Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia

Alternative

2AC – Alternative fails (Negation)

The alternative fails and reinforces the status quo – its pessimistic negation is not liberating.

Gintis 72 – Herbert Gintis, Visiting professor in the Economics Department of Central European University, Former Professor Emertius in Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, 1972 (“Towards a Political Economy of Education: A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich 's Deschooling Society,” Harvard Educational Review, February, Available Online at: http://hepgjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17763/haer.42.1.h2m4644728146775, Accessed 6-22-17)

Illich recognizes that the problems of advanced industrial societies are institutional, and that their solutions lie deep in the social core. Therefore, he consciously rejects a partial or affirmative analysis which would accept society's dominant ideological forms and direct its innovative contributions toward marginal changes in assumptions and boundary conditions.

Instead, he employs a methodology of total critique and negation, and his successes, such as they are, stem from that choice. Ultimately, however, his analysis is incomplete.

Dialectical analysis begins with society as is (thesis), entertains its negation (antithesis), and overcomes both in a radical reconceptualization (synthesis). Negation is a form of demystification—a drawing away from the immediately given by viewing it as a "negative totality." But negation is not without presuppositions, is not itself a form of liberation. It cannot "wipe clean the slate" of ideological representation of the world or one's objective position in it. The son/daughter who acts on the negation of parental and societal values is not free—he/she is merely the constrained negative image of that which he/she rejects (e.g., the negation of work, consumption order, and rationality is not liberation but negative un-freedom). The negation of male dominance is not women's liberation but the (negative) affirmation of "female masculinity." Women's liberation in dialectical terms can be conceived of as the overcoming (synthesis) of male dominance (thesis) and female masculinity (antithesis) in a new totality which rejects/embodies both. It is this act of overcoming (synthesis, consciousness) which is the critical and liberating aspect of dialectical thought. Action lies not in the act of negation (antithesis, demystification) but in the act of overcoming (synthesis/consciousness). The strengths of Illich's analysis lie in his consistent and pervasive methodology of negation. The essential elements in the liberal conceptions of the Good Life— consumption and education, the welfare state and corporate manipulation—are demystified and laid bare in the light of critical, negative thought. Illich's failures can be consistently traced to his refusal to pass beyond negations-—beyond a total rejection of the appearances of life in advanced industrial societies—to a higher synthesis. While Illich should not be criticized for failing to achieve such a synthesis, nevertheless he must be taken seriously to task for mystifying the nature of his own contribution and refusing to step—however tentatively—beyond it. Work is alienating—Illich rejects work; consumption is unfulfilling—Illich rejects consumption; institutions are manipulative—Illich places "nonaddictiveness" at the center of his conception of human institutions; production is bureaucratic—Illich glorifies the entrepreneurial and small-scale enterprise; schools are dehumanizing— Illich rejects schools; political life is oppressive and ideologically totalitarian— Illich rejects politics in favor of individual liberation. Only in one sphere does he go beyond negation, and this defines his major contribution. While technology is in fact dehumanizing (thesis), he does not reject technology (antithesis). Rather he goes beyond technology and its negation towards a schema of liberating technological forms in education.

The cost of his failure to pass beyond negation in the sphere of social relations in general, curiously enough, is an implicit affirmation of the deepest characteristics of the existing order.30

In rejecting work, Illich affirms that it necessarily is alienating—reinforcing a fundamental pessimism on which the acceptance of capitalism is based; in rejecting consumption, he affirms either that it is inherently unfulfilling (the Protestant ethic), or would be fulfilling if unmanipulated; in rejecting manipulative and bureaucratic "delivery systems," he affirms the laissez-faire capitalist model and its core institutions; in rejecting schools, Illich embraces a commodityfetishist cafeteria-smorgasbord ideal in education; and in rejecting political action, he affirms a utilitarian individualistic conception of humanity. In all cases, Illich's analysis fails to pass beyond the given (in both its positive and negative totalities), and hence affirms it.

2AC – Alternative Fails (Motivation)

The alternative fails and harms disadvantaged students – those who are disinterested will turn back to manipulative institutions.

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)

Illich illustrates the “Reference Service to Educational Objects” with the example of a friend who brought a pair of dice to the market with which he taught volunteers rules of semantics. While some children enjoyed the educational game and benefitted from it, others walked away.

This is a fundamental concern in Illich’s concept of deschooling society: Why did they leave? Did they understand too little of the concept to be curious? Or had they heard of semantics before and considered it boring? Should we ask them to stay? It can be concluded that Illich would object. If so, his approach might work only for highly motivated students but might not effective for those children we label “disadvantaged.”

