6 ms·

"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 beco

"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. In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery."

slowmovintarget 6y ago
Wow is that on the nose.
tharne 6y ago
The amount truth in that short passage is mind-blowing.
HarryHirsch 6y ago
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them You wish they knew but they don't. The kids, especially the poor ones, want worksheets, not problems. They want to pass but not learn. They want a degree without the competence. They want a job without possibility of advancement and if you don't provide that they resent you because you are in the way.
- dbspin 6y ago
  You're describing the Nth generation in a hopeless environment, not children in general. This is an encultured attitude, not an innate one. Illich's point, and one born out by learning research is that the desire to learn, to gain knowledge and mastery for its own sake - is innate to such an extent that it can actually be diminished by extrinsic rewards. All children share this.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    Complete agreement about the hopeless environment. My point was that the enculturation works extremely reliably. I have not met a single student who questioned or rejected the culture. It is dejecting, and you despise the kids for that.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > I have not met a single student who questioned or rejected the culture. Both as a student myself and later as a long-term sub in a high school for a while in a poor district, I met lots of students who rejected whatever you might want to (rightly or wrongly) characterize as “the culture”, including many who adapted to what they saw as the incentives in the system while still rejecting the culture and attitudes they perceived as setting those incentives.
  - mtgp1000 6y ago
    >This is an encultured attitude, not an innate one The only encultured attitude I see here is the modern western delusion that the average child (or person) intrinsically wants to make the substantial, multi year effort required to learn complex subjects. The vast majority of people do not enjoy learning. No one wants to spend their time on math problems (outside of a tiny minority). This is also tied to the nonsensical idea that we are all equally capable of everything; the ability to learn (both in general and by specific subject) is randomly distributed and probably normally so like many biological processes. That itself ensures that given equal curiosity, not all children will make the varied effort required to learn.
- 6y ago
danans 6y ago
That whole argument is a massive straw-man in service of a libertarian attack on the funding of social institutions like hospitals and schools. I would hope that for consistency, Illich on principle refused to take treatment from Germany's health care system, populated by medical professionals who are the product of the education system he so detested. There is a lot to be critiqued with the way that medicine and education are practiced and paid for, but to enjoy the benefits of both, while laying fault at the feet of institutionalized medicine and education while ignoring the context both operate borders on hypocrisy.
- mola 6y ago
  I agree. And it's such an easy target. Everybody hate schools. But the fact of the matter is that public schools were one of the prominent factors in reducing poverty around the world. As in any institution, it may calcify and be corrupted. But that's just how systems are, injecting the right amount of innovation usually takes care of that. No need to throw the baby with the water, and rethink the whole paradigm. I think that usually the commodditization of social services is what actually kills these systems. They become a race to the bottom, where marketing gets to be more important than substance and genuine interest in quality. It's all about the middle path...
  - guidoism 6y ago
    It's actually a pretty good time to rethink everything. The modern school was designed when most adults were illiterate, books were expensive, and we needed to train the population to work in our factories or join the military. Schools did a good job at that. But times are different. 1. Most adults are literate — When kids have questions about letters or words while they are teaching themselves to read they have a huge supply of adults and older children to get help from. 2. Books are so cheap to produce that we literally throw them away when we are done and the internet has provided the material for a lifetime of education for what is essentially free — And formats (like 3blue1brown animations that couldn't have been imagined a century ago). 3. We don't need to train the population to be obedient for factories or the military. Society can continue without so many people pretending to work. Let them continue to educated themselves until they discover something that benefits the rest of society.
jessmartin 6y ago
This is echoed by Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America, published in 1977: "The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared people. The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint—that of individual persons. We then begin to see the grotesquery—indeed, the impossibility—of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness. The first, and best known, hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists—people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest, in preventing. More common, and more damaging, are the inventors, manufacturers, and salesmen of devices who have no concern for the possible effects of those devices. Specialization is thus seen to be a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility. Even worse, a system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competences and responsibilities that were once personal and universal. Thus, the average—one is tempted to say, the ideal—American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturists and “agribusinessmen,” the problems of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators, the problems of conservation to conservationists, and so on. This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns: making money and entertaining himself. He earns money, typically, as a specialist, working an eight-hour day at a job for the quality or consequences of which somebody else—or, perhaps more typically, nobody else—will be responsible. And not surprisingly, since he can do so little else for himself, he is even unable to entertain himself, for there exists an enormous industry of exorbitantly expensive specialists whose purpose is to entertain him." [1] [1] https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Unsettling_of_America.html?id=uSk9gAktmpQC https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Unsettling_of_Ameri...
- afarrell 6y ago
GuiA 6y ago
It always pains me greatly to read writers from times past about social issues whose voice rings distinctly true today still. Because it means that understanding the problem is completely uncorrelated to being able to do anything about it.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Under the creakingly ancient system the conservative holds to, man is a wolf to other men. Under the shiny new system the progressive touts, it's exactly the opposite. (I hope you are either a masochist or don't read many social writers from times past. The Code of Hammurabi indicates social issues 3'700 years ago are similar to those of our day.)
throwawaygh 6y ago
