Deschooling Society (1970)
Illich's concept of a "Radical Monopoly," is also immensely relevant to internet platforms.
Radical monopoly is a concept defined by philosopher and author Ivan Illich in his 1973 book, "Tools for Conviviality," and revisited in his later work, which describes how a technology or service becomes so exceptionally dominant that even with multiple providers, its users are excluded from society without access to the product. His initial example is the effect of cars on societies, where the car itself shaped cities by its needs, so much so that people without cars become excluded from participation in cities. A radical monopoly is when the dominance of one type of product supersedes dominance by any one brand.
Social media as a technology in the forms of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter could be seen as a radical monopoly for reputation, as is Linkedin for employment, colleges for education, etc.
I think Illich's criticisms of car culture pushed him outside the Overton window of policy making, but his radical monopoly concept is a useful critical tool for reasoning about tech and ethics. A counter argument could use the example that the discovery of fire created a radical monopoly on heat, and therefore it's so general as to be applied arbitrarily to anything you don't like. However, being able to think about the consequences of a new radical monopoly might have on some aspect of human experience is useful for anticipating policy options in response to dynamic technology development.
"Classroom attendance removes children from the everyday world of Western culture and plunges them into an environment far more primitive, magical, and deadly serious."
I know it was written in 1970, but back then a family could still have one person working a good job on just a high school diploma. Today, grade school serves the primary purpose as a daycare for the kids so both parents can work.
Steven Kell has noted the relevance of Illich's ideas to computing and software:
https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/srk21/research/talks/...
"Ivan Illich was a 20th-century philosopher whose work recurringly examines the counterproductivity of modern social institutions. ... I encountered Illich's writing entirely by chance, but was immediately struck by how directly his words transferred to described what I saw as the plight of software."
https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/srk21/research/talks/...
"Software Against Humanity? An Illichian perspective on the industrial era of software
... (Ivan Illich) observed that (institutions he criticised were) poor at (their) stated ends... the means and ends had become confused! (those institutions) can still be self-sustaining, can still claim advances by (their) own criteria ..."
> In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery.
> Ivan Dominic Illich (/ɪˈvɑːn ˈɪlɪtʃ/; 4 September 1926 – 2 December 2002) was a Roman Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic.
I wonder if his experience as a priest informed his commentary here.
Religions start from exceptional individuals who divine spiritual truth. They develop followers who recognize said truth. Over time, followers ossify into a church, which can be thought of as an institutionalization of spiritual values.
This is an instance of having very compelling writing that describes a problem eloquently.... and then proposes solutions that are disastrous and make things even worse.
Educating humanity is difficult. Every solution has its flaws. Giving up on it is worse than every flawed solution, however.
Written in 1970, still relevant.
I've heard this called "Defund the thought police."
I read Deschooling Society after taking a job at a school that is modeled after The Sudbury Valley School in MA. I agree with the critique about the design and function of school in our society, and think that democratic self directed education is a viable starting point for a future educative system. At the school I work at, we have created a democratic community that is focused on learning as opposed to teaching. Kids are able to learn whatever they would like without interference or coercion. The rules and limitations are decided by the community according to democratic principles. It is the best example of a functional educational environment whose goal is true education that I have encountered so far.
I would also recommend people check out "Energy and Equity", I was impressed and influenced by the assertion that energy consumption is an important window to understanding class and society. The idea that we could have chosen to increase all human's speed to 20mph, but have instead allowed a small minority to travel at 70 mph, and an even smaller minority to travel at nearly 600 mph, has deeply influenced my view of structural inequality and violence.
If we take the long-term historic perspective, society has been mostly de-schooled throughout history. Going to school was a privilege for the children of the haves; the have-nots didn't go to school, and that was one factor which kept them that way, generation over generation.
Deschooling will never happen across all social strata; the privileged will keep sending kids to school no matter what.
Only a complete idiot would fall for this hippie bullshit and not send his kids to school.
The anti-intellectual movements in America in the 1960's likely did in fact contribute to a kind of deschooling of the lower classes, resulting in ever larger economic inequalities fifty years later.
A thread from 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=285107
One interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21578620
Illich related from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21512587
"Indeed, preventive concentration camps for predelinquents would be a logical improvement over the school system."
Nice.
My god, when I read stuff like this (and some comments here), I think -- only someone who grew up in a society which benefitted from all the supposed ills of education and useful institutions could even have the luxury to write or seriously believe something like this.
This is like saying that because of a small percentage of (yes, I agree) non-ideal outcomes, one should dismantle the entire system that has gotten us to the state we are in today -- which is, to remind many people, a stable, more materially prosperous, more-free-of-conflict time than any in our past. I hesitate to point out some parallels to our current social movements, for fear of being branded a counter-revolutionary.
