Session 5

1
Session 5 23/09/08 Agenda

• Time Activity
• 840 Quote Cards Due
• 845 Sir Ken Robinson Creativity expert
• http//www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66
• 915 Lecture Current Thoughts on Change
• (From Session 4)
• 1000 Break
• 1015 Lecture Illich
• 1115 End of Class

2
FOR NEXT WEEK

• Read
• the Preface of the Textbook
• Chapter One

3
Sir Ken Robinson Creativity expert
Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the
way we're educating our children. He champions a
radical rethink of our school systems, to
cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple
types of intelligence.
4
Why you should listen to him Why don't we get
the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues
that it's because we've been educated to become
good workers, rather than creative thinkers.
Students with restless minds and bodies -- far
from being cultivated for their energy and
curiosity -- are ignored or even stigmatized,
with terrible consequences. "We are educating
people out of their creativity," Robinson says.
It's a message with deep resonance. Robinson's
TEDTalk has been distributed widely around the
Web since its release in June 2006. The most
popular words framing blog posts on his talk?
"Everyone should watch this." A visionary
cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British
government's 1998 advisory committee on creative
and cultural education, a massive inquiry into
the significance of creativity in the educational
system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003
for his achievements. "Ken's vision and expertise
is sought by public and commercial organizations
throughout the world." BBC Radio 4
5
Sir Ken Robinson Creativity expert
http//www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66
6
Davies Guppy

• Past perspectives on education
• Ivan Illich
• http//www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
• Deschooling Society
• http//www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1970_deschooli
  ng.html

7
Ivan lllichhttp//www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illi
c.htm

• Known for his critique of modernization and the
  corrupting impact of institutions
• The pupil is schooled to confuse teaching with
  learning, grade advancement with education, a
  diploma with competence, and fluency with the
  ability to say something new.

8
Ivan lllichhttp//www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illi
c.htm

• Illichs lasting contribution was a dissection of
  traditional institutions (educational, energy,
  transportation and economic) and a demonstration
  of their corruption.
• Institutions, like schooling and medicine, had a
  tendency to end up working in ways that reversed
  their original purpose.

9
Ivan llichhttp//www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic
.htm

• Born in Vienna
• Family expelled by Nazis - mother had Jewish
  ancestry
• a wanderer - travelled the world
• PhD - understanding the institutional 13th
  century church

10
Ivan llichhttp//www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic
.htm

• Entered priesthood in R. C. Church
• Worked within the Puerto Rican culture
• Rector of Catholic University of Ponce in Puerto
  Rico
• Established Centre for Intercultural Formation
• Falling out with Pope and Church over political
  issues - birth control

11
Centre for Intercultural Formation

• a free club for the search of surprise, a place
  where people go who want to have help in
  redefining their questions rather than completing
  the answers they have gotten
• Chronicled the negative effects of schools
• Critiqued the radical monopoly of the dominant
  technologies of education in Deschooling Society.

12
Ivan llichhttp//www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illi
c.htm

• Central, coherent feature of Illichs work on
  deschooling is a critique of institutions and
  professionals and the way in which the contribute
  to dehumanization.
• Institutions create the needs and control their
  satisfaction, and by doing so, turn the human
  being and her or his creativity into objects

13
Ivan llichhttp//www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic
.htm

• Illichs anti-institutional argument has four
  aspects
• A critique of the process of institutionalization
• A critique of experts and expertise.
• A critique of commodification
• The principle of counterproductivity.

14
1. A critique of the process of
institutionalization

• Creation of more and more institutions
• Our lives has become institutionalized
• Undermines people - diminishes self-confidence
  problem solving capacity
• Kills convivial relationships
• Colonizes life like a parasite or a cancer that
  kills creativity

15
CONVIVIAL

• Adjective
• 1.friendly agreeable a convivial atmosphere.
• 2.fond of feasting, drinking, and merry company
  jovial.
• 3.of or befitting a feast festive.
• Synonyms sociable, companionable, genial.

16
2. A critique of experts and expertise.

• Experts and an expert culture always call for
  more experts.
• Experts have a tendency to cartelize themselves
  by creating institutional barricades -
  proclaiming themselves the gatekeepers and
  self-selecting themselves
• Experts control knowledge production - they
  decide what valid and legitimate knowledge is
  how its acquisition is sanctioned

17
3. A critique of commodification.

• Professionals and institutions tend to define an
  activity - in this case learning - as a commodity
  (education), whose production they monopolize,
  whose distribution they restrict, and whose price
  they raise beyond the purse of ordinary people

18
3. A critique of commodification.

• Illich Schooling
• the production of knowledge, the marketing of
  knowledge - draws society into the trap of
  thinking that knowledge is hygienic, pure,
  respectable, deodorized, produced by human heads
  and amassed in stock
• By making school compulsory, people are schooled
  to believe that the self-taught individual is to
  be discriminated against

19
3. A critique of commodification

• Illich Schooling
• Learning and the growth of cognitive capacity,
  require a process of consumption of services
  presented in an industrial, a planned, a
  professional form where learning is a thing
  rather than an activity.
• A thing that can be amassed measured, the
  possession of which is a measure of the
  productivity of the individual in society - ones
  social value!
• Learning becomes a commodity and like any
  commodity that is marketed - it becomes scarce.

20
4. The principle of counterproductivity

• The means by which a fundamentally beneficial
  process or arrangement is turned into a negative
  one - it reaches a certain threshold where the
  process of institutionalization becomes
  counterproductive
• Illich transgressed a cardinal rule of education
  by questioning the messianic principle that
  schools as institutions can educate

21
Convivial Alternatives

• Illich (1973) states
• I believe that a desirable future depends on our
  deliberately choosing a life of action over a
  life of consumption, on our engendering a
  lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous,
  independent, yet related to each other, rather
  than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows us
  to make and unmake, produce and consume - a style
  of life which is merely a station on the road to
  the depletion and pollution of the environment.

22
Convivial Alternatives

• The future depends more upon our choice of
  institutions which support a life of action that
  on our developing new ideologies and technologies.

23
Illichs Learning Webs

• Illich argued that a good education system should
  have three purposes
• To provide all that want to learn with access to
  resources at any time in their lives
• Make it possible for all who want to share
  knowledge etc. to find those who want to learn it
  from them
• To create opportunities for those who want to
  present an issue to the public to make their
  arguments known.

24
Four Approaches to Learning Webs

• Reference services to educational objects
• Skill exchanges
• Peer Matching
• Reference services to educators-at-large

25
1. Reference services to educational objects

• Facilitates access to things or processes used
  for formal learning

26
2. Skill exchanges

• Permits persons to list their skills, the
  conditions under which they are willing to serve
  as models for others who want to learn these
  skills, and the addresses where they can be
  reached

27
3. Peer Matching

• A communications network which permits persons to
  describe the learning activity in which they wish
  to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for
  the inquiry.

28
4. Reference services to educators-at-large

• A directory giving the addresses and
  self-descriptions of professionals,
  paraprofessionals and freelances, along with
  conditions of access to their services.

29
Critiques of Illich

• Illichs work was subject to attack from both the
  left and the right!
• His writings were founded essentially on
  intuition, without any appreciable reference to
  the results of socio-educational or learning
  research.
• He criticism evolves in a theoretical vacuum