I loved Illich when I was in high school. I read all of his books, dug up old audio recordings, and even built a website hosting all of the hard-to-find stuff he wrote. Reflecting on his work now, I think Illich's anti-institutionism was extreme and his alternatives are genuinely not compelling. Deschooling Society's critique is powerful, and Learning Webs is literally exactly how I learned how to program. But, it's an entirely unworkable alternative for like 60% of students. If we deschooled, we would absolutely end up with a double-digit percentage of the population either illiterate, innumerate, or both. If you're honest with yourself, Medical Nemesis is has some great passages but in it is also the germs of the anti-vaccination and natural healing movements. His critiques are powerful but the answer is not deinstitutionalism. The answer is taking his Tools for Conviviality to heart when engaging with/through institutions. Without conviviality, Learning Webs will become a "Platform" with blood-sucking silicon valley middle men taking a 20% cut on all education spending and gig worker teachers languishing away in poverty. Of course, Illich would just say SV platform capitalism is also an institution^1. With convivality, even the most institutional institutions can become places for human flourishing (Illich spent his life in the Catholic church, after all!) So, I love Illich's critique. And Illich was a genius, in the sense that he proposed online education 30 years before the internet was invented. But deschooling isn't the answer. Conviviality is. -- [^1]: which is one of the reasons that Foucault is worth reading of Illich resonates -- Illich always sort of grounded out in a no-true-scottsman when you point out his alternatives don't work. Foucault provides a more robust theory by explaining how power and institutions relate to one another.
- deburo 6y ago
  Can you expand a bit more on conviviality, what is represents?
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    Is it ok if simply I point you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Conviviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Conviviality and urge you to read the book (it's quite short)?
rednerrus 6y ago
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ~ Robert Anson Heinlein
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  Written, not by the author of Clan of the Cave Bear, but by the author of Stranger in a Strange Land. Interesting.
- mikestew 6y ago
  Anyone ever figure out if even Heinlein himself accomplished those skills? Because, frankly, it makes a nice trope or whatever, but I question the literal seriousness Heinlein had when he wrote that. Perhaps as an early prototype of The World's Most Interesting Man, but not to be taken as a literal bucket list.
  - wittyreference 6y ago
    As an engineer and military officer that made a career of writing, was active in real estate and silver mining and politics, knowing not a single other thing about him, I assume (and I am, admittedly, erring a little on the side of generosity in my assumptions, but my goal is to aim for "is it plausible?" not "did he definitely?"): -to change a diaper -plan an invasion (navy officer) -butcher a hog -conn a ship (navy, engineer) -design a building (engineer) -write a sonnet (writer) -balance accounts (numerate) -build a wall (engineer) -set a bone -comfort the dying -take orders (officer) -give orders (officer) -cooperate (officer) -act alone (probably) -solve equations (engineer) -analyze a new problem (engineer) -pitch manure -program a computer (engineer) -cook a tasty meal -fight efficiently (officer) -die gallantly (officer) 15 / 21 ain't bad, and the remainder aren't implausible either. A little googling suggests he was born in 1907 in Missouri, so he probably gets butchering a hog and pitching manure. Cooking a tasty meal is a fairly low bar for any functioning human to meet - that's 18/21. He didn't have kids, so I'm not willing to grant him diaper-changing without a reason to. I can't find any medic training, so I won't give him setting a bone. And I'm not sure anyone knows how to comfort the dying. 18/21 is quite plausible. The remaining three are possible.
mcguire 6y ago
E pur si muove.
wwweston 6y ago
The danger of confusing process with substance is definitely an interesting point. Everyone can probably think of an example where that's happened. But as someone who learned unix and some CS among other things in public schools in a way that would have been impossible out of anything provided at home I'm definitely reluctant to throw that institution entirely under the bus. And in general I'd think that a forum full of people who make process for a living (software is arguably nothing but process) should understand that while systems are often full of blind spots that doesn't mean they're without their utility. What's needed is to figure out how to make services/systems/institutions with value.
- TimTheTinker 6y ago
  I think a more fundamental and seldom-agreed-upon question is what constitutes substance in the first place. I would argue that it’s very rare to find an answer that is truly coherent in that it corresponds to reality, is internally consistent, and doesn’t devolve into absurdity (turtles all the way down, etc.). I only know of one, and it’s rooted in the Christian worldview.
  - hitekker 6y ago
    Do you mind telling us what that non-recursive substance is?
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      I'm not the one you're asking, but try "He Is There And He Is Not Silent", by Francis Schaeffer.
082349872349872 6y ago
To get an idea of what experiences led to 1984, see Orwell's "SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS (1947)" http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part49 http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part49 about his schooling at St Cyprian's. "And above all, I believed Sambo and Flip when they told me they were my benefactors. ... from Sambo's point of view I was a good speculation. He sank money in me, and ... I won him scholarships when the time came ... But it is difficult for a child to realize that a school is primarily a commercial venture. A child believes that the school exists to educate ... Flip and Sambo had chosen to befriend me, and their friendship included canings, reproaches and humiliations, which were good for me and saved me from an office stool. That was their version, and I believed in it. It was therefore clear that I owed them a vast debt of gratitude. But I was not grateful, as I very well knew. ... But it is wicked, is it not, to hate your benefactors?" Mr & Mrs Wilkes, or Big Brother?
Aperocky 6y ago
But this is just human. With or without school it's the same. We shouldn't blame the innate response of natural human emotions on schooling, or anything else.
pnathan 6y ago
Having seen firsthand the uses and failures of institutions, give me an institution. Or I'll build it if I have to. That paragraph is very, very, very unwise.
fzeroracer 6y ago
I feel like the concept of deschooling was written without taking into mind the actual humans behind the curtains. The idea of removing schools in favor of self-guided education seems like a good idea at first, but ignores the numerous factors that would make it hard for a lot of people to actually do so on their own. For example most of my middle and high school life was spent being severely depressed due to various life circumstances. School was more or less a routine affair that allowed me to disconnect briefly from my home life and without that escape I likely would've simply stopped learning altogether.

