BA (Hons) Sociology Joint Honours Pathways: Level 1

Ideas, Knowledge & Education

Born in Vienna in 1926 Illich attended school from 1931 to 1941, and after being
expelled along with his family (under the anti-Semitic laws of the Nazis), he
completed his secondary studies in Italy and then studied theology and
philosophy in Rome later obtaining his doctorate in history at the University of
Salzburg.

Earmarked by the Vatican for their diplomatic service, Illich chose a less
prestigious pastoral ministry and was appointed assistant parish priest at a
New York church with an Irish and Puerto Rican congregation.

Whilst in New York, in 1961 he accepted a professorship at Fordham University

and later moved on to found the Centre for Intercultural Documentation
(CIDOC) in Mexico.

From its foundation until the middle 1970s, CIDOC was a meeting-place for
many American and Latin American intellectuals wanting to reflect on education
and culture.

During this period vigorous debates between Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich (on
education, schooling and the awakening of awareness) took place, in order to
search for ways to transforming the whole of life into a learning experience -
usually outside of the school system.

Ivan Illichs writings on education are made up of collections of articles and

public speeches reproduced in various languages, as well as books, which have all

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Ideas, Knowledge & Education

been distributed internationally, on subjects such as education, health and

technology.

His now famous paper School: the sacred cow (CIDOC, 1968) is the first of a
series of works in the field of education. In this - Illich fiercely criticizes the
centralization, internal bureaucracy, rigidity and, above all the inequalities
inherent within public schooling systems.

Deschooling Society is considered to be one of Illichs most important works,

where he presents the central ideas which suffuse the whole of his work on
education:

Illich himself acknowledges in the introduction to Deschooling Society, that he

had never questioned the value of extending obligatory schooling to all people;
but gradually came to the realisation that for most men the right to learn is
curtailed by the obligation to attend school.

From then on schooling and education become diametrically opposed concepts

for Illich.

... [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. I will explain how this
process of degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are
transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education,
personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result
of services or "treatments."

I do this because I believe that most of the research now going on about
the future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalization of
values ... We need research on the possible use of technology to create
institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction and
the emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by
technocrats. We need counterfoil research to current futurology. (Page 1 of
Deschooling Society).

Full-Text link to Illichs Deschooling Society

http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html
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Ideas, Knowledge & Education

INTRODUCTION

1. WHY WE MUST DISESTABLISH SCHOOL

2. PHENOMENOLOGY OF SCHOOL

3. RITUALIZATION OF PROGRESS

4. INSTITUTIONAL SPECTRUM

5. IRRATIONAL CONSISTENCIES

6. LEARNING WEBS

Other basic institutions might differ from one country to another: family, party,
church, or press. But everywhere the school system has the same structure, and
everywhere its hidden curriculum has the same effect. Invariably, it shapes the
consumer who values institutional commodities above the nonprofessional
ministration of a neighbour.

Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth
that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent.
Everywhere this same curriculum instils in the pupil the myth that increased
production will provide a better life. And everywhere it develops the habit of self-
defeating consumption of services and alienating production, the tolerance for
institutional dependence, and the recognition of institutional rankings. The hidden
curriculum of school does all this in spite of contrary efforts undertaken by
teachers and no matter what ideology prevails.

7. REBIRTH OF EPIMETHEAN MAN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Paulo Freire (1921 - 1997), is arguably the most influential thinker about
education in the late twentieth century - with his emphasis on dialogue (debate)
and his concern for the oppressed.

Freire the Brazilian educationalist left a significant mark on thinking about

progressive education. His book: Pedagogy of the Oppressed is currently one of
the most quoted educational texts.

No one has done more to move the struggle forward, relating to the role of
education as a vehicle for liberation (via praxis) than Paulo Freire.

From being jailed by the Brazilian military (in 1964), to his exile and continuing
struggle on behalf of peasants and the working class throughout the world - he
has captured the political imagination of educators around the world.

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Freires pedagogical project can be seen as one of action-in-and-on the world;

this is most clearly expressed in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970).

Reminder: What is pedagogy?

Freire argues for a system of education that emphasizes learning as an act of

culture and freedom.

One of his key concepts in Pedagogy of the Oppressed is that of Banking

Education this is where passive learners have pre-selected knowledge
deposited in their minds.

The Culture of Silence, in which dominated individuals lose the means by which
to critically respond that which is forced on them by those that dominate.

Whereas Conscientization is the process by which the learner advances

towards critical consciousness; (this is achieved by the process of engaging in
critical pedagogy).

One of the founding assumptions of critical pedagogy is that human beings,

acting on the external world and transforming it, can, at the same time change
the nature of their existence.

Banking education

The banking concept of pedagogy is still the most widely accepted method of
delivery in classrooms of all types today.

