Pat Farenga: You don't have to go to grow: Growing without schooling

Here's an excerpt of Pat Farenga's chapter in Natural Born Learners: Unschooling and Autonomy in Education. The chapter is called You Don't Have to Go to Grow: Growing without Schooling.

One of the things that has been really interesting, and gratifying to me, has been understanding the work of Ivan Illich and understanding why John Holt was such a big fan of Ivan’s work. Illich wrote a book called Deschooling Society (1970/1983), which many people misinterpret, mainly because they don’t read it—they just read the title and assume he’s saying “let’s eradicate all the schools.”

Illich is not saying that. His whole thesis is that we need to eliminate compulsory schooling. Schools make sense for having central locations where communal resources can be distributed, but school is not a true communal resource. It’s become a private enterprise that is administered by professionals, almost as if it were medicine, and very expensive medicine at that. What Ivan pointed out is that learning is not a scarce commodity to be doled out like medicine. Human learning is abundant; institutional education is scarce.

Our economic system supports giving out rewards primarily to those who consume the most education credentials, but is that really learning? When Holt read and studied with Illich, he started exploring all sorts of ideas of how else can we help children and adults to learn?

In Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Things Better (1976/2004), John outlines the reasons he thinks compulsory education is “the most destructive force on earth;” largely because it wastes so much of everyone’s time in busywork. This is borne out all the time when employers say, “college graduates don’t know how to do anything except pass courses, and high school graduates don’t know how to write their names.”

Ivan pointed out, in 1971, that all institutions seem to hit a point where they become counter-productive. Our institutions for transportation create traffic jams, our medical institutions create iatrogenic illnesses like the antibiotic failure we see now. We suddenly turn a corner when these things get too big and, in education as Holt and Illich claim, we have reached the point where schools create stupidity in students.
Read more when you buy the book.

Remembering Lee Hoinacki: Friend and Collaborator to Ivan Illich.

I was saddened to hear that Lee Hoinacki had passed away on February 27th, 2014. For those who don't know, Lee was a former Dominican priest, author, professor of political science, and subsistence farmer. In 1960, he met Ivan Illich in Puerto Rico and became his close friend and collaborator. Influenced by Illich he raised his children unschooled.

I would like to honour his memory by sharing the podcast with you that we did at Radio Free School a decade ago.
It was called Remembering Ivan Illich: Lee Hoinacki on his life and work. Now let's remember Lee Hoinacki.
I want to include a little part of the excerpt here because, Hoinacki had an interesting perspective on unschooling. Read on.

How about yourself, I read that you started homesteading. Do you want to talk about that experience too?
I wrote a book on the subject. I thought, well Illich was talking about subsistence. He said the modern world was produced by the war against subsistence. That’s what he said, the whole point of modernity. And I said well, if that’s true would it be possible to live, that is to the extent that one could do it today, in a subsistence mode? Would it be possible to do that comfortably?  So my wife and I built this house ourselves.
Well, the first thing I think you have to decide is, if you want to live outside this economy is to get rid of electricity and phones. So we got rid of these things and then I found that one could live comfortably. One could live in beauty. Because people who saw our house said it was one of the most beautiful things they had ever seen.  One could do that and could survive.

I thought that I lived very well. I was selling my excess produce at the local farmers market and from that I could live. I was tied in to the larger economy because I’d have a pickup truck to get the produce to the farmers market and so on. So again, you don’t turn you r back on the question of the modern world but you try to live in it. And I wanted to try and see if we could do it enjoyably.
So we took our kids out of school and they sort of grew up sort of wildly there- on the farm.  It was a question of no school of any sort. It was kind of a totalitarian thing because they had no choice- they had to just do it because we did it.

I think that the point is that children growing up have to see what goes with what; that if you want water, it has to come from some place. The kids saw as we were working out ways to get water into the house--water to drink and for irrigation--and they saw that if you want to get rid of waste matter, or garbage how do you get rid of it? You don’t just flush toilets. We had no flush toilet. We had a composting toilet so they had to learn what went with what.
When we moved there, we were living in a tent, and we started building a house. We knew we had to get it finished by the winter because the winters there were cold. So we got enough finished to move in the winter.  So there was a roof over our head. Children growing up--what’s important is for them to know the connections; to know what is connected with now.
I see here, where I am living in Philadelphia, that people will turn on the hot water for example and just let it run.  Well you can’t do that. That’s a sin against the water and everything else. Or people who throw away garbage, or throw away food they are not eating. Well you can’t do that. The kids saw all that and I think they learnt from all that.