slowmovintarget 6y ago

Wow is that on the nose.

tharne 6y ago

The amount truth in that short passage is mind-blowing.

HarryHirsch 6y ago

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them You wish they knew but they don't. The kids, especially the poor ones, want worksheets, not problems. They want to pass but not learn. They want a degree without the competence. They want a job without possibility of advancement and if you don't provide that they resent you because you are in the way.

dbspin 6y ago
You're describing the Nth generation in a hopeless environment, not children in general. This is an encultured attitude, not an innate one. Illich's point, and one born out by learning research is that the desire to learn, to gain knowledge and mastery for its own sake - is innate to such an extent that it can actually be diminished by extrinsic rewards. All children share this.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  Complete agreement about the hopeless environment. My point was that the enculturation works extremely reliably. I have not met a single student who questioned or rejected the culture. It is dejecting, and you despise the kids for that.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > I have not met a single student who questioned or rejected the culture. Both as a student myself and later as a long-term sub in a high school for a while in a poor district, I met lots of students who rejected whatever you might want to (rightly or wrongly) characterize as “the culture”, including many who adapted to what they saw as the incentives in the system while still rejecting the culture and attitudes they perceived as setting those incentives.
- mtgp1000 6y ago
  >This is an encultured attitude, not an innate one The only encultured attitude I see here is the modern western delusion that the average child (or person) intrinsically wants to make the substantial, multi year effort required to learn complex subjects. The vast majority of people do not enjoy learning. No one wants to spend their time on math problems (outside of a tiny minority). This is also tied to the nonsensical idea that we are all equally capable of everything; the ability to learn (both in general and by specific subject) is randomly distributed and probably normally so like many biological processes. That itself ensures that given equal curiosity, not all children will make the varied effort required to learn.
6y ago

danans 6y ago

That whole argument is a massive straw-man in service of a libertarian attack on the funding of social institutions like hospitals and schools. I would hope that for consistency, Illich on principle refused to take treatment from Germany's health care system, populated by medical professionals who are the product of the education system he so detested. There is a lot to be critiqued with the way that medicine and education are practiced and paid for, but to enjoy the benefits of both, while laying fault at the feet of institutionalized medicine and education while ignoring the context both operate borders on hypocrisy.

