Joanna
Gregory Lipman wrote:
>'Tis easy to google for Illich material. Here's where you can find links to
>all his stuff on the web:
>http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich.html
>Deschooling Society is his most famous work and please note that it has even
>be issued by the Cuban government. Here's some excerpts (the whole thing can
>be accessed on line- follow the above link.)
>
>Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the
>schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once
>these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is,
>the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is
>thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with 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, 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 these ends, and
>their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the
>management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.
>In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads
>inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological
>impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and
>modernized misery. I will explain how this process of degradation is
>accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for
>commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or
>psychological healing are defined as the result of services or "treatments."
>I do this because I believe that most of the research now going on about the
>future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalization of
>values and that we must define conditions which would permit precisely the
>contrary to happen. We need research on the possible use of technology to
>create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous
>interaction and the emergence of values which cannot be substantially
>controlled by technocrats. We need counterfoil research to current
>futurology.
>.........
>Matching partners for educational purposes initially seems more difficult to
>imagine than finding skill instructors and partners for a game. One reason
>is the deep fear which school has implanted in us, a fear which makes us
>censorious. The unlicensed exchange of skills-even undesirable skills-is
>more predictable and therefore seems less dangerous than the unlimited
>opportunity for meeting among people who share an issue which for them, at
>the moment, is socially, intellectually, and emotionally important.
>The Brazilian teacher Paulo Freire knows this from experience. He discovered
>that any adult can begin to read in a matter of forty hours if the first
>words he deciphers are charged with political meaning. Freire trains his
>teachers to move into a village and to discover the words which designate
>current important issues, such as the access to a well or the compound
>interest on the debts owed to the patron. In the evening the villagers meet
>for the discussion of these key words. They begin to realize that each word
>stays on the blackboard even after its sound has faded. The letters continue
>to unlock reality and to make it manageable as a problem. I have frequently
>witnessed how discussants grow in social awareness and how they are impelled
>to take political action as fast as they learn to read. They seem to take
>reality into their hands as they write it down.
>
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