Education Without School: How It Can Be Done

[Guest guest]

Volume 15, Number 12 · January 7, 1971

A Special Supplement:

 

Education Without School: How It Can Be Done

By Ivan Illich

 

 

In a previous article[1] I discussed what is becoming a common

complaint about schools, one that is reflected, for example, in the

recent report of the Carnegie Commission: In school registered

students submit to certified teachers in order to obtain certificates

of their own; both are frustrated and both blame insufficient

resources—money, time, or buildings—for their mutual frustration.

 

Such criticism leads many people to ask whether it is possible to

conceive of a different style of learning. The same people,

paradoxically, when pressed to specify how they acquired what they

know and value, will readily admit that they learned it more often

outside than inside school. Their knowledge of facts, their

understanding of life and work came to them from friendship or love,

while viewing TV, or while reading, from examples of peers or the

challenge of a street encounter. Or they may have learned what they

know through the apprenticeship ritual for admission to a street gang

or the initiation to a hospital, newspaper city room, plumber's shop,

or insurance office. The alternative to dependence on schools is not

the use of public resources for some new device which " makes " people

learn; rather it is the creation of a new style of educational

relationship between man and his environment. To foster this style,

attitudes toward growing up, the tools available for learning, and

the quality and structure of daily life will have to change

concurrently.

 

Attitudes are already changing. The proud dependence on school is

gone. Consumer resistance is increasing in the knowledge industry.

Many teachers and pupils, taxpayers and employers; economists and

policemen would prefer not to depend any longer on schools. What

prevents their frustration from shaping new institutions is a lack

not only of imagination but frequently also one of appropriate

language and of enlightened self-interest. They cannot visualize

either a de-schooled society or educational institutions in a society

which disestablishes school.

 

In this essay, I intend to show that the inverse of school is

possible: That we can depend on self-motivated learning instead of

employing teachers to bribe or compel the student to find time and

the will to learn; that we can provide the learner with new links to

the world instead of continuing to funnel all educational programs

through the teacher. I shall discuss some of the general

characteristics which distinguish schooling from learning and outline

four major categories of educational institutions which should appeal

not only to many individuals, but also to many existing interest

groups.

 

An Objection: Who Can Be Served by Bridges to Nowhere?

We are used to considering schools as a variable, dependent on the

political and economic structure. If we can change the style of

political leadership, or promote the interests of one class or

another, or switch from private to public ownership of the means of

production, we assume the school system will change as well. The

educational institutions I will propose, however, are meant to serve

a society which does not now exist, although the current frustration

with schools is itself potentially a major force to set in motion

change toward new social arrangements. An obvious objection has been

raised to this approach: Why channel energy to build bridges to

nowhere, instead of marshaling it first to change not the schools but

the political and economic system?

 

This objection, however, underestimates the repressive political and

economic nature of the school system itself, as well as the political

potential inherent in a new educational style. In a basic sense,

schools have ceased to be dependent on the ideology professed by a

government or the organization of its market. Even the Chinese feel

they must adopt the basic international structure of schooling in

order to become a world power and a nation state. Control of society

is reserved everywhere to those who have consumed at least four units

of four years, each unit consisting of 500-1000 hours in the

classroom.

 

School, as I suggested in my previous article, is the major component

of the system of consumer production which is becoming more complex

and specialized and bureaucratized. Schooling is necessary to produce

the habits and expectations of the managed consumer society.

Inevitably it produces institutional dependence and ranking in spite

of any effort by the teacher to teach the contrary. It is an illusion

that schools are only a dependent variable, an illusion which,

moreover, provides them, the reproductive organs of a consumer

society, with their immunity.

 

Even the piecemeal creation of new educational agencies which are the

inverse of school would therefore be an attack on the most sensitive

link of a pervasive phenomenon, which is organized by the state in

all countries. A political program which does not explicitly

recognize the need for de-schooling is not revolutionary; it is

demagoguery calling for more of the same. Any major political program

of the Seventies should be evaluated by this measure: How clearly

does it state the need for de-schooling—and how clearly does it

provide guidelines for the educational quality of the society for

which it aims?

 

The struggle against domination by the world market and big power

politics might be beyond some poor communities or countries—but this

weakness is an added reason for emphasizing the importance of

liberating each society through a reversal of its educational

structure, a change which is not beyond any society's means.

 

General Characteristics of New Formal Educational Institutions

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. Such a system would require the

application of constitutional guarantees to education. 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 in fact restrict the public's chances for learning to

the services the profession is willing to put on the market. It

should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and

a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.

 

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to

everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that

secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and

that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual

with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of

classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper

tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid.

Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow

him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament,

if he cannot get in the door. Moreover, such new institutions should

be channels to which the learner would have access without

credentials or pedigree—public spaces in which peers and elders

outside his immediate horizon now become available.

 

I believe that no more than four—possibly even three—

distinct " channels " or learning exchanges could contain all the

resources needed for real learning. The child grows up in a world of

things, surrounded by people who serve as models for skills and

values. He finds peers who challenge him to argue, to compete, to

cooperate, and to understand; and if the child is lucky, he is

exposed to confrontation or criticism by an experienced elder who

really cares. Things, models, peers, and elders are four resources

each of which requires a different type of arrangement to ensure that

everybody has ample access to them.

 

I will use the word " network " to designate specific ways to provide

access to each of four sets of resources. The word is often used,

unfortunately, to designate the channels reserved to material

selected by others for indoctrination, instruction, and

entertainment. But it can also be used for the telephone or the

postal service, which are primarily accessible to individuals who

want to send messages to one another. What are needed are new

networks, readily available to the public and designed to spread

equal opportunity for learning and teaching.

 

To give an example: the same level of technology is used in TV and in

tape recorders. All Latin American countries now have introduced TV:

in Bolivia the government has financed a TV station, which was built

six years ago, and there are no more than 7,000 TV sets for four

million citizens. The money now tied up in TV installations

throughout Latin America could have provided every fifth adult with a

tape recorder. In addition, the money would have sufficed to provide

an almost unlimited library of prerecorded tapes, with outlets even

in remote villages, as well as an ample supply of empty tapes.

