We think that school is very important and is the key to our prosperity. Yet all around is is evidence that it is not doing well. We blame everything and everyone other than the system itself. More than 30% of boys can't cope with school. Why? We say they have ADD and medicate them. More than 40% of students graduate from Canadian schools unable to really read and write. Why? We say that classes are too large. We know that collaboration is essential to solve todays very complex problems but in spite of knowing this we cannot do it. Why? We say that we are not trying hard enough.
In this brilliant essay by Ivan Illich, he points the finger at the school system itself. It's not about the teachers per se or funding but the system and its cultural bias. Illich advocates the need for a revolution.
"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"
11:53:55 AM 
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