Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia

Links

Link – Reforms

(1NC) The affirmative’s attempt to reform the school system is fundamentally oriented towards the improvement and promotion of a schooled society which feeds children into the industrial machine of capitalism.

Note* there are few links to specific things not highlighted – Educational technologists and R&D, the Free-school movement, teachers unions, behaviourists.

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)

I believe that the contemporary crisis of education demands that we review the very idea of publicly prescribed learning, rather than the methods used in its enforcement. The dropout rate--especially of junior-high-school students and elementary-school teachers-- points to a grass-roots demand for a completely fresh look. The "classroom practitioner" who considers himself a liberal teacher is increasingly attacked from all sides. The freeschool movement, confusing discipline with indoctrination, has painted him into the role of a destructive authoritarian. The educational technologist consistently demonstrates the teacher's inferiority at measuring and modifying behavior. And the school administration for which he works forces him to bow to both Summerhill and Skinner, making it obvious that compulsory learning cannot be a liberal enterprise. No wonder that the desertion rate of teachers is overtaking that of their students.

America's commitment to the compulsory education of its young now reveals itself to be as futile as the pretended American commitment to compulsory democratization of the Vietnamese. Conventional schools obviously cannot do it. The free-school movement entices unconventional educators, but ultimately does so in support of the conventional ideology of schooling. And the promises of educational technologists, that their research and development--if adequately funded--can offer some kind of final solution to the resistance of youth to compulsory learning, sound as confident and prove as fatuous as the analogous promises made by the military technologists.

The criticism directed at the American school system by the behaviorists and that coming from the new breed of radical educators seem radically opposed. The behaviorists apply educational research to the "induction of autotelic instruction through individualized learning packages." Their style clashes with the nondirective cooption of youth into liberated communes established under the supervision of adults. Yet, in historical perspective, these two are just contemporary manifestations of the seemingly contradictory yet really complementary goals of the public school system. From the beginning of this century, the schools have been protagonists of social control on the one hand and free cooperation on the other, both placed at the service of the "good society," conceived of as a highly organized and smoothly working corporate structure. Under the impact of intense urbanization, children became a natural resource to be molded by the schools and fed into the industrial machine. Progressive politics and the cult of efficiency converged in the growth of the U.S. public school.* Vocational guidance and the junior high school were two important results of this kind of thinking. [*See Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, Cuaderno No. 50. Centro Intercultural de Documentacin, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1971.]

It appears, therefore, that the attempt to produce specified behavioral changes which can be measured and for which the processor can be held accountable is just one side of a coin, whose other side is the pacification of the new generation within specially engineered enclaves which will seduce them into the dream world of their elders. These pacified in society are well described by Dewey, who wants us to "make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society, and permeate it with the spirit of art, history and science." In this historical perspective, it would be a grave mistake to interpret the current threecornered controversy between the school establishment, the educational technologists and the free schools as the prelude to a revolution in education. This controversy reflects rather a stage of an attempt to escalate an old dream into fact, and to finally make all valuable learning the result of professional teaching. Most educational alternatives proposed converge toward goals which are immanent in the production of the cooperative man whose individual needs are met by means of his specialization in the American system: They are oriented toward the improvement of what--for lack of a better phrase--I call the schooled society. Even the seemingly radical critics of the school system are not willing to abandon the idea that they have an obligation to the young, especially to the poor, an obligation to process them, whether by love or by fear, into a society which needs disciplined specialization as much from its producers as from its consumers and also their full commitment to the ideology which puts economic growth first. Dissent veils the contradictions inherent in the very idea of school. The established teachers unions, the technological wizards, and the educational liberation movement reinforce the commitment of the entire society to the fundamental axioms of a schooled world, somewhat in the manner in which many peace and protest movements reinforce the commitments of their members--be they black, female, young, or poor--to seek justice through the growth of the gross national income.

Link – Funding

The affirmative’s increase in funding rewards a failing system and trades off with localized deschooled learning methods – wastefully reinforcing schooling.

