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Ivan Illich. Deschooling Society. Marion Boyers Publishers: London, 2000. pp. 150.
The All-In Podcast routinely sits atop the charts as the top-rated technology podcast in the world. Launched during the COVID pandemic by four Silicon Valley investor-entrepreneurs, it’s entertaining, interesting, and often irreverent. The friendly competitive energy among the hosts — and the sense that we’re getting their raw, unfiltered opinions on the world — drives the show’s popularity. One of their favorite invited guests is Elon Musk.
At a recent live recording in Los Angeles, the hosts asked Musk for an update on Optimus (the humanoid robot now under development at Tesla). Musk was ebullient. Within thirty years, he surmised, artificially intelligent, general-purpose robots will outnumber humans. We’ll soon be living in a world where robots will walk your dog, mow your lawn, and “teach your kids.”
If robots teaching your kids is a welcome development to you, maybe this essay isn’t for you. But for the rest of us, such a proposal invites sober reflection. How did we arrive at a place in society where the task of teaching children could be delegated to a machine? To answer this question, we need to revisit the work of Ivan Illich.
Illich was one of the most interesting and insightful radicals of the 1960s and 70s. Born in Austria, he served as a Roman Catholic priest in New York City, moved to Mexico to lead an intercultural research center, and spent his later years as a university professor in the U.S. and Germany. His fierce criticisms of modernity and of institutional religion frequently drew the ire of the Vatican, and his anti-capitalist proclivities caused opponents to deride him as a communist.
Illich’s thought reflects the influence of Latin American liberation theology, Marxist social analysis, and postmodern epistemology. He’s highly attuned to material conditions; highly critical of bureaucratic and technocratic solutions; and highly skeptical of totalizing narratives. In his incisive little book Deschooling Society, he invites us to consider the difference between learning and schooling.
Learning is something every human being does. But schooling, Illich contends, “[is] built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching… And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
This contrast between learning and schooling lies at the heart of Illich’s challenge to modern education. He asserts that our educational institutions, like most institutions in Western society, have succumbed to the logic of the market. We have come to view education as a good to be consumed. Society tells us that to be happy and successful, we must consume that good. Schools exist to offer us access to that good. The government, wanting its citizens to be happy and successful, seeks to subsidize and systematize the production of that good. And then a whole ecosystem of curriculum and consultants and conferences arises to ensure the quality of that good.
The end result is a one-size-fits-all product, measured by outcomes like test scores and graduation rates and college readiness, that largely fails to cultivate wonder and curiosity. Schooling replaces learning; standardization triumphs over spontaneity; “passing the test” eclipses the love of knowledge.
If education is a consumer good, then offering it at scale requires mass-production. Compulsory schooling creates a market for textbooks, teacher training, standardized testing, and specialists. And like most mass-produced goods, this entire ecosystem tends toward an economy of scale.
School sells curriculum — a bundle of goods made according to the same process and having the same structure as other merchandise. Curriculum production for most schools begins with allegedly scientific research, on whose basis educational engineers predict future demand and tools for the assembly line, within the limits set by budgets and taboos. The distributor-teacher delivers the finished product to the consumer-pupil… and last year’s wrapping is always obsolete for this year’s consumer.
This is how we arrive at the prospect of robots teaching our kids. If we uncritically accept the premise that learning is the result of schooling... and if schooling, to produce predictable outcomes, must be standardized and systematized across a wide market… then schoolteachers will ultimately face the same workforce disruptions as Amazon warehouse workers and Ford assembly-line technicians. We may reach a day when it is cheaper, more predictable, and more efficient to train a humanoid robot to teach a pre-packaged curriculum to a classroom full of students. What’s more, a robot will not be subject to human bias, human frailty, or the expense of retirement benefits and health insurance.
What can we do to avoid such a day? Well, Illich’s radical proposal — derided by many in 1971, and still controversial today — is captured in the title of his book. He believes we must dismantle the educational bureaucracy that has come to dominate so much of our society. (Lest you dismiss his proposal as overly aggressive, consider that Yale University employs 5,460 administrators for just 5,000 undergraduate students. Administrative bloat is a symptom of an over-schooled society.)
Though I had not encountered Illich’s work at the time, similar intuitions led me to help start a classical Christian school nine years ago. It’s been a strong success, and by God’s grace we’ve been able to coach and support similar school startups across our region. But Illich’s critique confronts even this burgeoning movement. Too often, Christian education is merely an alternative delivery vehicle for the same vision of schooling. We sell a different brand of education to a different type of consumer; but we compete according to the values of the market and measure our success by the standards of the market. Without strong and intentional efforts at resistance, Christian schools drift toward upward mobility and career success and college readiness rather than virtue and character and curiosity.
Christian parents, teachers, and students across the spectrum of education would do well to recapture Illich’s insights. Learning, not schooling, is the aim. When schooling replaces learning, the humanness of education is effaced, leaving us vulnerable to a machine-centric future. If we care about the children around us, we must resist the push toward educational efficiency, productivity, and standardization. And such resistance will require us to be a bit a more radical.
What, exactly, would gently radical resistance look like? Based on my own reading of Illich, let me offer three humble proposals as a starting point.
Change the scorecard.
I am surprised how many Christian schools emphasize test scores, college entrance exams, and career readiness as their primary success metrics. These are the outcomes American parents tend to associate with “a good education.” But Christian education isn’t just a different means to the same end; it’s a whole different telos. We must embrace a deeper and more intuitive vision of success.
If your kid makes it into a great college, but lacks virtue and character, is that a “win?” Most parents, I trust, would say no. Christian education should aim to shape virtue, impart wisdom, and build character traits like discipline and perseverance and resilience. Christian schools and Christian parents should make these outcomes the explicit goal, allowing college admissions to take a backseat to character formation.
Prioritize the classroom.
There’s been a lot of talk in our national politics lately about “dismantling the administrative state.” The same thing needs to happen in most schools. Bureaucracy tends to grow; administrative needs multiply; and the career path of many “educators” is to end up in an office rather than a classroom. Christian education should radically resist this trajectory.
Our best leaders should be in the classroom; our best efforts should be given to quality instruction; our best resources should flow toward learning, not managing. This is not to deny the critical need for good administration: schools are complex organizations, and they need competent leadership. But the best administrators are the ones who are most focused on a great classroom experience.
Emphasize the joy of learning.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, interest in our local classical Christian school skyrocketed. When I asked people why they were interested, the answer was almost always: “My [neighbor’s, sister’s, cousin’s, friend’s] kids go here, and they really love this school!” It’s not a surprise: kids love learning! They just don’t love schooling. When we allow the natural joy of curiosity and mastery to drive a child’s school experience, they almost always thrive. And everyone around them thrives, too, because there’s nothing more universally gratifying than a child full of joy and excitement. We all wanted to be that child. We remember the moments when we were that child. And we want the kids we care about to have that kind of childhood.
Maybe Illich’s radical vision of a deschooled society won’t come to fruition in the way he hoped. And maybe it shouldn’t. But at the very least, we should allow his critique to renew our vision for educational reform. If we don’t want robots teaching our kids, we’d better understand the difference between schooling and learning. Because if we continue to believe that learning is the result of schooling, we’ve already lost the plot.
