Ritualization of Progress

[Cactus]

The Myth of Packaging Values

School sells curriculum -- a bundle of goods made according to the same process and having the same structure as other merchandise. Curriculum production for most schools begins with allegedly scientific research, on whose basis educational engineers predict future demand and tools for the assembly line, within the limits set by budgets and taboos.

The distributor-teacher delivers the finished product to the consumer-pupil, whose reactions are carefully studied and charted to provide research data for the preparation of the next model, which may be "ungraded," "student-designed," "team-taught," "visually-aided," or "issue-centered."

The result of the curriculum production process looks like any other modern staple. It is a bundle of planned meanings, a package of values, a commodity whose "balanced appeal" makes it marketable to a sufficiently large number to justify the cost of production.

Consumer-pupils are taught to make their desires conform to marketable values. Thus they are made to feel guilty if they do not behave according to the predictions of consumer research by getting the grades and certificates that will place them in the job category they have been led to expect.

Educators can justify more expensive curricula on the basis of their observation that learning difficulties rise proportionately with the cost of the curriculum.

This is an application of Parkinson's Law that work expands with the resources available to do it.

This law can be verified on all levels of school: for instance, reading difficulties have been a major issue in French schools only since their per-capita expenditures have approached U.S. levels of 1950 -- when reading difficulties became a major issue in U.S. schools.

In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance is due not to the authoritarian style of a public school or the seductive style of some free schools, but to the fundamental approach common to all schools -- the idea that one person's judgement should determine what and when another person must learn.

- Deschooling Society - Ivan Illich

 

[Cactus]

The New Alienation

School is not only the New World Religion. It is also the world's fastest-growing labor market. The engineering of consumers has become the economy's principal growth sector. As production costs decrease in rich nations, there is an increasing consentration of both capital and labor in the vast enterprise of equipping man for disciplined consumption.

During the past decade capital investments directly related to the school system rose even faster than expenditures for defense. Disarmament would only accelerate the process by which the learning industry moves to the center of the national economy.

School gives unlimited opportunity for legitimized waste, so long as it's destructiveness goes unrecognized and the cost of palliatives goes up.

If we add all those engaged in full-time attendance, we realize that this so-called superstructure has become society's major employer.

In the United States sixty-two million people are in school and eighty million at work elsewhere. This is often forgotten by neo-Marxist analysts who say that the process of deschooling must be postponed or bracketed until other disorders, traditionally understood as more fundamental are corrected by an economic and political revolution.

Only if school is understood as an industry can revolutionary strategy be planned realistically. For Marx, the cost of producing demands for commodities was barely significant. Today most human labor is engaged in the production of demands that can be satisfied by industry which makes entensive use of capital. Most of this is done in school.

Alienation, in the traditional scheme, was a direct consequence of work's becoming wage-labor which deprived man of the opportunity to create and be recreated.

Now young people are prealienated by schools that isolate them while they pretend to be both producers and consumers of their own knowledge, which is conceived of as a commodity put on the market in school.

School makes alienation preparatory to life, thus depriving education of reality and work of creativity. School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.

Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition.

And school directly or indirectly employs a major portion of the population. School either keeps people for life or makes sure that they will fit into some institution.

Ivan Illich

The New World Church is the knowledge industry, both purveyor of opium and the workbench during an increasing number of the years of an individual's life.

Deschooling is, therefore, at the root of any movement for human liberation.