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)

A Political Argument

A political argument in favour of deschooling is a fairly simple one. Schools are huge businesses. They command massive amounts of capital, huge administrative apparatuses, they have enormous workforces and sprawling facilities, “Schooling is the largest single employer in the United States, and the largest grantor of contracts next to the Defense Department”. Over the course of a century, schools have developed into monumental undertakings, and the money that pours into them comes directly out tax dollars. Schooling is “a very profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state”. Schooling is about the triumph of the state over families and communities, and the spectacular entrenchment of bureaucracy at innumerable levels makes reform unthinkable. All across North America the pattern is relentless: tax money is appropriated in ever growing amounts and amassed in Ministries of Education, with colossal infrastructures and blanket mandates to license schools, accredit teachers and manufacture curricula. These Ministries then distribute that money to sanctioned school districts, themselves with huge bureaucracies who transfer money and required curricula to the actual schools. Teachers, also all accredited and sanctioned, are then given a series of groups of children, and are required to pass on a required curriculum in a required time frame. The effect is a seemingly endless hierarchy, with a downward spiral of tighter and tighter control, so that at the classroom level there is minimal flexibility. Teachers are given strict guidelines about discipline, achievement, pedagogy and time. They are reduced to information conveyers, passing on a prescribed set of knowledges to a prescribed population in a strictly regulated environment. And the real losers, of course, are the kids and their families. First, they are seeing only a sliver of their tax dollar returned to them, and have no political voice in how or where that sliver is spent. As John Gatto (1935- ), a past New York City and State Teacher of the Year and now vigourous deschooling advocate shows:

Out of every dollar allocated to New York schools 51% is removed at the top for system-wide administrative costs. Local school districts remove another 5% for district administrative costs. At the school site there is wide latitude (concerning) what to do with the remaining 44%. but the average school deducts another 12% more for administration and supervision, bringing the total deducted from our dollar to 68 cents. But there are more non-teaching costs in most schools: coordinators of all sorts, guidance counselors, librarians, honorary administrators who are relieved of teaching duties to do favours for listed administrators... under these flexible guidelines the 32 cents remaining after three administrative levies is dropped in most schools to a quarter, two bits. Out of a 7 billion dollar school budget this is a net loss to instruction from all other uses equaling 5 1/2 billion dollars.

This kind of pattern is recognizable in every school district across the continent. There is an incredible amount of money devoted to education, for example, “in Washington State nearly half of every tax dollar is spent on kindergarten through twelfth-grade education.”, and precious little of it is ever returned to those it was appropriated for, “New York State, for instance, employs more school administrators than all of the European Economic Community nations combined.” There is an amazingly pervasive myth that government schooling is cheaper than private education, and that opposition to schools is thus a necessarily elitist proposal. It is a contention that is plainly absurd, and one that common sense, a priori evidence and statistics prove foolish.

of the two forms (public and private) ... public school is by far the most expensive in direct cost (we’ll leave social costs out of it for the moment!), averaging $5500 a year per seat nationally, to a national average for all forms of private education of about $2200.

The scale of school bureaucracy is monstrously wasteful, and as a government sponsored monopoly with guaranteed customers there is no pressure on schools to perform, in fact the opposite is true. Schools are rewarded for failure. When students emerge from schools with minimal skills and degraded personalities, the call inevitably goes up for more school money, more teachers, longer school years, more rigourous regulation. Schools are failing at even their own narrow mandates, and yet the response is to then increase their power and scope, which is the reverse of what is really needed. We need fewer schools and less schooling. The inherent logic of centralized monopoly schooling is faulty, both in terms of economics and pedagogy. Schools have always been conceived of in terms of warehousing and the efficient maintenance of a maximum number of children, and in a very limited way, contemporary schools are moderately effective at that, although hardly cost-effective. The difficulty with school logic is that kids habitually defy regimentation and families continue to demand that their children be given conditions to flourish in. What it means to flourish though, and what each individual family and child needs to grow into themselves is as variable as kids themselves. Every child is a unique and enigmatic individual with all the nuances and contradictions humanity entails, and each requires a specific set of circumstances and environments to learn, grow and flourish that only the kid and their family can even begin to comprehend. Necessitated by its very structure, compulsory schooling attempts to standardize and regulate all students’ patterns of learning, and plainly does not and will not work. This represents the street-level tragedy of schooling, and underlines a political argument for deschooling. The centralized appropriation of school money drains families and local communities of the resources to create locally and individually appropriate learning environments. What is needed is a vast, asystematically organized fabric of innumerable kinds of places for kids to spend their time. A decentralized, deschooled community vision includes homelearners of every stripe, learning centres, traditional schools, religious schools, Montessori, free schools, arts and performing centres, dance troupes, language training, athletic clubs etc., all organized on the basis of local need and interest. The resources should be available in every community to create a swath of local answers, and for each family and kid to develop their own educational and pedagogical approaches. The attempt to drive all children into centralized, compulsory and regimented schooling is an absurd scam and wasteful at every level. It is impossible for healthy children to thrive in such circumstances, and the century-long effort to enforce schooling has been hugely costly. It is a burden our communities should bear no longer.

