What it does
Brings children together in graded classes under certified teachers, for a set number of years, to prepare them for work and (occasionally, still) citizenship.
Where it stops
It doesn’t stop at teaching. Illich argued that institutional schooling teaches its pupils to confuse being taught with learning, moving up a grade with being educated, and a diploma with competence, until they cannot imagine learning without these rituals.
How easily you can stop using it
Hard, without a parent or guardian’s intervention. Attendance is legally required in most places for a set number of years. Employers and universities use the credential as a gate while also discounting its value. Leaving early without a diploma can block access to work.
What is scored
- The unit: Schooling that children are required by law to attend: graded classes, certified teachers, a set number of years, and the credential at the end. Left out: learning outside school, and the reading and writing school certifies (see Imposed literacy).
- The job it is tested against: Preparing children for work and for citizenship, which is what it promises. We have not gathered evidence on whether it does this reliably. It is scored as doing its job because nearly every employer and university relies on its credential; that is a weak test, and an open question.
- Where and when: Illich’s argument of 1971, about rich countries and those copying them. None of the scores has been checked against current evidence.
School is best-known of Illich’s bad examples, and the one he built a whole book on. It belongs in the catalogue because it shows how a tool can fail without anyone intending it to. School is also how literacy is imposed and certified: see Literacy.
What Illich saw
In Deschooling Society (1971; chapter 2, “Phenomenology of School”) he argued that the school’s hidden lesson matters more than the curriculum: it teaches people to value institutional processes over the things they were meant to produce. He proposed replacing the school with what he called learning webs (chapter 6), ways for people to find each other, tools, and materials directly. That proposal is more speculative than his diagnosis, and this record does not rely on it.
The six balances
Scored as set out in How to evaluate tools. Tested against its promise to prepare children for work and citizenship, school is scored as doing its job, on weak evidence (see “What is scored”), so the scoring starts from the six balances. These scores follow Illich’s argument. They are not yet checked against current evidence.
- Biological degradation: 0. Not yet assessed.
- Radical monopoly: 2. Attendance is required by law, and the diploma is a gate to work. Learning by other routes does not count.
- Overprogramming: 2. Illich’s defining case: school teaches people to confuse being taught with learning.
- Polarization: 2. On Illich’s account, schooling grades people for life and marks those who leave early as failures.
- Obsolescence: 1. A credential loses value as more people hold it, so the same job asks for more years of school.
- Frustration: 1. Ten or more years of required attendance, for a credential that employers also discount.
Where the threshold falls
Past the second watershed, at 90. Three balances score 2, and any balance at 2 puts a tool past the limit: 70, plus 2.5 for each of the eight points in its total.
This record places compulsory schooling past the second watershed, following Illich. It is a reading of his argument, not a finding. Whether schools today (or any particular school) deserve that placement turns on additional questions.
Open questions
- Which parts of schooling are convivial in Illich’s sense (a library, a teacher who can be chosen, a workshop) and which are the compulsory institution?
- What does the evidence on home education, unschooling, and open online learning say about how well his alternatives work?
- Illich’s own later view of the book is complicated. What did he change his mind about?
Sources
- Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
- Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality.