Please please please let this be a come back for Illich. Blamb has already cited it. Its getting tweeted. It has been given 5 stars after 230 thousand views so far.
Aafter 5 years of edublogging, I have seen no more than 5 people reference Illich’s Deschooling Society and discuss its DIRECT references to networked learning, and only 2 references to his wider work on institutionalisation and humanity generally.
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March 7, 2009 at 2:40 am
minhaaj ur rehman
great video. i don’t agree with Illich as a whole but he definitely beats all the right-winged elitist educators. thanks for sharing
March 7, 2009 at 3:14 am
courosa
I’ve noticed more edubloggers quote Illich in the past few months, but you’re right, the work is notably absent. Now … try working in a Faculty of Education focused on social justice (like my own) … Illich is everywhere!
March 7, 2009 at 4:17 am
Brian
Did you ever check out Gardner Campbell’s “Deschool, Reboot, Real School”? It focuses on a work by Illich that is not as well-known as Deschooling Society, but perhaps even more relevant to networked learning: Tools for Conviviality:
http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=539
March 7, 2009 at 8:24 am
leighblackall
Thanks Brian.. listening now.
The best edublogging references to Illich I have seen is kiwi blogger Artichoke.
The particularly interesting thing about Illich to me was his anti technology stance on so many fronts. Another significant educationalist famous pre Illich and who also has an anti technology perspective is Neil Postman.
March 7, 2009 at 8:57 am
leighblackall
Campbell says “..reboot, that we know is the answer to every computer problem..” betrays the flaw in Campbell’s conservative approach. Reboot, only reboots the same operating system, reordering the original order of things. When I think about Cambell’s position in the Edupunk debate, and his insistence on “leaders”, and combine that with his metaphor of reboot, I think we see why real change cannot happen in the education system we have. The culture of it is so deeply embedded that it will absorb every effort. Campbell himself recognises this troubling fact. But like all of us, does little thinking about his position in that culture and what it is that he does that absorb change agencies and turn them into just a reboot. Its like School 2.0.. Real change will happen when we nuke it, not reboot it. But as if we’re going to do that. The best we can do I think, is strengthen the validity of the alternatives to “school”.
March 7, 2009 at 10:30 am
Sean FitzGerald
Time for my fave Buckminster Fuller quote:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
March 7, 2009 at 10:32 am
Mark
Hi Leigh,
I’ve been thinking and reading on the area of educational development for some time. I’ve come to the conclusion that critique is easy, answers much more complex.
For every Illich there is a Brighouse. Focusing on one perspective will inevitably lead to a simplistic treatment of issues… add some Dewey, then revisit Illich. Better still, add some Brighouse as well.
Social networking, based on what I have read, does not provide a viable alternative to formal (even institutionalised…) education. Research is confirming that social networking tends to be characterised by homophily (that is, the same people talking to the same people), in effect a narrowing of horizons rather than a broadening. Institutional learning, for all its foibles (and there are many) at least exposes students to ideas, opportunities, subjects and experiences they may otherwise never have access to or else might never occur to them (or their social networks) as being of any importance. In New Zealand the educational system is transparent and under constant critique and renewal.
Further, and perhaps most importantly, not all students in our schools have the social advantages you and I have… and we are also debating thanks to the language and skills of thinking that are a part of our schooled heritage. I am not convinced that a ‘de-schooled society’ could provide the same large-scale, base-line opportunity to all New Zealand children. There is an inherent value in our institutionalised education system that tends to be extremely under-valued by edubloggers, and until serious engagement with broader perspectives becomes a reality, I fear that edubloggers may continue to just enjoy this sort of critique among themselves.
Next time you’re in town, let’s do dinner. I’ll hopefully be down your way next year for a PhD residential, if so, my treat.
Cheers,
Mark.
March 7, 2009 at 10:47 am
leighblackall
Hi Mark, 5 edubloggers (that I know of) hardly warrents enjoyment of this sort of critique.
Social networking is not the “model” or proposed alternative. Social networking is a brand word now, snapped up by Facebook in co, occupying the vacume of ignorance left there by teachers and reseachers too slow or apathetic to recognise and experiment with a promising technology. To be fair, its probably more like a very agressive marketing sector not giving the education sector enough room to move.
To my knowledge there isn’t an alternative method proposed. I don’t think that is possible until we have more than 5 giving Illich (all his writing) a better look. To my simple mind, I have read all the leading theorists, but it is Illich that inspires me the most – that rings my inner bell of truth. Postman would be a close second. Dewey doesn’t even register – probably because he was plugged to death on me while I was in teacher training. As was the big V.. oh and Maslow of course. Probably well intended theorists, but a sore example of the sector absorbing their ideas and not understanding them at all.. Illich and Postaman remain untouched by this corruption.
