Talk:Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society/Ritualization of Progress

Ω--School is seen as a rite of passage--Ω

p34 "The university graduate has been schooled for selective service among the rich of the world."

p35 "The old university was a liberated zone for discovery and the discussion of ideas both new and old. Masters and students gathered to read the texts of other masters, now long dead, and the living words of the dead masters gave new perspective to the fallacies of the present day. The university was then a community of academic quest and endemic unrest."

p35-36

"In the modern multiversity this community has fled to the fringes, where it meets in a pad, a professor's office, or the chaplain's quarters. The structural purpose of the modern university has little to do with the traditional quest."

"The modern university has forfeited its chance to provide a simple setting for encounters which are both autonomous and anarchic, focused yet unplanned and ebullient, and has chosen instead to manage the process by which so-called research and instruction are produced"

Although it is advertised free-inquiry is not created in the university. Education has become planned, managed , and claculated.It is treated as for-profit, that is the problem.

Having a structure and plan, competign for grades, running trhoguh a maze for a reward has turned education into a rat race activity.

What happens to the unquantifiable extra-curricular reading? All meaningful experience is unmanageable, spontaneous, chosen and free. Spirituality cannot be quantified , measured packaged and predicted.

p40 “People who have been schooled down to size let unmeasured experience slip out of their hands. To them, what cannot be measured becomes secondary, threatening. They do not have to be robbed of their creativity. Under instruction, they have unlearned to "do" their thing or "be" themselves, and value only what has been made or could be made.” There is a hidden cirriculm in our world-veiw:

p47 “Of course, school is not, by any means, the only modern institution which has as its primary purpose the shaping of man's vision of reality. The hidden curriculum of family life, draft, health care, so-called professionalism, or of the media play an important part in the institutional manipulation of man's world-vision, language, and demands. But school enslaves more profoundly and more systematically, since only school is credited with the principal function of forming critical judgment, and, paradoxically, tries to do so by making learning about oneself, about others, and about nature depend on a prepackaged process. School touches us so intimately that none of us can expect to be liberated from it by something else.”