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Comment by minerjoe | Hacker News Reader

"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.

In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery."

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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 an entirely unworkable alternative for like 60% of students. If we deschooled, we would absolutely end up with a double-digit percentage of the population either illiterate, innumerate, or both.

If you're honest with yourself, Medical Nemesis is has some great passages but in it is also the germs of the anti-vaccination and natural healing movements.

His critiques are powerful but the answer is not deinstitutionalism. The answer is taking his Tools for Conviviality to heart when engaging with/through institutions.

Without conviviality, Learning Webs will become a "Platform" with blood-sucking silicon valley middle men taking a 20% cut on all education spending and gig worker teachers languishing away in poverty. Of course, Illich would just say SV platform capitalism is also an institution^1.

With convivality, even the most institutional institutions can become places for human flourishing (Illich spent his life in the Catholic church, after all!)

So, I love Illich's critique. And Illich was a genius, in the sense that he proposed online education 30 years before the internet was invented.

But deschooling isn't the answer.

Conviviality is.

[^1]: which is one of the reasons that Foucault is worth reading of Illich resonates -- Illich always sort of grounded out in a no-true-scottsman when you point out his alternatives don't work. Foucault provides a more robust theory by explaining how power and institutions relate to one another.

Can you expand a bit more on conviviality, what is represents?

Is it ok if simply I point you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Conviviality and urge you to read the book (it's quite short)?

That's good too, thank you.

Another take on conviviality is from its root - 'to live with'. Hannah Arendt (and I'm sure many others) argues that 'living with' other people, well, in a polity, where you inevitably have different views, is a key problem of modern life. If you are strong at sciences as a kid, it often takes you a while to understand this.

If you can get the BBC - this radio program (In our time) is a good introduction. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08c2ljg

I appreciate how the french idea of education includes savoir vivre.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23809211

One should be able to be convivial even with those who aren't companions.

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 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

But well worth reading, and a convivial life is a good life.

> 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

The amount of calories we're able to extract from the earth is proportionate to the amount of energy we can produce. If we stop generating large amounts of energy, the population will shrink dramatically. If we keep generating it, the population will eventually grow to exceed carrying capacity.

It's the wrong level of abstraction. There is no answer.

Illich reminds me a lot of Ayn Rand. Not so much for what they believe, but in the way that both of their worldviews appeal so much to sheltered but intelligent teenagers. If you have a very limited depth of understanding of the world and how complex it can be, they seem to have ALL the answers.

> If we deschooled, we would absolutely end up with a double-digit percentage of the population either illiterate, innumerate, or both.

This is already the case with our current schooling system; there double-digit percentages of school leavers who are functionally illiterate, and even more who are innumerate.

Not enough people understand this. It blew my mind when I first learned about illiteracy rates among Americans. And once you understand innumeracy you begin to understand just how vulnerable people are to coercion. And how people think that 1% fatality rates are no big deal.

The illiteracy rate in the US is really quite incredible, with the federal government reporting something like 20% of the population to be "low literacy"

https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp

Wow - I really thought the first gp in this thread must be wrong, and then researched the UK and we are similar - around 20 to 25 percent. Blows my mind - it appears the levels haven't changed much since the 40s in the UK - which shocked me.

Are there many people who think 1% fatality rate is no big deal? I haven't seen many. But of course the illiterate would not be commenting much online.

There are many who don't think COVID is a big deal, because it doesn't have anywhere close to a 1% fatality rate. But that's not quite the same thing.

Yes, I was referring to covid, but just an example. Initially experts thought thought 1% was correct for covid, AND people thought it was not a big deal.

Thankfully there have been reports that make us think the fatality rate is much less than 1%, but that doesn't change the fact that people though 1% was a tiny number.

I mean, 0.01 is objectively a tiny number. The problem is when you multiply by 328 million ;)

Hence the need for numeracy. You need to be able to do a little bit of thinking for any given number, the context, etc. For example, think about all the people you know, and also how that 0.01 might not be a random sampling of the entire population, but "cluster" in certain cohorts like the elderly, and consider that 0.01 is the worst-case outcome, but in many situations more will still have really bad consequences.

