Overlooking the Obvious: Ivan Illich

http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html

Click the link above and you will find yourself face to face with an online-text version of Deschooling Society, a book every bit as brilliant and relevant to our twenty-first-century educational quagmire as Barzun's Teacher in America.

The author of Deschooling Society was Ivan Illich (1926-2002), a man whom Wikipedia descibes as a "philosopher, social critic, and defrocked Roman Catholic priest." (If Illich's Wikipedia entry is to be trusted, he apparently defrocked himself, "resign[ing] from the active priesthood in the late 1960s [having attained the rank of monsigneur]....") Born in Vienna, he studied at the University of Florence and the Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican, served as an assistant parish priest in New York City, and as the vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico.

It was as the founder of the Interculteral Documentation Center (commonly referred to as CIDOC, an anagram based on its Spanish name), however, that he began forging in earnest the ideas about teaching and learning for which he would be best remembered. These ideas came to fruition in Deschooling Society (1971) and Tools for Conviviality (1973), works that established his reputation as a first-rate controversialist and that made him a much in-demand lecturer the world over. (He also served as a professor at Penn State University.)

There are, not surprisingly, elements of Deschooling Society that now seem dated, but they are outweighed by the elements that not only remain relevant (such as Illich's thesis, that "[u]niversal education through schooling is not feasible") but also predict the future. (His description of the "educational webs" that he envisioned as the best alternative to schools seems to anticipate the existence of the Internet.)

In this post--to which I will be adding, for months if not years, as time allows--I will examine the degree to which an understanding of the ideas in Deschooling Society can inspire those of us who would rescue teaching from professional "educators" and, in so doing, make possible the kind of learning that is a never-ending pleasure.