#title The International Journal of Illich Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1
#date 2010
#source DOI 10.4198.112. <[[https://journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/issue/view/2872][journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/issue/view/2872]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-04-25T11:55:14
#topics philosophy, technology, Illich
#isbn ISSN 1948–4666
*** [Table of Contents]
**Front Matter**
Clayton Pierce 1–3
Introduction to The International Journal of Illich Studies
**Articles**
Daniel Grego 4–13
Illich’s Table
Dana L. Stuchul 14–20
Three Invitations
Madhu Suri Prakash 21–27
Myth Maker, Story Weaver Ivan Illich: On the Rebirth of Epimetheus
Tyson E. Lewis 28–36
Understanding the Logic of Educational Encampment: From Illich to Agamben
Richard Kahn 37–49
Critical Pedagogy Taking the Illich Turn
**Book Reviews**
Kirsten Olson 50–52
Review: Everywhere All the Time: A New Deschooling Reader
Jason Lukasik 53–57
Review: The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge Edited by Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson
J. William Hug 58–61
Review: Place-based Education in the Global Age: Local Diversity, Edited by David Gruenewald and Gregory Smith
T. Francene Watson 62–66
Review: Escaping Education: Living as Learning within Grassroots Cultures by Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva
**Documents, Letters, and Other Materials**
*** ***
FOIA Request: Declassified FBI Files of Ivan Illich — End Matter
** [Front Matter]
*** Introduction to The International Journal of Illich Studies 1(1)
Setting a journal adrift into the digital sea that is devoted to promoting and expanding the work and ideas of Ivan Illich is an act that is, at first glance, bursting with irony. Truthfully, I have more than a sneaking suspicion that Illich himself would probably have been made ill by the very idea of a journal that is dedicated to advancing his penetrating analyses of modern society making such cavalier use of the largest and most omnipresent technology in human history. Yet, on the other hand, something inside tells me that Illich, a figure who was ostensibly contrarian by nature, would also quietly welcome the advent of a common space that allowed for acts of inquiry, discussion, memories, and creative expressions that challenge the stultifying spaces of thought and life that permeate the modern world. It is on this rather ambivalent yet honest note that we are both filled with excitement and humility in publishing this inaugural issue of The International Journal of Illich Studies.
In our humble estimate the time has never been riper for the voice of Illich to take a step beyond the prison of institutional obscurity and ostracization in order to begin to peck away once again at the insanity of the present social reality that modern institutions have called forth into existence. As ecological death is growing across the planet at a breakneck pace, the technocratic giants that compose the nation states of the global capitalist system fail to agree on even the simplest of remedies; Illich’s diagnoses and alternatives to modern life have never ringed with such urgency as they do today. It is in the context of utter institutional failure, where homo economicus and his Promethean appetite for developing for development’s sake, have taken humanity and nature to the brink of disaster. If Illich once talked about the medical establishment as a biocracy that controlled and managed us from “womb to tomb,” we can certainly extend this argument to now include all facets of life on earth. There are few thinkers who cogently offer alternatives to the malaise of institutional gridlock as does Ivan Illich. Our current circumstance of institutional crises speaks to the need for a return to the thought of a thinker who always seemed to be ahead of most in diagnosing the disease of modernization.
The monopoly on life that professional managers retain today demonstrates time and again that keeping alive massive systems of social administration, even if they are on life support and require a fresh injection of wealth, carries with it a faith that is hard to shake. The myth of modern progress, Illich would remind us, has many followers and still controls to a great degree how we learn, heal, interact with nature, and use tools in our societies and cultures. The model of biocracy that Illich was mapping in the field of health sciences has now permeated society to such a degree that the death of capitalism still seems untenable to most even when its terminal disease has presented itself once again in another violent paroxysm. Being human is now tied to the very health and life of institutions that have as an aim the administration of our existence. Our society’s good will toward the professional managers of the economic and financial systems of global capitalism is quite telling of this fact: the biocracy that controls approaches to human health that Illich lamented with great precision has now turned the health of humanity and nature into something that is tied with greater desperateness to the rising and falling of financial markets, debt rates, employment statistics, governmental and non-governmental bodies handouts, and the calculations of insurance companies. The question Illich was asking not so long ago is now staring us in the face once again: what will it take for individuals to begin to have faith in themselves and come to realize that their own abilities can be developed outside the biocratic institutions of schools, hospitals, laboratories and engineering tables, and the World Bank? It is precisely on this question that we now need to return to one of the most trenchant critics of biocratic life and look for starting points and ideas for taking back life from the calculus of managerial society. Part of such a gesture will require a healthy dose of being made uncomfortable with ourselves. This is something at which Illich excelled.
It was perhaps Illich’s ability to make people uncomfortable with themselves and the society of which they were a part that is needed now more than ever. Personally I never had the privilege to meet Illich. My knowledge of him has always been a mediated experience: either through his written words or the stories of those who met him and were profoundly moved by their encounter with the medieval scholar and priest, who emigrated to the United States from Austria in the 1950’s. It is difficult to name another intellectual who continues to have such a deep connection to those who he affected in one way or another at such a profound level. Speaking for myself, Illich has become the voice in the back of my head that is constantly measuring the intentions that fill my work and life, making me question the origin and authenticity that lurks behind each one. No one with whom I have intellectually engaged has had quite the same effect.
My sense is that I am not alone in feeling this way and can only imagine that those who stood in his presence and learned from the man himself suffer from this affliction to an even greater degree. I am not sure if this aspect of Illich’s spirit that lives on is entirely healthy, as it would have been much easier to not ever have been introduced to the ideas of Illich and his critiques of modern society, but I feel more enriched anyways. For those of us who are or are aspiring to be a professional in one field or another may also feel the affliction of Illich at a deeper and more disturbing level. After all, how can one read and spend time with the thought of Illich and justify their work as agents of a modern institution? This stinging question is well known and a long debated one within Illichean circles but I think it ultimately speaks volumes about Illich’s ability to make people unsettled in their lives, though in a good way.
Our hope is that this journal will have a similar affect on those who read it and participate in its life. We are not quixotic enough to believe that an Illichean journal could have the same effect as the human being that was once Ivan Illich, but we nevertheless feel that the world created through the image of modern institutions could stand a little bit more of Illich’s disdain, even if the primary tool being used to create this atmosphere of distrust is about as convivial as the freeway systems of modern society that Illich loathed so much. Still, with an ample sense of self reflection and unease, the commons that this journal is setting out to create can hopefully be a productive space in which to engage in a transdisciplinary dialogue with scholars, activists, educators, and other kindred souls who are seeking alternatives to biocratic life. We welcome submissions by anyone who would like to take part in such a discussion and search for reinventing what the commons can be.