 

This network of tape recorders, of course, would be radically

different from the present network of TV. It would provide

opportunity for free expression: literate and illiterate alike could

record, preserve, disseminate, and repeat their opinions. The present

investment in TV instead provides bureaucrats, whether politicians or

educators, with the power to sprinkle the continent with

institutionally produced programs which they—or their sponsors—decide

are good for or in demand by the people. Technology is available to

develop either independence and learning, or bureaucracy and

preaching.

 

Four Networks

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 educator, or with the learning goals

of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the

question, " What should someone learn? " but with the question, " What

kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with

in order to learn? "

 

Someone who wants to learn knows that he needs both information and

critical response to its use from somebody else. Information can be

stored in things and in persons. In a good educational system, access

to things ought to be available at the sole bidding of the learner,

while access to informants requires in addition others' consent.

Criticism can also come from two directions: from peers or from

elders, that is, from fellow learners whose immediate interests match

mine, or from those who will grant me a share in their superior

experience. Peers can be colleagues with whom to raise a question,

companions for playful and enjoyable (or arduous) reading or walking,

challengers at any type of game. Elders can be consultants on which

skill to learn, which method to use, what company to seek at a given

moment. They can be guides to the right questions to be raised among

peers and to the deficiency of answers they arrive at.

 

Educational resources are usually labeled according to educators'

curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four

different approaches which enable the student to gain access to any

educational resource which may help him to define and achieve his own

goals:

 

1.) Reference Services to Educational Objects—which facilitate access

to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things

can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental

agencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters;

others can be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but

made available to students as apprentices or on off-hours.

 

2.) Skill Exchanges—which permit persons to list their skills, the

conditions under which they are willing to serve as models for others

who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can

be reached.

 

3.) Peer Matching—a communication network which permits persons to

describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the

hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.

 

4.) Reference Services to Educators-at-large—who can be listed in a

directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of

professionals, para-professionals, and free-lancers, along with

conditions of access to their services. Such educators, as we will

see, could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients.

 

Reference Services to Educational Objects

Things are basic resources for learning. The quality of the

environment and the relationship of a person to it will determine how

much he learns incidentally. Formal learning requires special access

to ordinary things, on the one hand, or, on the other, easy and

dependable access to special things made for educational purposes. An

example of the former is the special right to operate or dismantle a

machine in a garage. An example of the latter is the general right to

use an abacus, a computer, a book, a botanical garden, or a machine

withdrawn from production and placed at the full disposal of students.

 

At present, attention is focused on the disparity between rich and

poor children in their access to things and in the manner in which

they can learn from them. OEO and other agencies, following this

approach, concentrate on equalizing chances, by trying to provide

more educational equipment for the poor. A more radical point of

departure would be to recognize that in the city rich and poor alike

are artificially kept away from most of the things that surround

them. Children born into the age of plastics and efficiency experts

must penetrate two barriers which obstruct their understanding: one

built into things, and the other around institutions. Industrial

design creates a world of things that resist insight into their

nature, and schools shut the learner out of the world of things in

their meaningful setting.

 

After a short visit to New York, a woman from a Mexican village told

me she was impressed by the fact that stores sold " only wares heavily

made up with cosmetics. " I understood her to mean that industrial

products " speak " to their customers about their allurements and not

about their nature. Industry has surrounded people with artifacts

whose inner workings only specialists are allowed to understand. The

non-specialist is discouraged from figuring out what makes a watch

tick, or a telephone ring, or an electric typewriter work, by being

warned that it will break if he tries. He can be told what makes a

transistor radio work but he cannot find out for himself. This type

of design tends to reinforce a noninventive society in which the

experts find it progressively easier to hide behind their expertise

and beyond evaluation.

 

The man-made environment has become as inscrutable as nature is for

the primitive. At the same time, educational materials have been

monopolized by school. Simple educational objects have been

expensively packaged by the knowledge industry. They have become

specialized tools for professional educators, and their cost has been

inflated by forcing them to stimulate either environments or teachers.

 

The teacher is jealous of the textbook he defines as his professional

implement. The student may come to hate the lab because he associates

it with schoolwork. The administrator rationalizes his protective

attitude toward the library as a defense of costly public equipment

against those who would play with it rather than learn. In this

atmosphere, the student too often uses the map, the lab, the

encyclopedia, or the microscope at the rare moments when the

curriculum tells him to do so. Even the great classics become part

of " sophomore year " instead of marking a new turn in a person's life.

School removes things from everyday use by labeling them educational

tools.

 

If we are to de-school, both tendencies must be reversed. The general

physical environment must be made accessible, and those physical

learning resources which have been reduced to teaching instruments

become generally available for self-directed learning. Using things

merely as part of a curriculum can have an even worse effect than

just removing them: It can corrupt the attitudes of pupils.

 

Games are a case in point. I do not mean the " games " of the physical

education department (such as football and basketball), which the

schools use to raise income and prestige and in which they have make

a substantial capital investment. As the athletes themselves are well

aware, these enterprises, which take the form of warlike tournaments,

have undermined the playfulness of sports and are used to reinforce

the competitive nature of schools. Rather I have in mind the

educational games which can provide a unique way to penetrate formal

systems. Set-theory, linguistics, propositional logic, geometry,

physics, and even chemistry reveal themselves with little effort to

certain persons who play these games. A friend of mine went to a

Mexican market with a game called " Wff'n Proof, " which consists of

some dice on which twelve logical symbols are imprinted. He showed

children which two or three combinations constituted a well-formed

sentence, and inductively within the first hour some onlookers also

grasped the principle. Within a few hours of playfully conducting

formal logical proofs, some children are capable of introducing

others to the fundamental proofs of propositional logic. The others

just walk away.

 

In fact, for some children such games are a special form of

liberating education, since they heighten their awareness of the fact

that formal systems are built on changeable axioms and that

conceptual operations have a game-like nature. They are also simple,

cheap, and—to a large extent—can be organized by the players

themselves. Used outside the curriculum such games provide an

opportunity for identifying and developing unusual talent, while the

school psychologist will often identify those who have such talent as

in danger of becoming anti-social, sick, or unbalanced. Within

school, when used in the form of tournaments, games are not only

removed from the sphere of leisure; they often become tools used to

translate playfulness into competition, a lack of abstract reasoning

into a sign of inferiority. An exercise which is liberating for some

character types becomes a strait-jacket for others.

