Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia

They Say: “Capitalist/Neoliberal Revolution first”

Note* - this could be read as links to an affirmative that claims Capitalism as an advantage.

Deschooling is a prerequisite to any other movement towards liberation – schools indoctrinate the logic of consumption and institutionalization, legitimizing the destructiveness of the capitalist system and removing the drive for independence.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

School is not only the New World Religion. It is also the world's fastest-growing labor market. The engineering of consumers has become the economy's principal growth sector. As production costs decrease in rich nations, there is an increasing concentration of both capital and labor in the vast enterprise of equipping man for disciplined consumption. During the past decade capital investments directly related to the school system rose even faster than expenditures for defense. Disarmament would only accelerate the process by which the learning industry moves to the center of the national economy. School gives unlimited opportunity for legitimated waste, so long as its destructiveness goes unrecognized and the cost of palliatives goes up.

If we add those engaged in full-time teaching to those in full-time attendance, we realize that this so-called superstructure has become society's major employer. In the United States sixty-two million people are in school and eighty million at work elsewhere. This is often forgotten by neo-Marxist analysts who say that the process of deschooling must be postponed or bracketed until other disorders, traditionally understood as more fundamental, are corrected by an economic and political revolution. Only if school is understood as an industry can revolutionary strategy be planned realistically. For Marx, the cost of producing demands for commodities was barely significant. Today most human labor is engaged in the production of demands that can be satisfied by industry which makes intensive use of capital. Most of this is done in school.

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. Now young people are prealienated by schools that isolate them while they pretend to be both producers and consumers of their own knowledge, which is conceived of as a commodity put on the market in school. School makes alienation preparatory to life, thus depriving education of reality and work of creativity. 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. And school directly or indirectly employs a major portion of the population. School either keeps people for life or makes sure that they will fit into some institution.

The New World Church is the knowledge industry, both purveyor of opium and the workbench during an increasing number of the years of an individual's life. Deschooling is, therefore, at the root of any movement for human liberation.

They Say: “The Alternative Doesn’t solve – Other Institutions Shape Values”

School promotes consumption on a deeper and more profound level than any other aspect of society – challenges to the logic of consumption must start there.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

The Revolutionary Potential of Deschooling

Of course, school is not, by any means, the only modern institution which has as its primary purpose the shaping of man's vision of reality. The hidden curriculum of family life, draft, health care, so-called professionalism, or of the media play an important part in the institutional manipulation of man's world-vision, language, and demands. But school enslaves more profoundly and more systematically, since only school is credited with the principal function of forming critical judgment, and, paradoxically, tries to do so by making learning about oneself, about others, and about nature depend on a prepackaged process. School touches us so intimately that none of us can expect to be liberated from it by something else.

Many self-styled revolutionaries are victims of school. They see even "liberation" as the product of an institutional process. Only liberating oneself from school will dispel such illusions. The discovery that most learning requires no teaching can be neither manipulated nor planned. Each of us is personally responsible for his or her own deschooling, and only we have the power to do it. No one can be excused if he fails to liberate himself from schooling. People could not free themselves from the Crown until at least some of them had freed themselves from the established Church. They cannot free themselves from progressive consumption until they free themselves from obligatory school.

Deschooling spills over – liberation from schools is crucial to formulate challenges to the rest of the social system.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

"Transportation" relying on new cars and superhighways serves the same institutionally packaged need for comfort, prestige, speed, and gadgetry, whether its components are produced by the state or not. The apparatus of "medical care" defines a peculiar kind of health, whether the service is paid for by the state or by the individual. Graded promotion in order to obtain diplomas fits the student for a place on the same international pyramid of qualified manpower, no matter who directs the school.

In all these cases employment is a hidden benefit: the driver of a private automobile, the patient who submits to hospitalization, or the pupil in the schoolroom must now be seen as part of a new class of "employees." A liberation movement which starts in school, and yet is grounded in the awareness of teachers and pupils as simultaneously exploiters and exploited, could foreshadow the revolutionary strategies of the future; for a radical program of deschooling could train youth in the new style of revolution needed to challenge a social system featuring obligatory "health," "wealth," and "security."

They Say: “The Alternative Is Infeasible”

Aston University’s Lifelong Learning Network provides a model for sustainability learning networks.

