Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia

Impact – Poverty

Schooling promotes dependence on institutions – makes endless new definitions of the poor inevitable.

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)

Everywhere not only education but society as a whole needs "deschooling." Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political, and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible. This monopoly is at the root of the modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Ten years ago in Mexico it was the normal thing to be born and to die in one's own home and to be buried by one's friends. Only the soul's needs were taken care of by the institutional church. Now to begin and end life at home become signs either of poverty or of special privilege. Dying and death have come under the institutional management of doctors and undertakers.

Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will. Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect. In Mexico the poor are those who lack three years of schooling, and in New York they are those who lack twelve. The poor have always been socially powerless. The increasing reliance on institutional care adds a new dimension to their helplessness: psychological impotence, the inability to fend for themselves. Peasants on the high plateau of the Andes are exploited by the landlord and the merchant-once they settle in Lima they are, in addition, dependent on political bosses, and disabled by their lack of schooling. Modernized poverty combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency. This modernization of poverty is a world-wide phenomenon, and lies at the root of contemporary underdevelopment. Of course it appears under different guises in rich and in poor countries.

Impact – Education

Schooling harms the education of society – demotivating the poor and discouraging education in other formats.

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 twin deceptions of increased treatment, as actually provided in the United States and as merely promised in Latin America complement each other. The Northern poor are being disabled by the same twelve-year treatment whose lack brands the Southern poor as hopelessly backward. Neither in North America nor in Latin America do the poor get equality from obligatory schools. But in both places the mere existence of school discourages and disables the poor from taking control of their own learning. All over the world the school has an anti-educational effect on society: school is recognized as the institution which specializes in education. The failures of school are taken by most people as a proof that education is a very costly, very complex, always arcane, and frequently almost impossible task.

School appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education. Simultaneously both schools and the other institutions which depend on them are priced out of the market.

Impact – Marginalization

Schools reproduce the dominant class – more schooling undergirds marginalization facilitating assimilation and preventing true challenges to discrimination and inequality.

Varbelow and Griffith 12 – Sanja Varbelow, Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Angelo State University, Former Field-Based Teaching Specialist in Learning and Innovation and Lecturer in Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Brownsville, Member of the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Professors of Education, Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Texas A&M University, M.A. in Education from Humbolt University, Bryant Griffith, Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, 2012 (“Deschooling Society: Re-Examining Ivan Illich’s Contributions to Critical Pedagogy for 21st Century Curriculum Theory,” Education Resources Information Center, June 6^th, Accessed Online at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED532618.pdf, Accessed 6-2-17)

But if diplomas don’t represent knowledge and questions don’t get answered, then what is the purpose of education? Clearly, school is one of the most influential institutions in passing society from one generation to the next, so it seems important to wonder what its effects on society are. Proponents of Reproduction Theory would answer that the purpose of the institution school is the reproduction of the dominant class. This is accomplished by legitimizing and challenging “modes of self-representation, self-image, and social class identification which are the crucial ingredients for job adequacy” (Bowles and Gintis in Pinar et al., 1995, p. 245). But as long as we stratify the education system in accordance with the stratification of society, central to which is the economy, when we use affirmative action to determine who gets accepted into universities, when we create phenomena like a Hispanic scholarship fund, we undergird the marginalization of certain groups as these practices are not directed to empower the members of those groups but to afford them a chance to join the dominant class.