Read Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault.
Religious fundamentalist homeschoolers will read Illich and get something out of it, but would probably not have the patience/reading comprehension level to engage with Foucault. Or, if they did, would burn it.
So, both have their place.
That said, I wish Foucault had provided a more thorough treatment of schooling, though. I think his reaction to schooling was something like "yeah that's so transparently a factory floor look-alike and so transparently training compliant factory workers that I'm not even sure it's worth saying much else".
> I wish Foucault had provided a more thorough treatment of schooling, though
Agreed. I think most schools were just broadly more authoritarian when he was writing. There's certainly more room to discuss the ways in which schooling has changed as we've shifted from the factory to service and knowledge economies.
Exactly. You could literally write Discipline and Punish today, but with education. The body -> mind and everything.
Educate and Punish? ;)
Foucault's explanation for why leprosy disappeared from Europe is pure psudoscience, along with the entirety of psychoanalysis (which he accepted at least partially). I don't like scholars who take the likes of Lacan as being serious instead of charlatans
Foucault had some good ideas in works like Discipline and Punish or A history of Sexuality but filtering between the noise and signal is extremely tough with him...
Sure. I was sort of intending to use the word in a way that didn't even make a distinction between those two things; i.e., I was using "intellectual" to refer more to the writing's style and tone than its substance :)
"Intellectual" doesn't necessarily mean "scientific" or even "correct". Maybe "academic" would be a better word for what I'm trying to get at.
In my opinion, it is not so much the concrete historical subjects of Focualt’s work that are valuable, but rather his approach at developing a mode of critique founded on historicity and his reminding us in a very general and strong sense that our present is determined by a complex of historical events that don’t actually fit into the neat and tidy bundled up narratives histories present (since this is usually the objective of writing history) but that things are far less coherent and far more like structural emergent phenomenon than they are the effects some historical will (a la Hegel) or the interests of “great men”. Not to mention he does what any great philosopher should do which is make us recognize the concepts we take for granted thanks to years of idioms and cliches being drilled into our heads are not so simple after all (his analysis of power). I think it is the task of every philosopher worth salt to de-hypostatize concepts.
This is why critiques that take issue with Foucault for “forgetting the subject” are taken more seriously and have more ground to stand on than any shallow dismissals on account of a few factual flubs.