Blewitt 10 – John Blewitt, Senior Lecturer in Sustainability and Communication at Aston Business School, Former Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Huddersfield, Distinguished Schumacher Fellow, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Ph.d. from the University of Wales, MEd from Huddersfield University, 2010 (“Deschooling Society? A Lifelong Learning Network for Sustainable Communities, Urban Regeneration and Environmental Technologies,” November 12^th, Sustainability, Volume 2, Issue 11, pg. 3465-3478, Available Online at: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/11/3465/htm, Accessed 5-29-17)

4. Aston University’s Lifelong Learning Network Consortium: Sustainable Communities, Urban Regeneration and Environmental Technologies

The Lifelong Learning Network for Sustainable Communities, Urban Regeneration and Environmental Technologies led by Aston University in Birmingham (UK) is attempting to re-imagine and create this new approach to learning for sustainability and extra mural university education. The Network offers both vertical and lateral progression within the existing structures and frameworks of formally accredited learning without denying opportunities for significant informal and non formal learning in a wide array of spaces and lifeworlds that recognises learning as an element of what it means to be human. A sustainable learning environment needs to draw on all the resources, cultures and histories existing in the city-region including those diasporic communities that have become significant in promoting development in poor countries. Participation in global-local networks enable quick access to and transfers of human and financial resources, neighbourhood focussed community development through mentoring, capacity building through language learning, and eco and social entrepreneurship often harnessing a religious faith to fashioning a practice of sustainable wellbeing. These communities, by their nature, lend a global and development perspective to this an otherwise urban and locally based initiative sustainability learning. Interestingly, this initiative also gains some official legitimacy from the UK Government’s 2009 white paper, The Learning Revolution, which rearticulated various ideas and approaches to lifelong learning through its emphasis on informal learning, co-operation, cultural space and the need to create of webs of learning opportunity outside and maybe tangental to mainstream formal education and training. Indeed, the White Paper endorsed the social value of “open space” as a means of empowering groups and individuals ([26], p. 7),

We want a broad choice of learning options to be available, including traditional classes, activities in museums, libraries and other settings, as well as opportunities to learn online. Self-organised learning is an important part of the mix. Many people are already doing this. We want to empower more people to organise themselves to learn, with opportunities designed by communities for communities. But we know that starting a group can be difficult: it can be particularly hard to find low cost space locally, and people need more expertise and tips on how to build a successful learning group.

The intimation here is that what was once known as extra mural learning within the university sector could be re-formed as an enabler, animateur, co-ordinator and centrifugal force of educative endeavour. Consequently, with development funding secured from two government QUANGOs (Quasi Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations), the Birmingham, Black Country and Solihull Lifelong Learning Network and the West Midlands Business Operations project [27]. Aston University’s new Lifelong Learning Centre established during the first part of 2010 a Lifelong Learning Network Consortium comprising of private, public and third sector organisations, groups and interested citizens. Consortium members include power companies, private consultancies, further education and sixth form colleges, professional associations, community groups, NGOs and charities whose knowledge, mission and expertise fall within the broad public purpose of promoting a green knowledge based, low-carbon economy. In the spring and summer of 2010 a number of Consortium members were engaged to design and develop new modules for university accreditation together with a growing portfolio of complementary non accredited learning opportunities particularly in learning methods and facilitation. Some existing learning programmes owned and previously developed by some Consortium members have been recognised, endorsed and/or accredited allowing them to carry and transfer higher education credit within the national qualification framework and add a further dimension to the Network’s operation. The Lifelong Learning Centre has transferred funding to some partners to develop learning materials because their knowledge, skills and values are not be readily found within the academy. These groups and individuals are at the forefront of their respective fields, are practically engaged in fashioning sustainable practices and opportunities and work directly and immediately with business, community and local government. Intellectual property rights (IPR) remain with the lead body if the Aston University has funded the materials’ development but with provision for the developer to deliver and further refine the material over a number iterations if undertaken from within the Consortium’s operational parameters. In some instances the IPR for some module learning materials are shared jointly. By the autumn of 2010 the newly accredited learning opportunities included a wide range of ten and twenty credit modules, largely at level four, with self explanatory titles including: Strategies for Local Food, Planning for Sustainable Energy and Carbon Reduction, Concepts and Issues in Sustainable Development, Low Carbon Project Management, Setting Up and Running a Social Enterprise, Sustainable Design Strategies, Engaging Communities in Climate Change, Sustainable Cities, Sustainable Built Environment, Environmental Auditing, Intelligent Sustainability and Transition, Technology and Sustainable Life, Independent Professional Practice. The intention is to develop more if and when the Consortium generates the necessary interest, demand and momentum that will be the necessary corollary of a creative politico-educative event or rupture.