The original essays and book reviews that comprise this inaugural issue, I am delighted to say, represent the very best of the Illichean spirit that this journal seeks to embody. The authors who have contributed their thoughts and ideas here constitute a blend of individuals who have personally known and worked with Illich as well as those who are carrying on his legacy in the work of second generation young scholars and activists. In the mosaic of writing that makes up this issue the goal of the journal is also clearly present: to look back to Illich and his insights as well as to look forward by reconfiguring Illichean perspectives and critiques to contemporary problems facing society and nature that continue to augment as the modern myth of progress still reigns supreme. Future issues will continue to promote the aim of extending Illich’s views on contemporary education, ecological crises, medicine and health care, science and technology, and the general advocacy for communities who stand as examples of convivial and autonomous life. We look forward to hearing from those who would like to contribute to such an endeavor.
Lastly, I would like to express my deep appreciation for those who have helped make this journal into a reality. Madhu Prakash has been a source of support and inspiration from the outset. Your kindness and work serve as a powerful example for those of us who take seriously the values and ideas that Illich cultivated and that you carry on in your life. Gregory Bourassa has done a commendable job with all of the book reviews. His keen eye and insightful suggestions have helped make the journal and the work that goes into making reviews a productive experience for both writer and reader come to fruition. Douglas Kellner must also be recognized as the one who originally thought of the idea for an Illichean journal at the annual AERA meeting in the spring of 2009. Doug’s confident suggestion and support have helped this journal see the light of day. Finally, without Richard Kahn this journal would not have been born. It was from his long held respect for Illich as a human being and thinker that he felt compelled to free the spirit of someone who has had such a profound affect on his life and work and who has been abused for so long by the institutions that fear him. I think it is this latter fact that makes Illich such an attractive figure to so many of us looking for alternatives in our work and lives. I am glad that this fear of Illich still exists as it reminds me that alternatives do exist. It is just a matter of turning this fear into a widespread hope that breaking the addiction to preprogrammed life is nothing to fear at all.
Clayton Pierce
Editor
** [Articles]
*** Illich’s Table
[[t-i-the-international-journal-of-illich-studies-vo-7.jpg]]
Daniel Grego
“Is it not the case that our world is out of whack with any prior historical epoch?”
—Ivan Illich[1]
**** 1.
In 1985, Wendell Berry wrote an essay entitled “What are People For?” He recounted the mass migration in the twentieth century of U.S. farmers into cities and the consequent problems. There were growing numbers of underemployed or perhaps even “permanently unemployable” city dwellers while rural areas declined as a result of necessary work being left undone. “What are people for?” Berry wondered. He went on to ask, “Is the obsolescence of human beings now our social goal?”[2]
Early on, as a boy growing up in Chicago, I sensed people were gradually reducing themselves to cogs in some giant economic machine, what Dwight Eisenhower had called “the military/industrial complex.” Everything around me seemed prepackaged: food, entertainment, ideas, even fears. The war in Vietnam raged on all through my adolescence. I could not understand how so many of my neighbors had come to believe that peasants living on the opposite side of the world, whose most “advanced” technology was the bicycle, were a threat to us on the southwestern shores of Lake Michigan.
Great abstractions were paraded before us: freedom, democracy, affluence, progress. My friends and I were being conditioned for our roles as soldiers and, if we should survive our years of “service,” as consumers. Increasingly, the evidence pointed to the fact that “affluent” consumption was polluting the water and air and damaging the land—the real places upon which our lives depend. This all seemed completely “out of whack” to me.[3] Like Berry, I wondered if this was all people were for.
When I encountered the writings of Ivan Illich in the early 1990s, I felt an immediate connection with the author. Here was a guy who shared my sense of dis-ease and who was trying to understand how this epoch had come into being. As I studied Illich’s work, I came to believe that he, more than anyone else I knew about, had exposed how “out of whack” the dominant Western ways of living had become, both for our home places and for our souls.
His series of “pamphlets,” as he called them, published in the 1970s drew attention to the “counter-productivity” of modern institutions.[4] Later, he examined critically the assumptions of modern “economics,” which had strayed a long way from the “management of households” as the etymology of the word implies.[5] As a historian, he sought to reveal the origins of these institutions and the unexamined assumptions he called “modern certainties.”
All along, he tried to practice the vocation of friendship symbolized by the “hospitable table” he offered his interlocutors wherever he lived. He hosted symposia where common investigation was accompanied by food and some of the “ordinary but decent wine” a good lawyer had persuaded the IRS was Illich’s major teaching tool and therefore tax deductible.[6] He became a master of the art of conviviality.
In this meditation, I invite you to join me in imagining what it would have been like to sit at Illich’s table, to share food and wine with him, and to participate in the conversations his search for truth inspired.
**** 2.
Near the end of his life, Ivan Illich “stammered” to his friend, David Cayley, a response to modern Western society he had “avoided to do for thirty years.” Looking around, Illich observed “horror, cruelty, and degradation with no precedent in other historical epochs.” Illich saw “an extraordinary evil,” an evil new and mysterious he could only name with the Latin phrase, mysterium iniquitatis.[7] What was he talking about? And what solace or remedy, if any, did he offer?
In the Western traditions, philosophers and theologians have described two types of evil: “natural evil” that results from disease, famine, drought, volcanic eruption and the like and “moral evil” that results from deliberate human action.[8] Illich saw the new evil he was trying to contemplate as the corruption of the glorious good that entered the world with the Incarnation. When the early Christian church succumbed to the temptations of worldly power and wealth, it began a turning away from the liberation promised in the Gospels. Human institutions began to supplant the personal calling of love. This corruption contributed to the evolution of a new kind of mentality that over time replaced felt connection with nature and other persons with “misplaced concreteness” and an idolatry of technique.
By considering the December 26, 2004 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in the Indian Ocean, I hope to clarify all three types of evil. At first glance, the recent tsunami is obviously an example of natural evil. The 200,000 human deaths and immense physical damage the tsunami left in its wake were the results of a “natural” disaster. No deliberate human action could be blamed. Looking more closely, however, it becomes clear the extent of the devastation was greatly exacerbated by human greed, a moral evil. The coral reefs and coastal forests that once provided natural protections against such tidal waves had been decimated by economic development.
The ugly side of this greed is suggested by a comment made on National Public Radio by Fred Bergstenof, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and current head of the Institute for International Economics. “Like any disaster,” Bergstenof stated, “you get negative effects through destroying existing properties and people’s health [sic], but you do get a burst of new economic activity to replace them, and, on balance, that generally turns out to be quite positive. When they put up new resort hotels, they’ll be more modern, they’ll be more attractive. They’ll probably bring in more people in the future.”[9]
Greed is nothing new, however. And even Bergstenof’s cold cost/benefit calculus is not novel. But, some of the stories about the events of December 26, 2004, reveal aspects of the mysterium iniquitatis.
