Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia

DAs to Alt

2AC — School Choice DA

The alternative in practice results in school choice.

Reich 12 — Justin Reich, Assistant Professor in the Comparative Media Studies department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Instructor in the Scheller Teacher Education Program, Director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, 2012 (“When Leftists and Libertarians Agree about Learning Webs,” Education Week, June 18^th, Available Online at http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/edtechresearcher/2012/06/when_leftists_and_libertarians_agree_about_learning_webs.html, Accessed 06-26-2017, Lil_Arj)

Several weeks ago, I was in a meeting at Berkman with Howard Rheingold who recommended Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, a remarkably prescient book from 1971 which predicts the rise of technology driven "Learning Webs". These Learning Webs are computer-mediated networks where learners identify their needs, find appropriate peers and mentors to advance their skills, and pursue their own individually-crafted education experience. What Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash did for immersive virtual worlds, Deschooling Society does for education: craft a compelling vision of a near future that we can watch come to pass around us.

Immediately after reading Deschooling Society, I thought to write a very clever blog post comparing Illich's vision of Learning Webs with the futurist educational vision crafted by the Libertarian/free market education reformers from the Fordham Institute, who recently published Education Reform for the Digital Era.

Here's what was so terribly clever about my idea: Illich's critique is strongly informed by leftist leanings, especially in the Catholic, liberation theology tradition. The first educator he cites in his book is Paulo Friere, with whom he shares the strong belief that school systems are designed by repressive states to maintain the status quo of social hierarchies and inequities. Illich suggests that we remove these schools and replace them with learning webs, where school funding is diverted from state institutions to individuals, credentialing for educators is completely eliminated, and individuals use networked technologies to identify appropriate learning experiences. In some cases, these learning experiences are also mediated by computers, especially the repetitive drill work required for elementary skill development. In other cases, computers simply match learners with peers or mentors who can provide optimal support for skill development.

Illich even goes so far as to write that "Opportunities for skill-learning can be vastly multiplied if we open the "market." This depends on matching the right teacher with the right student when he is highly motivated in an intelligent program, without the constraint of curriculum" (p. 15) Illich puts "market" in quotation marks because he imagines a small scale, artisanal-craft bazaar of learning experiences.

But if you remove the quotes from "market," and if you decide to keep the curriculum, then you essentially have the Fordham position, 40 years after Illich. Educational Reform for the Digital Era calls for a backpack of funds for each student, the abolition of teacher certification (an unnecessary barrier to entry akin to a medieval guild membership), the wide-spread availability of educational experiences made available by a competitive marketplace, and the ability of individual learners to chose from among those market options. Students could buy a P.E. course from Reebok, Spanish from Rosetta Stone, Math from Khan Academy, and science from the institutions advocating Intelligent Design. The "curriculum" will be held in check by standardized tests that allow consumers to compare standardized outcomes among various for-profit and not-for-profit course providers.

Sometimes I think it's helpful to imagine the American political spectrum not as a line, but as a horseshoe: go far enough to the left and right an you bend back together. I see that happening here: both Illich and the Fordham writers have a distrust of state institutions and a belief that individuals should have control over their educational futures, and 40 years apart they arrive at a vision of learning webs that are very similar to one another. They also share a belief that the changes that we need are quite radical, and the school system as we know it needs to be dismantled.

Anyway, as I said, I thought this analysis of the union of leftist and libertarian though was quite clever until I looked at the Wikipedia page for Illich. Sure enough, the libertarians of Illich's day recognized that his critique was at least compatible with, perhaps even derivative of, Milton Friedman's "tuition grants" for individual kids, especially kids from low-income families. Forty years ago, libertarians looked at Illich's learning webs and saw within them the future of a free market in education, much as today's libertarian digital reformers look at our own evolving learning webs—the edupunk movement, DIYU, flipped classrooms, Peer-to-Peer University, badges, and MOOCs—and once again see harbingers of a digitally-enabled free market in education.

