SCHOOL IS DEAD

Everett Reimer School has become the universal church of a technological society,incorporating and transmitting its ideology, shaping men's minds to acceptthis ideology, and conferring social status in proportion to its acceptance.There is no question of man's rejecting technology. The question is only oneof adaptation, direction and control. There may not be much time, and theonly hope would seem to lie in education -- the true education of free mencapable of mastering technology rather than being enslaved by it, or byothers in its name....Technology can kill by poisoning the environment, by modern warfare, byover-population. It can enslave by chaining men to endless cycles of competitive consumption, by means of police states, by creating dependenceon modes of production, which are not viable in the long run. There are nocertain roads of escape from these dangers. There can be no road of escapeat all, however, if men remain enthralled in a monolithic secular orthodoxy.Our major threat today is a worldwide monopoly in the domination of men'sminds.

School is Dead

An Essay on Alternatives in EducationEverett Reimer Everett Reimer has done too many things to mention in full: he has soldmaps, played professional football, printed greeting cards and worked in atire factory. During the war he became a civil servant. After that he workedfor the Atomic Energy Commission, for the Survey Research Center at theUniversity of Michigan, and for the Washington Research Center of theMaxwell School, University of Syracuse.Later he became Secretary of the Puerto Rican Committee of HumanResources, and worked for the Alliance for Progress. He is now with IvanIllich, at the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC), and isDirector of the CIDOC seminar on Alternatives in Education.

IntroductionNote for English Readers1 The Case Against Schools2 What Schools Do3 What Schools Are4 How Schools Work 5 Where Schools Came From6 Institutional Props for Privilege7 Are Democratic Institutions Possible?8 Education for Freedom9 What People Need to Know10 Networks of Things11 Networks of People12 Financing Education13 The Revolutionary Role of Education14 Strategy for a Peaceful Revolution15 What Each of Us Can Do

IntroductionMy grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.- Margaret Mead This book is the result of a conversation with Ivan Illich, which hascontinued for fifteen years. We have talked of many things but increasinglyabout education and school and, eventually, about alternatives to Schools.Illich and I met in Puerto Rico, where I had come in 1954, as secretary of the committee on Human Resources of the Commonwealth Government,charged with assessing the manpower needs of the island and recommendingan educational programme to meet them. Puerto Rico was then in the courseof rapid industrialization and my calculations showed that dropout rateswould have to decline throughout the school system if the estimatedmanpower needs of the economy were to be met. Everything was done toreduce these rates and they actually declined for a while, but it soon becameapparent that the decline was at the expense of grade standards and,therefore, was meaningless.Illich came to Puerto Rico in 1956, at the request of the Late CardinalSpellman, to organize a training programme for New York priests fromparishes overrun by Puerto Rican migrants. We soon found commoninterests and many parallels in the problems of church and school. In 1960Illich left Puerto Rico for Mexico and shortly after I also left for Washingtonto join the Alliance for Progress. We began to study the problems of LatinAmerican education at about the same time and these turned out to besimilar to the problems of Puerto Rico but on a vastly larger scale. It wassoon clear to both of us that the countries of Latin America could not, formany years, afford schools for all of their children. At the same timeeducation seemed to be the basic need of these countries, not only to us butto their political parties and leaders as well. In 1968 we began a part-timeformal study of this dilemma and of possible ways out of it.Our analysis of school was soon extended to other institutions and to thestructure of the society schools serve. At first we felt that school was alagging institution in an increasingly efficient technological society. Welater came to see schools as providing indispensable support for atechnological society which is itself not viable. The simplest way to expose