Updated: 12/27/05; 7:59:20 AM.
Connectivity: Spike Hall's RU Weblog
News, clips, comments on knowledge, knowledge-making, education, weblogging, philosophy, systems and ecology.
        

 Monday, February 14, 2005
Summary: Ivan Illich , more than thirty years ago, had much to say about educational Reform. His analysis, excerpted below, makes clear how much his and  John Taylor Gatto's  analyses overlap. His recommendations seem to directly address the issues of involvement, community and relationship which are missing in their high and positive forms, in the ennumbing schools that Gatto so accurately and poignantly derides.

Illich said[bracketed material is mine, SPH]:

"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.

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 facilitateaccess to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of thesethings can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rentalagencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters; otherscan be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but madeavailable to students as apprentices or on off-hours. [Stephen Downes' Old Daily has numerous mentions of
    just such entities. See Downes essay for a comprehensive start.]
  2. Skill Exchanges[~]which permit persons to list their skills,the conditions under which they are willing to serve as models forothers who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which theycan be reached.
  3. Peer Matching[~]a communication network which permits personsto describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in thehope of finding a partner for the inquiry.
  4. Reference Services to Educators-at-large[~]who can be listedin a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions ofprofessionals, para-professionals, and free-lancers, along withconditions of access to their services. Such educators, as we will see,could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients."
[via Dave Pollard's How to Save the World]
---------

   
An Epitaph of sorts was penned for Illich just after his death in November 2002
"Ivan Illich

This is as good a manifesto as any:
"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 restricts 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."

From Deschooling Society, by Ivan Illich, who died Monday in Germany.
By Unknown, November, 2002 as penned into Stephen's Web



Online Illich Resources;

Summary: Mark Twain long ago tweaked that which should be tweaked again. Our blindness to our own hypocrisy. That is, because we do not apply our critical facilities enough -it is, after all, rather inconvenient to do so--we escape the inconvenient reminder of our own tendency to lie, lie and then lie some more. In order to come to this disturbing awareness we have to distinguish between the verbal lie, "I did not chop down the cherry tree", which would have been Washington's untruth, had he told it, and the "lie" of silent assertion.

 [Mark Twain is writing here. In the paragraphs immediately preceding these he points out the difference between the verbal lie and the silent lie. He continues.] "...If they arrived at that truth it probably grieved them--did, if they had been heedlessly and ignorantly educated by their books and teachers; for why should a person grieve over a thing which by the eternal law of his make he cannot help?  He didn't invent the law; it is merely his business to obey it and keep still; join the universal conspiracy and keep so still that he shall deceive his fellow-conspirators into imagining that he doesn't know that the law exists.  It is what we all do--we that know.  I am speaking of the lie of silent assertion; we can tell it without saying a word, and we all do it--we that know.  In the magnitude of its territorial spread it is one of the most majestic lies that the civilizations make it their sacred and anxious care to guard and watch and propagate.

    For instance.  It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember that in the early days of the emancipation agitation in the North the agitators got but small help or countenance from any one.  Argue and plead and pray as they might, they could not break the universal stillness that reigned, from pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society--the clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent assertion--the silent assertion that there wasn't anything going on in which humane and intelligent people were interested.

    From the beginning of the Dreyfus case to the end of it all France, except a couple of dozen moral paladins, lay under the smother of the silent-assertion lie that no wrong was being done to a persecuted and unoffending man.  The like smother was over England lately, a good half of the population silently letting on that they were not aware that Mr. Chamberlain was trying to manufacture a war in South Africa and was willing to pay fancy prices for the materials.

    Now there we have instances of three prominent ostensible civilizations working the silent-assertion lie.  Could one find other instances in the three countries?  I think so.  Not so very many perhaps, but say a billion--just so as to keep within bounds.  Are those countries working that kind of lie, day in and day out, in thousands and thousands of varieties, without ever resting?  Yes, we know that to be true.  The universal conspiracy of the silent-assertion lie is hard at work always and everywhere, and always in the interest of a stupidity or a sham, never in the interest of a thing fine or respectable.  Is it the most timid and shabby of all lies?  It seems to have the look of it.  For ages and ages it has mutely laboured in the interest of despotisms and aristocracies and chattel slaveries, and military slaveries, and religious slaveries, and has kept them alive; keeps them alive yet, here and there and yonder, all about the globe; and will go on keeping them alive until the silent-assertion lie retires from business--the silent assertion that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop [emboldening,  and other tweaking, is mine, SPH].

    What I am arriving at is this: When whole races and peoples conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals?  Why should we try to make it appear that abstention from lying is a virtue? Why should we want to beguile ourselves in that way?  Why should we without shame help the nation lie, and then be ashamed to do a little lying on our own account?  Why shouldn't we be honest and honourable, and lie every time we get a chance?  That is to say, why shouldn't we be consistent, and either lie all the time or not at all?  Why should we help the nation lie the whole day long and then object to telling one little individual private lie in our own interest to go to bed on?  Just for the refreshment of it, I mean, and to take the rancid taste out of our mouth.