Delivery is by conventional face to face means, blended and in some cases purely on line at a distance. Much of the face to face delivery occurs outside the university’s campus boundaries in business premises, in neighbourhood groups, in public facilities devoted to social learning such as those provided by the library services and increasingly integrated with the learning affordances of new media technologies and applications. Thus through offering these part time and flexible opportunities the Lifelong Learning Centre has attempted to empower a connected collective of sustainability practitioners, educators, activists and entrepreneurs through a framework and space for sharing and development. The learning opportunities for sustainability are offered at a standardised fee to all citizens within the city of Birmingham, and beyond, who are capable of benefiting and succeeding at these higher level study. Marketing and promotion takes place through a variety means with the most effective being social networking activities from which Consortium members have organised information and guidance events or simply conveyed information to interested parties. Modules can be taken singly or in a cluster and credit may be accumulated to gain a higher level award qualification in Professional Development. Many adult learners have sought out these learning opportunities as part of their own personal and professional development but often to enhance their employability understandable in a region that is economically depressed. Many employers have expressed interest in fashioning learning programme that suits their own specific organisational and performance needs and this sometimes manifests itself in a demand for small units of credit (five) and a desire to negotiate learning outcomes. Thus, both award programme in Professional Development and for the independent Professional Practice modules intended learning outcomes may be identified by the learner him/herself in dialogue with the tutor and employing or professional body (if there is one). These outcomes may be expressive rather than strictly prescriptive further enabling creative development and refinement within the learning process. Space for radical innovation and challenge is therefore built into this emerging topography of work related professional learning and development for sustainability. In certain cases, non certificated, experiential, learning is recognised and/or accredited thus acknowledging the value of informal and non formal learning Illich saw as so extremely important. As he wrote, “most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction” ([12], p. 20).

The form and content of this Consortium provision articulates a public pedagogy which expresses an intermodal, interprofessional, intercultural and transdisciplinary perspective on sustainability and learning that mirrors the Mode 2 knowledge creation processes discussed by Gibbons et al. [28] in their important text The New Production of Knowledge. The Consortium, therefore, may be viewed as a educative and communication medium for sustainability and, given the fast changing nature of our social, economic and ecological environments, this medium is perhaps the dominant message for through its very existence and practice it articulates an inclusive political intervention that supports ‘the right to the city’ [29,30] by putting into place a structure overdetermined as much by sustainability than purely economic imperatives. As Harvey writes ([31], p. 23),

The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is (...) one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

Although the Aston University’s Lifelong Learning Centre retains an important role in quality assurance and enhancement of the learning on offer but its approach takes due cognizance of the power, significance and necessity of fostering connectivity, co-operation and collaboration. An ethics of social equality and environmental justice is at play for to do otherwise would be to reproduce a tunnel vision and unnecessary hierarchy individual learners, private companies and other institutions can no longer afford to countenance. Learning, creativity and innovation for sustainability require an open space of sharing and engagement. To put it another way, as Illich ([12], p. 89) wrote, “a truly public kind of ownership might begin to emerge if private or corporate control over the educational aspect of ‘things’ were brought to the vanishing point.” And this vanishing point can only be reached through choosing to think politically, act differently and by engaging in an active learning project that is married to informed, reasoned, emotionally sound and ethical changes in conduct and behaviour in all areas of social and working life. This means, in effect, the Lifelong Leaning Consortium Network for Sustainable Communities is positing ethics as central to its work through performing a political vision of a sustainable future by breaking down and crossing disciplinary boundaries and by creating new spaces in which knowledge can be produced, critiques offered and transformative possibilities realised. In doing so, it invokes and refashions the Epimetheus myth presciently referenced at the end Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society and implicitly explored in Paul Seabright’s [32] book on social trust and relationships, The Company of Strangers. The Lifelong Learning Consortium is inviting sustainability educators and other practitioners to enunciate a phenomenological understanding of human co-dependency and the values of sharing, caring, meeting, dwelling and loving. It also articulates a theory of practice that positions educators and cultural workers as transformative intellectuals and “militants” understood in Badiou’s sense of fashioning a new subjectivity through the learning intervention. Following Giroux ([33], p.79) these cultural workers and educators will need to, in and over time, develop a non totalizing politics that makes them attentive to the partial, specific, contexts of differentiated communities and forms of power. This is not a call to ignore larger theoretical and relational narratives, but to deepen power of analyses by making clear the specificity of contexts in which power is operationalized, domination expresses itself, and resistance works in multiple and productive ways. The possibility of, and potential for, a form of creative destruction that leads to intellectual, social and cultural innovation will depend on an emergent subjectivity that stays true to the event, and follows through with a radical trajectory of both imagining and realising a logic of practice that structures new subjective but non-individual experiences, dispositions, proclivities, relationships, ideas, common schemes of perception and conception with potentialities for alternative power blocs, political actions and habitus [34]. One emergent practice would see the development of an epistemic reflexivity that rearticulates the scholastic/academic point of view that presently apprehends the social world as a puzzle to be observed, often in abstraction, to one that embraces and resolves the rather messy, contradictory, assemblage of practical tasks and problems that are consequent upon us living and being in the exploitative, networked empire of global capitalism [35,36].

