'Deschooling Society'
The Strange Legacy of Ivan Illich
Sailen Routray
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| Ivan Illich (Wikimedia Commons) |
“Alternative to Schooling was not some other type of
educational agency, or the design of educational opportunities into every
aspect of life, but a society which fosters a different attitude of people to
tools.” (Illich 1987)
This year completes fifty years of the publication of Deschooling Society (DS). Of all the books purportedly on radical educational alternatives that came out in the sixties and the seventies of the last century, Illich’s book perhaps remains the most discussed and it still continues to inspire educational experiments in much of the Third World; Sikhyantar is Rajasthan is only one of such examples in
But a large part of the
discussion on Illich has focussed on the details of the proposal outlined in
DS, and seems to have missed the point that the book’s focus was more on
‘society’ rather than on ‘deschooling.’ Three of Illich’s major monographs, Deschooling Society, Medical Nemesis, and Energy and Equity carry out a ‘vivisection’
of three critical organisational matrices of modern industrial society, the
school system, the professional health care system, and the high-speed
transportation system. Through this vivisection Illich reveals the innards of
the system, and exposes to us its workings in all the gory detail.
The aim of such an exposition is threefold. First, Illich wants us to see that the logic of certain modern institutional systems (such as the school system, the hospital-based health system etc.) in many ways transcends the immediate socio-political structure they are embedded in.
Secondly, he argues that the aim of these dominant institutional
matrices is not human welfare or freedom but their own survival and the
survival of the modern industrial system that they serve. These institutions
are able to do so by the commoditisation of services that individuals and
communities were able to provide for themselves. Thus, he characterises the
nature of alienation in modern western institutions as inhering not merely in
sites of production, but in sites of consumption of services such as education
and health etc. as well.
Thirdly, he posits that the challenge to the modern
industrial system is better mounted against these institutions rather than the
economic edifice per se.
In many ways such
a focus on institutions parallels other attempts at generating an institutional
cartography of western modernity. The two most obvious examples that spring to
the mind are the attempts by Max Weber and Michel Foucault. In many ways these
scholars seem to be arguing with the ghost of Marx.
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| Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons |
Those influenced by
Foucault tend to reproduce a general theoretical move in the social sciences
which proceeds in this fashion – phenomena X and Y were supposed to be
different, but it can be shown that there are similarities between the two. Thus
‘essentially’ what are generated are not descriptions about the world, but
descriptions about the descriptions about the world.
For example, the broader poststructuralist
scholarship inspired by Foucault seems to draw out similarities between
capitalism and communism as meta-narratives. More often than not such
scholarship is a gesture towards the characteristics governing our description
of the world.
Illich seems to
generate much criticism, and yet remains marginal in theoretical discussions
about the issues he is also grappling with. This is not merely because he seems
to make a mockery of our discursive divisions of the world, but because he is
concerned not so much with the creation of subjectivities through discourses
that accrete as nodes in institutions, but with actual institutional forms,
practices, and alternatives.
This becomes clear when the textual careers of
Foucault and Illich are seen in parallel; the work of both deal with institutions
that have shaped the modern world, both create intellectual edifices that make
a mockery of academic straightjackets built till then and constitute a
non-liberal alternative to all varieties of Marxism.
But a better
comparison and parallel might be found further east: in many ways Illich’s
project is similar to, if not the same as, that of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
Both of them are wary of western modernity, see modern industrial civilisation
as ‘diabolic’, and want to have no truck with it.
Both of them see a conflict
between reason (as commonly understood and exercised within modern institutions)
and human freedoms. Both of them want to err on the side of freedom, and not on
the side of reason and a narrowly defined rationality. Both of them inhabit the
traditions that they belong to effortlessly, and by that very reason turn into
persistent critics of these traditions.
It is this that seems to generate the
anxieties in most people who come across Gandhi and Illich. With both, these critiques are
not merely a way of cognising the world; they are also an aid and commentary to/on
practice.
They are separated
by nearly three generations. Gandhi dies in 1948. Illich died in 2002 after a
prolonged illness due to cancer; but he refused to be hospitalised till the
very end. This was the end of a life that was formally or informally spent
within the tradition of Catholicism, and involved a reworking of this tradition
in the specific contexts that he had to inhabit.
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| Gandhi with his friend Dr. Hermann Kallenbach Photo Taken in 1913 Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons |
Illich was born in 1926 in Vienna Gregorian
University at Rome ,
he finished his education with a doctorate in history from University of Salzburg
After finishing his education he started working as an assistant parish priest
in a Church in New York, Ponce
In 1961, he
founded CIDCO (Intercultural Documentation Center ) at Cuernavaca
in Mexico Third
World .