["My First Lie and How I Got Out of It", in Twain's Short Stories Vol 2via  EcoPundit ]

When we acquiesce, via a squinting of the eyes or a well-timed turning of the head , to avoid seeing that which is clearly true, we are lying via silent assertion. We do this to avoid the consequence of not squinting or turning our heads or dodging in other ways; the consequence is that we would have to take some level of risk and assert ourselves. In the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes the child, out of naivete' rather than by reason of moral certitude and some degree of bravery, asserts that which all are studiously ignoring, the Emperor has been hoodwinked and is not in fact wearing new clothes. All the others there present were lying by silent assertion (smiling, say) or by exclamation (Oh, la la!!) over the nonexistent clothes.

As Twain pointed out, we do it all the time. We did it in the 19th and 20th centuries and we do it now. We avoid asserting ourselves because we would then be taking a risk, perhaps a significant risk. A case very much in point, and somewhat parallel, is the President Bush' assertion that, in effect, there is no global warming [it's an alarmist's fantasy]. Those of us who do not counter now and counter powerfully, are silently saying that which we KNOW to be false after any sort of consideration of fact, evidence and argument. Some of us stand to benefit greatly by credentialing this lie with our silence (e.g., oil companies, auto companies) others look the other way because to do otherwise would not only be "disrespectful" or "impolite"[the acceptable excuse] but would be taking a risk [the more
likely excuse].

For something closer to the truth than our silent assertion lie (sometimes referred to as denial), way closer to the evidence we have in hand,  read Dave Pollard's recent projections about 2045 at How To Save The World   . Excerpts of his entry are below.
  • "Between now and 2045 the price of oil will whipsaw... we're in for a veryrocky ride. We will learn to conserve, ration, find other ways, some healthy and some (burning coal, wood and nuclear) not, to get energy,and we'll get used to long line-ups followed by brief periods ofsurplus, and regular, lengthy blackouts.
  • The immediate consequences of this instability will be: (a)more political and military intervention by the West to try to control supply and hence prices; (b) the end of low interest rates and lowinflation rates, as the oil price jumps trickle down through everythingwe consume that depends on oil, from food to cars to plastics tofabrics, but again, we'll see these rates whipsaw, and speculating andhedging the sudden up-and-down changes will become a Western obsession;(c) the demise of the US dollar as the dominant currency in favour of amuch more stable combo of the Euro and the proposed new all-Asiancurrency unit, and the subsequent slow but steady decline in the valueof the US dollar; (d) a global economic depression, as living beyondour means catches up to us -- the US and its main suppliers, China andCanada, and suburbs in urban agglomerations worldwide, will be thehardest hit; (e) a crash in stock markets and in Western housingprices, followed by a flood of money from third-world corporations andtheir richest citizens to buy up Western property at fire-sale prices,and then a prohibition on ownership of property by non-residents.
  • By 2045, in the face of this economic tumult, we'll have a New New Deal...people will be working together at both a community and a national and international level to rebuild the economy. Unfortunately, short-term expediency will again dominate ... it will be just one more horrific year for the environment.
  • In 2045 the global footprint, the amount of resources usedby humans as a percent of the planet's ability to regenerate them, willbe about the same as it had been a decade earlier, about 300% (today it is 120%).
  • Famine will have hit in several areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America,...Part of the New New Deal will be the prohibition of using land for animal feed or grazing, and scientists will have already comeup with vegetable-based proteins to substitute for animal proteins[...]
  • The loss of almost all Earth's forests, much of it for theburning of wood for fuel, will have accelerated global warming and made weather enormously unpredictable. ...
  • The first great fresh-water shortages will have hit by2045, following three consecutive very hot years, and fresh water will be rationed. Use of fresh water for non-essential purposes likewatering lawns will be a criminal offense. But although the rationing will hit some industries especially hard, just as the New New Deal was starting to work, the shortage will not be life-threatening.
  • The big corporations of 2005 will mostly still be around in 2045, but mostly by default: Their stranglehold on the economy will have stifled innovation and entrepreneurship through most of the intervening 40 years, until they too fell victim to the Great Depression of the 2030s. [...] The fight over 'squatter's rights' to idle corporate assets still rages in the courts.
  • Nuclear weapons were first deployed in 2015 in a warbetween India and Pakistan, which then exploded into a regional warencompassing the Mideast and seeing the limited use of new nuclearweapons by the US to protect its strategic political and economicinterests there. Since that time they have been used again by the US inwars in Venezuela, Libya, Congo and Indonesia, all ostensibly forpeace-keeping purposes.
  • The United Nations continues to meet in its new headquarters in Brussels, but since the US withdrew in 2010, its power and authority has been greatly diminished.
  • Terrorists from 35 different countries have made attacks on other countries, in addition to the never-ending cycles of civil warthat continue to plague most of the third world. Terrorists attempted to use nuclear weapons on several occasions, but only once (in Indonesia) successfully. International terrorist organizations nowprefer to use biological weapons, which require much less money and no state sanction to develop, and which have successfully been used inattacks on dozens of countries. ...
Can we find the gumption, the deep humanity,  to create the foundation for a future less bleak?


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Spike Hall is an Emeritus Professor of Education and Special Education at Drake University. He teaches most of his classes online. He writes in Des Moines, Iowa.


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