 

The control of school over educational equipment has still another

effect. It increases enormously the cost of such cheap materials.

Once their use is restricted to scheduled hours, professionals are

paid to supervise their acquisition, storage, and use. Then students

vent their anger against the school on the equipment, which must be

purchased once again.

 

Paralleling the untouchability of teaching tools is the

impenetrability of modern junk. In the Thirties, any self-respecting

boy knew how to repair an automobile, but now car makers multiply

wires and withhold manuals from everyone except specialized

mechanics. In a former era, an old radio contained enough coils and

condensers to build a transmitter that would make all the

neighborhood radios scream in feedback. Transistor radios are more

portable, but nobody dares to take them apart. To change this in the

highly industrialized countries will be immensely difficult; but at

least in the Third World, we must insist on built-in educational

qualities.

 

To illustrate my point, let me present a model: By spending $10

million it would be possible to connect 40,000 hamlets in a country

like Peru with a spiderweb of six-foot wide trails and maintain

these, and, in addition, provide the country with 200,000 three-

wheeled mechanical donkeys—five on the average for each hamlet. Few

poor countries of this size spend less than this yearly on cars and

roads, both of which are now mainly restricted to the rich and their

employees, while poor people remain trapped in their villages. Each

of these simple but durable little vehicles would cost $125—half of

which would pay for transmission and a six horsepower motor.

A " donkey " could make 20 mph, and it can carry loads of 850 pounds

(that is, most things besides trunks and steel beams which are

ordinarily moved).

 

The political appeal of such a transportation system to a peasantry

is obvious. Equally obvious is the reason why those who hold power—

and thereby automatically have a car—are not interested in spending

money on trails and in clogging roads with engine-driven donkeys. The

universal donkey could work only if a country's leaders were willing

to impose a national speed limit of, say, 25 miles an hour and adapt

its public institutions to this. The model could not work if

conceived only as a stop-gap.

 

This is not the place to elaborate on the political, social,

economic, financial, and technical feasibility of this model.[2] I

only wish to indicate that educational considerations may be of prime

importance when choosing such an alternative to capital-intensive

transport. By raising the unit cost per donkey by some 20 percent it

would become possible to plan the production of all its parts in such

a manner that, as far as possible, each future owner would spend a

month or two making and understanding his machine, and would be able

to repair it. With this additional cost it would also be possible to

decentralize production into dispersed plants. The added benefits

would result not only from including educational costs in the

construction process. Even more significantly, a durable motor which

practically anyone could learn to repair and which could be used as a

plough and pump by somebody who understood it would provide much

higher educational benefits than the inscrutable engines of the

advanced countries.

 

Not only the junk but also the supposedly public places of the modern

city have become impenetrable. In American society, children are

excluded from most things and places on the grounds that they are

private. But even in societies which have declared an end to private

property, children are kept away from the same places and things

because they are considered the special domain of professionals and

dangerous to the uninitiated. Since the last generation the railroad

yard has become as inaccessible as the fire station. Yet with a

little ingenuity, it should not be difficult to provide for safety in

such places. To de-school the artifacts of education will require

making the artifacts and processes available—and recognizing their

educational value. Certainly, some workers would find it inconvenient

to be accessible to learners; but this inconvenience must be balanced

against the educational gains.

 

Private cars could be banned from Manhattan. Five years ago, it was

unthinkable. Now, certain New York streets are closed off at odd

hours, and this trend will probably continue. Indeed most cross-

streets should be closed to automotive traffic and parking should be

forbidden everywhere. In a city opened up to people, teaching

materials which are now locked up in storerooms and laboratories

could be dispersed into independently operated storefront depots

which children and adults could visit without the danger of being run

over.

 

If the goals of learning were no longer dominated by schools and

schoolteachers, the market for learners would be much more various

and the definition of " educational artifacts " would be less

restrictive. There could be tool shops, libraries, laboratories, and

gaming rooms. Photolabs and offset presses would allow neighborhood

newspapers to flourish. Some storefront learning centers could

contain viewing booths for closed-circuit television, others could

feature office equipment for use and for repair. The jukebox or the

record player would be commonplace, with some specializing in

classical music, others in international folk tunes, others in jazz.

Film clubs would compete with each other and with commercial

television. Museum outlets could be networks for circulating exhibits

of works of art, both old and new, originals and reproductions,

perhaps administered by the various metropolitan museums.

 

The professional personnel needed for this network would be much more

like custodians, museum guides, or reference librarians than like

teachers. From the corner biology store, they could refer their

clients to the shell collection in the museum or indicate the next

showing of biology videotapes in a certain viewing booth. They could

furnish guides for pest control, diet, and other kinds of preventive

medicine. They could refer those who needed advice to " elders " who

could provide it.

 

Two distinct approaches can be taken to financing a network

of " learning objects. " A community could determine a maximum budget

for this purpose and arrange for all parts of the network to be open

to all visitors at reasonable hours. Or the community could decide to

provide citizens with limited entitlements, according to their age

group, which would give them special access to certain materials

which are both costly and scarce, while leaving other, simpler

materials available to everyone.

 

Finding resources for material made specifically for education is

only one—and perhaps the least costly—aspect in building an

educational world. The money now spent on the sacred paraphernalia of

the school ritual can be freed to provide all citizens with greater

access to the real life of the city. Special tax incentives could be

granted to those who employed children between the ages of eight and

fourteen for a couple of hours each day if the conditions of

employment were humane ones. We should return to the tradition of the

bar-mitzvah or confirmation. By this I mean we should first restrict,

and later eliminate, the disenfranchisement of the young and permit a

boy of twelve to become a man fully responsible for his participation

in the life of the community. Many " school age " people know more

about their neighborhood than social workers or councilmen. Of

course, they also ask more embarrassing questions and propose

solutions which threaten the bureaucracy. They should be allowed to

come of age so that they could put their knowledge and fact-finding

ability to work in the service of a popular government.