For example, in curriculum terms, if learners are invited to explore the reasons for, benefits of and possibilities surrounding the growing, distributing and consuming of locally produced (organic) food a critique of mass produced food, the supermarket system, global distribution networks, pesticide use and, potentially, biotechnologies and genetic modification become implicit and explicit categories for thought and action. Such learning constitutes both a resistance, and a rupture, and as Badiou notes rupture follows resistance. Although these issues are presented for debate and discussion informing the ethic of such a learning opportunity is a view of an alternative to everyday routines of consumption, common sense opinion and of simply not thinking. “Not to resist is not to think. Not to think is not to risk risking” ([22], p. 8). And these risks, these thoughts, immanent to the infinity of a situation need to be aligned with a conception of learning as a “truth procedure”, a politics where deliberation about the possible is constitutive of the learning process itself [22]. Again, continuing with the theme of consumption a case study on palm oil production and the activities of many of those corporations embracing the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) production necessitates a close scrutiny of the activities corporations embracing, and of the WWF in promoting, the RSPO. The Indonesian rain forests are continually felled (often illegally), biodiversity continually destroyed and the orang u tan increasingly exterminated. Such a state of affairs has even been recorded in the Guinness Book of Records and such a case study requires active learning to push the term ‘sustainable’ beyond the public space of opinion and a dialogue of values into a realm that confronts and transcends the plurality of glib accommodation and the seeing of both sides [37] (Greenpeace International, 2007). The issue is not whether industrial practices can be modernized ecologically, and sustainably, but whether given the dynamic of global capitalism, the very notion of sustainable palm oil production is simply an ideological deception reinforcing the economic power of big corporations and the cultural hegemony of consumerism with a human face. Both these topics are addressed in various parts of the Consortium provision. It is important for sustainability educators to speak truth to power.

5. Conclusions

At the time of writing the Consortium is still in its early stages of development. The lead institution, Aston University, through its Lifelong Learning Centre, has taken a radical and progressive lead role in this reinvention of extra mural university learning for sustainability. Whether the development succeeds or not will depend on a number of factors but it is clear that sustainability is becoming an increasingly prominent part of the educational and other practices of higher education institutions and other sectors of society. It has to. The Conortium and perhaps university sustainability education in general is perhaps yet another contradiction of capitalism or at the very least a parallax view [38] requiring a form of dialectical transcendence. Certainly accreditation is something Illich would be very wary of but without it development funding could not have been secured or support of other bodies enlisted. The funding, and accreditation, signifies a particular moment or political conjuncture whereby the State’s specific political autonomy from dominant economic interests allowed a certain compromise or configuration of simultaneously radical and conservative educational possibilities to form [39]. There is also value is accrediting learning opportunities for designating learning as credit worthy is, on the part of the university, a public commitment to quality although as Illich ([12], p. 19) rightly argues, “neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification”. The Consortium is above all a product of seeking to work in a radical manner within a conservative system where the tensions resulting from it offer possibilities of both success and failure. Success will lead to a reconfiguration of university led extra mural lifelong learning and failure could displace the political potential of sustainability as a means for deinstitutionalising higher education practice and for deschooling society. The last word remains with those of the inspiring Brazilian thinker Roberto Unger ([40], p.5) who in his 2006 Ralph Miliband Lecture argued that the idea of universal empowerment must be developed in to,

(…) a form of education, both original education and life long education, focus[ing] on the nurturing of a core of generic conceptual and practical capabilities. A form of education that is collective and intensive rather than encyclopaedic, that is analytical and problematic rather than informational, that is cooperative rather than authoritarian and individualist, and that is dialectical in spirit (...).

There is infrastructure and interest – The internet provides the necessary platform for deschooling networks supported by the precariat class.

