MORALITY IS DEPENDENT ON INDIVIDUAL CHOICE

MORALITY IS DEPENDENT ON INDIVIDUAL CHOICE

1. MORALITY MUST BE AN INDIVIDUALS CHOICE, INDOCTRINATION IS A SLIPPERY SLOPE

Michael Macklin, Professor, University of New England, WHEN SCHOOLS ARE GONE, 1976. p. 44.

Prejudice must be overcome but the moral aspect of this problem cannot be solved by the schools since a moral decision can only be made by an autonomous person, by someone free to make such a decision. All too often, success in overcoming prejudice is attributed to schools when all that has happened is that the children have been indoctrinated I the opposite attitude. Each time a person submits to indoctrination, even indoctrination in what may currently been seen as a laudable attitude, his resistance to further indoctrination is lessened.

Ivan Illich, philosopher, DESCHOOLING SOCIETY, 1970. p. 40.

Once people have the idea schooled into them that values can be produced and measured, they tend to accept all kinds of rankings. There is a scale for the development of nations, another for the intelligence of babies, and even progress toward peace can be calculated according to body count. In a schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumer’s index.
3. GOOD CAN ONLY BE VOLUNTARY

Michael Macklin, Professor, University of New England, WHEN SCHOOLS ARE GONE, 1976. p. 44.

Freedom to learn is freedom to learn prejudice but it is also freedom to overcome prejudice. The scholastics saw this same point clearly when they argued that if man is to do good he must be able to sin. Compulsion to learn may be compulsion to avoid prejudiced behavior but only a free act will overcome prejudice itself and we cannot compel a free act.
4. AUSTERITY WOULD GUIDE THE EXERCISE OF AUTONOMY

Ivan Illich, philosopher, TOWARD A HISTORY OF NEEDS, 1978. p. 15.

[Austerity is the] social virtue by which individuals would recognize and decide limits on the maximum amount of instrumented power that anyone may claim, both for his own satisfaction and in the service of others. This convivial austerity inspires a society to protect personal use-value against disabling enrichment.

INSTITUTIONS ARE OPPRESSIVE

1. INSTITUTIONS CONFUSE PROCESS WITH SUBSTANCE

Ivan Illich, philosopher, DESCHOOLING SOCIETY, 1970. p. 1.

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.

Ivan Illich, philosopher, DESCHOOLING SOCIETY, 1970. p. 3.

The poor have always been socially powerless. The increasing reliance on institutional care adds a new dimension to their helplessness: psychological impotence, the inability to fend for themselves.
3. SCHOOLS ARE INSTITUTIONS OF SOCIAL CONTROL

Ivan Illich, philosopher, DESCHOOLING SOCIETY, 1970. p. 11-12.

Instruction is the choice of circumstances which facilitate learning. Roles are assigned by setting a curriculum of conditions which the candidate must meet if he is to make the grade. School links instruction – but not learning – to these roles. This is neither reasonable nor liberating. It is not reasonable because it does not link relevant qualities or competences to roles, but rather the process by which such qualities are supposed to be acquired. It is not liberating or educational because school reserves instruction to those whose every step in learning fits previously approved measures of social control.
4. CONFORMITY BECOMS INTERNALIZED, THEN ENTRENCHES ITSELF

Ivan Illich, philosopher, DESCHOOLING SOCIETY, 1970. p. 40.

People who submit to the standard of others for the measure of their own personal growth soon apply the same ruler to themselves. They no longer have to be put in their place, but put themselves into their assigned slots, squeeze themselves into the niche which they have been taught to seek, and, in the very process, put their fellows into their places, too, until everybody and everything fits.
5. INSTITUTIONS CLOSE INDIVIDUALS MINDS

Ivan Illich, philosopher, DESCHOOLING SOCIETY, 1970. p. 47.

School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition.
6. SCHOOLS ERODE INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM

Ivan Illich, philosopher, DESCHOOLING SOCIETY, 1970. p. 31.

The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical. The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil. When the schoolteacher fuses in his person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life. A teacher who combines these three powers contributes to the warping of the child much more than the laws which establish his legal or economic minority, or restrict his right to free assembly or abode.
7. SCHOOLS LEAD THE WAY FOR OTHER INSTITUTUIONS

Ivan Illich, philosopher, DESCHOOLING SOCIETY, 1970. p. 39.

Once a man or a woman has accepted the need for school, he or she is easy prey for other institutions. Once young people have allowed their imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to institutional planning of every sort.

DESCHOOLING IS PHILOSOPHICALLY BANKRUPT

1. EVEN ILLICH RECOGNIZES THAT POOR DESCHOOLING COULD DO MORE HARM THEN GOOD

Ivan Illich, philosopher, 1973, AFTER DESCHOOLING WHAT? 1973. p. 116-117.

The rash and uncritical disestablishment of school could lead to a free-for –all in the production and consumption of more vulgar learning, acquired for immediate utility or eventual prestige. The discrediting of school-produced, complex, curricular packages would be an empty victory if there were no simultaneous disavowal of the very idea that knowledge is more valuable because it comes in certified packages and is acquired from some mythological knowledge-stock controlled by professional guardians.

Philip W. Jackson, Author, FAREWELL TO SCHOOLS???” Ed. Levine and Havighurst chpt. 5 “A View From Within”. 1971. p. 64

Doubtlessly, there are children who, freed from the formal demands of schools and with a minimum of adult guidance, would set about the laborious task of educating themselves. But whether all or most children, if pressed to do so, would turn out to be such self-motivated learners is indeed doubtful. Moreover, there is at least some reason to believe that those who would suffer most from the absence of classroom constraints and teacher guidance would be those children who already exhibit signs of educational impoverishment. Thus, left largely to their own devices, our out-of-school learners would likely behave in ways that would result in exaggerating the cleavages that already separate social class groups within our society
3. THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCHOOLING DENIES HUMAN POTENTIAL

Maxine Greene, teacher, FAREWELL TO SCHOOLS??? Ed. Levine and Havighurst “To the Deschoolers, ” 1971 p.103

Not only is there an implicit elitism in the arguments of the deschoolers; there is, as well, a fearsome (and paradoxical) lack of confidence in the individual’s ability to work within the system, to choose himself as anything but a functionary, a Kafkaesque “clerk.” The assumption that the teacher can do nothing within the institutions to arouse students to critical thinking or creative endeavor implies a determinist view with respect to the nature of man. Aware of the weakness and injustices in our society, concerned to develop strategies to correct them, we need not, indeed we cannot- give up pure faith in the human being’s capacity to rebel. To say, as Bereiter does, that the average teacher is simply not talented enough to live up to the “humanist ideal” is to express a kind of contempt for the individual. To assume that the individual teacher can do nothing but indoctrinate, manipulate, and enforce an alien reality upon the young is to reject human possibility. Also, it is to ignore the theoretical and practical work which has clarified the nature of human development, concept-learning, sense-making in general.

4. DESCHOOLING CAN'T WORK UNTIL AFTER SOCIETY HAS BEEN RADICALLY TRANSFORMED

Amitai Etzioni, Author, FAREWELL TO SCHOOLS??? Ed. Levine and Havighurst. “The Educational Mission,” 1971. p 96-97

To eradicate educational institutions is to turn children over to other non-free institutions, for example from the authoritarian family to the exploitive labor market. To provide children with educational resources and teachers who rather than guide is to assume that children are already liberated, while in fact they must yet be set free. And to assume that there will be an easy transformation of the modern society to a good society is to underestimate greatly the tenacity of modernity and hence the magnitude of the educational and revolutionary mission.