Monday 15 June 2020

homeschooling and deschooling

We've had to do a lot of homeschooling these last weeks:
Lockdown homeschooling: The parents who have forgotten what they learned at school - BBC News
'Some days it's over by 11am': schooling under lockdown around the world | World news | The Guardian
How to homeschool your children during the coronavirus lockdown | World Economic Forum
"I've been brought to tears": Parents' lockdown homeschooling stories
How Are Parents Coping with Homeschooling During Lockdown? | Psychreg
Home schooling my kids in lockdown has been a horror | Metro News

This blog has looked at the phenomenon before:
Jay Doubleyou: homeschooling more popular in uk
Jay Doubleyou: education happens beyond the classroom

And it's looked at someone who was never a big fan of school:
Jay Doubleyou: deschooling society

Here's a strange little video:



The Pinky Show - Scary School Nightmare - YouTube

And here's the same text:

Ivan Illich: deschooling, conviviality and lifelong learning



Ivan Illich: deschooling, conviviality and lifelong learning. Known for his critique of modernization and the corrupting impact of institutions, Ivan Illich’s concern with deschooling, learning webs and the disabling effect of professions has struck a chord among many informal educators. We explore key aspects of his theory and his continuing relevance for informal education and lifelong learning.

contents: introduction · early life · ivan illich and cidoc · later work and life · ivan illich on institutionalization and commodification · illich’s convivial alternative · conclusion · further reading and references · links

"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 endeavour 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." Ivan Illich Deschooling Society (1973: 9)

Ivan Illich (1926 – 2002) rose to fame in the 1970s with a series of brilliant, short, polemical, books on major institutions of the industrialized world. They explored the functioning and impact of ‘education’ systems (Deschooling Society), technological development (Tools for Conviviality), energy, transport and economic development(Energy and Equity), medicine (Medical Nemesis), and work (The Right to Useful Unemployment and its Professional Enemies; and Shadow Work). Ivan Illich’s lasting contribution was a dissection of these institutions and a demonstration of their corruption. Institutions like schooling and medicine had a tendency to end up working in ways that reversed their original purpose. Illich was later to explore gender, literacy and pain. However, his work was the subject of attack from both the left and right. In the case of the former, for example, his critique of the disabling effect of many of the institutions of welfare state was deeply problematic. From the 1980s on he became something of a forgotten figure, although there were always a number of writers and practitioners in the fields he wrote about who found significant possibility in his analysis. Andrew Todd and Franco La Cecla (2002) have commented that his great contribution was as an archaeologist of ideas, ‘someone who helped us to see the present in a truer and richer perspective’. In this piece we examine his legacy.


Ivan Illich: deschooling, conviviality and lifelong learning – infed.org:
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