Jandrić 14 – Petar Jandrić, Professor at University of Applied Sciences in Zagreb, Former Senior Lecturer at The Polytechnic of Zagreb, Ph.D. in Information Science from Sveučilište u Zagrebu, MSc in Education from The University of Edinburgh, 2014 “Deschooling Virtuality,” Open Review of Educational Research, Volume 1, Issue 1, pg. 84-98, December 2^nd, Available Online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23265507.2014.965193?scroll=top&needAccess=true, Accessed 6-2-17)

The internet offers the complete technical and logical infrastructure for Illich's deschooling, while the growing number of precariat class provides an increasing flow of potential recruits to the struggle against the oppressive forces of global neoliberal capitalism. Some engage in a wide range of virtual learning webs such as Wikipedia, pre-publishing networks and open access academic journals, while others join the hacker community and struggle to ensure long-term sustainability of internet freedoms. At the first glance, it seems that Illich can rest in peace—his visions of deschooling through technology are slowly but surely getting embodied in virtual realities. However, this conclusion is methodologically restricted in three important ways. First, the concept of deschooling heavily depends on correctness of anarchist views to human nature. Second, deschooling society is dialectically intertwined with the concept of conviviality, while deschooling virtuality is based on non-convivial technologies which lead directly to radical monopoly. Third, even the most developed deschooling virtuality might never transform into deschooling society.

Ivan Illich has already proved as true visionary in many fields from energy to medicine. However, his more radical ideas such as deschooling have often been considered as thought-provoking intellectual exercises rather than real possibilities. In words of Engin Atasay, ‘his creative critique of industrial society and everydayness provokes a critical imagination, which perhaps is Illich's richest legacy and greatest strength as a philosopher, activist and a convivial individual’ (2013 Atasay, E. (2013). Ivan Illich and the study of everyday life. The International Journal of Illich Studies, 3(1), 57–78.

[Google Scholar p. 57). This article shows that even the most radical Illich's ideas should not be taken lightly. On the contrary, it seems that something so unimaginable to the average citizen of the mass society such as large-scale deschooling has been made possible by the advent of the network society. Certainly, it is a long way from isolated examples of virtual deschooling such as Wikipedia and pre-publication networks to deschooling virtuality, and it is an even longer way from deschooling virtuality to deschooling society. However, it is important to understand that deschooling has graduated from mere vision to the real opportunity.

They Say: “The Alternative Is Utopian/No Change”

The alternative generates concrete change – deschooling and the creation of learning networks represent a series of legislative changes.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

Our options are clear enough. Either we continue to believe that institutionalized learning is a product which justifies unlimited investment or we rediscover that legislation and planning and investment, if they have any place in formal education, should be used mostly to tear down the barriers that now impede opportunities for learning, which can only be a personal activity.

Two centuries ago the United States led the world in a movement to disestablish the monopoly of a single church. Now we need the constitutional disestablishment of the monopoly of the school, and thereby of a system which legally combines prejudice with discrimination. The first article of a bill of rights for a modern, humanist society would correspond to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education." There shall be no ritual obligatory for all.

To make this disestablishment effective, we need a law forbidding discrimination in hiring, voting, or admission to centers of learning based on previous attendance at some curriculum. This guarantee would not exclude performance tests of competence for a function or role, but would remove the present absurd discrimination in favor of the person who learns a given skill with the largest expenditure of public funds or what is equally likely has been able to obtain a diploma which has no relation to any useful skill or job. Only by protecting the citizen from being disqualified by anything in his career in school can a constitutional disestablishment of school become psychologically effective. Neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification. Learning and the assignment of social roles are melted into schooling. Yet to learn means to acquire a new skill or insight, while promotion depends on an opinion which others have formed. Learning frequently is the result of instruction, but selection for a role or category in the job market increasingly depends on mere length of attendance.

Even if the alternative solves nothing the in-round rejection of schooling represents progress towards deschooling – personal rejection is key.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

Many self-styled revolutionaries are victims of school. They see even "liberation" as the product of an institutional process. Only liberating oneself from school will dispel such illusions. The discovery that most learning requires no teaching can be neither manipulated nor planned. Each of us is personally responsible for his or her own deschooling, and only we have the power to do it. No one can be excused if he fails to liberate himself from schooling. People could not free themselves from the Crown until at least some of them had freed themselves from the established Church. They cannot free themselves from progressive consumption until they free themselves from obligatory school.

We are all involved in schooling, from both the side of production and that of consumption. We are superstitiously convinced that good learning can and should be produced in us-and that we can produce it in others. Our attempt to withdraw from the concept of school will reveal the resistance we find in ourselves when we try to renounce limitless consumption and the pervasive presumption that others can be manipulated for their own good. No one is fully exempt from the exploitation of others in the schooling process.

