A radical alternative to a schooled society requires not only new formal mechanisms for the formal acquisition of skills and their educational use. A deschooled society implies a new approach to incidental or informal education

3. Peer-matching – a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.

1. Reference services to educational objects – which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories and showrooms like museums and theatres; others can be in daily use in factories, airports or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or on off-hours.

In Deschooling Society Ivan Illich argued that a good education system should have three purposes: to provide all that want to learn with access to resources at any time in their lives; make it possible for all who want to share knowledge etc. to find those who want to learn it from them; and to create opportunities for those who want to present an issue to the public to make their arguments known (1973a: 78). He suggests that four (possibly even three, he says) distinct channels or learning exchanges could facilitate this. These he calls educational or learning webs.

In many respects, Ivan Illich is echoing here the arguments of earlier writers like Basil Yeaxlee who recognized the power of association and the importance of local groups and networks in opening up and sustaining learning. However, he takes this a stage further by explicitly advocating new forms of formal educational institutions. He also recognizes that the character of other institutions and arrangements need to be changed if the ‘radical monopoly’ of schooling is to be overturned.

I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members.

perhaps the most significant problem with the analysis is the extent to which Illich’s critique ‘overrated the possibilities of schools, particularly compared with the influence of families, television and advertising, and job and housing structures’ (Lister 1976: 10-11). This was something that Ivan Illich recognized himself when he was later to write of schools as being ‘too easy targets’ (1976: 42).

His criticism evolves in a theoretical vacuum’. Gajardo goes on to suggest that this may explain the limited acceptance of his educational theories and proposals.

The principle of counterproductivity. Finger and Asún (2001: 11) describe this as ‘probably Illich’s most original contribution’. Counterproductivity is the means by which a fundamentally beneficial process or arrangement is turned into a negative one. ‘Once it reaches a certain threshold, the process of institutionalization becomes counterproductive’ (op. cit.). It is an idea that Ivan Illich applies to different contexts. For example, with respect to travel he argues that beyond a critical speed, ‘no one can save time without forcing another to lose it…[and] motorized vehicles create the remoteness which they alone can shrink’ (1974: 42).

Schooling – the production of knowledge, the marketing of knowledge, which is what the school amounts to, draws society into the trap of thinking that knowledge is hygienic, pure, respectable, deodorized, produced by human heads and amassed in stock….. [B]y making school compulsory, [people] are schooled to believe that the self-taught individual is to be discriminated against; that learning and the growth of cognitive capacity, require a process of consumption of services presented in an industrial, a planned, a professional form;… that learning is a thing rather than an activity. A thing that can be amassed and measured, the possession of which is a measure of the productivity of the individual within the society. That is, of his social value. (quoted by Gajardo 1994: 715)

Interest in his ideas within education began to wane. Invitations to speak and to write slackened, and as the numbers of missionaries headed for Latin America fell away, CIDOC began to fade. Illich’s thinking did not resonate with dominant mood in the discourses of northern education systems. At a time when there was increasing centralized control, an emphasis on nationalized curricula, and a concern to increase the spread of the bureaucratic accreditation of learning, his advocacy of deinstitutionalization (deschooling) and more convivial forms of education was hardly likely to make much ground.

In 1951 he completed his PhD at the University of Salzburg (an exploration of the nature of historical knowledge). One of the intellectual legacies of this period was a developing understanding of the institutionalization of the church in the 13th century – and this helped to form and inform his later critique.

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)