School instructs us on our own inferiority.

I’ve been re-reading Ivan Illich this morning, getting ready to publish something I worked on a long time ago, and I am struck again by how in advance of EVERYTHING Ivan Illich really was. Not only did he anticipate, in 1971, the Internet and how it could and would transform learning–he suggested learning webs and networks of informal mentoring around interest groups–voila you have the internet! But he saw how these learning webs might ultimately deschool society: bring down those institutions because they are no longer necessary.

The way Illich was just so especially brilliant was his sense of schooling as false consciousness: the ways credentialling and mandatory attendance and graduate education inclucate in us the belief that we must have more and more education for legitimacy and value. He said if you turn the equation around, and instead of viewing the means of learning as scarce (and mediated by institutions) you start see learning opportunities as abundant, and everywhere, “not needing special arrangements.” How different the world starts to look.

I recently read a great book, Schooling As Violence (2004), by Clive Harber, where Harber takes on the whole false consciousness around schooling, and our disbelief at schooling’s harmful effects. But the book is hardly known or discussed. The school critics of the 1960s said schooling was a mass superstition. How to address the superstitions of the masses?