One of the purposes of school must be to allow children to learn enough about themselves and an idea to decide whether it is worthy of finding out more about or whether it does not interest them.

I often see my students “walk away.” After having aroused their curiosity towards a particular idea, I see them never returning to it unless prompted by homework assignments to be rewarded/punished with a grade. I doubt they don’t pursue it because of their ignorance. Rather, I believe they are overwhelmed with the requirements school puts before them in order to acquire their certificate. Therefore, they have to prioritize and lack the leisure to find out more about that initially interesting idea. Now, if we gave students a choice of what we ought to require of them based on their interests, would they be more engaged or would they spend their time following the beckoning of “manipulative” institutions such as the mall? I think Illich would not only entrust students to entertain their curiosity but also to know what concerns them based on their lives’ circumstances. His purpose of deschooling society is that students regain the ability and the courage to ask questions and voice concerns. If we successfully transform school into a “convivial” institution, students, by definition, would enjoy engaging in it.

1AR – Alternative Fails (Negation)

Illich’s negation is infinitely regressive – he even rejected his own alternative.

Bruno-Jofré and Zaldívar 12 – Rosa Bruno-Jofré, Professor of the History of Education at Queen’s University in Canada, Ph.D. from the University of Calgary, Jon Igelmo Zaldívar, Professor in the History of Education at la Universidad de Deusto, 2012 ("Ivan Illich's Late Critique of Deschooling Society: “I Was Largely Barking Up the Wrong Tree”," Educational Theory, Volume 62, Issue 5, October, Available Online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2012.00464.x/full, Pg. 573-592, Accessed 6-24-2017)

Illich: The Past, the Critique of Education as a Discourse, and Free Learning

After a hiatus of many years, Illich went back to his early work on education. During this period of his intellectual life, education was one of the certainties that Illich critiqued as being the result of tools (institutions) shaping our view of reality. In 1986, he wrote,

To make my plea for this novel research plausible, I will explain the steps which led me to my present position. This I will do by criticizing my own Deschooling Society for its naïve views. My travelogue begins sixteen years ago, at a point when that book was about to appear. During the nine months the manuscript was at the publishers, I grew more and more dissatisfied with its texts. This misapprenhension I owe to Cass Canfield, Harper's owner, who named my baby, and, in doing so, misrepresented my thoughts.… Since then my curiosity and reflections have focused on the historical circumstances under which the very idea of educational needs can arise. (RLL, 11).

In the foreword he wrote in 1995 for Matt Hern's edited collection, Deschooling Our Lives, Illich pointed to three moments in his intellectual journey, starting with the publication of Deschooling Society. The first moment, having his understanding of education as the point of reference, includes the texts that would become Deschooling Society in 1971. In this book, written at the peak of the expansion of modern educational institutions, Illich articulated a radical critique of schools and the idea of progress. He made a plea for the urgent need to liberate education from the monopoly of schooling, but he also proposed avenues and actions to work toward a world without schools. Drawing on his understanding of the process of the historical institutionalization of the Catholic Church, he was able to demonstrate in his critique of schooling how many of its mythologized rituals had originated in a process of secularization. Toward the middle of the twentieth century, as the Church lost believers and the new faith in schooling became evident, the schools monopolized the possibilities of education in the same way that the Church had progressively come to dominate spiritual life in the Western world during the previous twenty centuries. His emphasis on this parallelism was such that he neglected the connections that schools and educational institutions have with their social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. About this first moment, Illich wrote, “I called for the disestablishment of schools for the sake of improving education and here, I noticed, made my mistake. Much more important than the disestablishment of schools, I began to see, was the reversal of those trends that make of education a pressing need rather than a gift of gratuitous leisure.”47

The second moment in Illich's intellectual journey occurred in the five years following the publication of Deschooling Society, when he realized that even liberating education from the state's monopoly would not be enough because the state and the modern industrial society had a variety of “educational” tools designed to put people's views in conformance with dominant ideology. The texts Illich wrote just after Deschooling Society was published were to an extent a response to the criticism of that book. In a paper he presented at the 1971 Christian Education World Assembly in Lima, Peru, entitled “La Desescolarización de la Iglesia” (Deschooling the Church), Illich stressed how the fundamental aspects of modern society have been inculcated through schooling (for example, by means of methods of instruction accumulating canned life) while also denouncing the pseudoreligious character of “education.”48 He prepared the terrain for understanding education as one of the certainties of modernity. In this sense, his critique in Deschooling Society would not mean much without differentiating education from learning — the latter being planned, measurable, and imposed on another person. About this second moment Illich pointed out,