 

Until recently the dangers of school were easily underestimated in

comparison with the dangers of an apprenticeship in the police force,

the fire department, or the entertainment industry. It was easy to

justify schools at least as a means to protect youth. Often this

argument no longer holds. I recently visited a Methodist church in

Harlem occupied by a group of armed Young Lords in protest against

the death of Julio Rodan, a Puerto Rican youth found hanged in his

prison cell. I knew the leaders of the group who had spent a semester

in Cuernavaca. When I wondered why one of them, Juan, was not among

them I was told that he had " gone back on heroin and to the State

University. "

 

Planning, incentives, and legislation can be used to unlock the

educational potential within our society's huge investment in plants

and equipment. Full access to educational objects will not exist so

long as business firms are allowed to combine the legal protections

which the Bill of Rights reserves to the privacy of individuals with

the economic power conferred upon them by their millions of customers

and thousands of employees, stockholders, and suppliers. Much of the

world's know-how and most of its productive processes and equipment

are locked within the walls of business firms, away from their

customers, employees, and stockholders, as well as from the general

public, whose laws and facilities allow them to function. Money now

spent on advertising in capitalist countries could be redirected

toward education in and by General Electric, NBC-TV, or Budweiser

beer. That is, the plants and offices should be reorganized so that

their daily operations can be more accessible to the public in ways

that will make learning possible; and indeed ways might be found to

pay the companies for the learning people acquire from them.

 

An even more valuable body of scientific objects and data may be

withheld from general access—and even from qualified scientists—under

the guise of national security. Until recently science was the one

forum which functioned like an anarchist's dream. Each man capable of

doing research had more or less the same opportunity of access to its

tools and to a hearing of the community of peers. Now

bureaucratization and organization have placed much of science beyond

public reach. Indeed, what used to be an international network of

scientific information has been splintered into an arena of competing

teams. The members as well as the artifacts of the scientific

community have been locked into national and corporate programs

oriented toward practical achievement, to the radical impoverishment

of the men who support these nations and corporations.

 

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 uses 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. A truly public kind of

ownership might begin to emerge if private or corporate control over

the educational aspect of " things " were brought to the vanishing

point.

 

Skill Exchanges

A guitar teacher, unlike a guitar, can be neither classified in a

museum nor owned by the public nor rented from an educational

warehouse. Teachers of skills belong to a different class of

resources from objects needed to learn a skill. This is not to say

that they are indispensable in every case. I can not only rent a

guitar, but also taped guitar lessons and illustrated chord charts—

and with these things I can teach myself to play the guitar. Indeed,

this arrangement might have advantages—if the available tapes are

better than the available teachers. Or if the only time I have for

learning the guitar is late at night or if the tunes I wish to play

are unknown in my country. Or I might be shy and prefer to fumble

along in privacy.

 

Skill teachers must be listed and contacted through a different kind

of channel from that of things. A thing is available at the bidding

of the user—or could be—whereas a person formally becomes a skill

resource only when he consents to do so, and he can also restrict

time, place, and method as he chooses.

 

Skill teachers must also be distinguished from peers, from whom one

would learn. Peers who wish to pursue a common inquiry must start

from common interests and abilities; they get together to exercise or

improve a skill they share: basketball, dancing, constructing a

campsite, or discussing the next election. The first transmission of

a skill, on the other hand, involves bringing together someone who

has the skill and someone who does not have it and wants to acquire

it.

 

A " skill model " is a person who possesses a skill and is willing to

demonstrate its practice. A demonstration of this kind is frequently

a necessary resource for a potential learner. Modern inventions

permit us to incorporate demonstration into tape, film, or chart; yet

one would hope personal demonstration will remain in wide demand,

especially in communication skills. Some 10,000 adults have learned

Spanish at our Center at Cuernavaca—mostly highly motivated persons

who wanted to acquire near-native fluency in a second language. When

they are faced with a choice between carefully programmed instruction

in a lab, or drill-sessions with two other students and a native

speaker following a rigid routine, most choose the second.

 

For most widely shared skills, a person who demonstrates the skill is

the only human resource we ever need or get. Whether in speaking or

driving, in cooking or in the use of communication equipment, we are

often barely conscious of formal instruction and learning, especially

after our first experience of the materials in question. I see no

reason why other complex skills, such as the mechanical aspects of

surgery and playing the fiddle, of reading or the use of directories

and catalogues, could not be learned in the same way.

 

A well-motivated student who does not labor under a specific handicap

often needs no further human assistance than can be provided by

someone who can demonstrate on demand how to do what the learner

wants to learn to do. The demand made of skilled people that before

demonstrating their skill they be certified as pedagogues is a result

of the insistence that people learn either what they do not want to

know, or that all people—even those with a special handicap—learn

certain things, at a given moment in their lives, and preferably

under specified circumstances.

 

What makes skills scarce on the present educational market is the

institutional requirement that those who can demonstrate them may not

do so unless they are given public trust, through a certificate. We

insist that those who help others acquire a skill should also know

how to diagnose learning difficulties and be able to motivate people

to aspire to learn skills. In short, we demand that they be

pedagogues. People who can demonstrate skills will be plentiful as

soon as we learn to recognize them outside the teaching profession.

 

Where princelings are being taught, the parents' insistence that the

teacher and the person with skills be combined in one person is

understandable, if no longer defensible. But for all parents to

aspire to have Aristotle for their Alexander is obviously self-

defeating. The person who can both inspire students and demonstrate a

technique is so rare, and so hard to recognize, that even princelings

more often get a sophist than a true philosopher.

 

A demand for scarce skills can be quickly filled even if there are

only small numbers of people to demonstrate them; but such people

must be easily available. During the Forties, radio repairmen, most

of them with no schooling in their work, were no more than two years

behind radios in penetrating the interior of Latin America. There

they stayed until transistor radios, which are cheap to purchase and

impossible to repair, put them out of business. Technical schools now

fail to accomplish what repairmen of equally useful, more durable

radios could do as a matter of course.

 

Converging self-interests now conspire to stop a man from sharing his

skill. The man who has the skill profits from its scarcity and not

from its reproduction. The teacher who specializes in transmitting

the skill profits from the artisan's unwillingness to launch his own

apprentice into the field. The public is indoctrinated to believe

that skills are valuable and reliable only if they are the result of

formal schooling. The job market depends on making skills scarce and

on keeping them scarce, either by proscribing their unauthorized use

and transmission or by making things which can be operated and

repaired only by those who have access to tools or information which

are kept scarce.