If I were to do it over again, I would do the same thing.  I would even be more lenient--less directive in terms of what they could or could not do.  I think John Holt is correct on that, he’s right.  I hadn’t read Holt at the time--that you let kids grow up like reeds, and they’ll grow up all right.

But the reason I would not encourage people to do this is that it was difficult.  We were out so far in the boondocks by ourselves, surrounded by a national forest. And so the little piece of land that we had in the forest, the kids could run all day in the forest, well, this is not what you can do in a city.  My wife and I had planned all this ahead of time; what we were going to do, where we were going to do it and that kind of thing. And so although we were serious--again it’s something that Illich would say--it isn’t something that has to be imitated or copied by other people. More like, there’s something that’s been done and perhaps I can do what I’m able to do, within my limits and my conditions and my situation. But I see this kind of exemplar in front of me.

For example, when I first went there, I had read Scott Nearing and I don’t think that one can imitate Nearing, but one could take that as a kind of exemplar of an ideal that one would hold before himself.

How did the children manage? How did they turn out?
Well, it’s funny. Our daughter is now 35 and she says, "I now understand what you were trying to do and I’m really grateful we grew up that way and I see the importance of it." And  she’s on a farm in Oregon. But she also picked up a PhD.  She’s a funny kind of person. The two kids are very different. Ben, our son, he refused all schooling of any kind.  In high school at the time of the divorce, he refused to do anything. We put them in high school because we couldn’t reproduce what we were doing there (because we were separated) and so my wife understood that. So she put Ben in a school that would be easy on people, no requirements. He took basket weaving type courses and things like that. I don’t know how he got a diploma and graduated from that place. But then he would have nothing to do with schooling from that day on after he finished that, to this day. But he gets along very well. They are very different, but they are also very much alike.

Illich? It’s very hard to say his influence because I met him in 1960 and I've live with  him for many, many years and my wife said, "What are you going to do when this guy dies because your whole life has been centered around him?"  I said well, I don’t know.  I get along very well. That is, I think I do. I’m glad that he’s dead because being close to him you see how he suffered so much, he was in pain.

I think that this new book that I've just finished every chapter is influenced by Illich in some way.  Right now, I’m doing various things. I’m working on projects to make his thought known which I think is not known as widely as I think it should be. The book is just one step in that process. And I give talks to try to articulate what he thought and what he stood for, and to make these ideas and his life better known.

I think that Illich’s books are important and as he said himself, you don’t read these books as you would a newspaper. I worked with him on a number of these books, some people would say trying to make them more intelligible but they are his ideas and they require some work to understand what he is all about.
I would say Gender, which I think is the most important book he ever wrote, is not reviewed. There is one review, an important review, but other than that it’s never mentioned in any bibliography and nobody reads it and no one know it. But it’s a theory of economics which if one were to take it seriously, would have to reinterpret what is called a social history of Europe.  And I think it’s powerful enough that it requires that kind of rethinking of what is called a social history of Europe.

His book on Tools for Conviviality is a theory on technology and no one has ever come near those 5 dimensions that Illich talks about there. The only thing they talk about in technology is the first dimension which Illich dismisses almost immediately. He says unless you have all five of these dimensions, unless you look at all of them, forget about it. Bits and pieces of people are saying all kinds of important things and saying all kinds of good things here and there, but I would just argue that I think Illich too, was saying something that could perhaps be taken into account.

Is it time to reclaim the word 'education'?

Ivan Illich defined education as “learning under the assumption of scarcity.”
In Natural Born Learners, Writer, Aaron Falbel explains Illich’s thinking further:

The very idea education conveys to people is that valuable learning is scarce in society. Valuable learning, in this way of thinking, is not something that happens readily. On the contrary, special arrangements must be made to impart it. If we just left it up to chance or up to the personal initiative of the learner, most people would not learn those things due to their scarcity. Education is an institutional, deliberate, arrangement whereby scarce knowledge is held. 

Falbel continues:

llich says we have evolved into a subspecies called Homo Educandus, which means the human being born in need of education, in need of educational treatment. This is a fundamental belief of most people today: Just like we have a need for food and shelter, we have a need for education, and if we don’t acquire it we are deeply deprived, stigmatized, and disadvantaged.