Early on, reports surfaced of people whose lives were saved by animals. Rupert Sheldrake, writing in The Ecologist, recounted some of these events:
Elephants in Sri Lanka and Sumatra moved to high ground before the giant waves struck; they did the same in Thailand, trumpeting before they did so. According to a villager in Bang Koey, Thailand, a herd of buffalo was grazing by the beach when the animals “suddenly lifted their heads and looked out to sea, ears standing upright”; they turned and stampeded up the hill, followed by villagers, whose lives were thereby saved. At Ao Sane beach, near Phuket, dogs ran up to the hill tops, and at Galle in Sri Lanka dog owners were puzzled by the fact that their animals refused to go for their usual morning walk on the beach. In Cuddalore District in Tamil Nadu, southern India, buffaloes, goats and dogs escaped, as did a nesting colony of flamingos that flew to higher ground. In the Andaman Islands “stone age” tribal groups moved away from the coast before the disaster, having been alerted by the behavior of animals.[10]
Vandana Shiva reflected: “Animals and indigenous communities had the intelligence to anticipate the tsunami and protect themselves. The IT-embedded 21st century cultures lacked the natural intelligence to connect to the earthquake and tsunami in time to protect themselves.”[11]
A common theme in Illich’s writings is his observation that modern Western ways of living are deadening our imaginations. Human institutions and the abstractions upon which they are built undermine people’s trust in their own senses and in the “common sense” that would allow them to understand how things fit together. The loss of common sense, or in Shiva’s words, “natural intelligence,” leaves us as spectators to our own experience. Some Westerners on vacation on the beaches of the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004 took photographs of the wall of water rushing toward them just before they drowned. Were they resigned to their fate, or were they watching a movie?
The modern “global economy” is washing out, for more and more people, the possibility of living their own lives. What once were described as “natural” human activities are rapidly being replaced by the consumption of commodities and services. Instead of learning or healing or moving, we are persuaded “to get an education,” that we have “a right to healthcare,” and our status in society can be established by the make of car we drive. Is it any wonder so many people feel lost and dissatisfied when they have been seduced into surrendering their lives to systems and experts and to the Gross National Product?
When Illich discussed the new, mysterious evil besetting us, he noted the growing disparity in the incomes between the rich and the poor all over the world. But, he added:
What worries me most about that is…the fact that [the poor] can no longer live, as they could thirty years ago, without recourse to money. Then many things were still not monetarized; subsistence still was functioning. Today they can’t move without buying a bus ticket. They can’t get heat in their kitchen by collecting wood but have to buy electricity.[12]
Nowhere is the loss of common sense and human agency more apparent than in the deterioration of human communities. Even the word “community” has been eviscerated in modern usage. It has become a “plastic word” devoid of explicit meaning.[13] A human community is a group of people who live together in a specific place, who know each other, and care for each other. Communities must be limited in size or the whole concept will burst like a balloon pumped too full of air.[14] For their health and vitality, communities depend upon the virtue of their members and virtue is predicated on human action. (What are people for?) We must actively engage in the arts of living, suffering, and dying.
Illich’s friend, John McKnight, observed: “Communities grow weak as systems grow strong.”[15] The systems that make up the modern “global economy” are like vampires sucking the lifeblood out of human communities, which grow pale and wizened, filled with the living dead: people cut off from each other and from nature, distracted by the spectacle of modern mass media, and whose every vice is magnified and manipulated to keep them plugged into the economic machine.
But, it is even worse. Again, as John McKnight has pointed out, many of the systems of the modern world hide behind “the mask of love.”[16] The “caring professions”—our doctors and teachers and undertakers—steal care, the manifestation of love, from communities leaving them adrift in a sea of ministrations, each of which promises salvation it cannot possibly deliver.
Both the theft of common sense and the theft of human agency are justified in the name of “progress.” Progress, whether promoted by Alan Greenspan, the American Medical Association, or the NEA, rests on the idea that human beings can understand, plan, and control creation. We are no longer God’s, but think of ourselves as gods.
Illich told the story of asking his friend, Jacques Maritain, why the concept of “planning” did not appear in his philosophy. Puzzled, Maritain asked if “planning” was the English word for accounting. Illich answered, “No.” “Engineering?” “No.” Finally, Maritain understood. “Planning,” he said, “is a new variety of the sin of pride.”[17] I believe this new variety of pride is the key to understanding the mysterious species of evil about which Illich stammered.
In an early essay, “Rebirth of Epimethean Man,” Illich opposed the hubris of Prometheus raising expectations in the modern world to the “hindsight” of his brother, Epimetheus, whose life was centered on hope. We are not gods. While we can admire Prometheus’ daring, emulating his hubris has led to a world in which “everywhere nature becomes poisonous, society inhumane, and the inner life is invaded and personal vocation smothered.”[18]
Epimetheus’ chief virtue is sophrosyne, which under the name of temperance was considered one of the four cardinal virtues of antiquity. The word literally means “of sound mind” and connotes humility and restraint. It provides the foundation for a philosophy of limits. Throughout his long public career, Ivan Illich called us again and again to rediscover this virtue.
We cannot avoid “natural evil.” (“If you want to make God laugh, tell Him what your plans are” is an old Yiddish proverb.) The best we can do is comfort each other when we experience such suffering. “Moral evil” is opposed by community standards and by cultivating virtuous habits. To resist the mysterium iniquitatis, we must regain the practice of sophrosyne and sustain the courage to hope.
At one point in his conversations with Illich, Cayley, burdened with the darkness meditating on the new type of evil can cause, asked Ivan: “Is your counsel really to live in the dark?” “No,” Illich responded emphatically. “Carry a candle in the dark, be a candle in the dark.” Illich went on to relate the story of his friend and teacher, Dom Helder Camara. Confronted with the evil of the military government in Brazil, which murdered so many in its pursuit of power and its definition of “progress,” Camara refused to abandon hope. “You must never give up,” he advised Illich. “As long as a person is alive, somewhere beneath the ashes there is little bit of remaining fire.”
“Our task,” Camara explained, cupping his hands around his lips, “is to blow…carefully, very carefully, blow…you’ll see if it lights up. You mustn’t worry whether it takes fire again or not. All you have to do is blow.”[19]
**** 3.
As dusk fell on Saturday, February 12, 2005, eighteen men and women piled into a wagon pulled by two draft horses for a final ride into the woods at Harnischfeger Park in southeastern Dodge County, Wisconsin. In the distance, wisps of mist hovered over the ground around the black trunks and branches of the leafless trees. The passengers, huddled together against the chill, teased each other, laughed, and enjoyed each other’s company. They had just finished cleaning up after WinterFest, a day-long celebration at the park that had featured winter games, cross country skiing, pony rides, a dog sled demonstration, a treasure hunt, a petting zoo, a bon fire, food and drink.
The proceeds from WinterFest were to be used to improve the playground and playfield facilities at the newest Dodge County Park. Harnischfeger Park, located on 132 acres along the Rock River in the Town of Lebanon, had belonged to the employees of the Harnischfeger Corporation since 1969. The private park had been the site for picnics, wedding receptions, and rural retreats for the company’s urban workers. In the first years of the new millennium, the employees concluded they could no longer afford to maintain the park and decided to put it up for sale.
Immediately, developers descended like vultures hoping to make a killing by converting the park into a housing subdivision. The park’s neighbors objected. As in other areas of the United States, southeastern Wisconsin had already lost too much “green space” to “development.” Perhaps out of nostalgia, the Harnischfeger folks listened to the loose-knit, ad hoc coalition of farmers, artists, and assorted green space lovers and agreed to sell the property to Dodge County for considerably less than the developers were offering on the condition it would remain a park.
