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Deschooling Society (1970)

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Re: Deschooling Society (1970)

#121

Post by chongli »

bigtechdataeng wrote: post #120
chongli wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not looking at it radically enough. “How would a non-specialist survive in a specialized world?” is not the question the author seeks to answer. Rather, the question is “what would a non-specialized world look like?” and I think the answer is something resembling pre-agricultural society.

Wanted to call out that this would probably require most of us to never have existed. Specialization is more efficient at the macro level; this efficiency is why there are 7b humans instead of many fewer.

Yes and this gets into some very difficult questions of population ethics. What is the right amount of people for the world? Is it 7 billion or 70 billion or 700 billion? Or is it 700 million or just 70 million?

Increases in economic output, agricultural and industrial, make it possible for more people to survive. If further and further specialization lead to more and more efficiency with ever growing population, is there a point where we decide things have gotten worse? Or do we slide down the slippery slope into some hellish future dystopia with 700 trillion people, crammed into skyscrapers full of capsule apartments, subsisting on genetically engineered bio-protein sludge and pacified by neuro-electrical stimulation? Not far off from The Matrix.

Re: Deschooling Society (1970)

#122

Post by watwut »

guidoism wrote: post #108
watwut wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But ... my kids did not ended badly. It was no catastrophe. There is no blame on me. I just found that teachers know what they do better and that school is giving my kids more then I assumed before. I could put in a lot of effort to design and plan years and days around education. But it would be awful lot of work for not much benefit. While the schools can be improved in a lot ot ways, they are much less failures th…

Failure isn't a word that I would use to describe schools — They do an excellent job of doing what they are supposed to do. Like Illich says, a single model isn't work for everyone, but let's keep the models that work for the people who want them. For what I'm looking for traditional school is a tremendous waste of time and energy. Primary school skills don't actually need to be taught in anyway that resembles teachi…

My kids did not learned to read nor write just by interacting with world. Nor basic math.

I would have to consciously manipulate them into situations for them to "naturally" learn that. Same for stuff like vocabulary, foreign language, about nature or space. Or anything history. Or general what to do when accident happen that they learn in a school too. Naturally by playing they don't learn any of that unless I consciously set up situations.

Re: Deschooling Society (1970)

#123

Post by watwut »

tmaly wrote: post #66
the_other wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gut feeling is that this falls apart if you try to work in the current Western work culture and rent or pay a mortgage in the current land ownership culture (especially in a major city). The kind, pace and quality of work you would do whilst simultaneously homeschooling doesn’t mesh with the current work culture. I’m fairly sure that if you could successfully homeschool whilst working, you’d have to work/produce m…

I think if we had enough effort put into it like we mobilized with the Manhattan project, we could create some amazing supplemental online material. We have incredible technology and a good understanding of psychology. Why could we not apply some Hollywood approach to creating amazing lessons that are engaging and fun to watch?

Our undestanding of psychology is not all that great.

But what we know is that kids are social emotional animals. The relationship with teacher and other kids matter a lot. Interactions matter a lot. Own activity matter a lot.

There are fun and engaging lessons to watch, if you know where to look. The above is missing.

Re: Deschooling Society (1970)

#124

Post by paganel »

jimduk wrote: post #59
throwawaygh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved Illich when I was in high school. I read all of his books, dug up old audio recordings, and even built a website hosting all of the hard-to-find stuff he wrote. Reflecting on his work now, I think Illich's anti-institutionism was extreme and his alternatives are genuinely not compelling. Deschooling Society 's critique is powerful, and Learning Webs is literally exactly how I learned how to program. But, it's…

Agreed both being very impressed by Illich, but it not being workable. I dimly recall The Alphabetisation of the Popular Mind arguing that possibly you shouldn't teach language. Maybe this has merit (on the lines of Lanier arguing the midi-fication of music is detrimental which is clearer), but is the analogy that musical notation shouldn't happen. My Illich-worship hit a bump when talking to an Aussie English Phd wh…

> My Illich-worship hit a bump when talking to an Aussie English Phd who was much cleverer than me. After my first sentence she said "the problem with people who like Ivan Illich is they just want to talk about Illich". Touche

Because he was basically right, and not that many people are right (Rousseau was another one, Hobbes and Machiavelli too) so it's worth talking about those who are. Of course most of what he's saying is not "workable", but we tend to forget that the not being "workable" part is specific to a technological society like ours and thus maybe the "technological society" part is the problem itself.