Here’s what John Holt said about education in 1976:

It’s not a word I personally use. . . . The word “education” is a word much used, and different people mean different things by it. But on the whole, it seems to me what most people mean by “education” has got some ideas built into it or contains certain assumptions, and one of them is that learning is an activity which is separate from the rest of life and done best of all when we are not doing anything else, and best of all where nothing else is done—learning places, places especially constructed for learning. Another assumption is that education is a designed process, in which some people do things to other people or get other people to do things which will presumably be for their own good.  Education means that some A is doing something to somebody else B. (as cited in Hern, Deschooling Society. 2008, p. 61)

Still, when Ivan Illich talked about “the stench of education” permeating all areas of society (as it has now done so), and Holt promoted ‘instead of education,’ both men recognized their own privilege—that of having used their ‘education’ in order to examine the ills of institutionalized education. 'Unschooling,' a term that Holt came up with and 'deschooling,' Illich's word, were words that sought to do something about this stench that is corrupting our understanding of the natural, human impulse to learn.
Now, I’m starting to smell the ‘stench of unschooling.'  I ask myself, has unschooling become as narrow in definition, self-limiting, pretentious and exclusionary as ‘education’ has?

On a private unschooling facebook page where people share advice and support, I was told that my use of the word ‘educate’ was inappropriate: it is not an “unschooly" word (I was also told that my topic, ‘climate change’ was inappropriate for the group). I was silenced and my post removed.

I have since had time to think about this. To be in a position to unschool is to be in a position of privilege.  It usually means that you have experienced 'education/ing' and refused it. Unschoolers have been able to pick apart the understanding of education—that 'education' as we know it, is more about being taught than about learning. We recognize that conventional thinking continues to defer education to professionalism and authority that is outside of oneself.

Education: Not a dirty word.
But doing a basic google search, I learn that ‘education' is known to have several root words. It is popularly known to be derived from the Latin root 'educo' meaning to 'educe'- to draw out.
 It also has root words, 'educare' and 'educere'. 'to "educare" which means to  'rear or to bring up' and it refers to child rearing, whereas, 'educere' which is derived from two roots 'e' and 'ducere' means to 'draw out from within' or to 'lead forth'.
"To draw forth from within" Upbringing rather than instruction, "to develop from within.”
This definition, I can live with. It conveys a process of growing in knowledge and understanding-starting from what is already there. Also, it involves growing of character, personality--not just in skill and knowledge.

Yes, the concept of education has been deeply sullied, but it might be time for all those interested in pursuing and helping others to pursue 'knowledge and mastery' to reclaim this word as ours.

When it comes to 'learning,'Aaron Falbel compares learning with education:
In Natural Born Learners he builds on Ivan Ilich’s work saying about education:

Learning, on the other hand, is a natural process—a biological process really, similar to breathing: we do it all the time. From the moment they are born, babies are already learning. They are good at learning, their learning does not need to be developed or improved or enhanced in any way. The notion that people need to be taught how to learn or need to go to school in order to learn how to learn—phrases we hear all the time—is preposterous and deeply insulting to babies who are prodigious learners. I don’t use the word “learning” very much, because I think we get into trouble when we make such an issue out of learning, particularly when we try to control it or direct it. Why do we need to make such a fuss out of something we all do naturally?

But 'learning' is the process while 'education' is what emerges out of the process. Education is ever-evolving, and is a direct result of learning.

I turn it over to you! What are your thoughts? Do you like the word 'education?' Is it useful?

Is Unschooling Elitist?

 Some people insist that unschooling is elitist; “Public school isn’t good enough for you?” they’ll ask.
They’ll compare this practice to the methods of the rich who can afford to have the best in private schools and tutors for their children, trips, vacations, resources and general privilege.