 

Schools thus produce shortages of skilled persons. A good example is

the diminishing number of nurses in the United States, owing to the

rapid increase of four-year B.S. programs in nursing. Women from

poorer families, who would formerly have enrolled in a two- or three-

year program, now stay out of the nursing profession altogether.

 

Insisting on the certification of teachers is another way of keeping

skills scarce. If nurses were encouraged to train nurses, and if

nurses were employed on the basis of their proven skill at giving

injections, filling out charts, and giving medicine, there would soon

be no lack of trained nurses. Certification now tends to abridge the

freedom of education by converting the civil right to share one's

knowledge into the privilege of academic freedom, now conferred only

on the employees of a school. To guarantee access to an effective

exchange of skills, we need legislation which generalizes academic

freedom. The right to teach any skill should come under the

protection of freedom of speech. Once restrictions on teaching are

removed, they will quickly be removed from learning as well.

 

The teacher of skills needs some inducement to grant his services to

a pupil. There are at least two simple ways to begin to channel

public funds to non-certified teachers. One way would be to

institutionalize the skill exchange by creating free skill centers

open to the public. Such centers could and should be established in

industrialized areas, at least for those skills which are fundamental

prerequisites for entering certain apprenticeships—such skills as

reading, typing, keeping accounts, foreign languages, computer

programming and number manipulation, reading special languages such

as that of electrical circuits, manipulation of certain machinery,

etc. Another approach would be to give certain groups within the

population educational currency good for attendance at skill centers

where other clients would have to pay commercial rates.

 

A much more radical approach would be to create a " bank " for skill

exchange. Each citizen would be given a basic credit with which to

acquire fundamental skills. Beyond that minimum, further credits

would go to those who earn them by teaching, whether they serve as

models in organized skill centers or do so privately at home or on

the playground. Only those who have taught others for an equivalent

amount of time would have a claim on the time of more advanced

teachers. An entirely new elite would be promoted, an elite of those

who earn their education by sharing it.

 

Should parents have the right to earn skill-credit for their

children? Since such an arrangement would give further advantage to

the privileged classes, it might be offset by granting a larger

credit to the underprivileged. The operation of a skill exchange

would depend on the existence of agencies which would facilitate the

development of directory information and assure its free and

inexpensive use. Such an agency might also provide supplementary

services of testing and certification and might help to enforce the

legislation required to break up and prevent monopolistic practices.

 

Fundamentally, the freedom of a universal skill exchange must be

guaranteed by laws which prevent discrimination only on the basis of

tested skills and not on the basis of educational pedigree. Such a

guarantee inevitably requires public control over tests which may be

used to qualify persons for the job market. Otherwise, it would be

possible to surreptitiously reintroduce complex batteries of tests at

the work place itself which would serve for social selection. Much

could be done to make skill testing objective, e.g., allowing only

the operation of specific machines or systems to be tested. Tests of

typing (measured according to speed, number of errors, and whether or

not the typist can work from dictation), operation of an accounting

system or of a hydraulic crane, driving, coding into COBOL, etc., can

easily be made objective.

 

In fact, many of the true skills which are of practical importance

can be so tested. And for the purposes of manpower-management a test

of a current skill level is much more useful than the information

that a person—twenty years ago—satisfied his teacher in a curriculum

where typing, stenography, and accounting were taught. The very need

for official skill testing can, of course, be questioned: I

personally believe that freedom from undue hurt to a man's reputation

through labeling is better guaranteed by restricting than by

forbidding tests of competence.

 

Peer Matching

At their worst, schools gather classmates into the same room and

subject them to the same sequence of treatment in math, citizenship,

and spelling. At their best, they permit each student to choose one

of a limited number of courses. In any case, groups of peers form

around the goals of teachers. A desirable educational system would

let each person specify the activity for which he seeks a peer.

 

School does offer children an opportunity to escape their homes and

meet new friends. But, at the same time, this process indoctrinates

children with the idea that they should select their friends from

among those with whom they are put together. Providing the young from

their earliest age with invitations to meet, evaluate, and seek out

others would prepare them for a lifelong interest in seeking new

partners for new endeavors.

 

A good chess player is always glad to find a close match, and one

novice to find another. Clubs serve their purpose. People who want to

discuss specific books or articles would probably pay to find

discussion partners. People who want to play games, go on excursions,

build fish tanks, or motorize bicycles will go to considerable

lengths to find peers. The reward for their efforts is finding those

peers. Good schools try to bring out the common interests of their

students registered in the same program. The inverse of school would

be an institution which increases the chances that persons who at a

given moment share the same specific interest could meet—no matter

what else they have in common.

 

Skill teaching does not provide equal benefits for both parties, as

does the matching of peers. The teacher of skills, as I have pointed

out, must usually be offered some incentive beyond the rewards of

teaching. Skill teaching is a matter of repeating drills over and is,

in fact, all the more dreary for those pupils who need it most. A

skill exchange needs currency or credits or other tangible incentives

in order to operate, even if the exchange itself were to generate a

currency of its own. A peer-matching system requires no such

incentives, but only a communications network.

 

Tapes, retrieval-systems, programmed instruction, and reproduction of

shapes and sounds tend to reduce the need for recourse to human

teachers of many skills; they increase the efficiency of teachers and

the number of skills one can pick up in a lifetime. Parallel to this

runs an increased need to meet people interested in enjoying the

newly acquired skill. A student who has picked up Greek before her

vacation would like to discuss in Greek Cretan politics when she

returns. A Mexican in New York wants to find other readers of the

paper Siempre—or of " Los Asachados, " the most popular political

cartoons. Somebody else wants to meet peers who—like himself—would

like to increase interest in the work of James Baldwin or of Bolivar.

 

The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user

would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity

for which he seeks a peer. A computer would send him back the names

and addresses of all those who have inserted the same description. It

is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad

scale for publicly valued activity.

 

In its most rudimentary form, communication between client and

computer could be done by return mail. In big cities, typewriter

terminals could provide instantaneous responses. The only way to

retrieve a name and address from the computer would be to list an

activity for which a peer is sought. People using the system would

become known only to their potential peers.

 

A complement to the computer could be a network of bulletin boards

and classified newspaper ads, listing the activities for which the

computer could not produce a match. No names would have to be given.

Interested readers would then introduce their names into the system.