March 8, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Illich Makes a Come Back at Last! « International Educational Directory
[…] actress Blackall, Learn Online, March 6, 2009 [Tags: Schools, Online Learning, Networks, Video] [Link] […]
March 9, 2009 at 9:11 am
Dougald Hine
Hi Leigh –
Having lurked around the edublogosphere for a couple of years, while working on a Deschooling-inspired internet startup, I’ve also noticed how seldom Illich comes up. (Though you’re right to point to Artichoke as an exception!) So really glad to see this post.
More generally, when people do reference Illich in connection with the social potential of the internet, they often seem unaware of what you call his “anti technology stance”. (It might be fairer to call it a “selective” stance towards technologies?)
I’ve just posted a talk and an article of mine on Deschooling, along with links to a few recent posts from others –
http://otherexcuses.blogspot.com/2009/03/deschooling-edublogosphere.html
Hopefully further evidence of an overdue comeback!
March 9, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Deschool everything! « Learn Online
[…] 9, 2009 in Uncategorized Through a comment on my last post about Illich I met Dougald. A hand grenade of information about Illich packed full of linkages to projects […]
March 10, 2009 at 12:12 am
olegliber
Illich did not recommend getting rid of institutions, but rather the abolition of _schooling_ and the power relations involved in the teacher-pupil relationship. He argued for “institutional inversion” – that institutions be redesigned to permit their espoused purposes to flourish, which they are clearly failing to do. He has some innovative ideas on the democratic organisation of learning, (such as “learning webs”) which modern technology can help with. But it would be a mistake to think that he proposed the wholesale doing away with places where people come together to learn. Illich needs to be re-interpreted for the modern age and its technological possibilities – and a major part of that has to be a radical redesign of the education system, from kindergarten to university.
March 11, 2009 at 3:42 am
Jeremy
Just a quick note to thank you for this post…I enjoyed the video, and then went to read/view the five-part edupunk series with Groom and Gardner. Lots of good food for thought, but ultimately disappointing for the reasons you’ve implied here — the entire discussion seems to be predicated on the idea that the system must remain intact, and that a little tinkering will make things better.
My initial objection to the edupunk theme was basically that it was not going to go far enough — to claim revolutionary fervour, but really just tweak at the periphery. I’m dismayed that the critical reaction to it seems to have come from the OTHER side; from people afraid that it’s going too far and threatening their comfortable status quo. Of course that was predictable, but still disappointing.
The main edupunk definition out there still includes the concept of bringing the punk ethos to the classroom. So we can stick it to the man with our rebellious attitudes and DIY culture, as long as we keep going to class, listening to the teacher, and waiting for approval from the institution? This was why I invoked Illich in my rebuttal the first time around…to draw attention to the real potential of the meme in bringing his ideas (and other visionaries) to the forefront.
I had read Illich in university, where I found that nobody in the faculty of education was interested in his ideas (surprise!). But I’d also credit Artichoke for waking me up again and remembering why I couldn’t become a teacher, even after spending too much time and money pursuing the degree. And thanks to you for keeping this end of the conversation going.
March 11, 2009 at 9:28 am
leighblackall
Thanks for this encouraging comment Jeremy. I agree share your feelings about the edupunk debate.. I hope Jim will firm up.
Your comments reminded me of a post I made back in 2005. Teaching has nothing to do with technology. Hope you’ll check it out. Me too.. when I was in teacher training, I shouted out in the lectures, demanding to know why Illich and Postman were not on the reading list!
March 15, 2009 at 4:19 am
» OLDaily per Stephen Downes, 6 de març de 2009 TIC, E/A, REF / PER…:
[…] i humanitat, en general.” Leigh Blackall, Learn Online (aprenentatge en línia) [L’enllaç] [Etiquetes: escoles, aprenentatge Online, xarxes, […]
March 19, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Jay Cross
Leigh, I wrote this two days before your post:
http://tinyurl.com/cjwzx9
Illich lives. In fact, I’m re-reading Deschooling now.
March 20, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Matthew Shapiro
I am something of an anti-establishment educator; I began years ago advocating the total redesign of education through participatory process (see work of Bela H. Banathy), which I still advocate; I then got a teaching degree and started a progressive-approach charter school. But I was never convinced that starting charter schools was a solution, any more than NCLB is like the educational Stone Age. Now that I’ve been exposed to Illich and others who speak to the potential for community-based learning and using “funds of knowledge,” I am working on a way to combine the best of what educational research has given us but without the institutionalization that Illich decried. I am attempting to establish a “learning web” that is not Internet-based, although it would of course put to use technologies to support family-to-family, peer-to-peer, expert-to-learner, etc. learning across a local geographic area. It would not work to the exclusion of School, nor be operated by School, but would rather cross all boundaries of Schooling, homeschooling, and unschooling. Something that every family in a given community would want to be a part of. I am calling it the Boise Open School. Interesting blog!