Other people think that keeping kids out of school to educate them at home is doing a disservice to those who fought so that education could be universal; going against the school system is sacrilegious. What about all those unfortunate kids over in Afghanistan or Ethiopia who would give an arm or a leg to go to school?  What do you say to that, when you turn up your nose at public schooling?
For example, here’s a response to my article on why I unschool:

To me this article smacks of elitism and onesidedness and is smug to boot. It assumes that all parents are able to guide their children's education. Well that's wrong. Many parents are not able to read well enough, or let alone teach. It takes an educated parent to be able understand education. I wonder what the Mexican janitor would think if he came across this article, if he could read it, (here I am, working my butt off to put my kids through school, so they could have a better life, better than mine, and what, I'm doing it wrong?) Single mums? Poor mums, in the inner cities? No trees, no grass,  no snowflakes. School is where their kids go to get any kind of teaching, or positive attention. What about the 'educated', 'rich' mums. A doctor perhaps. Should she just dump all that schooling to unschool her kids? The 150 years argument makes no sense, because this is the world we live in now. The professions that exist now are pertinent to now, not to 150 years ago. And women can be fulfilled outside of the home, away from their kids.
What is the endpoint of any type of education? Overall? Overall, I think it is to make a living. Practical, prosaic, unpoetic, making a living. I am sure there are many creative and free-thinking people among the homeless who line the streets of any town. Does unschooling lead to better employment opportunities, more professional success? That's the question you unschoolers need to ask, I don't know, but I can tell you a snow-flake never filled an empty belly.

People who think like this are missing the point.
I ask those who call unschooling 'elitist,' would you call breastfeeding elitist because rather than drinking formula, the baby is receiving breast milk--natural and tailored to his growth and well being? Would you call that mother a snob? Hardly! It would be ludicrous to claim elitism is at the core of her intention. And so it is with unschooling that some parents see educating their kids as being natural and wholesome for their family.

Let's take energy. Should ‘developing countries’ go through their own industrial revolutions and burn coal rather than straight to renewable energy if they have the chance to do so, because that is the proper way to do it, since Western countries did? Of course not.
So if as parents we view unschooling as a healthier way to educate, and we can and want to do so with our children, why should this pose a threat to the education system? Why should we be beholden to this institution just because others fought so that all could have a so called universal education?  Why is guiding your child's education without public school seen as elitist and wrong?
Innovation isn’t fair.
--------------
School: a level playing field?

Has anyone asked poor people what sort of education they would like?
Who has bothered to query the poor if the school system works for them?
In my opinion, knowledge is not power if the knowledge you have does not empower you. What is the use of knowing things that are useless to you?
Read Ivan Illich's classic Deschooling Society .

Ivan Illich said, “For most men, the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.”
I take the position with Illich that public school can never provide universal education.
Back in 1970, Illich wrote in Deschooling Society 

Institutionalized education and the institution of the school are producers of merchandise with a specific exchange value in a society where those who already possess a certain cultural capital derive the most benefit. 

Here’s what Ivan Illich had to say about the so called mythical ‘leveling field’ that schooling is supposed to provide:

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for
them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value.
Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of
community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat
race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.......

It should be obvious that even with schools of equal quality a poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one. Even if they attend equal schools and begin at the same age, poor children lack most of the educational opportunities which are casually available to the middle-class child. These advantages range from conversation and books in the home to vacation travel and a different sense of oneself, and apply, for the child who enjoys them, both in and out of school. So the poorer student will generally fall behind  so long as he depends on school for advancement or learning. The poor need funds to enable them to learn, not to get certified for the treatment of their alleged disproportionate deficiencies.

What needs to change, what is already changing, is what as a society, we give value to. Education to further consumption or education to further contribution towards a decent society for all?

Lee Hoinacki; Looking back on a life long friendship with Ivan Illich

--> Lee Hoinacki is a former Dominican priest, professor of political science, and subsistence farmer. He collaborated with Ivan Illich many projects and still works today to spread the thoughts of his life long friend.

This is an excerpt from an interview a few years back:

Illich's concerns around technology, what it’s doing to society can we talk a little more about that?

He was interested first of all in the effects of technology - the actual effects first of all and later the symbolic effects. He would use an example, say a photograph. The photograph was introduced in the 19^th century and into history. But this technological artifact changed people’s perception so he thought it was a serious question which people should try to look at, figure out, whether anyone sees anything today. Period.

Anyone who is exposed to photographs that is. When you see the person are you able to see the person in front of you - see the nature etc and what you are able to see the people you claim to love etc and that kind of thing, you are not going to see them. That was his point. Because what technology is doing is creating an artificial universe and a lot of it has to do with the question of perception and so he spent a lot of time on perception and how technology affects ones perception, what one sees.