It is possible to argue with the specific contents of the programme that Illich and Gandhi have to offer. But that is only perhaps to be expected. Because the break that Illich and Gandhi offer to scholarship is total; it is in many ways an epistemic break. They do not provide an epistemic cleavage to hold on to.
To understand the nature of this consistency in the works
of Illich and Gandhi, we can learn from the kind of analysis that Dhareshwar makes
in a perceptive article on Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj published in Economic and Political Weekly in 2010. Dhareshwar
distinguishes between two aspects of Gandhi’s work.
According to him, Gandhi’s work
can be seen as answering two sets of questions: (a) What did colonialism destroy
or what did it try to destroy? What is the nature of resistance to such destruction?
(b) Why was Western colonialism so destructive in the first place?
According to
Dhareshwar, Gandhi’s answer to the first set of questions was that colonialism destroys
the integrity of experience by setting up experience-occluding structures that are
normative in nature. Therefore, Gandhi need not necessarily be seen as an anti-modern
Luddite who opposed trains and factories.
Thus, Dhareshwar says, what Gandhi actually opposed was the broader trend of forces set
off by colonialism that were inimical to the forms of experiential knowledge that
were/are the forms of acting upon the world in India. Thus, the professions that
Gandhi opposed as disabling, for example, those of law and medicine, are disabling
not because they are ‘foreign’, but because they set up normative schemas and domains
that then require experiential knowledge to become subservient to them.
In a similar fashion, we need to recover Illich from
his programmatic interventions. The programmatic interventions that he set up might
or might not work in some contexts. But what Illich is offering us is something
larger. His
larger argument seems to be broadly in the same direction that Dhareshwar argues
Gandhi’s arguments and interventions are oriented towards. The problem with schools,
hospitals and cars is not that they are ‘modern’ technologies.
The chief problem, as identified by Illich, is this:
they decrease autonomy—not of a ‘self’ or of an ‘individual’, but of experience
itself. According to him, the contemporary dominant systems of medicine and health are based on the
premise of the elimination of pain and of an indefinite postponement of death, and the school system is premised on the separation
of learning from experience and on making it a function of the ‘curriculum’. In
brief, the overall trend of institutional change seems to be one in which ‘swaraj’,
or the autonomy of self- knowledge or of experience, is progressively denied.
Thus, DS has to be read as a part of this search
for the ‘recovery of self’ in which the goal is not reform of ‘education’. It has
to be read as a master text for restoring the primacy of experiential knowledge
as a way of fostering the ways of life peculiar to contemporary India in particular and the Global South in general.
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| Ivan Illich (Wikimedia Commons) |
Note: This essay was published in the 'Text With Commentary Section' of the journal Contemporary Education
Dialogue in 2012 as part of a longer piece.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Foster, Philip J. 1971. Presidential Address: The Revolt against the Schools. Comparative Education Review 15 (3): pp. 267-275.
Ganapathy, R.S. 1975. Transportation
and Equity (Review of Energy and Equity by Ivan Illich). Economic
and Political Weekly 10 (30): pp. 1117-1118
Illich, Ivan. 1987. A Plea for Research on Lay Literacy. The North American Review 272. (3): pp.
10-17.
Illich, Ivan. 1975. The Medicalisation of Life. Journal of Medical Ethics 1(2): pp.
73-77.
Kak, Subhash. 1974. Sociological Ideas of Ivan Illich
Author. Social Scientist 2 (11): pp.
59-65.
Keesbury, Forrest E. 1981. Radical Education: What Went
Wrong? Peabody
Latta, Ruth. 1989. The Critics of Schooling. Canadian Journal of Education 14 (4): pp
482-496.
Lichtenstein, Peter M. 1985. Radical Liberalism and Radical Education: A Synthesis and Critical
Lichtenstein, Peter M. 1985. Radical Liberalism and Radical Education: A Synthesis and Critical
Evaluation of Illich, Freire, and
Dewey. American Journal of Economics and
Sociology Vol. 44 (1): pp. 39-53.
Nandy, Ashish. 2008. Forward to H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness by Ivan Illich. Bangalore
Ozmon, Howard. 1973. The School of Deschooling. The Phi Delta Kappan. 55 (3): pp.
178-179.
Pitt, Douglas. 1980. Mr
Illich's Multiplier: The Strange 'Death' of the Bureaucratic Organization. The
British Journal of Sociology 31 (2):
pp. 277-291.
Piveteau, Didier J. 1974. Illich:
Enemy of Schools or School Systems? The
School Review 82 (3): pp. 393-411.
Snyder, Sam R. 1972. What Is Ivan Illich Talking about? The Phi Delta Kappan. 53 (8): 516-517.
Stopsky, Fred. 1975. The School as a Workplace: Extending
Democracy to Schools. International
Review of Education 21 (4): pp. 493-506.
Wober, Mallory. 1974. Is Illich for Africa ?
Transition, 44: pp. 37-44.