They Say: “The Alternative Harms Access/Equal Opportunity”

1. No it doesn’t – learning networks will be readily available and designed to spread equality – that’s Blewitt

2. Only we access unique offense – schools are already unequal.

Hern 98 – Matt Hern, Writer and activist based in East Vancouver, Founder of the Eastside Learning Center and Groundswell: Grassroots Economic Alternatives, Ph.D. in Urban Studies from the Union Institute & University, M.A. from the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfeild, Vermont, 1998 (“The Promise of Deschooling” Social Anarchism, Volume 25, Available Online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/matt-hern-the-promise-of-deschooling, Accessed 4-20-17)

Some common objections and some short responses

There are many objections to a deschooling agenda, and while many of them are vigourously forwarded by those with very entrenched interests in the maintenance of schools and school funding, some of the critiques are salient. The primary set of reservations centers around access issues, the inference that without public schools, many kids will be without adequate educational opportunities, and the oft-repeated claim that a deschooled society would mean excellent facilities for rich communities and inadequate ones for poor families. These kinds of access arguments all focus around the implied belief that schools have somehow operated as great levelers, institutions that rise above societal inequalities and become places of equal opportunity where anyone can succeed regardless of their background, a claim that is patently false. Schools have always closely mimicked larger cultural and social inequities and rich kids have always had huge advantages in a schooled culture. The scenario of well-funded and prospering schools in rich areas alongside nightmare schools with abysmal resources in poor neighbourhoods is already the reality, as Jonathon Kozol has documented so clearly in Savage Inequalities. It is a pernicious myth that schools have ever acted as levelers. Moreover, the argument that school funding, if loosed from State control and returned to local communities would result in wide disparities in quality of opportunity is exactly the kind of paternalizing ethic that is so endemic in centralizing arguments. The assumption is that poor or non-affluent people cannot manage their money appropriately, and that families and communities need government agencies to spend their money for them, less they waste it. This is the paternalism that is at the heart of statism. The second major set of objections revolves around the idea that schools should shepherd and caretake an existing canon of knowledge that it is essential for everyone to comprehend, and without that understanding, kids have little chance to succeed in a society that reifies that canon. This argument is frequently forwarded by cultural conservatives lamenting the decline of Western Civilization and traditional standards and the clear articulations of education and intellectual status that were so once so easily defined. The contention that schools are the only guarantor of certain kinds of success has been convincingly refuted by the homeschooling and alternative education movements in North America and elsewhere, not to mention the examples of a plethora unschooled figures throughout history. Free school follow-up studies and the examples of families like the Colfaxes, who sent three homeschooled sons to Harvard, continue to demonstrate that success, however defined, is entirely possible beyond the constraints of compulsory schooling, and that there are innumerable paths to any goal. The final set of objections to deschooling I want to address here is argument that schools actually are not that bad and that the deschooling agenda somehow over-dramatizes their failings. The reasoning is that so many of us attended traditional schools and emerged alright, and that there are, in fact, good teachers and nice schools out there. These assertions are all undeniably true, but miss the point entirely in a culture where it is an old clich_ that ‘all kids hate school’ As Bookchin puts it “The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking” (21), and its this kind of debilitating reformist stance that deschooling so plainly refutes.

They Say: “The Alternative Causes Blowback/Violent Transition”

The alternative won’t cause conflict or blowback – school protection is disorganized and powerless

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, studied theology and philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

The risks of a revolt against school are unforeseeable, but they are not as horrible as those of a revolution starting in any other major institution. School is not yet organized for selfprotection as effectively as a nation-state, or even a large corporation. Liberation from the grip of schools could be bloodless. The weapons of the truant officer and his allies in the courts and employment agencies might take very cruel measures against the individual offender, especially if he or she were poor, but they might turn out to be powerless against the surge of a mass movement.

School has become a social problem; it is being attacked on all sides, and citizens and their governments sponsor unconventional experiments all over the world. They resort to unusual statistical devices in order to keep faith and save face. The mood among some educators is much like the mood among Catholic bishops after the Vatican Council. The curricula of so-called "free schools" resemble the liturgies of folk and rock masses. The demands of high-school students to have a say in choosing their teachers are as strident as those of parishioners demanding to select their pastors. But the stakes for society are much higher if a significant minority loses its faith in schooling. This would endanger the survival not only of the economic order built on the coproduction of goods and demands, but equally of the political order built on the nation-state into which students are delivered by the school.