Even at the reduced price, the County Board balked. Times were tough. Budgets were tight. Many County employees had been recently laid off. The park coalition people were not to be deterred, however. Neighbors talked to neighbors, called local businesses, broke into piggy banks. In a matter of weeks, they raised $150,000 toward the purchase price. Mounting political pressure finally persuaded the Board to make the deal and Harnischfeger Park became the fifth publicly owned park in Dodge County.
WinterFest was one of the annual fund-raisers the park coalition committed to organize to defray the cost of maintaining the park. All the food and entertainment were donated. The members of the group volunteered their time to sell concessions, to staff the event, to set up beforehand, and to clean up afterward.
The story of saving Harnischfeger Park is an example of people participating in what Ivan Illich might have called “the rests of community,” similar to “the rests of gender” he described in his book, Gender, and about which David Schwartz has written so beautifully.[20] Illich believed these “rests” were remnants of something lost and gone forever like the fossilized bones of an extinct animal. But I have not been able to see them that way. When I first read the phrase “the rests of gender,” I thought of musical rests, some moments of silence amid the noise of the modern world. I thought of blades of grass cracking the concrete of modern roads. I thought of a poem I had written some twenty-five years ago called “The Fields”:
the fields i walked
over as a boy
hoping to be surprised
by a pheasant’s
sudden flurry of wings
startled into the air
by my approaching
are now buried
beneath glaciers
of suburban cement. the mole
who once found light
at the feet of corn
now bumps his head
against the stone.
the ghosts of grasshoppers
leap in the weeds
behind the stores
where the tongues
of the ghosts of frogs
snap them out of the air.
where have all the barns gone?
i remember one
that stood by an apple orchard.
we used to play war there
lobbing rotten-apple-grenades
into the loft. we died
a thousand deaths
in an afternoon. looking across
the shopping malls now,
it’s hard to imagine
the fields not dead.
but they’re only hibernating.
they lie as in a child’s game of war.
they’ll get up again.[21]
Perhaps, my view is too romantic. As part of creation, the grass and fields will “get up again.” Gender and community are cultural constructs. They can be lost forever. But all over the world, people are attempting to recover a contemporary art of living. They are longing for community, to reconnect with their neighbors and with their home places.[22] The eighteen women and men enjoying the wagon ride in the brisk February air found common ground in their shared interest in Harnischfeger Park. They acted together as citizens and, as a result, friendships were made or strengthened and a small green place on earth was preserved. These efforts are perhaps too little, too late. But, one never knows. The task of those who dream about saner ways of living is to discern the spark smoldering in those they encounter, to cup their hands around their lips, and carefully, very carefully, to blow.
**** 4.
When I woke this morning, a light snow was falling. Through the window, I could see a marsh hawk perched on a branch of the silver maple in the yard. He sat there for a while, tilting his head every few minutes to survey the surroundings. Finally, he took off in the direction of the river.
Ivan Illich hovered over the certainties of the modern world like a hawk and for half a century he swooped down to puncture them with his beak and talons. As sharp as his criticism remained, after his early books, he offered no prescription. His friend, Bob Duggan, tells the story of a young woman asking Illich after one of his lectures, “What are we to do?” Illich responded with a sarcastic grin, “Don’t tempt me!”[23]
Gustavo Esteva says peasants in Mexico appreciated Illich because he did *not* give them a recipe.[24] It would make no sense to have devoted fifty years to criticizing trends that diminish people’s capacity to live their own lives and then to tell them what to do. But, while he did not provide a recipe, Illich generously allowed us to look into his pantry where we might find some ingredients to use to make our own stews.
The titles of some of his books and the concepts he was explicating at the end of his life suggest what he thought might be nourishing:
Celebration—Illich believed every moment of existence depends upon the will of God. Every moment, therefore, is a gift to us to be treasured and for which to be grateful.
Awareness—To live fully means to be open to surprise, to use our senses to savor the tastes, smells, sounds, sights, and textures given to us in each moment.
Hospitality—We should set a place at our table for the stranger who knocks at the door, “for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”
Friendship—Once the highest flowering of civic virtue, friendship, one of the three classical forms of love, must now be the soil out of which saner ways of living can grow.
Conviviality, conspiratio, communio—We find ourselves in the eyes of our friends. The arts of living, suffering, and dying are best practiced in community. We can celebrate who we are and where we are by sharing breath, food, and wine.
Askesis, limits, equity—Illich once defined askesis as “courageous, disciplined, self-critical renunciation accomplished in community.”[25] Renunciation does not preclude enjoyment, but enhances it by reducing distractions. But, renunciation and self-limitation are also preconditions for justice. As Mahatma Gandhi told us: “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.”[26]
Proportionality—We must recover the common sense of what is fitting, of how creation fits together, in order to orient ourselves toward the good, the true, and the beautiful.
These are some of the staples and spices one could find at Illich’s table. How we combine them will be up to each of us working in our communities with our neighbors and friends. Bon appetit!
**Author’s Bio**
Daniel Grego is Executive Director of TransCenter for Youth, Inc., a nonprofit agency that operates four high schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Dr. Grego has been a guest speaker for many organizations like the Centre for British Teachers and the Children’s Defense Fund, and at numerous forums focusing on education issues. He has taught in the Education Department at Alverno College and the Philosophy Department at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and been a consultant for the Institute for the Transformation of Learning, the Helen Bader Foundation and to Wisconsin’s Governor and Legislature in the drafting and revision of Wisconsin’s Children At Risk statute. He is a founding member of the Alliance for Choices in Education (ACE) in Milwaukee. His writings have appeared in Encounter, the CYD Journal, Out of the Box, the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel, America, the George Wright Forum, Life Learning Magazine, Education Revolution, Vitae Scholasticae and other periodicals and anthologies, including the book Life Learning: Lessons from the Educational Frontier. One of his main interests is exploring the confluence of the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi, Ivan Illich and Wendell Berry. He lives with his wife, choreographer Debra Loewen, and their daughter, Caitlin Grego, on a small farm in the Rock River watershed in Dodge County, Wisconsin.
*** Three Invitations
**Dana Stuchul**
Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, reminds us of the power of story to nullify the assumed divide separating teacher and taught, one who knows from one who doesn’t.[27] In storytelling, one posits equality of intelligence. In contrast, in the relationship between teacher and student the inequality of knowledge is presumed. It’s the premise of equality that distinguishes teaching/instruction/pedagogy from storytelling. Sharing stories opens a democratic space.
I enjoy sharing the story of my first ever encounter with Ivan Illich while a student at Penn State where Illich held a visiting professor appointment for 12 years. Years earlier while a student at Miami of Ohio, I had purchased his book Celebration of Awareness which one of the radical educationalists (either McLaren or Giroux who were then colleagues at Miami) had ordered for a class. I opened the book, quickly recognized that I didn’t understand anything in it, and soon forgot about Illich. Years later, in 1996, I was in my second week of graduate studies at Penn State, when a new graduate student friend said in a laundromat, “you’ve gotta go hear this guy Illich. He gives free public lectures each Tuesday. And, you better go soon, he looks like he’s gonna die.”
The next Tuesday arrived and I found myself in the packed hall where Illich lectured. I located a seat in the crowd. I watched and listened. What I saw was a man who indeed appeared to be dying, with a large softball-sized growth protruding from the side of his head. His wispy grey hair, blowing about as if choreographed to his sprite-like movements, Illich sitting on his knees on the table one moment, prancing up aisles the next—his energy, however, defied his supposedly imminent death (a death that would not come for 6 years). What I heard throughout the evening was a man referencing “the arts of living, suffering, and dying” coinciding with what was apparently his own approach to the threshold separating this world from the next. I was transfixed.
Attending an Illich lecture was for me reminiscent of my experience of a Catholic Mass. You might stand or kneel. There would be moments of quiet, others of high and exultant energy. From one instant to the next, you might experience awakeness of a hue similar to a lightening strike, or utter bewilderment … at once wondering how you could know so little and how much there was to know. Illich, the former priest, the great gondolier guided his listeners along a river of history.
To attend an Illich lecture during those years was akin to sanctioned eves-dropping. Nearly every lecture was attended by a group of Illich “friends”—a rag-tag collection of mostly dissident, junior and de-professionalized intellectuals. Whenever Illich raised his tent, folks from several continents would descend to the place in order to pick up the conversation, to report on new experiences, discoveries, revelations. Illich largely spoke to this circle of “co-conspirators” —people for whom questions were far from academic, scholarship anything but a matter of career enhancement, and deep understanding—or “standing under” was as much a moral as a political activity.
The theme of discussion where I entered Illich’s story-telling was the contemporary loss of common sense…of proportionality…of the capacity to sense in our body “the good”…that sense which unifies all other senses, which is neither located within the intellect, nor is it intuition alone, which is neither universal nor universalizable, but instead is specific to a place and time, to a cultural context, and which is woven into culture itself (which, defined by Illich is the “unique arrangements by which a given group limits exchange relationships to specific times and places”[28]…a group resistant to the impositions, even seductions of market expansion, if you will).
In the few weeks of Illich’s visit to Penn State, his “lectures” (again, not lectures, but conversation among friends where reporting and synthesizing—story-telling—were the modus operandi) addressed such diverse topics as the historical body; the architectural column; the mono-chord; the cosmos. From these topics, Illich and friends—compelled by mutual commitment and desire—sought to understand the evolution of contemporary certainties, of concepts born of modernity which collectively risked not political impotence but each one’s very ability to be fully human, and then fully humane (to extend the act of the Good Samaritan). To be fully alive in the only moment available was the intention of Illich and friends study.
I can say that I loved those 6 Tuesday Fall lectures, and I loved the lectures about the Illich lectures offered by his devoted friend of 4+ decades, Lee Hoinacki. In the wake of those three autumns, I felt aliveness unlike any other moments of my life. And, I have longed for times similar to those to dawn anew.
I have doubted the current institutionalization of Illich’s thought as a Special Interest Group in the American Research Association (AERA).[29] I have at times thought it repugnant to place Illich’s notion of a circle of friends bonded by shared suffering and common conviction to understand deeply within the frame of an organization dominated by specialized interests and careerists and whose principal contribution to schooling and education has been its own growth. To make it worse, I know what Illich thought of schools, education, and educationalists. And, I have had to check my propensity to safeguard the Illich “orthodoxy” at the door.
What I’m finding is that Illich in AERA may, afterall, allow for surprise…that very Illichian idea that stands opposed to plans, designs, curricula, mandates, rules, and the like.
As an installment within the category “hope for surprise,” I’d like to re-issue a few of the invitations for research (research of an Illichian order) that I read in Illich (and which I believe few if any have accepted). I’ll further suggest that “study” and “research” inspired by Illich in the form of story-telling, reporting, shared readings may further humanize the unreality of this context, and may lead to the kind of sustained reflection that enabled Illich and friends to arrive at important insight into our current predicaments … what Illich has named “Absurdistan.”
**** Invitation One
In Illich’s address in 1986 to the AERA General Assembly (San Francisco, CA), Illich extended his “Plea for Research on Lay Literacy,” while posing a question pertinent to this moment. Illich writes, “has schooling now become an initiation ritual introducing students to the cybernetic mind by hiding from all its participants the contradiction between the literate ideas education pretends to serve and the computer image it sells?” Illich’s interest is in the transformation of the literate mind to the cybernetic mind—a mind in which the computer is the key metaphor for human persons and for their place in the world. Illich underscores the urgency of such research into this transformation by recounting Orwell’s fable, 1984:
It is a story of the State that has turned into a computer, and that of educators who program people so that they come to lose that ‘distality’ between self and I which had come to flower within literate space. They learn to refer to themselves as ‘my system,’ and ‘to input’ themselves as appropriate lines into a mega-text.[30]
In speaking to education researchers, Illich understands that his audience’s interest rests with research IN education. Still, his plea is for research ON education … for research into “a distinct mode of perception in which the book becomes the decisive metaphor through which we conceive of the Self and its place.”[31] Illich is clear that lay literacy has no correspondence to whether one is literate or not. Rather, his concern is how all of the innovations, the technological advancements that preceded and enabled the transformation from orality to literacy have paralleled a similar transformation in our cultural and mental topography after Microsoft. Illich holds, I suspect, that as researchers learn about the transformation that has long past, they will be better positioned to comprehend the transformation currently underway … from a mode of perception in which “the text” was the key metaphor to one overtaken by communication code via the computer.
**** Invitation Two
A second invitation is found in Illich’s “A Constitution for Cultural Revolution,” written “to initiate discussion about the need for constitutional principles that would guarantee an ongoing cultural revolution in a technological society.” (p. 179) In this short chapter, Illich lays out “an alternative program both to development and to merely political revolution” whose aim is the “transformation of both public and personal reality.” Illich writes,
The political revolutionary wants to improve existing institutions—their productivity and the quality and distribution of their products. His vision of what is desirable and possible is based on consumption habits developed during the last hundred years.[32]
Illich takes the example of “the institution which currently produces education” to illustrate the cultural revolution he calls for. [It is significant to note that this essay (the final one in Illich’s Celebration of Awareness was published in 1969, two years prior to Deschooling Society.] Illich continues by distinguishing the cultural revolutionary from the political revolutionary:
The political revolutionary strengthens the demand for schooling by futilely promising that under his administration more learning and increased earning will become available to all through more schooling. He contributes to the modernization of a world class structure and a modernization of poverty.[33]
Illich then lays out his radial proposal—the same call made in Deschooling Society, which was erroneously misinterpreted as a diatribe against schooling as opposed to a proposal against stateenforced compulsory schooling. Illich writes,
A cultural revolutionary must fight for legal protection from the imposition of any obligatory graded curriculum. The first article of a bill of rights for a modern and humanist society corresponds to the first amendment of the United States Constitution. The state shall make no law with respect to an establishment of education. There shall be no graded curriculum, obligatory for all. To make this disestablishment effective, we need a law forbidding discrimination in hiring, voting, or admission to centers of learning based on previous attendance at some curriculum. This guarantee would not exclude specific tests of competence, but would remove the present absurd discrimination in favor of the person who learns a given skill with the largest expenditure of public funds. A third legal reform would guarantee the right of each citizen to an equal share of public educational resources, the right to verify his share of these resources, and the right to sue for them if they are denied. A generalized GI bill, or an edu-credit card in the hand of every citizen, would effectively implement this third guarantee…. A fourth guarantee to protect the consumer against the monopoly of the educational market would be analogous to anti-trust laws…. [34]
Illich goes on to point out that,
A bill of rights for modern man cannot produce cultural revolution. It is merely a manifesto. I have outlined the principles of an educational bill of rights. These principles can be generalized.
