When I suggested, in my post of 27th September, that I hoped that one day school would be no more, I roused the ire of several friends and commentators. For that reason, I plan to spend two or three posts on this subject, to explain more fully my statement and to convince some people that I haven't lost my mind.
When I suggest that no school is better than any school, the reaction is either laughter or disbelief, as if I concocted such an idea one night while imbibing a bottle of gin.
There are three teachers/authors I wish to write about, since all three saw clearly how school is the enemy of education.
The first is Ivan Illich, who wrote a brilliant book in the 1960s, entitled Deschooling Society. He describes how learning can be integrated into society, so that 'school' as we know it would become superfluous. Illich saw our system of education as deeply anti-educational. Given enough resources, he believed that children would become much better educated without the hidden curriculum of school. "Universal education through schooling is not feasible", he maintained. When people reacted to his idea, calling it 'mad', he would reply that sending children into a building to learn what they are not interested in, and yet must obey rules set down by others, is truly mad.
Time is against me today, so I shall leave until next week my post on John Holt and John Taylor Gatto, both worth looking up online. They were forceful opponents of school. Such a pity that the powers that be continue to trudge along the same, wrong path, deaf to such wise, experienced voices.
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ReplyDeleteIt doesn’t surprise me that Ivan Illich’s ideas receive short shrift from the education establishment. Likewise, in a different field, the painstaking research of the late Russian Professor K.P. Buteyko into the cause of chronic disease has yet to be given the attention it deserves from the medical establishment. Even so, what is once thought mad may one day be accepted practice. When Ignaz Semmelweis (1818 – 1865), an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures, suggested that doctors wash their hands before their work, he was thought mad by the medical establishment of the time. The poor man ended up in an asylum.
ReplyDeleteIvan Illich clearly has interesting ideas. What troubles me is that, in or out of school, we are not going to escape being told what to do by someone, and children, however intuitive, are not fully-fledged human beings. They need guidance, unless they are to be flung out of the nest to sink or swim. The Stirling Prize for Architecture this year has just been won by Burntwood School in South London. How much better that one’s children, avid to learn, be taught in such a lovely place, rather than wither in the poor and brutal circumstances into which so many of them are born. "Integrating learning into society" sounds a fine idea, but surely that is where it is already. For school is society’s very answer to education. No one says society is perfect. The better it becomes, the better will become the schooling. One day it may begin to chime with Ivan Illich’s ideas. In the meantime, children need schools, however dreadful our idealist blogger asserts them to be. Such assertions have value: there is always room for improvement! But for every child who hates school, there’s another child longing to get into one. And some of them are not too bad.