Ultimately, he thought that technology was changing what we call the ‘human condition.’ There he is coming out of an atomistic perspective-say Thomas Aquinas in terms of human nature, based first upon Aristotle and he is saying that those people had a certain notion of what it is to be human-what you call human nature and technology is changing that.

He would say for example, are there any human beings around today? Do humans still exist? He would say that would be a serious question....

I want to backtrack a bit and get to the idea of man created in man’s image- the cosmos in man’s hand.

Illich thought that humans are created in God’s image and he was very traditional in that. So that’s why he was believing that the question of image is important. He did a lot of writing on images i.e. these were late writings. He thought that what is happening today is that people are recreating human beings, but it isn’t in man’s image- it’s in a sort of pseudo man, a technological, artifact man.

He actually called it a kind of perversion that is going on. He believed that because of what is going on in the medical system today with respect to death an so on that what we are doing is producing monsters. So that people under intensive care as they approach death, these are not human any more.

These are creatures or what ever they are- well he used the word monsters and word like that. Now obviously, with respect to schooling there are people who learn in spite of schools- so there are people who die in spite of medical technology- who die their own death. Illich would spend a lot of time on words- so he would say, is it possible today to die? And he would think, "well no. It’s not because of technology."

The thing is, that subject of death and technology is not simple to get at. Very complicated and it would take along time to delineate his meaning with respect to technology and its effect on human beings. He would carry this through on everything. That is, for example any kind of vehicle he would think is a kind of monstrosity, a kind of perversion- once you take a person’s feet of the ground, flying and that kind of thing- he would be very critical of that object. He would be very critical of this kind of thing- of talking over the phone over wires. He was critical of that.

But many people would think-okay, this is going back! Did he want to go back?

No! No he said you’ve got to live right now. You’ve got to live in this world. We’ve go to live in the modern world. So he would get into an automobile, or an air plane for example. Although, realizing that this is not a good thing to do. And he would use things like telephones and so forth but as he said, “I would never want to speak to a person I love over the telephone. He never had any photographs of those friends and intimates. He would say, you have to live in this world but you try to live with technology at the same time being critical of it in terms of trying to see what is good and what is bad in the whole thing.

He placed a lot of emphasis on what he called askesis - he like to use Greek words now and then. We would call that in English an asceticism-which is life long process of trying to discipline your senses so that you are able to feel, to see, to smell, and so on. And it’s a life long process disciplinary practices which one can use- you see that in people today who are into mediation. He did not go for that kind of stuff, because he thought anything that smacked of new age- he avoided. It was sort of an anathema to him. He thought that was the worst kind of junk you can imagine. And he was quite explicit and vocal about that.

But he was very strong on the question of disciplines that are necessary in order to train ones self to be able to hear, to see to taste and so on....the point is to be in the world but not to be of the world. And he said this was a kind of mystery that one had to figure out- him or herself. So renouncing the world, it doesn’t mean that you close yourself up in some sort of ivory tower which he did not do, or go of to the desert some place which he did not to. Because he was in the midst of things all the time.

But he was living in what in the, the Roman Catholic tradition is called 'detachment.' That is, he wasn’t attached to any of these things for example a good wine, flowers, a comfortable bed. Well he didn’t have much of a comfortable bed because he just slept on a futon which I built. But he felt that one could not become attached to any of these things.

I’ve seen him eat all kinds of junk and drink all kinds of stuff and thought well this is crazy to eat and drink this way. But he could also enjoy a good meal and wine without attachment. The question of renouncing the world is a question of attachment - he would give me clothing that his brother would give him.

We were the same size so I could get his brother’s good shirts or whatever because his brother gave them to him thinking, he’s got to wear something! He’d be like in rags- well not rags but these sort of torn, old clothes. His brother would go out and buy him these expensive things and he’d pass them on to me. “I don’t want that stuff. I don’t need that!”

He’d say. So he would take what he needed but that was all. He wouldn’t take any more.

Do you want to go back and talk about the idea of friendship and how that could help us navigate ourselves through this world?

He thought that we live in an awful society. This society is not going to do anything to encourage us to be good. Because it’s just a mess. So the one thing he thought that could possibly save people or,may be that’s not the proper word, was the notion of friendship. Friendship for him was gaditas in Latin-charity that is, it was a grace. It was a supernatural thing. ......

So he would say, "Friends are everything- without my friends I would just be nothing in a sense."