Largely through the help of my friend and colleague Wolfgang Sachs, I came to see that the educational function was already emigrating from the schools and that, increasingly, other forms of compulsory learning would be instituted in modern society. It would become compulsory not by law, but by other tricks such as making people to pay huge amounts of money in order to be taught how to have better sex, how to be more sensitive, how to know more about the vitamins they need, how to play games, and so on. This talk of “lifelong learning” and “learning needs” has thoroughly polluted society, and not just schools, with the stench on education.49

In the third moment of his intellectual journey, during the 1980s and 1990s, Illich questioned the discourse behind the notion of educational needs, learning needs, and preparation for life (that is, lifelong learning). This third moment, neglected by historians, is of interest here. In fact, Illich realized then that when he wrote Deschooling Society, the social effects rather than the historical substance of education were at the core of his interest. Illich reflected that, in the past, he had called into question schooling as a desirable means but not as a desirable end. As he wrote in 1995, “I still accepted that, fundamentally, educational needs of some kind were an historical given of human nature. I no longer accept this today.”50 In addition, during this third moment, Illich critiqued educational institutions without a particular aim beyond critique, providing no alternative and even rejecting the alternatives that he had proposed in Deschooling Society. It is a creative critique without an ulterior response and with an ahistorical touch, which makes his later readings difficult to analyze, particularly in relation to schooling. It is difficult to use Illich's critique as a transforming tool.

Illich offers no alternative and crushes social movements

Waks 96 – Leonadrd J. Waks, Professor Emeritus at Temple University, Course Lecturer in ethics, political philosophy, and American pragmatism at Purdue Univeristy and Stanford University, former Faculty Member at Penn State in the programs on science, technology, and society, 1996 (“Recontextualizing Illich's Deschooling Society,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, November, Volume 16 Number 5-6, Available Online at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0270467696016005-610?legid=spbst%3B16%2F5-6%2F262&patientinform-links=yes, Available 06-27-2017, pp. 266-267)

We can evaluate Deschooling Society with respect to both the social end it advances and the means it puts forward for attaining that end. I start with problems of means.

Several early critics complained that Illich offered no map, no transition strategy, to achieve a convivial society. They noted that Illich called deschooling a "political objective" but then failed to indicate any plausible political action steps.

We could ask whether the "learning webs" themselves could become such action steps as a means for deschooling society, tools for ushering in a leftconvivial alternative; or, will they only be elements of convivial ends brought about by other means?

Because so many influential authors were prescribing educational innovations at the time, it was all too easy to read the learning webs as prescribed innovations, and Illich's detailed descriptions made this especially tempting. John Holt and other out-of-thesystem educators immediately set up such webs in the hope of transforming education.

Illich himself had argued, however, that the value to be derived from at least some of the webs depended upon the prior transition to a deschooled society (p. 101) . And the webs developed by Holt and others, whatever their virtues, have hardly shaken society. At most, they have provided one kink in the educational system - while in the process co-opting Illich as an educational innovator. We must conclude that Deschooling Society fails when considered as an heuristic for generating immediate tactics for transforming society.

What standards might Illich himself have set for evaluating Deschooling Society? He says:

As Thomas Kuhn points out, in a period of constantly changing paradigms most of the very distinguished leaders are bound to be proven wrong by the test of hindsight. Intellectual leadership does depend on superior intellectual discipline and imagination and the willingness to associate with others their exercise (p.lOO). Herbert Gintis criticized Illich for working outside of particular local action groups such as feminist collectives or labor unions. The criticism was precisely that Illich didn 't associate with others, or at least enough of the right ones. For Gintis, this failure reflected "dialectical" shortcomings in Illich's critical method; he offered a negation, an antithesis, but failed to go beyond it to a new synthesis grounded in real people with action opportunities and achievable goals in real life situations.

Illich's ideas did suggest directions for some out-ofthe-system educators. And for a short time in the early 1970's, Illich was also "news" in the education colleges; many professors of educational theory and policy used De-schooling Society and Everett Reimer's companion volume, School is Dead in required courses for educational professionals. Peter Goldstone at Temple used to refer with irony to the 3-credit "school is dead" requirement for teacher certification in Pennsylvania. His point was that the de-schooling concept offered such professionals, not a productive new direction, but a dead end.