A publicly supported peer-match network might be the only way to

guarantee the right of free assembly and to train people in the

exercise of this most fundamental civic activity.

 

The right of free assembly has been politically recognized and

culturally accepted. We should now understand that this right is

curtailed by laws that make some forms of assembly obligatory. This

is especially the case with institutions which conscript according to

age-group, class, or sex, and which are very time-consuming. The army

is one example. School is an even more outrageous one.

 

To de-school means to abolish the power of one person to oblige

another person to attend a meeting. It also means recognizing the

right of any person, of any age or sex, to call a meeting. This right

has been drastically diminished by the institutionalization of

meetings. " Meeting " originally referred to the result of an

individual's act of gathering. Now it refers to the institutional

product of some agency.

 

The ability of service institutions to acquire clients has far

outgrown the ability of individuals to be heard independently of

institutional media, which respond to individuals only if they are

salable news. Peer-matching facilities should be available for

individuals who want to bring people together as easily as the

village bell called the villagers to council. School buildings—of

doubtful value for conversion to other uses—could often serve this

purpose.

 

The school system, in fact, may soon face a problem which churches

have faced before: what to do with surplus space emptied by the

defection of the faithful. Schools are as difficult to sell as

temples. One way to provide for their continued use would be to give

over the space to people from the neighborhood. Each could state what

he would do in the classroom and when—and a bulletin board would

bring the available programs to the attention of the inquirers.

Access to " class " would be free—or purchased with educational

vouchers. The " teacher " could even be paid according to the number of

pupils whom he could attract for any full two-hour period. I can

imagine that very young leaders and great educators would be the two

types most prominent in such a system. The same approach could be

taken toward higher education. Students could be furnished with

educational vouchers which entitle them for ten hours yearly private

consultation with the teacher of their choice—and, for the rest of

their learning, depend on the library, the peer-matching network, and

apprenticeships.

 

We must, of course, recognize the probability that such public

matching devices would be abused for exploitative and immoral

purposes, just as the telephone and the mails have been so abused. As

with those networks, there must be some protection. I have proposed

elsewhere[3] a matching system which would allow only pertinent

printed information, plus the name and address of the inquirer to be

used. Such a system would be virtually fool-proof against abuse.

Other arrangements could allow the addition of any book, film, TV

program, or other item quoted from a special catalogue. Concern with

the dangers should not make us lose sight of the far greater benefits.

 

Some who share my concern for free speech and assembly will argue

that peer-matching is an artificial means of bringing people together

and would not be used by the poor—who most need it. Some people get

genuinely agitated when mention is made of creating ad-hoc encounters

which are not rooted in the life of a local community. Others react

when mention is made of using a computer to sort and match client-

identified interests. People cannot be drawn together in such an

impersonal manner, they say. Common inquiry must be rooted in a

history of shared experience at many levels, and must grow out of

this experience—or in the development of neighborhood institutions,

for example.

 

I sympathize with these objections, but I think they miss my point as

well as their own. In the first place, the return to neighborhood

life as the primary center of creative expression might actually work

against the reestablishment of neighborhoods as political units.

Centering demands on the neighborhood may, in fact, neglect an

important liberating aspect of urban life—the ability of a person to

participate simultaneously in several peer groups. Also, there is an

important sense in which people who have never lived together in a

physical community may have occasionally far more experiences to

share than those who have known each other from childhood. The great

religions have always recognized the importance of far-off encounters

and the faithful have always found freedom through them: pilgrimage,

monasticism, the mutual support of temples and sanctuaries reflect

this awareness. Peer-matching could significantly help in making

explicit the many potential but suppressed communities of the city.

 

Local communities are valuable. They are also a vanishing reality as

men progressively let service institutions define their circles of

social relationship. Milton Kotler in his recent book[4] has shown

that the imperialism of " downtown " deprives the neighborhood of its

political significance. The protectionist attempt to resurrect the

neighborhood as a cultural unit only supports this bureaucratic

imperialism. Far from artificially removing men from their local

contexts to join abstract groupings, peer-matching should encourage

the restoration of local life to cities from which it is now

disappearing. A man who recovers his initiative to call his fellows

into meaningful conversation may cease to settle for being separated

from them by office protocol or suburban etiquette. Having once seen

that doing things together depends on deciding to do so, men may even

insist that their local communities become more open to creative

political exchange.

 

We must recognize that city life tends to become immensely costly as

city-dwellers must be taught to rely for every one of their needs on

complex institutional services. It is extremely expensive to keep it

even minimally livable. Peer-matching in the city could be a first

step toward breaking down the dependence of citizens on bureaucratic

civic services.

 

It would also be an essential step to providing new means of

establishing public trust. In a schooled society we have come to rely

more and more on the professional judgment of educators on the effect

of their own work in order to decide whom we can or cannot trust: we

go to the doctor, lawyer, or psychologist because we trust that

anybody with the amount of specialized educational treatment by other

colleagues deserves our confidence.

 

In a de-schooled society professionals could no longer claim the

trust of their clients on the basis of their curricular pedigree, or

ensure their standing by simply, referring their clients to other

professionals who approve of their schooling. Instead of placing

trust in professionals it should be possible, at any time, for any

potential client to consult with other experienced clients of a

professional about their satisfaction with him by means of another

peer network easily set up by computer, or by a number of other

means. Such networks can be seen as public utilities which permit

students to choose their teachers or patients their healers.

 

Professional Educators

As citizens have new choices, new chances for learning, their

willingness to seek leadership should increase. We may expect that

they will experience more deeply both their own independence and

their need for guidance. As they are liberated from manipulation by

others, they learn to profit from the discipline others have acquired

in a lifetime. De-schooling education should increase—rather than

stifle—the search for men with practical wisdom who are willing to

sustain the newcomer on his educational adventure. As teachers

abandon their claim to be superior informants or skill-models, their

claim to superior wisdom will begin to ring true.

 

With an increasing demand for teachers, their supply should also

increase. As the schoolmaster vanishes, the conditions arise which

should bring forth the vocation of the independent educator. This may

seem almost a contradiction in terms, so thoroughly have schools and

teachers become complementary. Yet this is exactly what the

development of the first three educational exchanges would tend to

produce—and what would be required to permit their full exploitation—

for parents and other " natural educators " need guidance, individual

learners need assistance, and the networks need people to operate

them.

