Books for a Better World

Deschooling Society
IVAN ILLICH

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed. The pupil thereby is 'Schooled' to confuse teaching and 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 and the rat race for productive work.

Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible. This monopoly is at the root of the modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Modernized poverty combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency. This modernization of poverty is a world-wide phenomenon and lies at the root of contemporary under development.

It is obvious that even with schools of equal quality a poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one. Even if they attend equal schools and begin at the same age, poor children lack most of the educational opportunities, which are casually available to the middle class child. These advantages range from conversation and books in the home to a vacation travel and a different sense of oneself. So the poorer student will generally fall behind as long as he depends on the school for his learning and advancement.

Paradoxically, the belief that universal schooling is absolutely necessary is most firmly held in those countries where the fewest people have been and will be served by schools. All over the world the school has an anti-educational effect on the society: school is recognized as the institution, which specializes in education. The failures of school are taken by most people as a proof that education is very costly, very complex, always arcane and frequently almost impossible task.

School appropriates the money, men and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Obligatory schooling inevitably polarizes a society; it also grades the nations of the world according to an international caste system. Countries are rated like castes whose educational dignity is determined by the average years of schooling of its citizens, a rating, which is closely related to per capita gross national product and much more painful. School has become the world religion of a modernized proleriat and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The escalation of schools as destructive as the escalation of weapons but less visibly so. Everywhere in the world, school costs have risen faster than enrolments and faster than the GNP.

Neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification. Learning and the assignment of social roles are melted into schooling. Yet to learn means to acquire a new skill or insight, while promotion depends on an opinion, which others have formed. Learning frequently is the result of instruction, but selection for a role or category in the job market increasingly depends on mere length of attendance.
Curriculum has always been used to assign social rank. An illusion regarding schools is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school in so far as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.

The deschooling of society implies a recognition of the two-faced nature of learning. An insistence on skill alone could be disaster; equal emphasis must be placed on other kinds of learning. But if schools are the wrong places for learning a skill, they are even worse places for getting an education. School does both tasks badly, partly because it does not distinguish between them. School is inefficient in skill instruction especially because it is curricular. Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances, which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which the term 'liberal education' is used. The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling's sake: en enforced stay in the company of teachers.

In schools, including universities, most resources are spent to purchase the time and motivation of a limited number of people to take up pre-determined problems in a ritually defined setting. The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service, which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern. Some schools become so flexible that they cease to be useful. 'School' and 'teaching' are such terms. Like an amoeba they fit into almost any interstice of the language. ABM will teach the Russians, IBM will teach Negro children and the army can become the school of a nation.

A degree always leaves its indelible price tag on the curriculum of its consumer. Certified college graduates fit only into a world, which puts a price tag on their heads, thereby giving them the power to define the level of expectations in their society. In schools, including universities, most resources are spent to purchase the time and motivation of a limited number of people to take up pre determined problems in a ritually defined setting. The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service, which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern.

I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a life style, which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows us to make and unmake, produce and consume - a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment.

'Modern' technology transferred to poor countries falls into three large categories: goods, factories, which make them and serviced institutions - principally schools - which make men into modern producers and consumers. Most countries by far spend the largest proportion of their budget on schools. Fundamental social change must begin with a change of consciousness about institutions and to explain why the dimension of a viable future turns on the rejuvenation of institutional style.

Schools are fundamentally alike in all countries, be they fascist, democratic or socialist, big or small, rich or poor. This identity of the school system forces us to recognize the profound world-identity of myth, mode of production and method of social control, despite the great variety of mythologies in which the myth finds expression.

A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them and finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support, through a regressive taxation a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which infact restricts the public's chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market. The planning of new educational institutions ought not to begin with the administrative goals of a principal or president or with the teaching goals of a professional educators or with the learning goals of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the questions, "What should someone learn?" but with the questions, "What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?"

In a world, which is controlled and owned by nations and corporations, only limited access to educational objects will ever be possible. But increased access to those objects which can be shared for educational purposes may enlighten us enough to help us to break through these ultimate political barriers. Public schools transfer control over the educational use of objects from private to professional hands. The institutional inversion of schools could empower the individual to reclaim the right to use them for education. Local communities are valuable. They are also a vanishing reality as men progressively let service institutions define their circles of social relationship.
School has become the advertising agency, which makes you believe that you need the society as it is. In such a society, marginal value has become constantly self-transcendent. The ethos of non-satiety is thus at the root of physical depredation, social polarization and psychological passivity.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed
PAULO FREIRE

A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.

The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. "Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem." The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of 'capital' in the affirmation "the capital of Para is Belem", that is what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil. Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into 'containers', into 'receptacles' to be 'filled' by the teacher. The more completely he fills the receptacles, the better a teacher he is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.
Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositer. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the 'banking' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is men themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, men cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students. This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:

a. the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
b. the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
c. the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
d. the teacher talks and the students listen - meekly;
e. the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined:
f. the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
g. the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
h. the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;
i. the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
j. the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness, which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not 'marginals', are not men living 'outside' society. They have always been 'inside' - inside the structure, which made them 'beings for others'. The solution is not to 'integrate' them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become 'beings for themselves'. Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors' purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientizacao.

The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never propose to students that they critically consider reality. It will deal instead with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat, and insist upon the importance of learning that, on the contrary, Roger gave green grass to the rabbit. The 'humanism' of the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons - the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human. Solidarity requires true communication, and the concept by which such an educator is guided fears and proscribes communication.

Yet, only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher's thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students' thinking. The teacher cannot think for his students, nor can he impose his thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of men in their relations with the world. 'Problem-posing' education, responding to the essence of consciousness - intentionality - rejects communiqués and embodies communication. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian 'split' - consciousness as consciousness of consciousness.

Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far from being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors-teacher on the one hand and students on the other. Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.

Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed.
In problem-posing education, men develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. Although the dialectical relations of men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action men adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action.

Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition, which unveils reality. Banking education treats students as objects of assistance; problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers. Education is thus constantly remade in the praxis. In order to be, it must become. Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor. No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why? While only a revolutionary society can carry out this education in systematic terms, the revolutionary leaders need not take full power before they can employ the method. In the revolutionary process, the leaders cannot utilize the banking method as an interim measure, justified on grounds of expediency, with the intention of later behaving in a genuinely revolutionary fashion. They must be revolutionary - that is to say, dialogical from the outset.