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 endeavour 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.
Ivan Illich Deschooling Society
Schooling - the production of knowledge, the marketing of knowledge, which is what the school amounts to, draws society into the trap of thinking that knowledge is hygienic, pure, respectable, deodorized, produced by human heads and amassed in stock..... [B]y making school compulsory, [people] are schooled to believe that the self-taught individual is to be discriminated against; that learning and the growth of cognitive capacity, require a process of consumption of services presented in an industrial, a planned, a professional form;... that learning is a thing rather than an activity. A thing that can be amassed and measured, the possession of which is a measure of the productivity of the individual within the society. That is, of his social value.
A radical alternative to a schooled society requires not only new formal mechanisms for the formal acquisition of skills and their educational use. A deschooled society implies a new approach to incidental or informal education.... [W]e must find more ways to learn and teach: the educational qualities of all institutions must increase again.
http://www.pudel.uni-bremen.de/100en_index.html
http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/texts/energy_and_equity/energy_and_equity.html
http://www.incae.ac.cr/ES/clacds/proyectos/naciones_digitales/construyendo_escenarios/documentos/Illich%20Chapters%201_2_3.pdf
http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Vernacular.html
http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Silence.html
http://www.ivanillich.org/ espanol
http://www.augustana.ab.ca/rdx/eng/activism_illich.htm
http://agora.qc.ca/textes/ellul.html
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http://agora.qc.ca/textes/illich.html
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1999/03/ILLICH/11802
http://www.radio.cbc.ca/programs/Tapestry/audio.html
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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=11192
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=11159
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=10912
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=10734
A Consitution for Cultural Revolution
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/texts/const_revolution/
