I’m reading Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. Illich argues against the institution of compulsory schooling. Quite persuasively.
Schooling teaches that learning is the result of instruction. And thus, Illich argues, the mere existence of schools creates an ever increasing demand for schools. Society and students come to believe that (important) learning only happens through professional instruction. Even after the age at which attending school is no longer legally obligatory, it continues to be what you need to do if you have a desire to learn. The process of education (according to a curriculum set by others) becomes the important thing, not what a person actually learns.
The “convivial” alternative is “an educational network or web for the autonomous assembly of resources under the personal control of each learner”. It should be made illegal for employers to ask about someone’s educational history. People should be judged only on their knowledge and ability, not on how that was acquired. The process of completing an educational programme does not actually guarantee that a student has learned what they were supposed to learn, precisely because the process is compulsory, predefined, and imposed from without.
The idea of students seeking out their own education is an attractive one. And not new, of course. This is how the schools of ancient Greece worked, how students came to sages like Confucius, or the master-apprentice model. I also agree with Illich that it is an interesting question how modern technological tools and cognitive science could support a contemporary version of that model.
In fact, this is a little bit how certain YouTube channels, newsletters, and other online communities work. They gather a community of people interested to learn about a topic, and can engage in activities that look a lot like coursework, but in a free and voluntary way. That model is hampered by its commercial underpinning, although funding through Patreon and other subscriptions is highly similar to the direct payment of professors by students in early European universities.
What Illich (and those educational YouTube communities) miss, however, is the fact that students do often need to do stuff of which they can only see the value after they’ve done it a few times. In my own field – design education – it really takes (being forced through) a few projects before you can effectively start to reflect on the process and the required skills to build expertise. It may be difficult to learn anything meaningful when you’re only there because you have to be, but that does not invalidated the concept of a predesigned course and teacher-directed instruction (?).
I find this idea of deschooling and putting learning under “the personal control of the learner” interesting. But education also sometimes requires committing to a programme or submitting to instruction for an extended period – voluntarily entering into a series of obligations. It is a good question, however, how long you can productively sustain such a suspension of disinterest – and when you can expect it from aspiring students in the first place.