mola 6y ago
I agree. And it's such an easy target. Everybody hate schools. But the fact of the matter is that public schools were one of the prominent factors in reducing poverty around the world. As in any institution, it may calcify and be corrupted. But that's just how systems are, injecting the right amount of innovation usually takes care of that. No need to throw the baby with the water, and rethink the whole paradigm. I think that usually the commodditization of social services is what actually kills these systems. They become a race to the bottom, where marketing gets to be more important than substance and genuine interest in quality. It's all about the middle path...
- guidoism 6y ago
  It's actually a pretty good time to rethink everything. The modern school was designed when most adults were illiterate, books were expensive, and we needed to train the population to work in our factories or join the military. Schools did a good job at that. But times are different. 1. Most adults are literate — When kids have questions about letters or words while they are teaching themselves to read they have a huge supply of adults and older children to get help from. 2. Books are so cheap to produce that we literally throw them away when we are done and the internet has provided the material for a lifetime of education for what is essentially free — And formats (like 3blue1brown animations that couldn't have been imagined a century ago). 3. We don't need to train the population to be obedient for factories or the military. Society can continue without so many people pretending to work. Let them continue to educated themselves until they discover something that benefits the rest of society.

jessmartin 6y ago

This is echoed by Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America, published in 1977: "The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared people. The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint—that of individual persons. We then begin to see the grotesquery—indeed, the impossibility—of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness. The first, and best known, hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists—people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest, in preventing. More common, and more damaging, are the inventors, manufacturers, and salesmen of devices who have no concern for the possible effects of those devices. Specialization is thus seen to be a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility. Even worse, a system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competences and responsibilities that were once personal and universal. Thus, the average—one is tempted to say, the ideal—American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturists and “agribusinessmen,” the problems of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators, the problems of conservation to conservationists, and so on. This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns: making money and entertaining himself. He earns money, typically, as a specialist, working an eight-hour day at a job for the quality or consequences of which somebody else—or, perhaps more typically, nobody else—will be responsible. And not surprisingly, since he can do so little else for himself, he is even unable to entertain himself, for there exists an enormous industry of exorbitantly expensive specialists whose purpose is to entertain him." [1] [1] https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Unsettling_of_America.html?id=uSk9gAktmpQC https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Unsettling_of_Ameri...

afarrell 6y ago

GuiA 6y ago

It always pains me greatly to read writers from times past about social issues whose voice rings distinctly true today still. Because it means that understanding the problem is completely uncorrelated to being able to do anything about it.

082349872349872 6y ago
Under the creakingly ancient system the conservative holds to, man is a wolf to other men. Under the shiny new system the progressive touts, it's exactly the opposite. (I hope you are either a masochist or don't read many social writers from times past. The Code of Hammurabi indicates social issues 3'700 years ago are similar to those of our day.)

throwawaygh 6y ago

I loved Illich when I was in high school. I read all of his books, dug up old audio recordings, and even built a website hosting all of the hard-to-find stuff he wrote. Reflecting on his work now, I think Illich's anti-institutionism was extreme and his alternatives are genuinely not compelling. Deschooling Society's critique is powerful, and Learning Webs is literally exactly how I learned how to program. But, it's an entirely unworkable alternative for like 60% of students. If we deschooled, we would absolutely end up with a double-digit percentage of the population either illiterate, innumerate, or both. If you're honest with yourself, Medical Nemesis is has some great passages but in it is also the germs of the anti-vaccination and natural healing movements. His critiques are powerful but the answer is not deinstitutionalism. The answer is taking his Tools for Conviviality to heart when engaging with/through institutions. Without conviviality, Learning Webs will become a "Platform" with blood-sucking silicon valley middle men taking a 20% cut on all education spending and gig worker teachers languishing away in poverty. Of course, Illich would just say SV platform capitalism is also an institution^1. With convivality, even the most institutional institutions can become places for human flourishing (Illich spent his life in the Catholic church, after all!) So, I love Illich's critique. And Illich was a genius, in the sense that he proposed online education 30 years before the internet was invented. But deschooling isn't the answer. Conviviality is. -- [^1]: which is one of the reasons that Foucault is worth reading of Illich resonates -- Illich always sort of grounded out in a no-true-scottsman when you point out his alternatives don't work. Foucault provides a more robust theory by explaining how power and institutions relate to one another.

deburo 6y ago
Can you expand a bit more on conviviality, what is represents?
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  Is it ok if simply I point you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Conviviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Conviviality and urge you to read the book (it's quite short)?