Yes, if you want to keep nuclear power plants running you need a technocracy [1] that you need to have educated before the fact, but maybe we've been looking at all this the wrong way all the time and we don't actually need nuclear power plants and we don't need super-sonic flights.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fibDNwF8bjs

Re: Deschooling Society (1970)

#125

Post by zozbot234 »

throwawaygh wrote: post #52
aldendaniels wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Illich wasn't against school per-se. He was against compulsory school, centralized pedagogy, and other attributes of a "modern" (ala 1970s) schooling system in Western social democracies. He was particularly concerned with how the tenants of modernism affected developing nations (where he lived for much of his life) by pushing traditional methods into forced obsolescence in favor of ever-increasing reliance on social…

> Illich wasn't against school per-se. There's a recording of a teacher asking how to infuse lessons from deschooling into her classroom and his response is basically "you can't". He's actually a bit rude about it tbh. Illich was opposed to schooling. He would have said he was in favor of "education". Nailing down what that would mean on the scale of a society, aside from learning webs, is a bit elusive. I think Illi…

Note that there is a robust tradition of "student-centered learning" and after-the-fact "unschooling" that does propose some worthwhile answers.

Re: Deschooling Society (1970)

#126

Post by 082349872349872 »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #97
rednerrus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ~ Robert Anson Hein…

I grew up reading books espousing this type of stuff, but the older I got, the more I realized how much of a pipe dream it is. As a kid, you think you can master everything, as an adult, you realize how much maintenance each of these skills take. So even if you "learn to fight" or "program a computer" well once, it will quickly fade if not maintained...for an hour or two a day. You can see how that short-circuits the…

See Lafferty's The Primary Education of the Camiroi for a satire of the genre.

(Carver Mead's "tall thin person", or the IBM "T-shaped" knowledge, is still possible, however.)

Re: Deschooling Society (1970)

#127

Post by zozbot234 »

marnett wrote: post #114
throwawaygh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Illich wasn't against school per-se. There's a recording of a teacher asking how to infuse lessons from deschooling into her classroom and his response is basically "you can't". He's actually a bit rude about it tbh. Illich was opposed to schooling. He would have said he was in favor of "education". Nailing down what that would mean on the scale of a society, aside from learning webs, is a bit elusive. I think Illi…

Most critical theory doesn’t come with a proposed set of workable solutions or policy suggestions. It is important to separate the expectation and allow critique to be just that. Anyhow, the first step to a solving a problem is identifying it; they need not be atomic operations.

Critique is not helpful if you don't know anything about the feasibility of alternative approaches. "I want a pony!" is not a worthwhile critique of anything, it's merely a fallacy.

Re: Deschooling Society (1970)

#128

Post by Chiba-City »

afarrell wrote: post #54
jessmartin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is echoed by Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America, published in 1977: "The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared pe…

But what is the real-life practical alternative? It is makes lovely and invigorating fiction to imagine men who have learned to competently conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, butcher a hog, set a bone, and program a 1973-era computer. But life is short and any art takes long to learn to sufficient depth that you can solve dynamic complex problems. How many more men would have died if Ei…

What was Eisenhower? A General. What is a General? A Generalist. Relegating "Generalists" to a "Specialization" is playing with words. An alternative is reading Philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, etc. I'm reading The Pythagorean Sourcebook, right now. I cook my own food from scratch whenever and however feasible, and research the original old world traditional recipe versions of things. I also spend hours per week arranging and playing jazz music. To make that possible, I don't watch TV, listen to pop music, drink booze or play games.

FWIW, great Systems Thinking books relatively popular in the softdev community (Jackson's "Problem Frames" comes to mind) are pretty great guides to becoming a decent Generalist. In my own career hiring techies, I find better System Admins are also pretty good Systems Thinkers and Generalists, which is not surprising. Better Developers have a keen appreciation for getting words, logic and taxonomies right. Get the words wrong? We're almost assured of getting the Worlds wrong.

Re: Deschooling Society (1970)

#130

Post by Chiba-City »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #16
motohagiography wrote: post #4

Illich's concept of a "Radical Monopoly," is also immensely relevant to internet platforms. Radical monopoly is a concept defined by philosopher and author Ivan Illich in his 1973 book, "Tools for Conviviality," and revisited in his later work, which describes how a technology or service becomes so exceptionally dominant that even with multiple providers, its users are excluded from society without access to the prod…

> I think Illich's criticisms of car culture pushed him outside the Overton window of policy making. Then or now? Cars being terrible and destroying society is not a fringe view in many places.

I live car-free in a DC embassy neighborhood near a Metro station. Cars are depreciating assets. Why would anyone want one? Commercial vehicles make sense, because they are productivity tools that (hopefully) pay for themselves.
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