The disestablishment of schooling can be generalized to freedom from monopoly in the satisfaction of any basic need. Discrimination on the basis of prior schooling can be generalized to discrimination in any institution because of underconsumption or underprivilege in another. A guarantee of equal education resources is a guarantee against regressive taxation. An educational antitrust law is obviously merely a special case of antitrust laws in general, which in turn are statutory implementations of constitutional guarantees against monopoly.[35]
Illich concludes his call for cultural revolution with a warning; “Only a cultural and institutional revolution which reestablishes man’s control over his environment can arrest the violence by which development of institutions is now imposed by a few for their own interest. Maybe Marx has said it better, criticizing Ricardo and his school: ‘They want production to be limited to ‘useful things,’ but they forget that the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people”’[36]
One potential research effort would look at what effects the disestablishment clause had on the flowering of diverse forms of religious practices and communities. Other lines of inquiry might trace a host of sociological questions such as: How has the role of religion and religious expression evolved since disestablishment? How have tensions among religious groups changed? How have attitudes toward religion and religious participation changed? Et al. Parallels between church/religion and school/learning could then be drawn.
**** Invitation Three
In the forward to Matt Hern’s book Deschooling Our Lives, Illich tells the story of how Deschooling Society came to be.[37] In the telling we get a tiny glimpse of what those seminars in Illich’s Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) must have been like – with Paulo Freire, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Joel Spring, Everett Reimer, George Dennison and others in attendance—reading drafts of essays distributed by Illich (that would later become Deschooling), the sizzling debates, the discussion of alternatives.
Yet, 25 years after the fact, Illich admits his naivete, that he was “barking up the wrong tree.” Illich writes,
I called for the disestablishment of schools for the sake of improving education and here, I noticed, lay my mistake. Much more important than the disestablishment of schools, I began to see, was the reversal of those trends that make of education a pressing need rather than a gift of gratuitous leisure. I began to fear that the disestablishment of the educational church would lead to a fanatical revival of many forms of degraded, all-encompassing education, making the world into a universal classroom, a global schoolhouse. The more important question became, “Why do so many people — even ardent critics of schooling — become addicted to education, as to a drug?”
Illich continues (in the following lengthy excerpt):
Norman Cousins published my own recantation in the Saturday Review during the very week Deschooling Society came out. In it I argued that the alternative to schooling was not some other type of educational agency, or the design of educational opportunities in every aspect of life, but a society which fosters a different attitude of people toward tools. I expanded and generalized this argument in my next book, Tools for Conviviality.
Largely through the help of my friend and colleague Wolfgang Sachs, I came to see that the educational function was already emigrating from the schools and that, increasingly, other forms of compulsory learning would be instituted in modern society. It would become compulsory not by law, but by other tricks such as making people believe that they are learning something from TV, or compelling people to attend in-service training, or getting people to pay huge amounts of money in order to be taught how to have better sex, how to be more sensitive, how to know more about the vitamins they need, how to play games, and so on. This talk of “lifelong learning” and “learning needs” has thoroughly polluted society, and not just schools, with the stench of education.
Then came the third stage, in the late seventies and early eighties, when my curiosity and reflections focused on the historical circumstances under which the very idea of educational needs can arise. When I wrote Deschooling Society, the social effects, and not the historical substance of education, were still at the core of my interest. I had questioned schooling as a desirable means, but I had not questioned education as a desirable end. I still accepted that, fundamentally, educational needs of some kind were an historical given of human nature. I no longer accept this today.
As I refocused my attention from schooling to education, from the process toward its orientation, I came to understand education as learning when it takes place under the assumption of scarcity in the means which produce it. The “need” for education from this perspective appears as a result of societal beliefs and arrangements which make the means for so-called socialization scarce. And, from this same perspective, I began to notice that educational rituals reflected, reinforced, and actually created belief in the value of learning pursued under conditions of scarcity. Such beliefs, arrangements, and rituals, I came to see, could easily survive and thrive under the rubrics of deschoooling, free schooling, or homeschooling (which, for the most part, are limited to the commendable rejection of authoritarian methods).
What does scarcity have to do with education? If the means for learning (in general) are abundant, rather than scarce, then education never arises — one does not need to make special arrangements for “learning.” If, on the other hand, the means for learning are in scarce supply, or are assumed to be scarce, then educational arrangements crop up to “ensure” that certain important knowledge, ideas, skills, attitudes, etc., are “transmitted.” Education then becomes an economic commodity which one consumes, or, to use common language, which one “gets.” Scarcity emerges both from our perceptions, which are massaged by education professionals who are in the business of imputing educational needs, and from actual societal arrangements that make access to tools and to skilled, knowledgeable people hard to come by—that is, scarce.[38]
If there were one thing I could wish for the readers (and some of the writers) of Deschooling Our Lives, it would be this: If people are seriously to think about deschooling their lives, and not just escape from the corrosive effects of compulsory schooling, they could do no better than to develop the habit of setting a mental question mark beside all discourse on young people’s “educational needs” or “learning needs,” or about their need for “a preparation for life.” I would like them to reflect on the historicity of these very ideas. Such reflection would take the new crop of deschoolers a step further from where the younger and somewhat naive Ivan was situated, back when talk of “deschooling” was born.
In re-issuing these Illich invitations, my desire is neither to limit the creative pursuits that might inspire further contributions to our circle, nor to promote a defacto “correct” version of Illichian research, either in style or substance. Rather, in doing so I profess my own admiration for the man, his way of being in the world and being among friends, his ability to create humane and convivial spaces even within the most inhumane and inhospitable contexts, to highlight his commitment to enhancing “eutrapelia” (or graceful playfulness) in personal relations” in the hope that together we might approach the same.
**Author’s Bio**
Dana Stuchul is an Assistant Professor in Curriculum and Instruction at The Pennsylvania State University, where she received her Ph.D. in Educational Theory and Policy. She is currently working on a book that examines the relevance of Ivan Illich’s social critique. Her other research interests include the relationship between modernity and technology.
*** Myth Maker, Story Weaver Ivan Illich: On the Rebirth of Epimetheus
Madhu Suri Prakash
**** 1st Story—Shattered Certainties: Services, Systems and Self-Management
In addition to being the most important social critic of the 20th century, Ivan Illich also happened to be the most terrifying teacher of my life: systematically shattering all my certainties of Systems, Services and Self-Management. Diligently, I learned these in the laps / labs [?] of Faithful Professionals.
No myth, my first tale of meeting Illich is straight brute fact. Daunted I found myself from that first encounter with Illich overwhelmed by the sharpness of an unmatched intellect that could easily pierce right through the opacity of history which shrouded for most of us “the Dark Ages” of his favored 12th century; even as it shed brilliant light, ripping right through the opacity shrouding the 20th century under the heavy dark blanket of modern industrial certainties; writ with all the arrogance of modern grandiosity.
Crippling contemporary certainties, Illich’s brilliance illuminated, transmogrify real women and men into destructive, needy consumers: one of two inevitable kinds of slaves— the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. Slavery and imprisonment from cradle to grave, rooted as deep and early as parental and professional anxiety driven kindergartener’s grade zeal or grade envy, whipped into performance speed; racing for the final dash—high scores on SATs, GREs, and LSATs, promising power, prestige and all else that defines the American Dream. Pushing, pummeling, seducing or bribing our children; faithfully repeating to ourselves and the rest of the world the indubitable beauty of this dream, we connect it to the other modern truth: Education is a universal human good; so good as to be a universal Human Right.
Worse, yet, than being daunted by the sheer forceful brilliance of Illich’s genius was the sense of being summarily dismissed by him for being a sincere, dedicated, “alternative” educator who would do right by her students—secularly saving them from grade envy or credential addiction; who would design an “empowering” curriculum or a “radical” pedagogy a la Freireans; who would create the best “liberation,” “authenticity” and “happiness” promoting classrooms; working with a Dream Team of “alternative educators” for reforming, revamping and radicalizing education; ready to study sitting at the feet of the Master of the ‘60s seminal critique of education. Shattering for me proved Illich’s deliberate disregard for the types of questions my “best” “critical” and liberal colleagues deemed “big,” “important” and “socially significant,” serving the human good through the educational enterprise.
With a freshly minted Ph.D. in hand in Philosophy of Education, proud of the professional position I had just secured with competitive competence and noble–minded professional zeal at my university where he was visiting for the first of 15 Falls; enjoying the sense of being liberated by my “Equal Educational Opportunity Employer” from the medieval limits that had held back my mother, grandmothers and others doomed for centuries to be the Second Sex, Illich’s Gender, just published, like his earlier bestseller, Deschooling Society could not but be doubly disturbing.
The Educational Enterprise: a counterproductive soul-shredder, dooming most people on earth to the lowest modern caste: “illiterate”, “uneducated” and “underdeveloped”?
My Equal Educational Opportunity Employer: dooming my gender, almost half the human race to being the mere Second Half—one gender permanently incapacitated by the system’s structured inequalities; designed never to let us “catch up” in the just and noble race for equality?
My most cherished Services Sector’s promotion of “self-management...suggest[ive of] masturbation”?
Shell shocked by bombs packaged in a philosophical and literary genre unrecognizable for my educated mind, with all my cunning intellect and analysis honed solid by professional training, I rejected Illich’s awful truth: with its threads and inimitable patterns running ceaselessly through all his writings: dismissing in no uncertain terms my work as a liberal, liberating educator; my spanking new professional identity.
What was I supposed to do with Illich’s outrageous indictments of my hard won and long-slogged-for professional status as Professor of Education? Quit? Shut my teaching shop? My legitimate, professionally designed courses abandoned? To go sit with my grandmothers knitting booties for their great-grandchildren under the winter Punjab afternoon sun in slow, non-modern time? Or, worse yet, join the ranks of the peasants of subsistence, the latest Luddites, doomed to premature death or inevitable suicide[39] for resisting the engines of modern progress?
Laughable questions, spurred by my reading and listening to Illich! Yet, something stopped me from laughing them away. Neither could I experience these Illich provoked questions as merely theoretical—to be mulled comfortably in the academic armchair; only to be put aside after I took off my “think cap” and got up from theorizing for a hard days work. Pushing me hard towards too many excruciatingly practical questions, Illich’s ideas rubbed and rankled. His social statistics, my educated mind’s certainties compelled me to conclude, were too “crazy” not to be rigged. “How dared he!” raged the professional within.
Poised and ready to be rid of Illich for the rest of my life—thanks to these conclusions; geared up for the definitive “takeoff” of my professional career, I surprised myself; or, rather, life surprised me—slowing and pausing me longer than was healthy for my professional mind at the tail end of Deschooling Society. Fates conspiring, despite myself, I began returning again and again, as ancient mythmakers and storytellers have long known how to return us to ourselves with tales. Illich’s retelling of ancient myth in “The Rebirth of Epimethean Man” did just that. Prometheus’s lust to play god chained him to his rock. Epimetheus’s union with Pandora, the All Giver, married him to the keeper of human hope in the Pythos given her by the Gods; to be at home on Earth – with its illness as much as its wellness. Plato’s warnings to philosophers of the likes of Pan’s pipes to awaken the instincts and the senses, Illich understood only too well as he played his words at the end of a disturbing book. Pan’s lute, these oral myths now put in print, read and re-read, reveal the ancient patterns of tales told long before there was philosophical argument. Leaving behind the analytic tedium of clever point and counterpoint, Illich’s prose poems, weaving myth and tale, came to haunt.
Armed well and protected by every contemporary counter-theory conceived to counter every Illichian theory, it is only now, decades later, that I discern how unguarded I remained to the primordial power of myth and song that Illich returns us to after all the numbers and data have been turned in—none in any way able to turn the soul. Ancients, Hindu or Greek, have time tested meter and rhyme to awaken the soul put to sleep by the troubled, troubling mind. Even today, at the core, the dead center of industrially engineered Social Systems, mythmakers and storytellers mysteriously arrive at the doorway of the dormant soul, drugged and doped into the modern illusion of awakeness by affluenza.[40]
Heart broken open by Illich’s remembering the perennial human tragedy in “The Rebirth of Epimethean Man,” I found myself feeling and sensing what the analytic mind had closed me to in the modern pathos I was living—unconscious and unaware. The contemporary tragedy inherent in the primordial human lust to play god could no longer stay hid from me as I dwelt on every Illich story of technological and institutional prowess and progress—designed to dissect and possess the mysteries the ancients have known belong to the gods. Refusing to learn, moderns attempt to steal as their role model Prometheus did the God’s fire, decade after decade, spouting global “Equality, Fraternity, Liberty”; only to see, like Sisyphus, our rock roll right back at the end of the day to where it was before the latest National Policy was mandated and manned with the promise of Progress.
The pain of the perennial human tragedy, just at the moment it becomes unbearably heavy, Illich sings us other songs...contemporary and ancient; turning to Christian or agnostic Saints from Greek heroes. Greek tragedy turned into “hopeful prophecy”, Illich remembers, while telling us of the son of the fire thief, Prometheus, “Deucalion, the Helmsman of the Ark who like Noah outrode the Flood to become the father of a new mankind which he made from the earth with Pyrrha, the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora....who “value hope above expectations...who love people more than products... who love the earth on which each can meet the other,
And if a man lived in obscurity
Making his friends in that obscurity,
Obscurity is not uninteresting.”[41]
In the full face of the fragility of the good, and of the inevitable finality of death, Illich nourishes hope; cultivating and calling us to the ancient virtues of humility and hindsight Epimetheaus exemplified for us: unafraid of marriage; of the feminine; in union, gaining the hindsight, cultivating the hope nourished, like all virtues, not only at Delphi but also in Delhi. Here and now; wherever humans recover the capacity and the humble gaze which reveals to us what, despite their skill in creating beauty, is not in human hands, seeing the Cosmos in the hands God.