More people are educated and out of poverty right now than any time previously in history. You would seek to destroy the system that has gotten you here, because some of its imperfections are showing by the very nature of the progress it has produced? Many people around the world would love to have the curse of educational systems that grind down your spirit by providing you textbooks, materials, teachers, computers, and corporate faceless healthcare systems that cruelly save you from life-threatening diseases.
How quickly we let the great become normal and disappointing.
We should fix things that are going wrong, and that expose and remedy the flaws in how the system was designed. It's true that in any system, unintended side effects and people seeking to gain from it start to emerge. And that should be fixed.
But, often the people who lack proper perspective on all that a system has produced (at hard toil and accomplishment of their predecessors) -- usually those who are young and those who have nothing to lose -- are too willing to destroy something that has given them the luxury of thinking it should be destroyed.
John Taylor Gatto's work in this space is also worth noting:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=John+Taylor+Gatto&ref=nb_sb_noss
I honestly could not be more happy that COVID is displacing Education once and for all and making it compete with the ED-Tech solutions, some from many from HN regulars. Because prior to that, it was always known how superior the product could be if adoption were possible, but now that its happening it really is hard to grasp how fast it started to disrupt the Industry and how quick students are to adapt to it. Granted, there are growing pains, but I just finished my exams and required readings for my Supply Chain course(s) for the rest of the month this weekend and most of today, something entirely impossible in the traditional model.
I wish I had the patience to have stayed in the few Honor classes I was forced to sit in when I was in HS, if only because so many here have said that this model is actually more apt to what is being promoted, which favours autodidacts. Instead, I got impatient at the idea of mandatory attendance and class participation, because I was already attending University level STEM lectures by my Junior Year in HS of my own volition (MOOCS/ED-tech weren't a thing, nor was wide access to broadband or wifi for that matter back then) and felt it was a waste of my time entirely.
Still, I'm glad there are more options for children to opt out and still have a solid trajectory for some profession instead of being seen as a delinquent, degenerate, or misfit as I was accused of despite still holding a 3.6 GPA and only showing up for the exams/quiz days. I tried my best to try and defund the school I felt was holding me in a mind prison, and that got me in a lot of trouble and almost delayed my graduation date because despite having had the grades the administration felt it was imperative I show up daily and on time, something I didn't agree with and would become entirely optional in University where I had become more focused as I divested out of the HS model and took my Education into my own hands at the age of 16.
The sooner we can decouple from the formal Education paradigm, the better we will be as a Society and can explore for more efficient modes of professional Education and training, and this includes the University model which is starting to eat itself alive the further COVID delays classes on campus.
Extinction Rebellion and it's large collective of School Striking Youth are an affirmation that this was bound to happen, but it should also not be forgotten that these kids are also not lost causes, but are instead highly motivated environmentalists just seeking alternative ways to finding solutions to the dire consequences they face and should be trained in professions and positions that suit their aims.
I'd love to be able to teach some of them Ag/Plant Science for regenerative and sustainable farms, and have them in turn be able to get an opportunity to undergo the same apprenticeship model I followed and eventually manage a farm of their own to help offset the CO2 emission and undertake carbon sequestering/negative business models. I'd probably also sign them up for Grid Alternatives, which taught me how Solar Panel installation and grid hookups were being done in the US, whereas I only knew how to do it in the EU. Grid Alternatives [1] is also an amazing non-profit that helps low income families offset the expenses of Solar Panel installation and helps them integrate into their own community.
If we had UBI I could probably also teach a few kids the basics on how to cook properly and help some of them be the dedicated culinary staff that helps feed the staff on site installing the panels.
> "Today in the United States the black and even the migrant can aspire to a level of professional treatment which would have been unthinkable two generations ago, and which seems grotesque to most people in the Third World"
"The black"? "The migrant"? Really?
Instead of this "helping the poor hurts them" bullshit, learn about how white people in the United States stole from blacks, again and again, to keep them from building generational wealth and stability:
https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/128211865715026330...
I'm sympathetic to the idea that there are problems with modern schooling (quantity != quality), but this guy just wants to pretend white people and the wealthy/middle class have no obligation to build a healthy society that functions well for everyone.
"Schools, banks, government, vaccines, democracy, the apollo program? all giant conspiracies" says angry man
Read Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault.
I wish people would think about the format they use to present their ideas more.
If you're presenting arguments based on empirical evidence and logic, you are building a directed graph. Using long-winded prose to represent it is the wrong data structure, which makes working with it (comprehending and contemplating its merits) difficult.
"Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.
In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery."