she is easy prey for other institutions....

This transfer of responsibility from self to institution guarantees social regression, especially once it has been accepted as an obligation.... [p.38-39]

As Max Weber traced 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 years in school. [p.45]

Alienation, in the traditional scheme, was a direct consequence of work's becoming wage-labor which deprived man of the opportunity to create and be recreated....School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition. [p.47]

The discovery that most learning requires no teaching can be neither manipulated or planned. Each of us is personally responsible for his or her own deschooling, and only we have the power to do it. [p.47-48]

The capacity to pursue incongruous goals requires an explanation. According to Max Gluckman, all societies have procedures to hide such dissonances from their members. He suggests that this is the purpose of ritual. Rituals can hide from their participants even discrepancies and conflicts between social principle and social organization. As long as an individual is not explicitly conscious of the ritual character of the process through wich he was initiated to the forces which shape his cosmos, he cannot break the spell and shape a new cosmos. As long as we are not aware to the ritual through which school shapes the progressive consumer -- the economy's major resource -- we cannot break the spell of this economy and shape a new one. [p.51]

I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a life style which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a life style which only allows us to make and unmake, produce and consume -- a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to depletion and pollution of the environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies. We need a set of critieria which will permit us to recognize those institutions which support personal growth rather than addiction, as well as the will to invest our technological resources preferentially in such institutions of [personal] growth. [p.52-53]

I've not been able to identify any such institutions after 20 years or so of searching.

Of all "false utilities," school is the most insidious. Highway systems produce only a demand for cars. Schools create a demand for the entire set of modern institutions which crowd the right end of the spectrum. A man who questioned the need for highways would be written off as a romantic; the man who questions the need for school is immediately attacked as either heartless or imperialist. [p.60]

An educational revolution depends on a twofold inversion: a new orientation for research and a new understanding of the educational style of an emerging counterculture.

Operational research now seeks to optimize the efficiency of an inherited framework -- a framework which is itself never questioned. This framework has the syntactic structure of a funnel for teaching packages. The syntactic alternative to it is an educational network or web for the autonomous assembly of resources under the personal control of each learner. This alternative structure of an educational institution now lies within the conceptual blind spot of our operational research. If research were to focus on it, this would constitute a true scientific revolution. [p.70]

Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent. Everywhere this same curriculum instills in the pupil the myth that increased production will provide a better life. [p.74]

The lack of any alternatives over the past 40 years is a testimony to the validity of his thesis.

 

Tools For Conviviality by Ivan Illich

Selected excerpts from Tools For Conviviality [Please note that the excerpts are from a different edition: ISBN 06011386]:

(conviviality-noun -- the staff at the inn got an excellent rating for their helpfulness and conviviality. friendliness, geniality, affability, amiability, bonhomie, congeniality, cordiality, warmth, good nature, sociability, gregariousness, cheerfulness, good cheer, joviality, jollity, gaiety, liveliness.)

(Although Illich does not explicitly state it; the key to conviviality is scale.)

Highways, hospital wards, classrooms, office buildings, apartments, and stores look everywhere the same.  [This is why I got out of the investment real estate business.]  Identical tools also promote the development of the same character types.  Policemen in patrol cars or accountants at computers look and act alike all over the world....The progressive homogenization of personalities and personal relationships cannot be stemmed without a retooling of society. [p.15]

The major institutions now optimize the output of large tools for lifeless people.  Their inversion implies institutions that would foster the use of individually accessible tools to support the meaningful and responsible deeds of fully awake people.  Turning basic institutions upside down and inside out is what the adoption of a convivial mode of production would require.  Such an inversion of society is beyond the managers of present institutions. [p.16]

It has become difficult for contemporary man to imagine development and modernization in terms of lower rather than higher energy use. [p.26]

New power meant a new relation to time.  The lending of money against interest was considered "against nature" by the Church: money was naturally a means of exchange to buy necessities, not a capital that could work or bear fruits.  During the seventeenth century even the Church abandoned this view -- though reluctantly -- to accept the fact that Christians had become capitalist merchants. [p.31]

The commodity called "education" and the institution called "school" make each other necessary.  The circle can be broken only by a widely shared insight that the institution has come to define the purpose.  Values abstractly stated are reduced to mechanical processes that enslave men.  This serfdom can be broken only by the joyful self-recognition of the fool who assumes personal responsibility for his folly. [p.19]

Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. [p.21]

Most people have staked their self-images in the present structure and are unwilling to lose their ground.  They have found security in one of the several ideologies that support further industrialization.  They feel compelled to push the illusion of progress on which they are hooked.  They long for and expect increased satisfaction, with less input of human energy and with more division of competence.  They value handicraft and personal care as luxuries, but the ideal of a more labor-intensive, yet modern, production process seems to them quixotic and anachronistic. [p.44]

The demands made by tools on people become increasingly costly.  This rising cost of fitting man to the service of his tools is reflected in the ongoing shift from goods to services in over-all production.  Increasing manipulation of man becomes necessary to overcome the resistance of his vital equilibrium to the dynamic of growing industries; it take the form of educational, medical, and administrative therapies.  Education turns out competitive consumers; medicine keeps them alive in the engineered environment they have come to require; bureaucracy  reflects the necessity of exercising social control over people to do meaningless work. [p.46]

Political debate must now be focused on the various ways in which unlimited production threatens human life.  This political debate will be misled by those who insist on prescribing palliatives which only disguise the deep reasons why the systems of health, transport, education, housing, and even politics and law are not working. [p.47]

[In a section labeled Overprogramming.] The balance of learning is determined by the ration of two kinds of knowledge in a society.  The first is a result of the creative action of people on their environment, and the second represents the result of man's "trivilization" by his manufactured milieu.  Their first kind of knowledge is derived from the primary involvement of people with each other and from their use of convivial tools; the second accrues to them as a result of purposeful and programmed training to which they are subjected. [p.57]

Manipulative teaching tools raise the cost of learning.  Now we only ask what people have to learn and then invest in a means to teach them.  We should learn to ask first what people need if they want to learn and provide these tools for them.  Professional teachers laugh at the idea that people would learn more from random access to leaning resources than they can be taught.  In fact, they frequently cite as proof for their skepticism the declining use of libraries.  They overlook the dact that libraries are little used because they have been organized as formidable teaching devices.  Libraries are not used because people have been trained to demand that they be taught. [p.65]

Hunger and impotence lead the poor to demand rapid industrialization, and the defense of growing luxuries pushes the rich into more frantic production.  Power is polarized, frustration is generalized, and the alternative of greater happiness at lower affluence is pushed into the blind spot of social vision. [p.68]

Never before have tools approached present power.  Never before have they been so integrated at the service of a small elite.  Kings could not claim divine right with as little challenge as executive claim services for the sake of greater production. [p.70]

A society with very large tools must rely on multiple devices to keep the majority from claiming the most expensive packages of privilege.  These must be reserved for the most productive individuals.  The most prestigious way to measure a person's productivity is by the price tag on his education consumption.  The higher a person's knowledge capital, the greater the social value placed on the decisions he "makes" and the more legitimate is his claim to high-level packages of industrial outputs. [p.71]

Industrial innovations are costly, and managers must justify their high cost by producing measurable proof of their superiority.  Under the rule of industrial socialism, pseudo science will have to provide the alibi, while in market economies, appeal can be made to a survey of consumer opinion.  In any case, periodic innovations in goods or tools foster the belief that anything new will be proven better.  This belief has become an integral part of the modern world view.  It is forgotten that whenever a society lives by this delusion, each marketed unit generates more wants than it satisfies.  If new things are made because they are better, then the things most people use are not quite good.  New models constantly renovate poverty.  The consumer feels the lag between what he has and what he ought to get.  [p.74-75]

One of the major objections against a stationary-state economy is the fear that the production of a limited and durable number of goods would set intolerable limits on the freedom of innovation and of scientific exploration.  This would be justified if I were discussing the transition from the present industrial society to its next model: clean and limited production of goods and unlimited growth in the service sector.  I am not, however, discussing the evolution of industrial society, but the transition to a new mixed mode of production.