The affirmative’s call for “more funding” directly supports the system of schooling – nurturing the worst in humanity and creating an anti-ecological culture.

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)

Politics, Pedagogy, Culture, Self-design, Community Control.

It is virtually anathema in our culture, but I want to argue here that our society needs far fewer schools, not more. I believe that schools as we have conceived them in the late-20th Century are a parasite on our communities, a burden to our children and are the very essence of a hierarchical, anti-ecological culture. I further contend that dissolving the school monopoly over our kids may well hold the key to reconstructing our communities around local control and participatory democracy. Fortunately, there are a phenomenal number of alternatives to schools and schooling already flourishing in every community across the continent, representing a major threat to centralized institutional control. The abject failure of monopoly, state-controlled, compulsory schooling is evident to anyone who looks. The nightmare of schooling is costing our kids, our families and communities dearly in every way. Schools waste more money than anyone can fully conceive of, demand that our kids spend twelve years of their natural youth in morbidly depressing and oppressive environments and pour the energies of thousands upon thousands of eager teachers into demeaning and foolish classrooms. The sanctity of public schools has become so reified in our bizarre North American public political consciousness that people reflexively mouth support for ‘education spending’ or ‘school dollars’ without any comprehension of what they are calling for. The reality that stands as background to the sordid liberal-conservative debate about how much cash to allocate to public schools is a system that systematically nurtures the worst in humanity and simultaneously suppresses individuality and real community.

Deschooling is a call for individuals, families and communities to regain the ability to shape themselves. It is a political, a cultural and a pedagogical argument against schools and schooling, and the impetus to fundamentally reorganize our institutional relationships. For many good reasons I believe schools are the linchpin of the monopoly corporate state power over local communities, and actively resisting their grip holds much of the key to local power. I want to analyze and forward deschooling here in terms of three kinds of arguments: political, cultural and pedagogical, and draw each into a rubric of radical decentralism and direct democracy.

Link – Educational Equality

The affirmative’s goal of educational equality injects false hope into the modern religion of schooling. Only abandoning schools can solve prejudice and discrimination.

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 escalation of the schools is as destructive as the escalation of weapons but less visibly so. Everywhere in the world school costs have risen faster than enrollments and faster than the GNP; everywhere expenditures on school fall even further behind the expectations of parents, teachers, and pupils. Everywhere this situation discourages both the motivation and the financing for large-scale planning for nonschooled learning. The United States is proving to the world that no country can be rich enough to afford a school system that meets the demands this same system creates simply by existing, because a successful school system schools parents and pupils to the supreme value of a larger school system, the cost of which increases disproportionately as higher grades are in demand and become scarce.

Rather than calling equal schooling temporarily unfeasible, we must recognize that it is, in principle, economically absurd, and that to attempt it is intellectually emasculating, socially polarizing, and destructive of the credibility of the political system which promotes it. The ideology of obligatory schooling admits of no logical limits. The White House recently provided a good example. Dr. Hutschnecker, the "psychiatrist" who treated Mr. Nixon before he was qualified as a candidate, recommended to the President that all children between six and eight be professionally examined to ferret out those who have destructive tendencies, and that obligatory treatment be provided for them. If necessary, their re-education in special institutions should be required. This memorandum from his doctor the President sent for evaluation to HEW. Indeed, preventive concentration camps for predelinquents would be a logical improvement over the school system.

Equal educational opportunity is, indeed, both a desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with obligator;' schooling is to confuse salvation with the Church. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition.

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.

Link – Environmental Education

The affirmative call for environmental education relies on an anthropocentric greenwash of real environmental issues — crushes solvency and turns the case.