And then of course, one of the deeper key notions is what he called hospitality. That is to be an hospitable host. His door was always open in a sense that any one could come in. I mean I’ve seen all kinds of crazy people come in, living with him over a number of years. And so he felt that it was extremely important to be hospital to the stranger and to friends. There are people I know who interpret Illich just in terms of hospitality- they say that’s the most important thing he had to say in his life - there is some truth in that.

Did he think that the world was just going to hell in a hand basket?

Well yes. I think so. Um hmm.

Do you think so too?

I feel perhaps much more stronger about that then he did. I feel that there’s no hope in a sense.

That’s very discouraging.

He would say, I don’t speak this way to young people because it’s too horrible, I can’t say these things. And so he would talk to me about his views that way. But he wouldn’t really come out and be explicit with respect to others. At the same time, he was a ‘man of faith’ so he believed well, this world could go to hell in a hand basket because it doesn’t make that much difference anyway "because there is another world in which I believe. That’s the world in which I want to die."

He was a peculiar person in the sense that he was a genuine believer so while he was looking at the world and seeing what it was, he also was not discouraged. He was not depressed because he saw that there was more then what meets the eye.

He was very active in Europe protesting the implantation of Persian missiles in Germany and he supported people who were in the green party in Europe and he did a lot of behind the scenes work supporting people when Pinochet overthrew Rajende in Chile and when Goulah was overthrown in Brazil, Illich did a a lot of stuff behind the scenes- very active with respect to Comunotorez in Columbia - those are just incidences that come to mind at the top of my head.. He took a very active part in things that were going on in the world. He would really work for what he thought were good things. So he said, "Who knows what will come of it? ....................

That’s Illich. It’s very hard to say his influence because I met him in 1960 and I’ve live with him for many many years and my wife said what are you going to do when this guy dies because your whole life has been centered around him? .....

I think that Illich’s books are important and as he said himself, "You don’t read these books as you would a newspaper." And so, I worked with him on number of these books, some people would say trying to make them more intelligible but they are his ideas and they require some work to understand what he is all about.

Gender, which I think is the most important book he ever wrote, is not reviewed. There is one review, an important review, but other than that it’s never mentioned in any bibliography and nobody reads it and no one know it. But it’s a theory of economics which if one were to take it seriously, would have to reinterpret what is called a social history of Europe. And it think it’s powerful enough that it requires that kind of rethinking of what is called a social history of Europe.

His book, Tools for conviviality is a theory on technology and no one has ever come whatever near those 5 dimensions that Illich talks about there. Bits and pieces of people are saying all kinds of important things and doing all kinds of good things here and there, but I would just argue that I think Illich too was saying something that could perhaps be taken into account.

Listen to the audio here: http://radio4all.net/index.php/program/10512

Does no Education mean no Culture?

We worry that if there is no overarching curriculum to education, indeed, if there is no education at all then what will happen to culture? How will we be able to identify culture from culture? How will we be able to distinguish ourselves as a people, different from another set of people? What will happen to each county's unifying qualities, flavours and idiosyncrasies?

Again, it's the anxiety of the unknown. We are afraid of deviation because we do not want to be surprised. But if we listen to Ivan Illich, "It is precisely for surprise that true education prepares us."
He continues;

Education implies a growth of an independent sense of life and a relatedness which go hand in hand, with increased access to, and use of,memories stored in the human community. This presupposes a place within the society in which each of us is awakened by surprise; a place of encounter in which others surprise me with their liberty and make me aware of my own.

Let us learn always to receive further surprises. I decided long ago to hope for surprises until the final act of my life-that is to say, in death itself. (Celebration of Awareness: A call for institutional Revolution, 1969).

It is helpful to consider what Leo Tolstoy had to say about culture versus education. From his essay, 'On education,' to be found in Deschooling Our lives,1994 (a collection of essays edited by Matt Hern):

"Culture in general is to be understood as the consequences of all those influences which life exerts on man."

I don't know about you but when I read this, I get the sense of vibrancy, dynamism, movement, ever changing, ever responsiveness to societal interaction and interrelatedness.
The feeling I get when I think 'institutionalized education and learning,' is one of the straight and narrow, linear, a to b movement, rather stagnant or at least slow going. Definitely no room for that flourishing, organic exploration. Predictable -definitely no surprises!

Tolstoy continues;

Instruction and teaching are the means of culture, when they are free, and means of education, when the teaching is forced upon the pupil, and when the instruction is exclusive (when only those subjects are taught which the educator regards as necessary).

