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League of Real Nations Male Rites & Feminist Fallacies 'Anti-Fascism' is the New Fascism Greening The Blues Bombers & Burqas A Book Whose Time Has Come Politics of The Forked Tongue A Book Whose Time Has Come by Dr Aidan Rankin Ivan Illich, who was born in 1926 and died late in 2002, was a man of many parts. He was a dissident cleric whose faith, rather than doubt, led him to challenge the Catholic hierarchy. Transplanted as a young man from Vienna and Rome to New York, Puerto Rico and then Mexico, he straddled Old and New Worlds, over-developed and 'developing' societies. A radical, who battled tirelessly and in practical ways for the poor, Illich was also deeply conservative, championing such 'organic' experiences as friendship, conviviality and loyalty to local community, rather than grand design or abstract theory imposed in the name of progress or the greater good of man. Illich was an erudite man, but in his long writing career he gave an intellectual context to the instincts and insights of peasant societies. As such, Illich might have been a pioneer of the green movement, had that movement genuinely transcended 'left' and 'right' wing labels, instead of turning into an encounter group for recycled soixanthuitards.
Illich might not have been a green pioneer (and that was the greens' loss not his), but in Deschooling Society he emerges as a prophet as well as a social chronicler. For he believed that mass education, far from being the harbinger of human progress, reason and opportunity, promised little more than a bureaucratic nightmare. Through mass schooling, and the emphasis on credentials and 'qualifications', valuable skills were being lost, communities broken down and individuals made more dependent on the state on the one hand and corporate consumer culture on the other. Modernist education, to Illich, was a poor substitute for traditional rites of passage for the young.
School is a ritual of initiation which introduces the neophyte to the sacred race of progressive consumption, a ritual of propitiation whose academic priests mediate between the faithful and the gods of privilege and power, a ritual of expiation which sacrifices its dropouts, branding them as scapegoats of underdevelopment. Even those who spend at best a few years in school - and this is the overwhelming majority in Latin America, Asia and Africa - learn to feel guilty because of their underconsumption of schooling.
These are harsh words, delivered with characteristic rhetorical flourish. But events have proved that Illich's thesis has more than an element of truth. In the 'developed' West, the narrow emphasis on academic qualifications has made schooling a miserable, rather than a fulfilling, experience for many young people. Studies of peripheral intellectual or cultural merit are elevated at the expense of craftsmanship and skill - domains of the increasingly marginalized artisan. Inventiveness and creativity are stifled, in favour of conformity and submissiveness. Accumulated wisdom is sacrificed, on the altar of approved 'knowledge'. The academic ideal itself suffers, because the academic curriculum is shorn of intellectual rigour to turn it into a product fit for mass consumption. To Illich, modern education is a game in which there are no winners, except bureaucrats and self-appointed experts.
There is more to schooling, of course, than Illich's bleak vision. However it would have been better if this little squib of a book had received more attention in its day, for it points towards some of the most dangerous and destructive educational trends. The Blair government's daft proposal that half the population should go to university would be recognised by Illich as the fulfilment of his worst prophecy. University is seen, in mystical terms, as an end in itself, whilst in the name of false 'equality', everything that makes university distinctive is undermined. Dumbed-down, mass-access academia is complemented by a growing body of school refuseniks, young people Illich sees as rebels with a cause:
In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance is due to … the fundamental idea common to all schools - the idea that one person's judgement should determine what and when another person must learn.
It would seem to follow from this that Illich would favour 'progressive' schooling, in the form of Summerhill-style experimental schools or non-competitive, mixed ability teaching in state education. But Illich sees such approaches as a chimera. To him the underlying problem is schooling itself and attempts to modify it or 'reform' it are doomed to failure. In this, too, he is prophetic. The progressive educational methods that were coming into vogue when Deschooling Society was written have since congealed into authoritarian dogmas, inimical to creativity and overtly hostile to traditional skills. An admirer of the co-operative, as opposed to centralising, strain of socialist thought, Illich sees schooling as the bureaucratic nationalisation of knowledge. His is a society of autodidacts, where knowledge comes from an infinite variety of sources, and where the transfer of skills between generations, and the apprentice-master relationship, are cherished rather than undermined. Paradoxically, these localised and highly specific forms education is broader in scope than the universalised approaches of modern schooling. They give back to intellectual creativity, as well as artisanship, the value that dumbed-down academic curricula take away. A deschooled society is a more culturally diverse society than one governed by paper qualifications.
Rising skill shortage, alongside the growth of boredom and disaffection in non-academic pupils - and burnout among their academic colleagues - show that Illich was quite right. For green and free-market economists (who are usually at loggerheads), the value of this book lies in his challenge to the idea that big is always better, that more expense always brings better results:
Educators can justify more expensive curricula on the basis of their observation that learning difficulties rise proportionately with the cost of the curriculum. This is an application of Parkinson's Law that work expands with the resources available to do it. The law can be verified at all levels of school: for instance, reading difficulties have been a major issue in French schools only since their per capita expenditures have approached US levels of 1950 - when reading difficulties became a major issue in US schools.
Mass education, mass politics and mass consumption are the models we continue to impose on the 'developing' world. By the 1970s, Illich was already aware that these models were false ones, founded on bad faith, that would increase the very iniquities they were intended to tackle. His ideas are, therefore, as relevant today as they were then. Indeed, it could be said that their moment has come.
Aidan Rankin is co-Editor of New European. His book, The Politics of the Forked Tongue: Authoritarian Liberalism was published in 2002 and is available from New European Publications, 14-16 Carroun Road, London SW8 1JT, price £9.
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