Word: illich
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Academic Priests. Few urge that gospel more ardently than Ivan Illich, 45, a restless Vienna-born U.S. citizen and Roman Catholic priest who has resigned his clerical functions. For the past ten years, Illich has dominated a free university in Cuernavaca, Mexico called the Center for Intercultural Documentation. While training social workers for jobs in Latin America, the center has become a crucible for provocative ideas...
Like an educational Martin Luther, Illich has gradually become convinced that faith in formal schooling ("the new world religion") is misplaced. His prickly essays on "Why We Must Abolish Schooling" began appearing in the New York Review of Books last summer; a book of his ideas was published last week. Its title is fast becoming part of the educational vocabulary: Deschooling Society...
...Illich challenges the assumption that school learning-certified by diplomas-is the best preparation for worthwhile life and work. Allowing schools to monopolize learning, he says, gives arbitrary power to "academic priests who mediate between the faithful and the gods of privilege and power." It also makes education an impossibly scarce commodity. Illich calculates that "in the U.S. it would take $80 billion per year to provide what educators regard as equal treatment for all in grammar and high school, well over twice the $36 billion now being spent...
Desegregating Ages. Worse, says Illich, much of what schools now teach is a waste. As he sees it, "most people acquire most of their knowledge outside of school," the way children master speaking and walking. Middle-class parents tacitly admit the potency of nonschool learning, Illich observes dryly, when they "commit their children to a teacher's care to keep them from learning what the poor learn on the street." Beyond that, recent studies have shown that much formal schooling has little bearing on success...
Samuel Bowles, assistant professor of Economics, argued that Illich's analysis ignored the role of education in production. He called attention to the parallels between the student's lack of control over his education and the worker's lack of control over production...