Should Schools Be Abolished?

My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.

--Margaret Mead

It takes no fancy theory to point the way to education. People learn best when driven by curiosity or necessity, a sheer "need to know." Formal schooling aims to create that desire on a mass scale. But when schooling is compulsory, what it often creates is apathy and boredom, an invitation to rebellion.

Such problems now plague the U.S., which leads the world in mass schooling. Student discontent, failing public schools, financial pressures--all these lend new weight to gadflies who preach a new heresy. The best way to reform U.S. education, they say, is to supplant compulsory attendance with voluntary learning.

Academic Priests. Few urge that gospel more ardently than Ivan Illich, 45, a restless Vienna-born U.S. citizen and Roman Catholic priest who has resigned his clerical functions. For the past ten years, Illich has dominated a free university in Cuernavaca, Mexico called the Center for Intercultural Documentation. While training social workers for jobs in Latin America, the center has become a crucible for provocative ideas.

Like an educational Martin Luther, Illich has gradually become convinced that faith in formal schooling ("the new world religion") is misplaced. His prickly essays on "Why We Must Abolish Schooling" began appearing in the New York Review of Books last summer; a book of his ideas was published last week. Its title is fast becoming part of the educational vocabulary: Deschooling Society.

Illich challenges the assumption that school learning--certified by diplomas--is the best preparation for worthwhile life and work. Allowing schools to monopolize learning, he says, gives arbitrary power to "academic priests who mediate between the faithful and the gods of privilege and power." It also makes education an impossibly scarce commodity. Illich calculates that "in the U.S. it would take $80 billion per year to provide what educators regard as equal treatment for all in grammar and high school, well over twice the $36 billion now being spent."

Desegregating Ages. Worse, says Illich, much of what schools now teach is a waste. As he sees it, "most people acquire most of their knowledge outside of school," the way children master speaking and walking. Middle-class parents tacitly admit the potency of nonschool learning, Illich observes dryly, when they "commit their children to a teacher's care to keep them from learning what the poor learn on the street." Beyond that, recent studies have shown that much formal schooling has little bearing on success in a job.

Illich is convinced that only a radical redistribution of education can enlarge human freedom of mind, spirit and talent. To eliminate the "social addiction" to attending school, his deschooled world would replace most formal classes with networks of "learning exchanges." Instead of confining the young in schools, which prolong childhood, such exchanges would integrate all generations. Encouraged by tax incentives, businesses could employ interested children between the ages of eight and 14 "for a couple of hours each day if the conditions were humane." People of any age who wanted to learn something would go to counselors somewhat like reference librarians. "From a corner biology store," for example, "they could refer their clients to the shell collection in the museum or indicate the next showing of biology video tapes in a viewing booth. They could furnish guides for pest control, diet and other forms of preventive medicine. They could refer those who needed advice to 'elders.' "

Computer Dating. Most of the current paraphernalia of education would be rearranged. "Educational objects" would include not only books in libraries but also photo labs, factories, railroad yards and fire stations. Basic skills like reading, computer programming and even cooking would be taught and drilled by "skill teachers" whom learners picked from lists in computerized telephone directories. A kind of computer dating would unite people who wanted to share their skills, whether in art, politics or carpentry. It would match them with "peers" for ad hoc sessions in restaurants, drugstores and commuter trains--and in existing school buildings.

To develop critical thinking and eventually become scholars, learners could turn to "educators at large." Such elders--including many present-day gurus and professors--would "sustain the newcomer in his educational adventure," posing the "unexpected question" to help a pupil "formulate his puzzlement" so that he could pursue it independently.

Freedom Not to Learn. People would buy their learning opportunities with government-issued "edu-credit" cards. The rich could not use their own money to buy more education than the poor; if low-income students started slowly, their unspent credits would earn interest so that they could keep learning for a longer time. Illich would legally guarantee the freedom not to learn, extending the constitutional right of assembly to include the right not to be compelled to assemble. He would also require employers to test the skills needed for a job instead of screening out applicants without diplomas.

Hard Knocks. Illich skillfully picks holes in his own scheme. The drawbacks are vast. With total freedom to choose their education, people might prefer the bliss of ignorance or fall prey to "charlatans, demagogues, clowns, miracle workers and messiahs." Abolishing required school attendance, as Mississippi did after the Supreme Court's desegregation order, might encourage pinch-penny governments to reduce their spending on education. The poor would thus be abandoned completely to the school of hard knocks. More subtly, making teachers depend on student demand might do grave harm to universities that now support "impractical" scholarship and to the intellectual freedom to criticize society. Illich cheerfully agrees that deschooling would probably decelerate technology and the consumption that feeds economic growth. That is one of his chief goals. "Men must choose," he says, "whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them."

The obvious question is whether a degreeless society would produce enough skilled people to bring technology under control. It is one thing to lambaste the tyranny of diplomaism, but quite another to expect nations to function without high standards of excellence. Illich rightly condemns excessive meritocracy, which makes learning painful rather than satisfying. He bets on natural human curiosity as the best incentive for intellectual achievement. But a society without formal schooling might face mediocrity. Though Illich has started a vital debate, he has not shown that a country can survive by abolishing academic sticks in favor of carrots alone.

Illich acknowledges that his Utopian "bridges to nowhere" are "meant to serve a society which does not now exist." Still, some harbingers of deschooling have already appeared. By absorbing children's attention, TV has broken the schools' monopoly on teaching. So have industrial training courses, private computer schools and burgeoning apprenticeship programs for high school students. Peer matching is now performed by a company that arranges telephone "conference calls" among people with similar interests (TIME, Jan. 11). A recent Supreme Court decision (Griggs v. Duke Power Co.) banned exclusionary aptitude tests for men who wanted to advance within a company. The law may eventually require employers to hire people on the basis of their actual skills--whether or not they have a degree. In these areas, at least, Illich may not be advocating a revolution, but simply asking society to legitimize a new status quo.

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