 

Parents need guidance in guiding their children on the road that

leads to responsible educational independence. Learners need

experienced leadership when they encounter rough terrain. These two

needs are quite distinct: the first is a need for pedagogy, the

second for intellectual leadership in all other fields of knowledge.

The first calls for knowledge of human learning and of educational

resources, the second for wisdom based on experience in any kind of

exploration. Both kinds of experience are indispensable for effective

educational endeavor. Schools package these functions into one role—

and render the independent exercise of any of them if not

disreputable at least suspect.

 

Three types of special educational competence should in fact be

distinguished: one to create and operate the kinds of educational

exchanges or networks outlined here; another to guide students and

parents in the use of these networks; and a third to act as primus

inter pares in undertaking difficult intellectual exploratory

journeys. Only the former two can be conceived of as branches of an

independent profession: educational administrators or pedagogical

counselors. To design and operate the networks I have been describing

would not require many people, but it would require people with the

most profound understanding of education and administration, in a

perspective quite different from and even opposed to that of schools.

 

While an independent educational profession of this kind would

welcome many people whom the schools exclude, it would also exclude

many whom the schools qualify. The establishment and operation of

educational networks would require some designers and administrators,

but not in the numbers or of the type required by the administration

of schools. Student discipline, public relations, hiring,

supervising, and firing teachers would have neither place nor

counterpart in the networks I have been describing. Neither would

curriculum-making, text-book purchasing, the maintenance of grounds

and facilities or the supervision of interscholastic athletic

competition. Nor would child custody, lesson planning, and record

keeping, which now take up so much of the time of teachers, figure in

the operation of educational networks. Instead the operation of

networks would require some of the skills and attitudes now expected

from the staff of a museum, a library, an executive employment

agency, or a maître d'hôtel.

 

Today's educational administrators are concerned with controlling

teachers and students to the satisfaction of others—trustees,

legislatures, and corporate executives. Network builders and

administrators would have to demonstrate genius at keeping

themselves, and others, out of people's way, at facilitating

encounters of students, skill models, educational leaders, and

educational objects. Many persons now attracted to teaching are

profoundly authoritarian and would not be able to assume this task:

building educational exchanges would mean making it easy for people—

especially the young—to pursue goals which might contradict the

ideals of the traffic manager who makes the pursuit possible.

Pedagogues, in an unschooled world, would also come into their own,

and be able to do what frustrated teachers pretend to pursue today.

 

If the networks I have described can emerge, the educational path of

each student would be his own to follow, and only in retrospect would

it take on the features of a recognizable program. The wise student

would periodically seek professional advice: assistance to set a new

goal, insight into difficulties encountered, choice between possible

methods. Even now, most persons would admit that the important

services their teachers have rendered them are such advice or

counsel, given at a chance meeting or in a tutorial.

 

While network administrators would concentrate primarily on the

building and maintenance of roads providing access to resources, the

pedagogue would help the student to find the path which for him could

lead fastest to his goal. If a student wants to learn spoken

Cantonese from a Chinese neighbor, the pedagogue would be available

to judge their proficiency, and to help them select the textbook and

methods most suitable to their talents, character, and the time

available for study. He can counsel the would-be airplane mechanic on

finding the best places for apprenticeship. He can recommend books to

somebody who wants to find challenging peers to discuss African

history. Like the network administrator, the pedagogical counselor

conceives of himself as a professional educator. Access to either

could be gained by individuals through the use of educational

vouchers.

 

The role of the educational initiator or leader, the master or " true "

leader, is somewhat more elusive than that of the professional

administrator or pedagogue. This is so because leadership is itself

hard to define. In practice, an individual is a leader if people

follow his initiative, and become apprentices in his progressive

discoveries. It is hard to amplify this definition except in the

light of personal values or preference. Frequently, this involves a

prophetic vision of entirely new standards—quite understandable today—

in which present " wrong " will turn out to be " right. " In a society

which would honor the right to call assemblies through peer-matching,

the ability to take educational initiative on a specific subject

would be as wide as access to learning itself. But, of course, there

is a vast difference between the initiative taken by someone to call

a fruitful meeting to discuss this article, and the ability of

someone to provide leadership in the systematic exploration of its

implications.

 

Leadership also does not depend on being right. As Thomas Kuhn points

out, in a period of constantly changing paradigms most of the very

distinguished leaders are bound to be proven wrong by the test of

hindsight. Intellectual leadership does depend on superior

intellectual discipline and imagination, and the willingness to

associate with others in their exercise. A learner, for example, may

think that there is an analogy between the US antislavery movement or

the Cuban Revolution and what is happening in Harlem. The educator

who is himself a historian can show him how to appreciate the flaws

in such an analogy. He may retrace his own steps as a historian. He

may invite the learner to participate in his own research. In both

cases he will apprentice his pupil in a critical art—which is rare in

school—and which money or other favors cannot buy.

 

The relationship of master and disciple is not restricted to

intellectual discipline. It has its counterpart in the arts, in

physics, in religion, in psychoanalysis, and in pedagogy. It fits

mountainclimbing, silverworking and politics, cabinetmaking and

personnel administration. What is common to all true master-pupil

relationships is the awareness both share that their relationship is

literally priceless—and in very different ways a privilege for both.

 

Charlatans, demagogues, clowns, proselytizers, corrupt masters and

simoniacal priests, tricksters, miracle-workers, and messiahs have

proven capable of assuming leadership roles and thus show the dangers

of any dependence of a disciple on the master. Different societies

have taken different measures to defend themselves against these

counterfeit teachers. Indians relied on caste-lineage, eastern Jews

on the spiritual lineage of rabbis, high periods of Christianity on

an exemplary life of monastic virtue, other periods on hierarchical

orders. Our society relies on certification by schools. It is

doubtful that this procedure provides a better screening, but if it

should be claimed that it does, then the counterclaim can be made

that it does so at the cost of making discipleship almost vanish.

 

In practice, there will always be a fuzzy line between the teacher of

skills and the educational leaders identified above, and there are no

practical reasons why access to some leaders could not be gained by

discovering the " master " in the drill-teacher who introduces students

to his discipline.