May 20, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Matthew Shapiro
Update: It’s now called the Boise Open Learning Network, but the original name lingers. For some of the new brainstorming on it, see
http://grou.ps/boiseopenschool. A lot of progress has been made in two months.
June 26, 2009 at 7:56 am
Mike Caulfield
Hey I do want to point out the first comment on the now seminal Glass Bees post on edupunk quoted extensively from Illich:
http://bavatuesdays.com/the-glass-bees/#comment-74150
July 8, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Filadelfia
Comeback for Illich? Since the spash made by “Medical Nemesis,” he hasn’t gotten a great deal of attention, but many of us out here own everything available of his writings. As for his lack of attention, there’s a lot of that going ’round; consider Albert Jay Nock, for example. As to organizations, they all do generally follow their purposes exactly: giving a cosy berth to legions of bureaucrats,; certainly not their publicly-stated objectives. All organizations are failures in the fullness of time, insofar as the common citizen is concerned, despite the efforts of the talented minority within them.
July 10, 2009 at 7:23 am
IslandNotes
Aloha,
Just sort of cyber-stumbled this way. Hope to check it out more.
Illich eh? The guy wrote a lot of truth. I forget who said it, but naked truth just screams for being properly covered up. With Illich, the parasitic scammers mustn’t avow the legitimacy of his ideas lest they admit their corruption.
From my experience, the imposition of inappropriate technology coupled with non-contextual information jack-offs (encouraged by biz and co-opted drone educrats of course) is the enemy of community centered learning. Ivan called that stuff out. To be sure, the better ‘models’ for learning are unclear, and yet the “institutional nemesis” is hard to not see. Thanks.
http://islandnotes.wordpress.com/category/education/
Darren
November 5, 2009 at 9:28 am
John Verity
What most people, including many here on this page, miss about Illich’s Deschooling argument is that he is not arguing against schools but against compulsory schooling in all of its forms – by traditional government-run schools, in bedrooms, at work, throughout life (adult education, anyone?), from womb to tomb. He is not against learning, just enforced learning. He certainly is NOT proposing homeschooling as a more efficient way of cramming knowledge and tactily, the idea that only schooled knowledge is valid into children’s brains, and he certainly did not want to see the home made into a school.
Read in conjunction with Tools for Conviviality, the Deschooling book calls for a world in which constant, intensive schooling is no longer necessary. As society depends ever-more on constantly changing (usually dubbed “improving”) tools and technologies, and on greater levels of management and planning, and on increasingly standardized consciousness, it requires ever-higher levels of compulsory schooling – and on the ever-higher levels of spending to pay for that intensive schooling. But if politically-defined limits are put on tools, if today’s toolkit remains useful tomorrow, if users don’t need constant re-training to use a never-ending stream of the “latest” tools and/or updated versions of existing tools, and if the need for professional training is generally reduced, then less traditional schooling is required. The production of scarce knowledge calls for the production of scarce education.
Sure, you can use schoolrooms or the Web to help students and teachers come together and work with each other but you don’t need to set up the rigged schooling system that we’re all struggling to pay for, reform, fix, or transcend today. As it is, the educational system has figured out how to 1) make its product scarce and 2) make its product (credentials, that is, more than actual learning) pretty much a necessity (college dropout Bill Gates serves as the exception that proves the rule) – and 3), it should be noted, hide these facts under cover of so much talk about learning and progress and human potential, etc.
In one of his post-Deschooling essays on the subject, Illich points out that as a society becomes more dependent on formal schooling, the sheer cost of that schooling becomes a limit to the society’s ability to reproduce itself from one generation to the next. (This fact, I believe, underlies the “educational crisis” that has been discussed and addressed and investigated year after year since the 1960s in the U.S., especially.) In a more convivial society, in which tools are of a human scale, etc. etc. (read the Tools book for full explanation), there’d be less need for (and less spent on) formal schooling because tools would be more self-evident and less professionalized. And, as it was for eons, learning would woven into daily life, not treated as a separate activity.
Finally, anyone interested in Illich’s views on schooling oughta read this later essay: The Educational enterprise in the Light of the Gospel (1988), which is available here (along with many other Illich essays):
http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1988_Educational.html