ivan illich

bakhtiar mikhakgrassroots invention group

mit media lab

IVAN ILLICH

• Born in Vienna in 1926 • Attended a religious school from 1931-1941• Expelled because of his Jewish maternal

ancestry• Secondary studies at the University of Florence

in Italy• Studied theology and philosophy at the

Gregorian University in Rome• Doctorate in History from University of

Salzburg.

IVAN ILLICH

• Earmarked by Vatican for its diplomatic service

• Opted for pastoral ministry and was appointed assistant parish priest to a New York Church with Irish and Puerto Rican delegation (1951-1956)

• Vice Rector at the Catholic University of Ponce in Puerto Rico (Until 1960)

• Worked on spreading the idea of intercultural sensibility by establishing the Center for Intercultural Communication

IVAN ILLICH

• Back to New York to Fordham University• In 1961 he established the Center for

Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

• Education of American missionaries for work in Latin America

• Ideas of ‘deschooled’ education was put into practice at CIDOC

• Transform every moment of life into a learning experience, usually outside of school system

IVAN ILLICH

• Disassociated CIDOC from the Catholic Church in 1968

• Left the priesthood in 1969• Focused on developing an educational

thinking from 1960-mid 1970s• Later he focused on other institutional

problems in modern society• Moved to Europe in the late 1970s.

Deschooling Society

• Universal education through schooling is not feasible• Neither new attitudes of teachers towards their

pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware and software, nor finally an attempt to expand the teacher’s responsibility until it engulfs the pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education

• The goal should be to establish educational webs which heighten the opportunity for learning sharing and caring.

• The ethos of the society must be deschooled• The right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to

attend school

Deschooling Society

• He denounced the institutionalized education and the institution of school as producers of merchandise with a specific exchange value in society where those who already possess a certain cultural capital derive the most benefit.

• He asserts that the prestige of school as a supplier of good quality educational services for the population rests of myths:– Myth of institutionalized values– Myth of the measurement of values– Myth of packaging values– Myth of self-perpetuating progress

Myth of institutionalized values

– grounded in the belief that the process of schooling produces something of value. That belief generates a demand.

– It is assumed that the school produces learning. The existence of schools produces the demand for schooling. Thus the school suggests that valuable learning is the result of attendance, that the value of learning increases with the amount of this attendance, and that this value can be measured and documented by grades and certificates.

– Illich takes the opposite view: that learning is the human activity that least needs manipulation by others; that most learning is the result not of instruction but of participation by learners in meaningful settings.

– School, however, makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.

Myth of the measurement of values

People who submit to the standard of others

for the measure of their own personal growth soon apply the same standard to themselves. They no longer have to be put in their place

but put themselves into their assigned slots, squeeze themselves into the niche which they have been taught to seek, and in the very process, put their fellows into their places,

too, until everybody and everything fits.

Myth of packaging values

• The school sells the curriculum, says Illich, and the result of the curriculum production process looks like any other modern staple product. – The distributor/teacher delivers the finished product to the

consumer/pupil, – whose reactions are carefully studied and charted to provide

research data for the preparation of the next model– which may be ‘ungraded’, ‘student-designed’, ‘visually-aided’,

or ‘issue-centred’.

Myth of self-perpetuating progress

• Illich talks not only about consumption but about production and growth.

• He links these with the race for degrees, diplomas and certificates, since the greater one’s share of educational qualifications the greater one’s chances of a good job.

• For Illich the working of consumer societies is founded to a great extent on this myth, and its perpetuation is an important part of the game of permanent regimentation.

• To smash it, says Illich, ‘would endanger the survival not only of the economic order built on the co-production of goods and demands, but equally of the political order built on the nation-State into which students are delivered by the school.’

• Consumers/pupils are taught to adjust their desires to marketable values, even though this cycle of eternal progress can never lead to maturity.

We must conceive of new relational structures which are deliberately set up to facilitate access to these resources for the use of anybody who is motivated to seek them for his education. Administrative, technological, and especially legal arrangements are required to set up such web-like structures.

Ivan Illichfrom the “learning webs” chapterin Deschooling Sciety

We must conceive of new relational structures which are deliberately set up to facilitate access to these resources for the use of anybody who is motivated to seek them for his education. Administrative, technological, and especially legal arrangements are required to set up such web-like structures.

Ivan Illichfrom the “learning webs” chapterin Deschooling Sciety

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 a stock. I see no difference between rich and poor countries in the development of these attitudes to knowledge. There is a difference of degree, of course; but I find it much more interesting to analyze the hidden impact of the school structure on a society; and I see that this impact is equal or, to be more precise, tends to be equal. It doesn’t matter what the overt structure of the curriculum is, whether the school is public, whether it exists in a State that has the monopoly of public schools, or in a State where private schools are tolerated or even encouraged. It is the same in rich as in poor countries, and might be described as follows: if this ritual that I consider schooling to be is defined by a society as education [...] then the members of that society, by making schooling compulsory, 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 [...]

Someone who wants to learn knows that he needs both information and critical response to its use from somebody else. Information can be stored in things and in persons. In a good educational system access to things ought to be available at the sole bidding of the learner, while access to informants requires, in addition, others' consent.

Ivan Illichfrom the “learning webs” chapterin Deschooling Sciety

Educational resources are usually labeled according to educators' curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four different approaches which enable the student to gain access to any educational resource which may help him to define and achieve his own goals:

1. Reference Services to Educational Objects2. Skill Exchanges3. Peer-Matching4. Reference Services to Educators-at-Large

Ivan Illichfrom the “learning webs” chapterin Deschooling Sciety

peer-to-peer learning

People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call "conviviality." They are degraded to the status of mere consumers.

A convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favor of another member's equal freedom.

In every society there are two ways of achieving specific ends, such as locomotion, communication among people, health, learning. One I call autonomous, the other heteronomous. In the autonomous mode I move myself. In the heteronomous mode I am strapped into a seat and carried. In the autonomous mode I heal myself, and you help me in my paralysis, and I help you in your childbearing [...]In every society and in every sector, the efficiency with which the goal of the sector is achieved depends on an interaction between the autonomous and the heteronomous modes.

This reversal would permit the evolution of a life style and of a political system which give priority to the protection, the maximum use, and the enjoyment of the one resource that is almost equally distributed among all people: personal energy under personal control. I will argue that we can no longer live and work effectively without public controls over tools and institutions that curtail or negate any person's right to the creative use of his or her energy. For this purpose we need procedures to ensure that controls over the tools of society are established and governed by political process rather than by decisions by experts.

Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. 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. Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion.

What is fundamental to a convivial society is not the total absence of manipulative institutions and addictive goods and services, but the balance between those tools which create the specific demands they are specialized to satisfy and those complementary, enabling tools which foster self-realization. The first set of tools produces according to abstract plans for men in general; the other set enhances the ability of people to pursue their own goals in their unique way.