rednerrus 6y ago

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ~ Robert Anson Heinlein

mumblemumble 6y ago
Written, not by the author of Clan of the Cave Bear, but by the author of Stranger in a Strange Land. Interesting.
mikestew 6y ago
Anyone ever figure out if even Heinlein himself accomplished those skills? Because, frankly, it makes a nice trope or whatever, but I question the literal seriousness Heinlein had when he wrote that. Perhaps as an early prototype of The World's Most Interesting Man, but not to be taken as a literal bucket list.
- wittyreference 6y ago
  As an engineer and military officer that made a career of writing, was active in real estate and silver mining and politics, knowing not a single other thing about him, I assume (and I am, admittedly, erring a little on the side of generosity in my assumptions, but my goal is to aim for "is it plausible?" not "did he definitely?"): -to change a diaper -plan an invasion (navy officer) -butcher a hog -conn a ship (navy, engineer) -design a building (engineer) -write a sonnet (writer) -balance accounts (numerate) -build a wall (engineer) -set a bone -comfort the dying -take orders (officer) -give orders (officer) -cooperate (officer) -act alone (probably) -solve equations (engineer) -analyze a new problem (engineer) -pitch manure -program a computer (engineer) -cook a tasty meal -fight efficiently (officer) -die gallantly (officer) 15 / 21 ain't bad, and the remainder aren't implausible either. A little googling suggests he was born in 1907 in Missouri, so he probably gets butchering a hog and pitching manure. Cooking a tasty meal is a fairly low bar for any functioning human to meet - that's 18/21. He didn't have kids, so I'm not willing to grant him diaper-changing without a reason to. I can't find any medic training, so I won't give him setting a bone. And I'm not sure anyone knows how to comfort the dying. 18/21 is quite plausible. The remaining three are possible.

mcguire 6y ago

E pur si muove.

wwweston 6y ago

The danger of confusing process with substance is definitely an interesting point. Everyone can probably think of an example where that's happened. But as someone who learned unix and some CS among other things in public schools in a way that would have been impossible out of anything provided at home I'm definitely reluctant to throw that institution entirely under the bus. And in general I'd think that a forum full of people who make process for a living (software is arguably nothing but process) should understand that while systems are often full of blind spots that doesn't mean they're without their utility. What's needed is to figure out how to make services/systems/institutions with value.

TimTheTinker 6y ago
I think a more fundamental and seldom-agreed-upon question is what constitutes substance in the first place. I would argue that it’s very rare to find an answer that is truly coherent in that it corresponds to reality, is internally consistent, and doesn’t devolve into absurdity (turtles all the way down, etc.). I only know of one, and it’s rooted in the Christian worldview.
- hitekker 6y ago
  Do you mind telling us what that non-recursive substance is?
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    I'm not the one you're asking, but try "He Is There And He Is Not Silent", by Francis Schaeffer.

082349872349872 6y ago

To get an idea of what experiences led to 1984, see Orwell's "SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS (1947)" http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part49 http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part49 about his schooling at St Cyprian's. "And above all, I believed Sambo and Flip when they told me they were my benefactors. ... from Sambo's point of view I was a good speculation. He sank money in me, and ... I won him scholarships when the time came ... But it is difficult for a child to realize that a school is primarily a commercial venture. A child believes that the school exists to educate ... Flip and Sambo had chosen to befriend me, and their friendship included canings, reproaches and humiliations, which were good for me and saved me from an office stool. That was their version, and I believed in it. It was therefore clear that I owed them a vast debt of gratitude. But I was not grateful, as I very well knew. ... But it is wicked, is it not, to hate your benefactors?" Mr & Mrs Wilkes, or Big Brother?

Aperocky 6y ago

But this is just human. With or without school it's the same. We shouldn't blame the innate response of natural human emotions on schooling, or anything else.

pnathan 6y ago

Having seen firsthand the uses and failures of institutions, give me an institution. Or I'll build it if I have to. That paragraph is very, very, very unwise.

fzeroracer 6y ago

I feel like the concept of deschooling was written without taking into mind the actual humans behind the curtains. The idea of removing schools in favor of self-guided education seems like a good idea at first, but ignores the numerous factors that would make it hard for a lot of people to actually do so on their own. For example most of my middle and high school life was spent being severely depressed due to various life circumstances. School was more or less a routine affair that allowed me to disconnect briefly from my home life and without that escape I likely would've simply stopped learning altogether.