There is a great deal of excitement from futurists of all political leanings for leveraging technology to unbundle education. Teachers today are lecturer, assessor, coach, mentor, counselor, baby-sitter, grader, security guard, advocate, and janitor in their classroom: what if we could assign those responsibilities to specialists? Schools are responsible for teaching math, science, reading, writing, social studies, the arts, and citizenship as well as for providing transportation, college and career counseling, security, certification, and a whole host of responsibilities: what if we could assign those responsibilities to specialist institutions?

Teachers and schools also create community. I'm very concerned about what happens to the development of young people and our society when we unbundle that.

If we follow a path of leveraging technology to create new forms of networked learning, I think they are much more likely to end up as Friedman-inspired marketplaces than Dewey-inspired learning webs. Perhaps there are real advantages to be enjoyed in such a future, but I don't find enough thinkers—progressive, libertarian or anyone else— who have adequately considered the potential losses.

[Insert School Choice Bad]

1AR — School Choice DA

Illich’s argument supports school choice.

Glenn 15 — Charles Glenn, Reporter for RefinED Online, 2015 (“A radical’s take on educational freedom,” refinED, October 13^th, Available Online at https://www.redefinedonline.org/2015/10/a-radicals-take-on-school-choice-educational-freedom/, Accessed 06-26-2017, Lil_Arj)

In “Deschooling Society” (1971), Illich directed that eloquence against the American educational system. He portrayed it as an unreformable bureaucracy devoted to the forced-feeding of conventional ideas into passive youth. The various reforms proposed at the time, including progressive “alternative schools” and “new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils,” he wrote, would not provide the education needed by contemporary society, nor would “the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes.”

“School,” Illich insisted, “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.”

What was needed instead, he continued, were “educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.” Specifically, individuals should be enabled to acquire the skills currently taught in schools (badly, in Illich’s view, and with accompanying bad habits and attitudes) through other routes, including individual or group tutoring and mentoring by those competent to teach a particular skill.

Of course, “free and competing drill instruction is a subversive blasphemy to the orthodox educator,” but Illich argued it would be both efficient and liberating. Above all, it would deprive government of a major instrument for regimenting its citizens. “The first article of a bill of rights for a modern, humanist society,” he wrote, “would correspond to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: ‘The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.’”

Illich supported school choice, with caveats.

He offered a partial endorsement of a 1971 proposal by educational sociologist Christopher Jencks “to put educational ‘entitlements’ or tuition grants into the hands of parents and students for expenditure in the schools of their choice.” Jencks and others would conclude, in an important study of education’s role in perpetuating social injustice in the United States (“Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America,” 1973), that “the ideal system is one that provides as many varieties of schooling as its children and parents want and finds ways of matching children to schools that suit them. … since professional educators do not seem to understand the long-term effects of schooling any better than parents do, there is no compelling reason why the profession should be empowered to rule out alternatives that appeal to parents, even if they seem educationally ‘unsound.’”

2AC — Inequality DA

Deschooling cements inequality.

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)

Re-Entrenching Inequality

Deschooling, several authors contested, would be bad for the poor, who were alleged to oppose it[33]. Consensual learning as a type of laissez-faire might undo the redistributive economics of democratic education, creating new concentrations of power and privilege or maintaining the status quo[34]. By shifting to a local scale, consensual learning tended to create a race- and class-homogenous studium generale, and allowed educators in privileged communities to abandon the rest of society; Kozol described a typical free school in Vermont as "a sandbox for the children of the SS guards at Auschwitz.[35]." On a world scale, deschooling "in its most anarchistic sense" would ossify the unequal levels of development between nations[36].

These concerns are exacerbated and extended if consensual education is especially costly. Added expenses might be incurred as economies of scale are lost, or if small free-schools are expected to have "an implausibly wide range of ‘relevant equipment' or resources at their disposal.[37]" Potentially, all the successes of free schools could be attributed to the high socio-economic status of the students[38]. However, free schools seemed to run on very narrow financial margins[39], and thus were also criticized for being unsustainably financially vulnerable. Moreover, decision-making around finance depended on the adult community-both in the conventional and alternative models-and adults might have different and internally conflicting goals for the studium generale [40].