Kahn 10 — Richard Kahn, Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Research University of North Dakota, Core Faculty in Education Antioch University in Los Angeles, PhD in Social Sciences and Comparative Education from the University of California, 2010 (“Ecopedagogy: An Introduction,” Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis, Published by Peter Lang Publishing, ISBN 978-1-4331-0545-6)

However, the Zoo School is promoted within leading environmental education circles as a leader because it is, in the words of the Environmental Education & Training Partnership, “Meeting Standards Naturally.” That is, it is motivating students in a new way to go to school and meet or even surpass national curricular and testing standards of a kind consistent with the outcome-orientation of the No Child Left Behind Act. As with other schools that have adopted environmental education as the central focus of their programs, the Zoo School apparently shines – not because it is producing ecological mindsets and sustainable living practices capable of transforming society in radically necessary ways, but because its students’ reading and math scores have improved, and they have performed better in science and social studies, developed the ability to transfer their knowledge from familiar to unfamiliar contexts, learned to “do science” and not just learn about it, and showed a decline in the sort of overall behavior classified as a discipline problem. Obviously, regardless of whatever good pedagogy is taking place at the Zoo School, this laudatory praise of its environmental literacy program by environmental educators is little more than the present-day technocratic standardization movement in education masquerading as a noteworthy “green” improvement. Put bluntly: this is environmental literacy as a greenwash.

Worse still, however, is that here environmental literacy has not only been coopted by corporate state forces and morphed into a progressively-styled, touchy-feely method for achieving higher scores on standardized tests like the ACT and SAT, but in an Orwellian turn typical of the Bush-era it has come to stand in actuality for a real illiteracy about the nature of ecological catastrophe, its causes, and possible solutions. As I have insisted, our current course for social and environmental disaster (though highly complex and not easily boiled down to a few simple causes or solutions) must be traced to the evolution of an anthropocentric worldview grounded in what the sociologist Patricia Hill Collins has referred to as a “matrix of domination,” a global technocapitalist infrastructure that relies upon market-based and functionalist versions of literacy to instantiate and augment its socioeconomic, cultural and environmental control. Conversely, the type of environmental literacy standards now showcased at places like the Zoo School as Michele Archie’s “Hallmarks of Quality” are those that fail to develop the type of radical and partisan subjectivity in students which might be capable of deconstructing their socially and environmentally deleterious hyper-individualism or their obviously socialized identities that tend towards state-sanctioned norms of competition, hedonism, consumption, marketization and a form of quasi-fascistic patriotism that they unflinchingly belong to “the greatest nation on earth.”

It is clear, then, that despite the effects and growth of environmental education over the last few decades, it is a field that is ripe for a reconstruction of its literacy agenda. Again, while something like the modern environmental movement (conceived broadly) should be commended for the role it has played in helping to articulate many of the dangers and pitfalls that contemporary life now affords, it is also clear that environmental education has thus far inadequately surmised the larger structural challenges now at hand and has thus tended to intervene in a manner far too facile to demand or necessitate a rupture of the status-quo. What has thereby resulted is a sort of crisis of environmental education generally and, as a result, recently the field has been widely critiqued by a number of theorists and educators who have sought to expose its theoretical and practical limitations.

Link – Funding for Poor Students

The affirmative does nothing to resolve educational inequalities for poorer students – funding doesn’t go to the poor and true equality is only possible absent current schools.

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 first is certainly true so long as the money has been spent through the school budget. The money indeed went to the schools which contained most of the disadvantaged children, but it was not spent on the poor children themselves. These children for whom the money was intended comprised only about half of those who were attending the schools that added the federal subsidies to their budgets. Thus the money was spent for custodial care, indoctrination and the selection of social roles, as well as education, all of which functions are inextricably mingled in the physical plants, curricula, teachers, administrators, and other key components of these schools, and, therefore, in their budgets.

The added funds enabled schools to cater disproportionately to the satisfaction of the relatively richer children who were "disadvantaged" by having to attend school in the company of the poor. At best a small fraction of each dollar intended to remedy a poor child's disadvantages in learning could reach the child through the school budget. It might be equally true that the money was incompetently spent. But even unusual incompetence cannot beat that of the school system. Schools by their very structure resist the concentration of privilege on those otherwise disadvantaged. Special curricula, separate classes, or longer hours only constitute more discrimination at a higher cost. Taxpayers are not yet accustomed to permitting three billion dollars to vanish from HEW as if it were the Pentagon. The present Administration may believe that it can afford the wrath of educators. Middle-class Americans have nothing to lose if the program is cut. Poor parents think they do, but, even more, they are demanding control of the funds meant for their children. A logical way of cutting the budget and, one hopes, of increasing benefits is a system of tuition grants such as that proposed by Milton Friedman and others. Funds would be channeled to the beneficiary, enabling him to buy his share of the schooling of his choice. If such credit were limited to purchases which fit into a school curriculum, it would tend to provide greater equality of treatment, but would not thereby increase the equality of social claims.