They Say: “Children need schools/can’t make decisions”

This is a link – their conception of “Childhood” is a modern construction of institutional wisdom produced by schools that causes dehumanizing psychological violence and discrimination against other ages in education, harming lifelong learning.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

1. Age

School groups people according to age. This grouping rests on three unquestioned premises. Children belong in school. Children learn in school. Children can be taught only in school. I think these unexamined premises deserve serious questioning. We have grown accustomed to children. We have decided that they should go to school, do as they are told, and have neither income nor families of their own. We expect them to know their place and behave like children. We remember, whether nostalgically or bitterly, a time when we were children, too. We are expected to tolerate the childish behavior of children. Man-kind, for us, is a species both afflicted and blessed with the task of caring for children. We forget, however, that our present concept of "childhood" developed only recently in Western Europe and more recently still in the Americas.* [* For parallel histories of modern capitalism and modern childhood see Philippe Aries, Centuries 0f Childhood, Knopf, 1962.]

Childhood as distinct from infancy, adolescence, or youth was unknown to most historical periods. Some Christian centuries did not even have an eye for its bodily proportions. Artists depicted the infant as a miniature adult seated on his mother's arm. Children appeared in Europe along with the pocket watch and the Christian moneylenders of the Renaissance. Before our century neither the poor nor the rich knew of children's dress, children's games, or the child's immunity from the law. Childhood belonged to the bourgeoisie. The worker's child, the peasant's child, and the nobleman's child all dressed the way their fathers dressed, played the way their fathers played, and were hanged by the neck as were their fathers. After the discovery of "childhood" by the bourgeoisie all this changed. Only some churches continued to respect for some time the dignity and maturity of the young. Until the Second Vatican Council, each child was instructed that a Christian reaches moral discernment and freedom at the age of seven, and from then on is capable of committing sins for which he may be punished by an eternity in Hell. Toward the middle of this century, middle-class parents began to try to spare their children the impact of this doctrine, and their thinking about children now prevails in the practice of the Church.

Until the last century, "children" of middle-class parents were made at home with the help of preceptors and private schools. Only with the advent of industrial society did the mass production of "childhood" become feasible and come within the reach of the masses. The school system is a modern phenomenon, as is the childhood it produces. Since most people today live outside industrial cities, most people today do not experience childhood. In the Andes you till the soil once you have become "useful." Before that, you watch the sheep. If you are well nourished, you should be useful by eleven, and otherwise by twelve. Recently, I was talking to my night watchman, Marcos, about his eleven-year-old son who works in a barbershop. I noted in Spanish that his son was still a "ni–o,” Marcos, surprised, answered with a guileless smile: "Don Ivan, I guess you're right." Realizing that until my remark the father had thought of Marcos primarily as his "son," I felt guilty for having drawn the curtain of childhood between two sensible persons. Of course if I were to tell the New York slum-dweller that his working son is still a "child," he would show no surprise. He knows quite well that his eleven-year-old son should be allowed childhood, and resents the fact that he is not. The son of Marcos has yet to be afflicted with the yearning for childhood; the New Yorker's son feels deprived.

Most people around the world, then, either do not want or cannot get modern childhood for their offspring. But it also seems that childhood is a burden to a good number of those few who are allowed it. Many of them are simply forced to go through it and are not at all happy playing the child's role. Growing up through childhood means being condemned to a process of in-human conflict between self-awareness and the role imposed by a society going through its own school age. Neither Stephen Daedalus nor Alexander Portnoy enjoyed childhood, and neither, I suspect, did many of us like to be treated as children.

If there were no age-specific and obligatory learning institution, "childhood" would go out of production. The youth of rich nations would be liberated from its destructiveness, and poor nations would cease attempting to rival the childishness of the rich. If society were to outgrow its age of childhood, it would have to become livable for the young. The present disjunction between an adult society which pretends to be humane and a school environment which mocks reality could no longer be maintained.

The disestablishment of schools could also end the present discrimination against infants, adults, and the old in favor of children throughout their adolescence and youth. The social decision to allocate educational resources preferably to those citizens who have outgrown the extraordinary learning capacity of their first four years and have not arrived at the height of their self-motivated learning will, in retrospect, probably appear as bizarre. Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.

They Say: “We need teachers/schools to learn”

This is a link – the idea that instruction produces learning directly promotes the myth of unending consumption, perpetuating institutionalized values. Learning doesn’t require outside manipulation.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

The Myth of Institutionalized Values

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 input; 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. Once young people have allowed their imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to institutional planning of every sort. "Instruction" smothers the horizon of their imaginations. They cannot be betrayed, but only short-changed, because they have been taught to substitute expectations for hope. They will no longer be surprised, for good or ill, by other people, because they have been taught what to expect from every other person who has been taught as they were. This is true in the case of another person or in the case of a machine.

