May 3, 2005

• "Many students, especially those who are
  poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to
  confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is
  assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation
  leads to success. The pupil is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with
  learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and
  fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is ‘schooled’ to
  accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health
  care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for
  safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.
  Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as
  little more than the performance of the institutions that claim to serve these
  ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to
  the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question." 
  Ivan Illich Deschooling Society

  What Illich was criticising was the way
  schools (and other similar public agencies) turn us into slavish
  consumers who must depend on professional producers (whether government
  bureaucrats or corporations) to tell us what's good or right for us.
  When homeschoolers take responsibility for their own education, they
  are resisting what he called "approved measures of social control." You
  could say homeschooling is a form of deschooling in practice, because
  we see education as a lifelong commitment to formal and incidental
  learning utilising new approaches that foster life values, not dead
  knowledge.
   
  I would take that to mean values that express love for God
  in heart, soul, mind, and strength - and love for our neighbour as we
  love ourselves.

  • 1:47 pm
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