September 26/27th Agenda Session 3

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September 26/27th Agenda Session 3

• Time Activity
• 600 Announcements
• Assignment One - Major Paper Proposal Form
• Seminar Groups and Rooms
• 620 Lecture
• 740 Break
• 800 Seminars (Please be on time!)
• 900 End of Class

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Ivan Illich

• 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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Four Approaches to Learning Webs

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

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1. Reference services to educational objects

• Facilitates access to things or processes used
  for formal learning

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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Davies Guppy Chapter 1

• What is a Schooled Society?
• Formal education has moved towards centre stage
  in social life
• Nations increasingly rely on the education system
  to rationalize the social order
• Social Order a groups usual and customary
  social arrangements, on which its members depend
  and on which they base their lives. (Henslin,
  Glenday, Duffy Pupo, 2004)

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Davies Guppy Chapter 1

• We each spend a great deal of our lives in some
  form of a school setting
• School attendance mandatory
• Stat Can
• School attendance
• Entering post-secondary institution
• Changes in the past 50 years
• Clock Analogy

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Davies Guppy Chapter 1

• Life-long learning - accepted norm
• Demand for formal education - jobs requiring
  educational certification
• Educational attainment as a predictor of income
  employment success (social insurance)
• Major route for social mobility

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Changes

• Greater access for
• Women
• Racial minorities
• Education as a means for upward mobility and
  social justice.
• Canadian schools - the main institution that
  embodies core values of
• Equity, progress technical sophistication
• Values that are intrinsic to modern society

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Education shapes the organization of society

• Its reached is personal public, individual and
  societal
• National education budgets billions
• Role in nation-building citizenship
• Regulation of who works where
• Influenced by commerce - advertising, business
  impacting curriculum, student employment

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Education shapes society

• Post-secondary institutions tied to labour
  markets
• Employees encouraged to get training
• On-the-job training programs
• (IBM experience)
• Company-specific certification programs (e.g.
  Banking Institutions)
• Corporate Learning Centres
• McDonalds Hamburger University General Motors
  University Dunkin Donuts University
• Corporations look to universities for innovative
  research

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Education shapes society

• De-differentiation of institutions
• De-differentiation the blurring of boundaries
  between institutions
• Social problems - seen to have educational
  solutions
• Drugs, racism, violence, health
• Weakened influence of religion
• Social Issues - a devised educational solution
• Sexism, environmental concerns, welfare, an
  alternative to incarceration (diversion programs)
  - john schools

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Modern notion of learning

• Now ubiquitous
• The understanding of what constitutes schooling
  has expanded
• Preschooling
• Formal certification for most jobs
• Community colleges - security, bartending,
  bra-fitting, cooking
• Health - pre-natal classes, exercise diet
  programs

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Relationships

• The relationship between schooling and society is
  closer and more complex that ever the School
  Society

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Next day What do schools do?

• We will continue with Chapter 1 and begin Chapter
  2.