This transfer of responsibility from self to institution guarantees social regression, especially once it has been accepted as an obligation. So rebels against Alma Mater often "make it" into her faculty instead of growing into the courage to infect others with their personal teaching and to assume responsibility for the results. This suggests the possibility of a new Oedipus story-Oedipus the Teacher, who "makes" his mother in order to engender children with her. The man addicted to being taught seeks his security in compulsive teaching. The woman who experiences her knowledge as the result of a process wants to reproduce it in others.

We learn most outside school and without teachers.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

2. Teachers and Pupils By definition, children are pupils. The demand for the milieu of childhood creates an unlimited market for accredited teachers. School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We have all learned most of what we know outside school. Pupils do most of their learning without, and often despite, their teachers. Most tragically, the majority of men are taught their lesson by schools, even though they never go to school.

Everyone learns how to live outside school. We learn to speak, to think, to love, to feel, to play, to curse, to politick, and to work without interference from a teacher. Even children who are under a teacher's care day and night are no exception to the rule. Orphans, idiots, and schoolteachers' sons learn most of what they learn outside the "educational" process planned for them. Teachers have made a poor showing in their attempts at increasing learning among the poor. Poor parents who want their children to go to school are less concerned about what they will learn than about the certificate and money they will earn. And middle-class parents commit their children to a teacher's care to keep them from learning what the poor learn on the streets. Increasingly educational research demonstrates that children learn most of what teachers pretend to teach them from peer groups, from comics, from chance observations, and above all from mere participation in the ritual of school. Teachers, more often than not, obstruct such learning of subject matters as goes on in school.

Half of the people in our world never set foot in school. They have no contact with teachers, and they are deprived of the privilege of becoming dropouts. Yet they learn quite effectively the message which school teaches: that they should have school, and more and more of it. School instructs them in their own inferiority through the tax collector who makes them pay for it, or through the demagogue who raises their expectations of it, or through their children once the latter are hooked on it. So the poor are robbed of their self-respect by subscribing to a creed that grants salvation only through the school. At least the Church gave them a chance to repent at the hour of death. School leaves them with the expectation (a counterfeit hope) that their grandchildren will make it. That expectation is of course still more learning which comes from school but not from teachers.

Pupils have never credited teachers for most of their learning. Bright and dull alike have always relied on rote, reading, and wit to pass their exams, motivated by the stick or by the carrot of a desired career.

Adults tend to romanticize their schooling. In retrospect, they attribute their learning to the teacher whose patience they learned to admire. But the same adults would worry about the mental health of a child who rushed home to tell them what he learned from his every teacher. Schools create jobs for schoolteachers, no matter what their pupils learn from them.

Most learning happens casually absent teaching

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.

Most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction. Normal children learn their first language casually, although faster if their parents pay attention to them. Most people who learn a second language well do so as a result of odd circumstances and not of sequential teaching. They go to live with their grandparents, they travel, or they fall in love with a foreigner. Fluency in reading is also more often than not a result of such extracurricular activities. Most people who read widely, and with pleasure, merely believe that they learned to do so in school; when challenged, they easily discard this illusion.

They Say: “No Support”

1. Increasing movements towards unschooling and homeschooling along with the majority of people who hated school itself prove there is.

2. Schools are in crisis – opposition to compulsory schooling is on the rise.

Illich 73 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1973 (“After Deschooling, What?,” After Deschooling What?, Published by Harper & Row, Available Online at: http://learning.media.mit.edu/courses/mas713/readings/Illich,%20I.%20After%20deschooling%20what.pdf, Accessed 6-13-17)

Schools are in crisis, and so are the people who attend them. The former is a crisis in a political institution; the latter is a crisis of political attitudes. This second crisis, the crisis of personal growth, can be dealt with only if understood as distinct from, though related to, the crisis of the school. Schools have lost their unquestioned claim to educational legitimacy. Most of their critics still demand a painful and radical reform of the school, but a quickly expanding minority will not stand for anything short of the prohibition of compulsory attendance and the disqualification of academic certificates. Controversy between partisans of renewal and partisans of disestablishment will soon come to a head.

3. Attitudes are shifting away from schools – the alternative is crucial to provide a vision alternate to the SQUO.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

Attitudes are already changing. The proud dependence on school is gone. Consumer resistance increases in the knowledge industry. Many teachers and pupils, taxpayers and employers, economists and policemen would prefer not to depend any longer on schools. What prevents their frustration from shaping new institutions is a lack not only of imagination but frequently also of appropriate language and of enlightened self-interest. They cannot visualize either a deschooled society or educational institutions in a society which has disestablished school.