Deschooling Society (1971)

By Ivan Illich - 30 Q&As - Book Review and Summary

Three billion dollars spent on six million disadvantaged American children between 1965 and 1968 produced no measurable improvement in their learning. Measured against classmates from middle-income homes, they had fallen further behind. This was the most expensive compensatory education program ever attempted anywhere, and in the course of running it, professionals discovered an additional ten million children in need of the same treatment, generating fresh grounds for further funding requests. Ivan Illich published Deschooling Society in 1971 with this pattern as his opening evidence. His conclusion was not that the money had been spent badly. It was that no amount of money spent through schools could reach the children the money was meant for, because schools by their structure resist the concentration of privilege on those otherwise disadvantaged. The institution built to relieve the problem was producing more of it, and this was not an accident of American policy. It was the design of the institution operating as designed.

Illich was born in Vienna in 1926, studied theology and philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, and earned a PhD in history at the University of Salzburg. He came to the United States in 1951 and served as assistant pastor in an Irish-Puerto Rican parish in New York City. From 1956 to 1960 he was vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, where he ran an intensive training center for American priests in Latin American culture. In 1961 he co-founded the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and from there directed research seminars on institutional alternatives in technological society, with particular attention to Latin America. Deschooling Society grew from thirteen years of dialogue with Everett Reimer, from working conversations at CIDOC with Paulo Freire, Peter Berger, and Paul Goodman, and from a final exchange with Erich Fromm on Bachofen’s Mutterrecht. He was writing as someone who had watched the American schooling model exported to Latin America under USAID contracts and had seen what it did to peasant societies where universal schooling was structurally impossible from the start.

The book appeared at the peak of American confidence that federal spending, professional expertise, and the international extension of the American educational model would produce a schooled world by the end of the century. Title One had passed in 1965. The Ford Foundation was pressuring Latin American governments to raise per-capita education spending toward North American levels. The Germans were tripling their higher-education budget to catch up with the American system. The French proposed to raise school spending to ten percent of GNP by 1980. Behaviorists and free-schoolers were fighting publicly over what school should look like, while agreeing without argument that all children should be in one. Fidel Castro was promising that by 1980 Cuba would dissolve its university because all of Cuban life would be an educational experience. Into this consensus Illich brought a claim that placed him outside every faction: schools are fundamentally alike in all countries regardless of ideology, their hidden curriculum shapes the same consumer whether the flag over the building is red, white, or tricolor, and this identity forces us to recognize a worldwide identity of myth, mode of production, and method of social control.

Deschooling Society stands as an early and unusually clear application of institutional critique to a service industry the postwar West had placed beyond question. Illich’s target was school, but his analytical method extended to every institution that promises to deliver a human value through professional service, and he named hospitals, courts, transportation, welfare, and the family as sharing the same pattern. The summary that follows unpacks his four myths that convert children into consumers, his description of the classroom as a magic womb in which morality, legality, and personal worth collapse into one dimension so that a pupil who cheats is made to feel outlaw and morally corrupt and personally worthless at once, and his proposal for four learning networks that could replace what school pretends to provide. It closes on his recovery of the pre-classical Pandora, the All-Giver whose jar was a vessel from which good things flow as gifts, which Illich sets against the self-sealing casket of modern institutional life: a New York toy shop machine whose only function is to close its own lid on itself.

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