Benjamin Riley
October 18, 2012

Benjamin Riley

Benjamin Riley

People who intendance about California'southward children watched in horror this week equally the boxing between Governor Chocolate-brown and Molly Munger over their dueling education initiatives descended into a Hobbesian state of war of all against all (with most of the "all" firmly in the governor's camp). Brown'south Proffer 30, already barely above fifty per centum in the polls, now faces $xxx million in "funded opposition" from Munger and thus the very existent prospect of failing at the ballot box. If that happens, and if Munger's favored Suggestion 38 also does non pass (which seems all simply certain), the resulting budget cuts to pedagogy would seem to ensure that  California's students volition face a time to come that is poor, nasty, hardhearted, and – given the possible truncating of the school year to an indefensible 160 days – extremely short.

Yet it's not Thomas Hobbes but another, more obscure philosopher named Ivan Illich who'southward been on my mind lately. If you've never heard of Illich, y'all're not lone, but forty years ago he wrote a provocative tract titled "Deschooling Guild." Illich's basic thesis – to the extent one tin be discerned from his fascinating but very rambling postmodernist essay – is that the institutionalization of schools leads to the "institutionalization of values." That in turn conflates the process of schooling with the substance of what schools are supposed to attain (learning). Equally a effect, "the student is thereby 'schooled' to confuse education with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new."

To combat this, Illich urged the "disestablishment" of formal schools in favor of a variety of decentralized learning possibilities, including the cosmos of breezy computer-based learning webs to lucifer students with experts; allowing learners to experiment with educational artifacts in laboratories and tool shops; providing skill credit (such as badges) for learning for mastery of specific tasks, such every bit calculator programming; and providing educational games to receptive students.

What's remarkable is that many of Illich's ideas conceptualize those that are relevant to education today, particularly around the growing use of technology to "personalize" learning. For instance, Joel Rose, the founder of New York City's "School of One," echoes Illich'southward schoolhouse-industrialization critique when he (Rose) calls for an cease to the "nineteenth-century manufactory-era model education system." Similarly, compare Michael Horn of Innosight Institute's definition of blended learning, which involves more than student control "over time, place, path, and/or footstep" of learning, with this passage from Illich:

The changed of school is possible: that we tin depend on self-motivated learning instead of employing teachers to bribe or compel the student to find the time and the will to learn; that nosotros can provide the learner with new links to the earth instead of continuing to funnel all educational programs through the teacher.

Bang-up for someone writing in 1971. Of form, Illich besides proposed creating an extensive network of trails connecting villagers in Peru by means of 3-wheeled mechanical donkeys – suffice it to say that idea has yet to catch on.

Merely the existent reason to read Ivan Illich is that his philosophical musings on the nature and role of school in our club inform the views of none other than Governor Brown. Lest in that location be any doubt, compare this (admittedly somewhat arcane) abbreviated passage from a radio interview Brown conducted of Illich in 1996:

Brown: And then Deschooling was based on the insight that the schoolhouse industry teaches people, not teaches them but manipulates them, into thinking that they have certain needs that the school itself alone can satisfy?

Illich: Schooling, which nosotros engage in and supposedly creates equal opportunities, has get the unique, never before attempted manner of dividing the whole society into classes. Everybody knows in which level of his twelve or 16 years of schooling he has dropped out, and in addition knows what price tag is attached to the higher schooling he has gotten.

Chocolate-brown: And then you get a precise definition of where y'all are in the social hierarchy past how much schooling yous had or how much schooling you don't have, then you lot didn't know you needed fourteen years and a postgraduate degree to get out of high school depending upon where yous lived.

Illich: It'southward a history of degrading the majority of people.

Chocolate-brown: So you accept somebody who'due south poor and y'all modernize the poverty by non only having a person that doesn't have a lot of material goods but now lacks the mental self-confidence that his father or grandfather had earlier that.

Although this interview took identify xvi years ago, I debate Illich's thoughts on the role of schools and education provide the closest thing nosotros have to a "Rosetta Stone" to agreement Governor Brown'southward arroyo to instruction policy. This is not to say Chocolate-brown agrees with every radical idea Illich proposed – far from it. Rather, Illich's philosophical skepticism of the school as an institution helps illuminate why Chocolate-brown would exist skeptical of certain instruction reforms that he perceives every bit "technocratic" – teacher evaluation and data-driven educational activity come to mind – while simultaneously embracing others, such online instruction and charters, that permit for new approaches to student learning.

Which brings us back to the November election and the governor'due south duel with Molly Munger. Make no error, like anybody else who cares about California's schools and students, I hope the voters pass Proposition thirty to foreclose further fiscal Armageddon. Should California voters decide otherwise, nevertheless, my promise is that the resulting crisis might finally provoke a serious effort to dramatically rethink and redesign every attribute of our education system. Though not by pick, we are already "deschooling" in California through budget attrition, and we may shortly need to innovate like never earlier.

Benjamin Riley is the Managing director of Policy and Advocacy at NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit organization that supports education entrepreneurs. Previously, Ben worked as a deputy attorney full general for the California Department of Justice, where he worked primarily on didactics-related matters. He currently lives in Washington, D.C. simply will 1 day return to the Golden State.

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