Industrial innovations are planned, trivial, and conservative.  The renewal of convivial tools would be as unpredictable, creative, and lively as the people who use them.  Scientific progress is also dulled by the present identification of research with industrial development.  Most of the cost of research derives from its competitive nature and pressure: most of its goals are set by the need for more power and efficiency.  Leisurely scientific research does not exclude a bevatron or some ultracentrifuges; removal of access restrictions now created by schools would again admit the curious, rather than the orthodox, to the alchemist's vault; and study for its own sake would produce more surprises than team research on how to eliminate production snags.

A changeless society would be as intolerable for people as the present society of constant change.  Convivial reconstruction requires limits on the rate of compulsory change.  An unlimited rate of change makes lawful community meaningless.  Law is based on the retrospective judgment of peers about circumstances that occur ordinarily and are likely to occur again.  If the rate of change which affects all circumstances accelerates beyond some point, such judgments cease to be valid.  Lawful society breaks down.  Social control does not accommodate community participation and becomes the function of experts.  Educators define how people are to be trained and retrained throughout their lives -- shaped and reshaped until the fit the demands of industry and are attracted by its profits.  Ideologues define what is right or wrong.  The tooling of man for the milieu becomes the major industry when this milieu changes beyond a certain rate; then man's need for language and law, for memories and myths, imposes limits to the change of tools. [p.75-76]

At present we tend to define human needs in terms of abstract goals and treat these as problems to which technocrats can apply escalating solutions.  What we need is rational research on the dimensions within which technology can be used by concrete communities to implement their aspirations without frustrating equivalent aspirations by others. [p.78]

Commuter transportation leads to negative returns when it admits, anywhere in the system, speeds much above those reached on a bicycle.  Once the barrier of bicycle velocity is broken at any point in the system, the total per capita monthly time spent at the service of the travel industry increases. [p.79]

Counterfoil research is concerned first with an analysis of increasing marginal disutility and the menace of growth.  It is then concerned with the discovery of general systems of institutional structure which optimize convivial production.  This kind of research meets psychological resistance.  Growth has become addictive.  Like heroin addiction, the habit distorts basic value judgments.  Addicts of any kind are willing to pay increasing amounts for declining satisfactions.  They have become tolerant to escalating marginal disutility.  They are blind to deeper frustration because they are absorbed in playing for always mounting stakes.  Minds accustomed to thinking that transportation ought to provide speedy motion rather than reduction of the time and effort spent moving are boggled by this contrary hypothesis.  Man is inherently mobile, and speeds higher than those he can achieve by the use of his limbs must be proven to be of great social value to warrant support by public sacrifice. [p.83]

The body of laws that regulates an industrial society inevitably reflects and reinforces its ideology, social character, and class structure.  "More" is always in the common good -- more power to firms, professions, and parties. [p.94]

The stance of each man or woman takes when a social problem becomes an overwhelming threat depends on two factors:  the first is how a smoldering conflict erupts into a political issue demanding attention and partisan actions; the second is the existence of new elites which can provide an interpretive framework for new -- and hitherto unexpected -- alignments of interest. [p.102]

Further growth must lead to a multiple catastrophe.  That people would accept multiple limits to growth without catastrophe seems highly improbable.  The inevitable catastrophic event could be either a crisis in civilization or its end:  end by annihilation or end in B. F. Skinners's world-wide concentration camp run by a T. E. Frazier.  The foreseeable catastrophe will be a true crisis -- that is, the occasion for a choice -- only if at the moment it strikes the necessary social demands can be effectively expressed.  They must be represented by people who can demonstrate that the breakdown of the current industrial illusion is for them a condition for choosing an effective and convivial mode of production.  The preparation of such groups is the key task of new politics at the present moment. [p.106]