Posted December 9, 2002
Ivan Illich died last week. I will leave to others the usual journalistic duty to the recent dead. With Ivan Illich the usual treatment does not strike me as appropriate. I will instead do what honor I can to his legacy by taking sides. I side against. He was a bad writer and a something of a fool. I won't say any different now that he's dead.
Against Institutions
Reading from the very first paragraph of his most famous book, Deschooling Society, his method and aim become clear, even as we struggle with his characteristic muddles:
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance.
Aside from being almost certainly untrue (poor students are not apt to jump to this conclusion; other complaints with schools come much more readily to their minds), what is most amazing about these two sentences is how badly written the second one is, with its pronoun troubles and an unclever verbal use of the word school
(later in the paragraph the word is twice used in this manner, but with quotation marks, why not in this first instance I don't know). And the bad writing does not stop:
Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is therebyschooledto confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination isschooledto accept service in place of value.
After a third sentence worthy of a professor at a teacher's college, in the fourth we get a series of ideas instantiating process
and substance.
Of course, Illich is wrong: students don't confuse teaching with learning. At worst, they confuse their accommodations to being teached at
with learning.
But Illich's larger point becomes a bit more clear: in schools the means become an end, and the most important ends of education get lost in the bureacratized means chosen to advance that end.
And Illich goes on, seeing this confusion everywhere:
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 those ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.
You see his argument's appeal. It is utopian. It insists that ends always be served directly by simple means.
But the world is a complicated enough place that our ends (goals) are diverse while our means remain scarce. We are not all agreed on what education
should be, for instance, so when it comes to helping children, education
cannot be a simple matter of learning in some rarefied sense; it also becomes a matter of baby sitting
and moral direction
and rule maintenance
and skill acquisition
as well as loftier ideas that radical education reformers like to talk about, that is, a matter of nurturing independent thinking -- which is what Illich and his ilk most admire.
Now, I also wish that parents, teachers, and school board members showed more respect for the loftiest goals for education. But wishes are not enough. We can dream many impossible things, all before a state-provided school breakfast.
But what can we achieve?
The Harsh Reality
Alas, reality was not Illich's strong suit, so he could not provide good guidance out of today's current confusions. He repeatedly argued against a realistic way of looking at the world. He did not see why competing ends and scarce means must remain a basic, permanent feature of human life. Instead, he said things like this:
Economic assumptions, once incorporated in one's way of perceiving reality and constructing arguments, exclude ethical options whose object is the good.
Economic understanding does exclude many simplistic visions of the good.
Economists, whose first job is to explain the consequences of a diversity of notions of the good,
also have the supposedly dismal task of explaining why many proposed solutions to humanity's myriad problems can't work.
It was Illich's assumption (not his understanding) that we can solve our social problems without making and maintaining institutions -- and so he advocated the abolition of institutions as the best course. With this assumption fixed in place, he disabled himself from seeing clearly the many levels to institutions, and how alternative institutional arrangements could effectively improve learning. Today, many powerful people demand that political institutions micromanage schools, insisting upon a uniform approach to teaching. But the best alternative to this dangerous, self-defeating institutional structure is a looser one, not abolition.
We could insist, instead, that political and legal institutions take a more hands-off
approach to schools, allowing competition among methods of instruction and organization to match the diversity of people's needs.
Those who wish to reform education, or even make society more convivial
(to use a word Illich liked enough to misuse), had best not follow Illich's basic teachings. Institutions are inevitable. Technology is, too. We must make many choices, and they are often not easy. And no matter how radical we may reform society, no matter how many institutions we re-arrange, questions of ends and means will always be with us.
But Illich himself no longer is.
A sad thing, perhaps. But even sad occasions like a death can be put to good purpose. I can't think of any better way of responding to Illich's demise than by rejecting his ideas and moving on to better ones.
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