 

On the other hand, what characterizes the true master-disciple

relationship is its priceless character. Aristotle speaks of it as

a " moral type of friendship, which is not on fixed terms: it makes a

gift, or does whatever it does, as to a friend. " Thomas Aquinas says

of this kind of teaching that inevitably it is an act of love and

mercy. This kind of teaching is always a luxury for the teacher and a

form of leisure (in Greek, " scholé " ) for him and his pupil: an

activity meaningful for both—having no ulterior purpose.

 

To rely for true intellectual leadership on the desire of gifted

people to provide it is obviously necessary even in our society, but

it could not be made into a policy now. We must first construct a

society in which personal acts themselves reacquire a value higher

than that of making things and manipulating people.[5] In such a

society exploratory, inventive, creative teaching would logically be

counted among the most desirable forms of leisurely " unemployment. "

But we do not have to wait until the advent of utopia. Even now one

of the most important consequences of de-schooling and the

establishment of peer-matching facilities would be the initiative

which " masters " could take to assemble congenial disciples. It would

also—as we have seen—provide ample opportunity for potential

disciples to share information or to select a master.

 

Schools are not the only institutions which pervert professions by

packaging roles. Hospitals render home-care increasingly impossible—

and then justify hospitalization as a benefit to the sick. At the

same time the doctor's legitimacy and ability to work increasingly

come to depend on his association with a hospital, even though he is

still less totally dependent on it than are teachers on schools. The

same could be said about courts which overcrowd their calendars as

new transactions acquire legal solemnity—and thus delay justice. Or

it could be said about churches, which succeed in making a captive

profession out of a free vocation. The result in each case is scarce

service at higher cost; and greater income to the less competent

members of the profession.

 

So long as the older professions monopolize, superior income and

prestige it is difficult to reform them. The profession of the

schoolteacher should be easier to reform, and not only because it is

of more recent origin. The educational profession now claims a

comprehensive monopoly; it claims the exclusive competence to

apprentice not only its own novices but those of other professions as

well. This overexpansion renders it vulnerable to any profession

which would reclaim the right to teach its own apprentices.

Schoolteachers are overwhelmingly badly paid and frustrated by the

tight control of the school system. The most enterprising and gifted

among them would probably find more congenial work, more

independence, and even higher incomes by specializing as skill

models, network administrators, or guidance specialists.

 

Finally, the dependence of the registered student on the certified

teacher can be broken more easily than his dependence on other

professionals—for instance, that of a hospitalized patient on his

doctor. If schools ceased to be compulsory, teachers who find their

satisfaction in the exercise of pedagogical authority in the

classroom would be left only with pupils who are attracted by their

style. The disestablishment of our present professional structure

could begin with the dropping out of the schoolteacher.

 

The disestablishment of schools will inevitably happen—and it will

happen surprisingly fast. It cannot be retarded very much longer and

it is hardly necessary to vigorously promote it, for this is being

done now. What is worthwhile is to try to orient it in a hopeful

direction, for it could take place in two diametrically opposed ways.

 

The first would be the expansion of the mandate of the pedagogue and

his increasing control over society even outside school. With the

best of intentions and simply by expanding the rhetoric now used in

school, the present crisis in the schools could provide educators

with an excuse to use all the networks of contemporary society to

funnel their messages to us—for our own good. De-schooling, which we

cannot stop, could mean the advent of a " brave new world " dominated

by well-intentioned administrators of programmed instruction.

 

On the other hand, the growing awareness on the part of governments,

as well as of employers, taxpayers, enlightened pedagogues, and

school administrators, that graded curricular teaching for

certification has become harmful could offer large masses of people

an extraordinary opportunity: that of preserving the right of equal

access to the tools both of learning and of sharing with others what

they know or believe. But this would require that the educational

revolution be guided by certain goals.

 

1.) To liberate access to things by abolishing the control which

persons and institutions now exercise over their educational values.

 

2.) To liberate the sharing of skills by guaranteeing freedom to

teach or exercise them on request.

 

3.) To liberate the critical and creative resources of people by

returning to individual persons the ability to call and hold

meetings: an ability now increasingly monopolized by institutions

which claim to speak for the people.

 

4.) To liberate the individual from the obligation to shape his

expectations to the services offered by any established profession—by

providing him with the opportunity to draw on the experience of his

peers and to entrust himself to the teacher, guide, adviser, or

healer of his choice.

 

Inevitably de-schooling of society blurs the distinctions between

economics, education, and politics on which the stability of the

present world order and the stability of nations now rests.

 

In addition to the tentative conclusions of the Carnegie Commission

reports, the last year has brought forth a series of important

documents which show that responsible people are becoming aware of

the fact that schooling for certification cannot continue to be

counted upon as the central educational device of a modern society.

Julius Nyere of Tanzania has announced plans to integrate education

with the life of the village. In Canada, the Wright Commission on

post-secondary education has reported that no known system of formal

education could provide equal opportunities for the citizens of

Ontario. The president of Peru has accepted the recommendation of his

commission on education, which proposes to abolish free schools in

favor of free educational opportunities provided throughout life. In

fact he is reported to have insisted that this program proceed slowly

at first in order to keep teachers in school and out of the way of

true educators.

 

What has happened is that some of the boldest and most imaginative

public leaders find their insights into school failures matching

those of radical free spirits (for example, Paul Goodman) who only a

few years ago were seen as " anarchic. " More programmatic radicals, on

the other hand, often simply seek to obtain control over schools and

other teaching media and thus only strengthen the certification

system.

 

The alternative to social control through the schools is the

voluntary participation in society through networks which provide

access to all its resources for learning. In fact these networks now

exist, but they are rarely used for educational purposes. The crisis

of schooling, if it is to have any positive consequence, will

inevitably lead to their incorporation into the educational process.

Email to a friend

 

Notes

[1] " Schooling: The Ritual of Progress, " NYR, December 3, 1970.

 

[2] Documentation on the construction, testing, and use of such

machines is now in preparation at CIDOC.

 

[3] " Why We Must Abolish Schooling, " NYR, July 2, 1970.

 

[4] Neighborhood Governments: The Local Foundations of Political

Life, Bobbs-Merrill, 1969.

 

[5] For a fuller discussion of these distinctions, see my forthcoming

book, De-Schooling Society.

 

 

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10701