Like Gintis and Illich's marxist critics, we can also assess Illich's left-convivial vision of humanity in society as an ideal end. I have some doubts (they are no more than this) about the very possibility of convivial society as Illich depicts it. He provides only hints about left-convivial institutions. While we have both rightmanipulative society and a sociology to explain it, we possess no concrete examples of left-convivial society.

I worry that IIlich may be inferring the possibility of left-convivial society from the existence of marginal left-convivial sub-groups within right-manipulative society. He may see his own band of roving scholars as a microcosm of convivial society, thinking "we exist - why can't everyone be just like us?" But this would be an unacceptable inference. It is one thing for some individuals in society to break away from convention and shape their own lives, but it is quite another for there to be a society composed exclusively of "disciplined dissidents." This may enjoin something of the logical status of a "week full of weekends:' or a "lifetime of retirement."

1AR — Alternative Fails (Motivation)

Deschooling’s freedom kills motivation and detracts from instrumental skills.

Mitchell 07 – Ethan Mitchell, Independent Researcher for Philica Institute in the United States, 2007 (“Educational Antidisestablishmentarianism”, Philica, Available Online at http://www.philica.com/display_article.php?article_id=74, Accessed 06-27-2017)

Freedom

A good many authors saw the fundamental thesis of consensual learning as an error. Freedom may not be intrinsically valuable[41], or may not be valued by children[42]. They argued that children have no experiential background to make educational choices, especially in terms of envisioning what they would find useful or fulfilling years hence[43]. The "hidden curriculum" of schools was an intentional effort to provide children with intellectual tools and patterns of thought that they would not seek out on their own accord[44]. If children are left to study only what they want, they will learn prejudices[45], impulsively switch topics[46], or simply do nothing and waste their potential (27,13). Finally, the suggestion that lessons are optional inferred that they are unimportant, and that students were valueless because adults had no expectations of them (7, 21)

A more moderate version of this critique was the idea that while certain skills can be learned in a consensual environment, other indispensable skills could not be. The major focus here was literacy, whose importance was denigrated by several of the early consensual educators[47]. Their position was very widely condemned, and did not appear so much in later writings on consensual learning. In addition to its direct utility, Ashton-Warner pointed out that reading and writing have therapeutic and behavior-modifying effects which are of value in schools[48].

Beyond literacy, there are other skills that society needs to reproduce-and that subgroups of society need for their own empowerment-but which arguably cannot be learned in a "spontaneous and ecstatic" fashion[49]. These include systematic and logical thought, mathematics, medicine, classical languages, and law[50]. The studium generale cannot afford to leave open the possibility that such skills will not be reproduced.

Still a third group of authors, more optimistic about the potential of consensual learning, were concerned about its scope and practice. Perhaps consensual learning is adequate or even desirable for most students, but there is some group for whom it would be disastrous[51]. A particularly common criticism in this regard was that consensual learning posits essentially negative, divisive freedoms-there is little emphasis on mutualism and solidarity[52]. Students are not presented with adequate guidance, or actively drawn into new interests, which could be accomplished without coercion[53]. Moreover, they may not be encouraged to persist in the face of intellectual setbacks, a trend that Kozol terms the "Cult of Incompletion[54]." Without direction and guidance, the choices of a consensual learner resemble someone watching television, flipping from one channel to the next[55].

Finally, some authors who supported the idea of consensual learning nevertheless warned that it carries great psychic risks. It demands a great level of self-respect, and-failing that-might plunge the learner into depression, alcoholism, or insanity[56].

They Say: “Peer Matching”

Peer matching causes the commodification of knowledge and robs the alternative of its conviviality.

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)

However, in his third approach, which he calls “Peer-Matching,” he suggests what I perceive as a detrimental restriction to his entire theory: He (Illich, 1971) proposes that “access to a ‘class’ would be free – or purchased with educational vouchers” (p. 94), which one would earn based on the number of hours one has spent teaching a skill and “the number of pupils (one) could attract for any full two-year period” (p. 94). This seems like a sort of merit pay that contains the danger of moving school as a “convivial” institution away from the left side of the spectrum to the far right among the “manipulative” institutions. A “teacher’s” focus might shift away from voluntarily sharing a skill to earning vouchers because it will allow him to learn more himself. This would not only have a pernicious effect on the quality of his “teaching” as intrinsic motivation gives way to extrinsic motivation (Pink, 2009), but he might spend his energy and resources on advertising himself. This exemplifies the observation made by Illich’s Mexican friend “that stores sold ‘only wares heavily made up with cosmetics.’” Illich (1971) criticizes that products speak “about their allurement not their nature” for the purpose of consumption (p. 80). But under these circumstances skill sharing would become such a product. Moreover, it begs the question of who’s to decide how many pupils a teacher has to attract and hours to teach in order to earn the “educational vouchers” that allow him to learn, let’s say, what a PhD program might offer?