Education is a compulsory, forcible action of one person upon another for the purpose of forming a man such as will appear to us to be good; but culture is the free relation of people, having for its basis the need of one man to acquire knowledge, and of the other to impart that which he has acquired. The difference between education and culture lies only in the compulsion, which education deems itself in the right to exert. Education is culture under restraint. Culture is free.

The Stench of Education, Educational Needs (?) and Learning under 'Conditions of Scarcity'

I'm on an Ivan Illich kick. If you don't know who this is, Illich wrote Deschooling Society back in the 70s. It was a book that got alternative education models going in earnest.

But what is significant is that at the time of publishing the book, Illich was already revising his thoughts on education.
In a forward note to Deschooling our Lives, a collection of essays edited by Matt Hern, Illich wrote;

I called for the disestablishment of schools for the sake of improving education and here, I noticed, lay my mistake. Much more important than the disestablishment of schools, I began to see, was the reversal of those trends that make of education a pressing need rather than a gift of gratuitous leisure. I began to fear that the disestablishment of the educational church would lead to a fanatical revival of many forms of degraded, all-encompassing education, making the world into a universal classroom, a global schoolhouse. The more important question became, "Why do so many people - even ardent critics of schooling - become addicted to education, as to a drug?"

What a piercing idea-education as 'a gift of gratuitous leisure' rather than a 'pressing need.'
When Illich's recantation was published in the Saturday Review, that same week the book came out, it was to explain that

the alternative to schooling was not some other type of educational agency, or the design of educational opportunities in every aspect of life, but a society which fosters a different attitude of people toward tools. I expanded and generalized this argument in my next book, Tools for Conviviality.

"Fostering a different attitude of people towards tools." That is something I would like to spend some time on and would appreciate input from readers of this blog.
When you think tools, what comes to mind and how does this bear on how you thing about education?
Illich goes on to point out that the educational function was emigrating from the schools and that, increasingly,

other forms of compulsory learning would be instituted in modern society. It would become compulsory not by law, but by other tricks such as making people believe that they are learning something from TV, or compelling people to attend in-service training, or getting people to pay huge amounts of money in order to be taught how to have better sex, how to be more sensitive, how to know more about the vitamins they need, how to play games, and so on. This talk of "lifelong learning" and "learning needs" has thoroughly polluted society, and not just schools, with the stench of education.

Wrapping up this short foreward, Illich says;

When I wrote Deschooling Society, the social effects, and not the historical substance of education, were still at the core of my interest. I had questioned schooling as a desirable means, but I had not questioned education as a desirable end. I still accepted that, fundamentally, educational needs of some kind were an historical given of human nature. I no longer accept this today.

As I refocused my attention from schooling to education, from the process toward its orientation, I came to understand education as learning when it takes place under the assumption of scarcity in the means which produce it. The "need" for education from this perspective appears as a result of societal beliefs and arrangements which make the means for so-called socialization scarce.

And, from this same perspective, I began to notice that educational rituals reflected, reinforced, and actually created belief in the value of learning pursued under conditions of scarcity. Such beliefs, arrangements, and rituals, I came to see, could easily survive and thrive under the rubrics of deschooling, free schooling, or homeschooling (which, for the most part, are limited to the commendable rejection of authoritarian methods).

What does scarcity have to do with education? If the means for learning (in general) are abundant, rather than scarce, [and I think at this point we can think about the tools for learning and how accessible they are to everyone] then education never arises - one does not need to make special arrangements for "learning." If, on the other hand, the means for learning are in scarce supply, or are assumed to be scarce, then educational arrangements crop up to "ensure" that certain important knowledge, ideas, skills, attitudes, etc., are "transmitted."

Education then becomes an economic commodity which one consumes, or, to use common language, which one "gets." Scarcity emerges both from our perceptions, which are massaged by education professionals who are in the business of imputing educational needs, and from actual societal arrangements that make access to tools and to skilled, knowledgeable people hard to come by - that is, scarce.

Illich concludes with his wish that;

If people are seriously to think about deschooling their lives, and not just escape from the corrosive effects of compulsory schooling, they could do no better than to develop the habit of setting a mental question mark beside all discourse on young people's "educational needs" or "learning needs," or about their need for "a preparation for life."

How does that make you feel?