It should be obvious that even with schools of equal quality a poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one. Even if they attend equal schools and begin at the same age, poor children lack most of the educational opportunities which are casually available to the middle-class child. These advantages range from conversation and books in the home to vacation travel and a different sense of oneself, and apply, for the child who enjoys them, both in and out of school. So the poorer student will generally fall behind so long as he depends on school for advancement or learning. The poor need funds to enable them to learn, not to get certified for the treatment of their alleged disproportionate deficiencies.

All this is true in poor nations as well as in rich ones, but there it appears under a different guise. Modernized poverty in poor nations affects more people more visibly but also-for the moment-more superficially. Two-thirds of all children in Latin America leave school before finishing the fifth grade, but these "desertores" are not therefore as badly off as they would be in the United States.

Few countries today remain victims of classical poverty, which was stable and less disabling. Most countries in Latin America have reached the "take-off" point toward economic development and competitive consumption, and thereby toward modernized poverty: their citizens have learned to think rich and live poor. Their laws make six to ten years of school obligatory. Not only in Argentina but also in Mexico or Brazil the average citizen defines an adequate education by North American standards, even though the chance of getting such prolonged schooling is limited to a tiny minority. In these countries the majority is already hooked on school, that is, they are schooled in a sense of inferiority toward the better-schooled. Their fanaticism in favor of school makes it possible to exploit them doubly: it permits increasing allocation of public funds for the education of a few and increasing acceptance of social control by the many.

Link – New/Better Education

The affirmative’s promise of new and better education corrupts the organic development of learning and spurs the ritual of rising deceptions – motivating increased investment in a schooled society.

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 Self-Perpetuating Progress

Even when accompanied by declining returns in learning, paradoxically, rising per capita instructional costs increase the value of the pupil in his or her own eyes and on the market. At almost any cost, school pushes the pupil up to the level of competitive curricular consumption, into progress to ever higher levels. Expenditures to motivate the student to stay on in school skyrocket as he climbs the pyramid. On higher levels they are disguised as new football stadiums, chapels, or programs called International Education. If it teaches nothing else, school teaches the value of escalation: the value of the American way of doing things.

The Vietnam war fits the logic of the moment. Its success has been measured by the numbers of persons effectively treated by cheap bullets delivered at immense cost, and this brutal calculus is unashamedly called "body count." Just as business is business, the never-ending accumulation of money, so war is killing, the never-ending accumulation of dead bodies. In like manner, education is schooling, and this open-ended process is counted in pupil-hours. The various processes are irreversible and self-justifying. By economic standards the country gets richer and richer. By death-accounting standards the nation goes on winning its war forever. And by school standards the population becomes increasingly educated.

School programs hunger for progressive intake of instruction, but even if the hunger leads to steady absorption, it never yields the joy of knowing something to one's satisfaction. Each subject comes packaged with the instruction to go on consuming one "offering" after another, and last year's wrapping is always obsolete for this year's consumer. The textbook racket builds on this demand. Educational reformers promise each new generation the latest and the best, and the public is schooled into demanding what they offer. Both the dropout who is forever reminded of what he missed and the graduate who is made to feel inferior to the new breed of student know exactly where they stand in the ritual of rising deceptions and continue to support a society which euphemistically calls the widening frustration gap a "revolution of rising expectations."

But growth conceived as open-ended consumption-eternal progress-can never lead to maturity. Commitment to unlimited quantitative increase vitiates the possibility of organic development.

Link – Superficial Solutions

The affirmative’s proposed solution to schooling is superficial – only the alternative enables a rupture with schooling and hidden curriculum.

Note* specific links to urban school administration and technology in schools.