The danger of confusing process with substance is definitely an interesting point. Everyone can probably think of an example where that's happened.

But as someone who learned unix and some CS among other things in public schools in a way that would have been impossible out of anything provided at home I'm definitely reluctant to throw that institution entirely under the bus.

And in general I'd think that a forum full of people who make process for a living (software is arguably nothing but process) should understand that while systems are often full of blind spots that doesn't mean they're without their utility.

What's needed is to figure out how to make services/systems/institutions with value.

I think a more fundamental and seldom-agreed-upon question is what constitutes substance in the first place.

I would argue that it’s very rare to find an answer that is truly coherent in that it corresponds to reality, is internally consistent, and doesn’t devolve into absurdity (turtles all the way down, etc.). I only know of one, and it’s rooted in the Christian worldview.

Do you mind telling us what that non-recursive substance is?

I'm not the one you're asking, but try "He Is There And He Is Not Silent", by Francis Schaeffer.

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 people. The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint—that of individual persons. We then begin to see the grotesquery—indeed, the impossibility—of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness.

The first, and best known, hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists—people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest, in preventing. More common, and more damaging, are the inventors, manufacturers, and salesmen of devices who have no concern for the possible effects of those devices. Specialization is thus seen to be a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility.

Even worse, a system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competences and responsibilities that were once personal and universal. Thus, the average—one is tempted to say, the ideal—American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturists and “agribusinessmen,” the problems of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators, the problems of conservation to conservationists, and so on. This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns: making money and entertaining himself. He earns money, typically, as a specialist, working an eight-hour day at a job for the quality or consequences of which somebody else—or, perhaps more typically, nobody else—will be responsible. And not surprisingly, since he can do so little else for himself, he is even unable to entertain himself, for there exists an enormous industry of exorbitantly expensive specialists whose purpose is to entertain him." [1]

[1] https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Unsettling_of_Ameri...

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 Eisenhower had planned the D-day invasion without being able to delegate a huge number of urgent and important tasks like weather prediction to specialists like Meteorologist James Martin Stagg?

How easily could a hobbyist Cessna pilot land a passenger jet in the Hudson river?

> How easily could a hobbyist Cessna pilot land a passenger jet in the Hudson river?

Poorly, but he would have a heck of a shot.

I think these are excellent things to keep in mind, but the vast majority of real life is not D-Day or crash landing in the Hudson. I'd go so far as to say that most people hardly ever even spend any time solving "dynamic complex problems." People being really, really good at stuff is important, but I don't think it follows that everyone should only do one thing.

I have a hunch that Eisenhower himself was probably a person who could do most of the things on that list.

> I have a hunch that Eisenhower himself was probably a person who could do most of the things on that list.

Further supporting your point, that is perhaps why they are called “Generals”, IE: they have mastered enough areas that they are now generalists able to approach many subject areas and problem sets.

Wiki says: "The term general is used in two ways: as the generic title for all grades of general officer and as a specific rank. It originates in the 16th century, as a shortening of captain general, which rank was taken from Middle French capitaine général. The adjective general had been affixed to officer designations since the late medieval period to indicate relative superiority or an extended jurisdiction." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_officer

Okay, just going off of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower#Family_ba...

- conn a ship: It mentions no naval career. It does mention fishing, so there is a decent probability that he could handle a canoe. But if that is the standard for "conn a ship", then this whole argument is basically just "people should have hobbies" which...okay sure. And they already do.

- design a building: No mention of this. He attended West Point, which is also an engineering school, but that is very weak evidence. I went to MIT and the only building design I've ever done is that of a shed. Again, people should have hobbies.

- write a sonnet: Google searches for "poetry by Dwight D Eisenhower", "Ike sonnet", "Eisenhower Sonnet", and "Sonnet by Eisenhower" do not turn up anything. Maybe he wrote poetry to his wife, but we have no evidence of it. Again, people should have hobbies.

- balance accounts: I'm happy to just assume this to be true as part of his career's focus in being able to organize troops.

- butcher a hog: His father worked as a railroad mechanic and then at a creamery. They were not wealthy. There's no mention of his working in agriculture. He did like hunting, so its totally plausable that he could dress a deer. But he didn't work on a farm or in a slaughterhouse or meat-packing plant. Why would someone who owned pigs waste the meat/time/money to teach someone how to slaughter them as even a hobby?

- set a bone: Plausable, but I see a number of sports-related leg injuries.

- program a 1973-era computer: He died in 1969

I could go and try to research this more thoroughly, but it is hard to prove a negative and time is a global variable.

[1] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Washington/Pub...

Sure, people should indeed become "sorta good" at multiple skills. In practice, they do. Many people know how to doodle or play charades or tell stories or sing sea-shanties. Otherwise, hobbyist Cessna pilots would not exist -- nor the word "hobby". In real life, statements like "he is even unable to entertain himself" are pretty false.

> the vast majority of real life is not D-Day or crash landing in the Hudson

Sure, but a significant portion of life is spent interacting with the results of other people's work. When you get into a car, would you rather that its microcontrollers were programmed by someone who

A: Felt continually distressed and defeated that he had not thoroughly mastered sailing, animal husbandry, military history, rhetoric, first aid, copy-editing, painting, masonry, carpentry, and several other skills.

B: Felt fulfilled that the only domains in which he had deep knowledge were microcontroller programming, cooking seafood to his wife's taste, and the emotional/medical meanings of their child's sounds -- yet that they had merely a hobbyists' knowledge of hiking, sketching, kites, anime, and the history of flight.

Because I'd rather a world with more of B and less of A.

> But what is the real-life practical alternative?

> But life is short and any art takes long to learn to sufficient depth that you can solve dynamic complex problems.

In the time I spent playing DOTA my brother learned Chinese AND learned enough about programming to get his first programming gig paying about $80k/year.

While it can take a long time, even a lifetime, to master a field you can get to a competent level surprisingly quickly.

Your line of questioning goes against the intent of the critique. Which is: while perhaps (but not always) good for the institution and the societal whole, the gains from specialization are at the cost of individual wholeness.

Questioning how shifting the focus from society to the individual would harm the larger whole seems to skirt around the discussion.

Was the unidimensional valor given for Stagg’s meteorological accomplishments a worthy reward for a lifetime of hyper-specialization?

And to the, in my opinion more important, flipside: how does the psyche heal when, perhaps for reasons entirely outside of an individuals’ control, the specialized-man fails the one task they spent a lifetime training for. What happens when you define a man by one function and in the critical moment they fail?

This seems like a majorly contrived line of reasoning to me.

A person does not spend their entire lives training to succeed at one particular task on one particular day. The career of a specialist will comprise decades worth of accomplishments and failures, both big and small.

Such a career will also be only one portion of a persons life. If a person were to derive their entire reason for existing from their career, then they’re going to have a shallow and unfulfilling life. No matter whether they specialize or not, or whether they’re successful or not.

The critique that specialists lack the broader contextual knowledge/skills required to apply their speciality also seems invalid to me. Such people are simply skilled ICs, who are instructed on how to apply their skills by others. A highly skilled programmer may not know what programs to write, or what problems they should try and solve. But that’s fine if they work with a skilled product manager who can tell them what to do. Why would it be necessary for all of the roles required to solve a problem to be performed by a single person?

A world without specialists would simply be a world where nothing that requires specialist skills/knowledge can be accomplished. Aside from the obvious problems that would cause, I don’t see how that would actually solve any of the problems that are purportedly being attributed to specialization.

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.

Apart from there being a 'right answer', there does appear to be an answer for how many people we will be: the world population is expected to level off at 11 billion or so as global birthrates drop off (mainly as most countries catch up to a transition a few have already gone through). Without substantial changes to our society it seems it will stay there or slowly decline.

And once we get there, there will be some very tough questions about how to ensure the rate of economic growth that we’ve come to expect to ensure a sustainable quality of life for people.

Perhaps there will be breakthroughs in preventing aging, automation etc. that will allow for sustainable living then? Maybe. It’s an interesting question.

OTOH, we could also simply descend into nuclear war and reset civilization.

Or have more deadly pandemics ravage our cities.

Strange times indeed.

Much of that came from Lewis Mumford's works on Technics from the 1930s! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technics_and_Civilization

Reminds me of the book on professional jobs called Disciplined Minds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Schmidt_(writer)

It always pains me greatly to read writers from times past about social issues whose voice rings distinctly true today still. Because it means that understanding the problem is completely uncorrelated to being able to do anything about it.

Under the creakingly ancient system the conservative holds to, man is a wolf to other men. Under the shiny new system the progressive touts, it's exactly the opposite.

(I hope you are either a masochist or don't read many social writers from times past. The Code of Hammurabi indicates social issues 3'700 years ago are similar to those of our day.)

That whole argument is a massive straw-man in service of a libertarian attack on the funding of social institutions like hospitals and schools.

I would hope that for consistency, Illich on principle refused to take treatment from Germany's health care system, populated by medical professionals who are the product of the education system he so detested.

There is a lot to be critiqued with the way that medicine and education are practiced and paid for, but to enjoy the benefits of both, while laying fault at the feet of institutionalized medicine and education while ignoring the context both operate borders on hypocrisy.

I agree. And it's such an easy target. Everybody hate schools. But the fact of the matter is that public schools were one of the prominent factors in reducing poverty around the world. As in any institution, it may calcify and be corrupted. But that's just how systems are, injecting the right amount of innovation usually takes care of that. No need to throw the baby with the water, and rethink the whole paradigm. I think that usually the commodditization of social services is what actually kills these systems. They become a race to the bottom, where marketing gets to be more important than substance and genuine interest in quality.

It's all about the middle path...

It's actually a pretty good time to rethink everything. The modern school was designed when most adults were illiterate, books were expensive, and we needed to train the population to work in our factories or join the military. Schools did a good job at that.

But times are different.

1. Most adults are literate — When kids have questions about letters or words while they are teaching themselves to read they have a huge supply of adults and older children to get help from.

2. Books are so cheap to produce that we literally throw them away when we are done and the internet has provided the material for a lifetime of education for what is essentially free — And formats (like 3blue1brown animations that couldn't have been imagined a century ago).

3. We don't need to train the population to be obedient for factories or the military. Society can continue without so many people pretending to work. Let them continue to educated themselves until they discover something that benefits the rest of society.

Is this a historical reality that schools are built for factory style education? Citation is needed.

Not sure to what extent we need to rethink primary education, vs refining it. Your points 1 and 2 are true _because_ the education system has excelled at increasing the knowledge of the average person.

> 1. Most adults are literate — When kids have questions about letters or words while they are teaching themselves to read they have a huge supply of adults and older children to get help from.

I had first grader during corona lock down and I can tell you that ability to read/write does not imply ability to help the kid to learn to read and write. This part about kids learning to read by themselves and by asking question of adults around of, frankly, complete nonsense for wast majority of kids.

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 institutions.

His views on policy may or may not be on point (he seems most comfortable in the area of principle and theory), but the conceptual core that relates his views on education to his views on cars and medicine merits consideration.

He similarly wasn't against scientific medicine, but he thought the medical bureaucracy had outgrown its utility: that advances in specialized medicine were too expensive and served to prop up artificially unhealthy lives.

A strong line of his argument is that past a tipping point of size/power, institutions will create the needs they serve. We create these artificial environments where it's hard for most people to thrive and then we create social institutions to compensate: a social prosthetic.

The result in Illich's view is increasing passivity and helplessness: a petulant society composed of a disempowered citizenry.

The argument no-doubt merits a balancing counter-argument, but I find it compelling and it goes deeper than a simplistic dismissal of school.

> 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 Illich provided a fantastic prognosis of certain problems but didn't develop workable solutions.

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.

While I’ve added the critique to my reading list, I have yet to finish. I cannot speak to your claim the Illich’s critique is based on what he so desires (“I want a pony”), as opposed to describing a phenomenon of individual emptiness as a side-effect of Western institutions.

I agree if his long-form critique takes the structure you claim, it is of poor quality because claiming desires in not critical of anything.

However, I do disagree with your claim the critique alone is not helpful. A harsh, well formed critique is typically the very first pillar in driving change. Expecting identification and resolution in the same piece is asking too much.

I would argue to say that a critique being invalidated because it somehow must include both framing and describing a phenomenon as well as suggesting changes, each weighted by their feasibility in remedying the systemic woes, is much more fallacious.

That would be fine if the quote didn't include this bit:

"...and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question."

That's where he veers into making a policy recommendation (defunding social institutions), and where he is no longer engaging in critical theory but in pushing a particular policy agenda, therefore opening his critique (some of which I'd even agree with) to practical criticism from people with more skin in the game.

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

> I agree. And it's such an easy target. Everybody hate schools.

This is not true. I dont hate schools. My kids dont hate schools. My friends did not hated schools and my kids friends dont hate schools. There are people, both adults and kids who hate school, of course. And then there are very crappy schools. Speaking to my collegues, they dont hate schools and only two hated school as a kid. And even these do like their kids schools, but they took more care about what is going on there (like they put more effort into selection of school).

But I think that people HN are heavily biased against the schools, the way no other forum or social group I encountered is.

You are right, Of course I exggarated. But for a significant chunk of people I school is something you don't like. It's significant enough to be a cultural trope[0]. This makes it an easy target, and a useful hook to get support for any anti social institution criticism.

[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuckySchool

> But for a significant chunk of people I school is something you don't like.

That is much milder sentiment through and I think the difference matters. And significant chunk of people perceives school positively or neutrally.

> This makes it an easy target, and a useful hook to get support for any anti social institution criticism.

My problem is that while I see this a lot on HN, I don't see it anywhere else. Including in people who loudly criticize this or that aspect of education or school. The positive attitude toward school is unrepresented on HN, despite being present in real life and in studies that measure attitudes.

Similarly, the people on HN are way more pushing homeschooling then anyone else I know ... including people on forums for stay at home moms or general mom forums (who would be in position to do it and tend to be biased more toward family/children interests). Reading HN, one would believe that the only reason to not homeschool is that you cant afford one parent at home. And that those parents are unhappy for having kids in school and that those kids are unhappy. That sentiment is not present among people who are actually at home and could theoretically homeschool if they were inclined to.

The whole thing seems to me political ideological. Some people here want everyone to hate the school, but it does not make it so.

I agree with your critique in the first paragraph, but I disagree with your second.

You can criticize a system while still participating in it; just because you think there should be a better system doesn't mean that the current system is worse than nothing.

I dislike the US health care system, and think we should move from private insurance to a single payer model. However, I still currently have private insurance and participate in the system, because I need healthcare and my only choice right now is private insurance.

> You can criticize a system while still participating in it

I agree with this wholeheartedly, but Illich called for the abolishment of social institutions altogether, not the improvement of them.

I'm quite suspicious of such calls for abolishing institutions rather than reforming them - whether from the right or left - because they are often just cloaked attempts to replace those institutions with their own preferred "purer" institutions. In the case of Illich, his preferred institutions would seem to be somewhat connected to his religious work as a priest.

> dislike the US health care system, and think we should move from private insurance to a single payer model

Single-payer/Medicare-for-all is just advocating for reform of the health care system by removal of the pathologies of private insurance, not the abolishment of shared risk pools altogether. It's an evolution of the current system, not the destruction of it.

> I would hope that for consistency, Illich on principle refused to take treatment

If memory serves Illich tolerated (and perhaps died from?) a prominent tumor on his face which he refused to have treated.

(That I would remember him as an exception in part makes your point.)

Apparent confirmation: "His charisma, brilliance and spirituality were clear to anyone who encountered him; these qualities sustained him in a heroic level of activity over the last 10 years in the context of terrible suffering caused by a disfiguring cancer." From the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/dec/09/guardianobituar...

Yep, while the general shortcoming of the population described is true, it's not schools fault.

Humans are not infinitely malleable, in fact, most are not malleable by much. To blame the shortcoming of biological human on institution that tries to correct them (but largely fails to achieve the high bar he's aiming for) is idiotic.

Having seen firsthand the uses and failures of institutions, give me an institution. Or I'll build it if I have to.

That paragraph is very, very, very unwise.

The amount truth in that short passage is mind-blowing.

I feel like the concept of deschooling was written without taking into mind the actual humans behind the curtains. The idea of removing schools in favor of self-guided education seems like a good idea at first, but ignores the numerous factors that would make it hard for a lot of people to actually do so on their own.

For example most of my middle and high school life was spent being severely depressed due to various life circumstances. School was more or less a routine affair that allowed me to disconnect briefly from my home life and without that escape I likely would've simply stopped learning altogether.

Wow is that on the nose.

To get an idea of what experiences led to 1984, see Orwell's "SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS (1947)" http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part49 about his schooling at St Cyprian's.

"And above all, I believed Sambo and Flip when they told me they were my benefactors. ... from Sambo's point of view I was a good speculation. He sank money in me, and ... I won him scholarships when the time came ... But it is difficult for a child to realize that a school is primarily a commercial venture. A child believes that the school exists to educate ... Flip and Sambo had chosen to befriend me, and their friendship included canings, reproaches and humiliations, which were good for me and saved me from an office stool. That was their version, and I believed in it. It was therefore clear that I owed them a vast debt of gratitude. But I was not grateful, as I very well knew. ... But it is wicked, is it not, to hate your benefactors?"

Mr & Mrs Wilkes, or Big Brother?

But this is just human. With or without school it's the same.

We shouldn't blame the innate response of natural human emotions on schooling, or anything else.

E pur si muove.

“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 Heinlein

Anyone ever figure out if even Heinlein himself accomplished those skills? Because, frankly, it makes a nice trope or whatever, but I question the literal seriousness Heinlein had when he wrote that. Perhaps as an early prototype of The World's Most Interesting Man, but not to be taken as a literal bucket list.

As an engineer and military officer that made a career of writing, was active in real estate and silver mining and politics, knowing not a single other thing about him, I assume (and I am, admittedly, erring a little on the side of generosity in my assumptions, but my goal is to aim for "is it plausible?" not "did he definitely?"):

-to change a diaper

-plan an invasion (navy officer)

-butcher a hog

-conn a ship (navy, engineer)

-design a building (engineer)

-write a sonnet (writer)

-balance accounts (numerate)

-build a wall (engineer)

-set a bone

-comfort the dying

-take orders (officer)

-give orders (officer)

-cooperate (officer)

-act alone (probably)

-solve equations (engineer)

-analyze a new problem (engineer)

-pitch manure

-program a computer (engineer)

-cook a tasty meal

-fight efficiently (officer)

-die gallantly (officer)

15 / 21 ain't bad, and the remainder aren't implausible either. A little googling suggests he was born in 1907 in Missouri, so he probably gets butchering a hog and pitching manure. Cooking a tasty meal is a fairly low bar for any functioning human to meet - that's 18/21.

He didn't have kids, so I'm not willing to grant him diaper-changing without a reason to. I can't find any medic training, so I won't give him setting a bone. And I'm not sure anyone knows how to comfort the dying.

18/21 is quite plausible. The remaining three are possible.

That list really irritates me.

> - to change a diaper

Ok? What if one never intends to have kids.

> -plan an invasion

For goodness' sake, why is that important outside of the military?

> -butcher a hog

Irrelevant to most people.

> -conn a ship

So? Are we in the navy or maritime service? A gent in Montana has no need of this,

> -design a building

Design, engineer, or build?

> -write a sonnet

Popular for schoolchildren. Says little. Interpretation of sonnets says more.

> -balance accounts

I'll give heinlein that.

> -build a wall

So?

> -set a bone

Useful enough, sure.

> -comfort the dying

Yeah, that's good.

> -take orders

Still not in the military

> -give orders

Still not in the military

> -cooperate

Sure!

-act alone

Sure!

-solve equations

What kind of equation? Arithmetic, algebra, calculus, analysis?

> -analyze a new problem

What kind of analysis? This is extremely specialized.

> -pitch manure

If manure matters in your life, otherwise: so what

> -program a computer

Useful to me, but not relevant to most people

> -cook a tasty meal

Sure.

> -fight efficiently

Still not in the military.

> -die gallantly

Baloney. The Great War should have cured him of this dream.

"Heinlein really likes the military" is my take away. Most of his vaunted list is deeply irrelevant to outright obnoxious to me. It's like reading a "bet you couldn't solve these problems 1850s kids had to solve" thing. Anchored in the past and a different priority system.

Should you be able to provide first aid, cook well, and work with others? Yes. Do reading, riting, and rithmatic? Yeah, sure. That's kind of what the point of the school system is for.

Honestly. No one will know everything, and no one should strive to be ignorant, misanthropic, and uncultured. I could size up my life and write a similar list, but it'd only be a reflection of my priorities in life.

> - to change a diaper > Ok? What if one never intends to have kids.

Then...one should still have that skill. I mean, I didn't have kids until my 40s and the only decade of my life where I didn't apply that skill was the first.

> -plan an invasion > For goodness' sake, why is that important outside of the military?

It's not, but Heinlein—and while some of the list might be more Long-the-character than Heinlein though the broad outline is clearly Heinlein, including at least the outline of the military focus of not the particular examples—(hardly uniquely in US history, one might note—this was a common belief among the founders) viewed military service, including leadership, as something one should be prepared to assume at need (whether on behalf of or against one’s government, as dictated by the need) not a profession for a distinct and isolated caste whose skills the rest of society could afford to neglect, and viewed the contrary view as incompatible with liberty. (I imagine that, had our adulthooda overlapped, as they didn't quite, I'd have been pretty far from Heinlein politically. But on this point, we could agree.)

> The Great War should have cured him of this dream.

That someone should be prepared to die gallantly at need does not imply that the Great War (or war generally) is particularly the occasion where such death was most likely to be called for. Certainly while Heinlein clearly believed it was possible that that could occur, one could hardly read his body of work without recognizing that he saw that possibility outside of war and, likewise saw much, if not most, death in war as pointless and unnecessary.

> Anchored in the past and a different priority system.

It may have been written a half century ago by someone whose formative years were a century ago, but I don't see anything particularly dated about it. It may speak to a different set of ideals than you hold, but I don't know why it is surprising or irritating that disagreement on that level exists.

The point is that we should have the ability to be self-reliant and shouldn’t rely on school or government to set the agenda for what’s important to learn. Make your own list. Step outside the bounds of what your job is and learn some other skills. Build a deck, drift a car, deploy containers in k8s, make jam, grow a garden, fight city hall, etc. The list is irrelevant just make one.

> Because, frankly, it makes a nice trope or whatever, but I question the literal seriousness Heinlein had when he wrote that.

I wouldn't take anything Heinlein put in Lazarus Long’s—or any other fictional character’s—mouth as representing his simple literal view unless Heinlein also said it directly in a nonfictional context.

You're not far off talking about "The World's Most Interesting Man". It's a quote from Time Enough for Love, which is about Lazarus Long, a genetically modified human who lives for 2000 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Long

Also consider that it's not as impressive a list as it rhetorically seems. If you spit into a crowd of people at least 30 years old, you'll probably hit a person who has done at least 10 of them, maybe more.

Also he doesn't say a human should have done all of them, only that they should be able to.

Which is an even lower bar, is it not?

Yeah, I call BS. I don't know any insect with more than half a dozen specialized roles. Mankind surpassed that before we built pyramids.

Just think about how many unique professions are required before your daily job even starts to make sense. Someone is being paid to monitor a tank of fluorine compound so that it can be used to etch silicon wafers.

I don't think he's saying that a single species of insect will have specialists in many different roles. I think he's saying that there are millions of species of insects and each species usually specializes in one thing so that they can survive in a specific environmental niche.

I don't think specialization by humans is bad, but I agree that specialization can go too far sometimes. If the person being paid to monitor a tank of fluorine loses the ability to do their own laundry or hold a conversation because they are spending so much of their time developing fluorine tank monitoring skills it's kind of a waste. Part of the human experience is learning and doing lots of different things. Even if our economy rewards hyper-specialization that doesn't mean that a person's entire life has to be focused on their hyper-specialized job.

Diversification is a huge luxury, which you can afford if you are worth over a 100 mil and focus your life on being diversified. Even then it's questionable whether you are able to bring it all together ala DaVinci, Alexander, Caesar, etc. Seems we are past that point in history.

That's the whole point though: you don't need "to monitor a tank of fluorine compound so that it can be used to etch silicon wafers" if you're computing with clockwork or fluidics. (I'm not knocking silicon, just pointing out that there are alternatives.)

Also, humans are the only species that can run a marathon, swim a lake, and climb a tree. We are generalists.

Written, not by the author of Clan of the Cave Bear, but by the author of Stranger in a Strange Land.

Interesting.

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 list quickly.

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.)

Once you start digging deep enough into problems to make a difference there is not enough hours in the day to be more than a dilettante in a more than a limited set of topics.

One does need some general skills, some of those listed above, but you'll definitly need first aid skills like stopping bleeding before learning how to set a bone. School is about the only place that systematically teaches general skills to everyone, not just people with paretns with enough time, skills and energy to do so or hire someone to do that for them.

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them

You wish they knew but they don't. The kids, especially the poor ones, want worksheets, not problems. They want to pass but not learn. They want a degree without the competence. They want a job without possibility of advancement and if you don't provide that they resent you because you are in the way.

You're describing the Nth generation in a hopeless environment, not children in general. This is an encultured attitude, not an innate one. Illich's point, and one born out by learning research is that the desire to learn, to gain knowledge and mastery for its own sake - is innate to such an extent that it can actually be diminished by extrinsic rewards. All children share this.

Complete agreement about the hopeless environment. My point was that the enculturation works extremely reliably. I have not met a single student who questioned or rejected the culture. It is dejecting, and you despise the kids for that.

> I have not met a single student who questioned or rejected the culture.

Both as a student myself and later as a long-term sub in a high school for a while in a poor district, I met lots of students who rejected whatever you might want to (rightly or wrongly) characterize as “the culture”, including many who adapted to what they saw as the incentives in the system while still rejecting the culture and attitudes they perceived as setting those incentives.

>This is an encultured attitude, not an innate one

The only encultured attitude I see here is the modern western delusion that the average child (or person) intrinsically wants to make the substantial, multi year effort required to learn complex subjects.

The vast majority of people do not enjoy learning. No one wants to spend their time on math problems (outside of a tiny minority).

This is also tied to the nonsensical idea that we are all equally capable of everything; the ability to learn (both in general and by specific subject) is randomly distributed and probably normally so like many biological processes. That itself ensures that given equal curiosity, not all children will make the varied effort required to learn.

You aren't disagreeing with it, so far as I can tell.

> The kids, especially the poor ones, want worksheets, not problems.

No, they want out, for both right and wrong reasons, or they want school as a refuge from an even worse home situation, or they want and seek out problems beyond the worksheets, and learn how to extract value from a flawed system. Or...well, lots of other things, kids, even poor ones, not being homogenous, but “thet want worksheets, not problems” is pretty rare. Wanting to pass but not learn is maybe sometimes an epiphenomenon of other motivations (school as refuge plus adverse consequences at both school and home for not passing, for instance.)

> They want a job without possibility of advancement

No one specifically wants wants that, though many see “possibility of advancement” as illusionary for people of their background.

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