And finally, knowledge once again would have a price. This way these restrictions would seriously endanger the system’s literal conviviality.

They Say: “Convivial Institutions Solve”

No they don’t.

Gintis 72 – Herbert Gintis, Visiting professor in the Economics Department of Central European University, Former Professor Emertius in Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, 1972 (“Towards a Political Economy of Education: A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich 's Deschooling Society,” Harvard Educational Review, February, Available Online at: http://hepgjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17763/haer.42.1.h2m4644728146775, Accessed 6-22-17)

Moreover, the ideology of commodity fetishism not only reflects the day-to-day operations of the economic system, it is also functionally necessary to motivate men/women to accept and participate in the system of alienated production, to peddle their (potentially) creative activities to the highest bidder through the market in labor, to accept the destruction of their communities, and to bear allegiance to an economic system whose market institutions and patterns of control of work and community systematically subordinate all social goals to the criteria of profit and marketable product. Thus the weakening of institutionalized values would in itself lead logically either to unproductive and undirected social chaos (witness the present state of counter-culture movements in the United States) or to a rejection of the social relations of capitalist production along with commodity fetishism.

Third, Illich argues that the goal of social change is to transform institutions according to the criterion of "non-addictiveness," or "left-conviviality." However, since manipulation and addictiveness are not the sources of social decay, their elimination offers no cure. Certainly the implementation of left-convivial forms in welfare and service agencies—however desirable in itself—will not counter the effects of capitalist development on social life. More important, Illich's criterion explicitly accepts those basic economic institutions which structure decision-making power, lead to the growth of corporate and welfare bureaucracies, and lie at the root of social decay. Thus Illich's criterion must be replaced by one of democratic, participatory, and rationally decentralized control over social outcomes in factory, office, community, schools, and media. The remainder of this essay will elucidate the alternative analysis and political strategy as focused on the particular case of the educational system.

They Say: “Don’t Need Teachers”

Teacher-directed learning is essential to student success.

Mitchell 07 – Ethan Mitchell, Independent Researcher for Philica Institute in the United States, 2007, (“Educational Antidisestablishmentarianism”, Philica, Available Online at http://www.philica.com/display_article.php?article_id=74, Accessed 06-27-2017)

Teaching

The claim that students, not teachers, are the primary agents of learning has been criticized from various directions. Teaching (or motivating students to learn new things) remains possible, even if some students learn things outside the classroom[72], and even if it could be shown that such teaching is a rarity[73]. After all, if one concedes that it is possible for teachers to indoctrinate students or crush their spirits, then they must have the influence to affect children positively as well[74]. Perhaps teacher-directed learning is less efficient than student-directed learning, but there is no evidence that this is the case[75].

Consensual education makes extraordinary demands of the teachers, both intellectually and emotionally[76]. In particular, consensual education demands a genuine emotional attitude on the part of teachers that cannot be a mere pragmatic strategy[77]. Love and respect cannot be faked to any useful effect.

Some authors have criticized the actual teaching quality and classroom methods in free-schools, as if the teachers, satisfied at having created a liberated environment, "pretend to abdicate…the power which they do possess and continue to exercise" as expert knowledge providers[78]. Moreover, in primarily addressing educators, consensual learning shifts responsibilities away from parents and the community, which need to share them[79].

Consensual educators are also said to present a false degree of indifference between the merits of various subjects (Bach and Elvis are equivalent). Variously, consensual educators advocate the worse subject over the better one. In either case, these presentations are insincere and possibly dangerous. Kozol wrote: "It is, too often, the rich white kids who speak three languages with native fluency, at the price of sixteen years of high-cost, rigorous and sequential education, who are the most determined that poor kids should make clay vases, weave Indian headbands, play with Polaroid cameras, climb over geodesic domes[80]."

Testing and Success

Testing and certification were defended as necessary in schools so that we can measure progress (of students and schools). They also occur outside of schools, e.g. in sports, and so they cannot be thought of as a school-specific problem[81].

Professional success, in a conventional understanding of the concept, matters[82]. Such standards have empirically been shown to be trans-cultural[83]. No one thinks that a street-cleaner is "just as good as" a doctor. Moreover, professional success is especially vital for poor and oppressed populations[84]. Radicals' tendency to disregard or minimize the importance of career success as an outcome measure is short-sighted[85].