Teaching according to this method is based on the premise that the teacher
educates while the students memorize and feed back to the teacher the
information they absorb.

With this type of pedagogical approach, there is little room for interaction
among the students and between the students and the teacher.

An alternative pedagogy involves participatory learning and research that

fosters classroom collaboration and draws connections between lived experience
and academic theories.

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Banking Education: (Adapted from Freires Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

Solutions to oppressive pedagogies cannot be found within the banking concept,

as banking education contains the following attitudes and practices that mirror
the oppressive:

the teacher teaches and the students are taught;

the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
the teacher talks and the students listenmeekly;
the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
teachers choose and enforce their choice, and the students comply;
the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the
action of the teacher;
the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were
not consulted) adapt to it;
the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own
professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom
of the students;
the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are
mere objects.

Can the banking analysis be applied to education in this country?

The more that students work at storing the deposits, the less they develop
critical consciousness - this would create an intervention in the world, where they
act as transformers of their world.

The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they
tend simply to adapt to the world (as it is), and to the fragmented view of
reality deposited in them.

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Banking education minimizes the students creative and critical power; this in turn
serves the interests of the oppressors, who do not wish to have the world
revealed as it really is, nor do they want to see it transformed.

The interests of the oppressors lie in changing the consciousness of the

oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them - the more the oppressed
can be shaped in order to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be
dominated.

The oppressed become regarded as the pathology of the healthy society as a

result, these incompetent and lazy folk must adjust by changing their mentality.

These marginals need to be integrated, incorporated into the healthy society that
they have forsaken.

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not marginals, they are not people
living outside society. They have always been inside inside the same system
that shaped them into beings for others.

The solution therefore is not to integrate them into the structure of oppression,
but to transform that structure so that they can become beings for themselves.

Such transformation of course, would undermine the oppressors' purposes; hence

their tight control and utilisation of the banking concept of education (to avoid the
threat and development of student conscientization).

The banking approach to adult education can never propose to students that they
critically consider reality. The illusory humanism of the banking approach masks
its purpose to turn women and men into automatons.

Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly (for there are
innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are
serving only to dehumanize), fail to perceive that the deposits themselves
contain contradictions about reality.

Sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn
against their domestication and the attempt to change their conditions.

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But the revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibility to materialize.
From the outset, their efforts must coincide with those of the students - to
engage in critical thinking, and the quest for mutual humanization.

Revolutionary educators efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in people

and their creative power. To achieve this, they must be partners of the students
in their relations with them.

Banking education cannot create such a partnership, as the person is not seen as
a conscious being; he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty
mind passively open to the reception of deposits.

The teacher's task is to organize a process which already occurs spontaneously,

to fill the students by making deposits of information which he or she considers to
constitute true knowledge.

And since people receive the world as passive entities, education should make them
more passive still, and adapt them to the world.

The (banking) educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is

better fit for the world.

This is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquillity rests on
how well people fit the world (that the oppressors have created), and how little
they question it.

The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant
minority prescribe for them, the more easily the minority can continue to
prescribe.

The theory and practice of banking education serve this end quite efficiently.
Mundane lessons, reading requirements, the methods for evaluating knowledge,
the distance between the teacher and the taught, serves to quash free thinking.

Solidarity requires true communication, and only through communication can

human life hold meaning.

Unfortunately, those who espouse the cause of liberation (e.g. socialist

politicians) are themselves surrounded and influenced by the climate which

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generates the banking concept, and often do not perceive its true significance or its
dehumanizing power.

Indeed, some revolutionaries brand as innocents, dreamers, or even reactionaries

those who would challenge this educational practice.

But one does not liberate people by alienating them. Authentic liberationthe
process of humanizationis not another deposit to be made in men. Liberation is a
praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to
transform it.

Those truly committed to the cause of liberation can accept neither the mechanistic
concept of consciousness as an empty vessel to be filled, nor the use of banking
methods of domination (propaganda, slogansdeposits) in the name of liberation.

Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety,
adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness
as consciousness intent upon changing the world.

They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the
posing of the problems of human beings in their relations with the world.

Accordingly, the practice of problem-posing education entails at the outset that the
teacher-student contradiction to be resolved.

Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher

cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers.
The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself
taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach.

They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process,
arguments based on authority are no longer valid; in order to function, authority
must be on the side of freedom, not against it.

Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other,
mediated by the world, (which in banking education is owned by the teacher).

The students no longer docile listeners are now critical co-investigators in

dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for

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their consideration, and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students

express their own.

The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the

students, the conditions under which knowledge is created.

Seminar Question:

To what extent do the Illichean and Freirean approaches to education &

learning offer useful strategies for the democratic empowerment of citizens
in the advanced West?

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