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)

Superficial Solutions

Since the crisis in schooling is symptomatic of a deeper crisis of modern industrial society, it is important that the critics of schooling avoid superficial solutions. Inadequate analysis of the nature of schooling only postpones the facing of deeper issues. But most criticism of the schools is pedagogical, political, or technological. The criticism of the educator is leveled at what is taught and how it is taught. The curriculum is outdated, so we have courses on African culture, on North American imperialism, on Women’s Liberation, on food and nutrition. Passive learning is old-fashioned, so we have increased student participation, both in the classroom and in the planning of curriculum. School buildings are ugly, SO we have new learning environments. There is concern for the development of human sensitivity, SO group threapy methods are imported into the classroom.

Another important set of critics is involved with the politics of urban school administration. They feel that the poor could run their schools better than a centralized bureaucracy that is oblivious to the problems of the dispossessed. Black parents are enlisted to replace white teachers in the motivation of their children to make time and find the will to learn.

Still other critics emphasize that schools make inefficient use of modem technology. They would either electrify the classroom or replace schools with computerized learning centers. If they follow McLuhan, they would replace blackboards and textbooks with multimedia happenings; if they follow Skinner, they would compete with the classical teacher and sell economy packages of measurable behavioral modifications to cos t-conscious school boards.

I believe all these critics miss the point, because they fail to attend to what I have elsewhere called the ritual aspects of schooling-what I here propose to call the “hidden curriculum,” the structure underlying what has been called the certification effect. Others have used this phrase to refer to the environmental curriculum of the ghetto street or the suburban lawn, which the teacher’s Curriculum either reinforces or vainly attempts to replace. I am using the term “hidden curriculum” to refer to the structure of schooling as opposed to what happens in school, in the same way that linguists distinguish between the structure of a language and the use the speaker makes of it.

Link – Curriculum

The affirmative’s demand for new curriculum serves as advertisement for the product of schools – causing authoritarian management of learning and basing decisions off of marketable values.

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 Packaging Values

School sells curriculum--a bundle of goods made according to the same process and having the same structure as other merchandise. Curriculum production for most schools begins with allegedly scientific research, on whose basis educational engineers predict future demand and tools for the assembly line, within the limits set by budgets and taboos. 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," "team-taught," "visuallyaided," or "issue-centered."

The result of the curriculum production process looks like any other modern staple. It is a bundle of planned meanings, a package of values, a commodity whose "balanced appeal" makes it marketable to a sufficiently large number to justify the cost of production. Consumer-pupils are taught to make their desires conform to marketable values. Thus they are made to feel guilty if they do not behave according to the predictions of consumer research by getting the grades and certificates that will place them in the job category they have been led to expect.

Educators can justify more expensive curricula on the basis of their observation that learning difficulties rise proportionately with the cost of the curriculum. This is an application of Parkinson's Law that work expands with the resources available to do it. This law can be verified on all levels of school: for instance, reading difficulties have been a major issue in French schools only since their per capita expenditures have approached U.S. levels of 1950-when reading difficulties became a major issue in U.S. schools.

In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance is due not to the authoritarian style of a public school or the seductive style of some free schools, but to the fundamental approach common to all schools-the idea that one person's judgment should determine what and when another person must learn.

Link – Hidden Curriculum

The affirmative’s focus on reform does nothing to resolve the Hidden curriculum of school – that inevitably promotes institutional dependence and the logic of consumption.

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)

This objection, however, underestimates the fundamental political and economic nature of the school system itself, as well as the political potential inherent in any effective challenge to it. In a basic sense, schools have ceased to be dependent on the ideology professed by any government or market organization. Other basic institutions might differ from one country to another: family, party, church, or press. But everywhere the school system has the same structure, and everywhere its hidden curriculum has the same effect. Invariably, it shapes the consumer who values institutional commodities above the nonprofessional ministration of a neighbor.

Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent. Everywhere this same curriculum instills in the pupil the myth that increased production will"" provide a better life. And everywhere it develops the habit of self-defeating consumption of services and alienating production, the tolerance for institutional dependence, and the recognition of institutional rankings. The hidden curriculum of school does all this in spite of contrary efforts undertaken by teachers and no matter what ideology prevails. In other words, schools are fundamentally alike in all countries, be they fascist, democratic or socialist, big or small, rich or poor. This identity of the school system forces us to recognize the profound world-wide identity of myth, mode of production, and method of social control, despite the great variety of mythologies in which the myth finds expression.