10 Provocative Quotes from Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society"

By Daniel Lattier / intellectualtakeout.org
Sep 14, 2015
7
10 Provocative Quotes from Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society"

Ivan Illich’s groundbreaking book Deschooling Society (1971) offers a radical critique of the institutionalization of education within modern societies. Illich believed that we wrongly identify education with schooling, since most of our education happens outside of the school environment. He advocated restructuring education to provide people with multiple opportunities for learning outside of school. “What are needed,” he wrote, “are new networks, readily available to the public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and teaching.” 

Here are 10 thought-provoking quotes that will give you an idea of what the book is about:

1) “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 endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which 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."

 

2) “The paradox of the schools is evident: increased expenditure escalates their destructiveness at home and abroad.”

 

3) “Most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only in so far as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.”

 

4) “Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value of licenses… Most teachers of arts and trades are less skillful, less inventive and less communicative than the best craftsmen and tradesmen. Most high-school teachers of Spanish or French do not speak the language as correctly as their pupils might after half a year of competent drills.”

 

5) “Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.”

 

 

6) “Once a man or woman has accepted the need for school, he or she is easy prey for other institutions. Once young people have allowed their imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to institutional planning of every sort.”

 

7) “School initiates young people into a world where everything can be measured, including their imaginations, and, indeed, man himself.”

 

8) “School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence.”

 

9) “The public is indoctrinated to believe that skills are valuable and reliable only if they are the result of formal schooling.”

 

10) “School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”

 

Read the full text of Deschooling Society here.

Trending Videos
CIA Stories: The Jakarta Method (2023)
68 min - Abby Martin speaks with journalist Vincent Bevins about the hidden CIA mass murder in Indonesia, which created the model for US extermination campaigns against socialists and accused leftists in...
How Your Attention is Stolen
28 min - This video is a masterpiece.  Created by Then & Now.
Briahna Joy Gray Examines the Role of Race and Authoritarianism in Police Violence
19 min - Every minute of this is fantastic commentary, from CRT in schools, to why police violence should be framed more often as authoritarian, to the censorship and school defunding campaign being led by...
The Need to GROW (2019) ($13)
96 min - With an estimated 60 years of farmable soil left on Earth, The Need To GROW offers an intimate look into the hearts of activists and innovators in the food movement - an 8 year old girl challenges...
There Is No One Right Way to Live | The Ideas of Daniel Quinn
On Demand Films Now Streaming For Free
Films For Action
Recommended

Films For Action hosts a subscription service that currently offers 55 highly-curated, solutions-oriented films to Patron subscribers donating $5 per month. 

Subscribe here. Your support helps grow our 5000+ video library, which is 99% free and contains no ads thanks to our patrons.

Cancel any time via your settings page.

 

How to Use and Contribute to this Library

  • Use the Explore menu to filter content by type and topic. Selections stack, so you can view Film Types about Specific Topics.

  • Submit videos directly to our library! Just sign up and click +Add Video at the top of the site and paste the video URL to get started. 

  • Create an account to save videos and articles for later and rate content for others

  • Filmmakers: Interested in our TVOD or SVOD services? Films For Action is one of the best homes for paradigm-shifting documentaries.

  • Contact us if you have a site or film suggestion, question, want to volunteer, or you're a filmmaker looking to collaborate. 

    Let's be the media!