Illich’s contemporary heroes, Epimethean women and men reborn, are not to be confused with his in-numerable other subjects for reflection and admiration: like the school[wo]men Saints of Chicago, and other urban ghettos; concrete jungles that turn real people into dangerous, destructive monsters, in whose honor Illich sings his little known elegy on education, “The Educational Enterprise in the Light of the Gospel.” Sanctifying Doc Thomas MacDonald in Chicago’s Goudy Elementary, he describes these many Schindler’s of Education, saving their Jews from further filling the fast expanding Prison System of the world’s self-promotional “# 1 Nation in Development and Democracy”. One of millions of unknown, unsung heroes, Illich pulls their stories out of places like the Saturday Tribune: “Principal McDonald reaches up to smooth a shock of white hair that has spilled onto his forehead. He notices the smudge of blood on his hand. Then he lunges, eyes flashing ‘give me that pipe’! Circling him in the second-floor hallway are two pre-teen students, Arnary Bibs who is armed with a long, unraveled piece of cardboard tubing, and Morris Elliston, who is swinging a stubby piece of copper pipe...‘shut up’ says Morris...McDonald grabs the pipe.”
Pedestrian and trite in the dailyness of what millions of Principals endure and what Illich pauses to describe, he explains what likens Saint McDonald of Chicago to Saint Schindler: “they expect nothing from an evil system in which they find themselves except the chance to make its total victims feel that they can beat it....McDonald runs a ‘gravity school’, a sink for the school system’s dregs and wastes. He takes anything which walks in and assigns it to ... courageous old ladies. To let Maurice jab the copper pipe at his behind: is part of the ‘endurance test’ to which he exposes himself in his struggle for these kids...as a distant relative of Schindler.”
After asking the most difficult questions of Thomas Mc Donald’s motivation to do what he does daily with the dregs, Illich can still celebrate him, full of compassion for the futility of principals and teachers like him pushing Sisyphus’s rock up the slopes of all the modern institutions of Services and Self-Management. Other well-intentioned alternative educators, sharing their good intentions, receive Illich’s compassion expressed differently: “Many times women whore just to put food on the table.” Illich reveals no intention to convert these whores into virtuous women. He offers neither priestly, religious nor secular salvation—especially not for the refuseniks and the dropouts and the dregs of the School System’s services.
Biblical stories increasingly became part of Illich’s rich repertoire for reflecting on the human condition. The Good Samaritan’s story told by Jesus to his disciplines; the little Jewish girl being visited by the Archangel, Gabriel, to reveal to her that she is soon to be mother of the son of God—these familiar stories, among others, Illich told and retold in his last decade with his own inimitable flavor; delving deeper and deeper into the infernal depths of “the corruption of Christianity” to explain the corruption of all the caring professions[42]; so far removed from the Sermon on the Mount by the global institution wielding centralized global power from Rome...or other city centers:
The new possibility of personally facing one another has produced as its perversion a vast architecture of impersonal institutions all claiming, in some sense, to care. The vast engines of education and health, as much as those of economic and technological development—all derive finally from a cooptation of the gospel’s promise of freedom. Contemporary persons may often live without faith, but they live nonetheless amidst the husks of faith betrayed.[43]
Master of the oral tradition as much as he was of the printed page, no two tellings of Illich’s stories ever came out the same. Each mythic tale was crafted with care even in its improvization; each alive with the spontaneous colors of jazz that the moment of telling demanded, Illich’s ideas had a different vitality in the telling of his stories—especially as he drew upon his own lived experiences with people, famous, infamous or completely unknown. With each telling and retelling, Illich towered taller, as other literary giants before and after his time, including Leo Tolstoy, the creator of The Death of Ivan Illych. Tolstoy’s pathetic Illych, the bureaucratic, lay cowering before death; while the real Illich, unafraid of the evils and exclusions meted to the disobedient of banal bureaucracies, bowed before organic death. Illych and other city dwellers doomed themselves to rolling a heavy stone up the hill to the pinnacle of Hell becoming modern day Sisyphus seeking to chain Thanatos. Or Tantalus, “who was invited by the gods to share their meal, and on that occasion stole their secret of how to prepare all-healing ambrosia, which bestowed immortality, suffers eternal hunger and thirst standing in a river of receding waters, overshadowed by fruit trees with receding branches.”[44]
His history of modern needs, daily manufactured, legitimized and given a new lease on life today by the educational systems of consumer societies, with their ever-rising demands, is “not just evil—it can be spoken of only as Hell.”[45] Tantalus tormented lives; in me and in you, desperately driven to The Mall.
**** 2nd Story—Master Illich: In Flesh and Blood Studied by Teachers-in-the-Making
Students compulsorily enrolled in my Education courses, well trained to grovel for grades, ignore well most of the indignities and losses of freedom Illich reminds us of about the credentialing game. Yet, predictably, they stand ready for fierce battle—even as I did two decades ago—when confronted by Illich’s ideas of soul shredding engineered for the benefit of the elite of every society; for mechanical, managed, time clocked life sped in systems— Educational, Economic, and, best of all, ever-obsolescently Technological.
Techno-fasting? Abandoning the illusion of Progress? A good life lived without cell phones or internet chatrooms?
The silent contempt readable in their bored, masked faces match their explicitly articulated rejection of Illich prose as unreadable; and, worse yet, totally irrelevant to their times. “That guy is another dead, White Man. Why do we have to read his unreadable books and essays?” Too politically correct to ask their Proff such questions out loud in class, yet, they ask in their heavy silent stance ... bodies slouched over with boredom and un-said “yukhs.”
Today, these “yukhs” continue to be as disturbing to me as Illich’s disestablishment of education two decades ago, when I was poised to launch my teaching career. How do I bring Illich to life to challenge their imaginations? How do I invite Illich into our midst? How do I put flesh on his words, so that they move in this room with that unbeatable vitality and aliveness—which even my failing memory of Illich in the Walker and Willard Buildings of Pennsylvania State University cannot erase from my heart and mind?
Moments of desperation, the taste of acrid failure on my tongue, semester after semester, my soul beseeches my muse. Best are those surprising moments, then, when effortlessly, myth and stories flow for me in front of 21-year old teachers-in-the-making, with the freedom they did in the life and work of Master Illich. With my muse moving me, Illich reveals himself even larger than life. Here, before us stands an outspoken priest who saw his way right through the arrogance of cultural and religious prosyletization; who cultivated the courage and faith it takes to engage in the revolutionary acts of “divine disobedience;” unafraid to enter the catacombs to defend his personal truth against institutional might and brute force; who had the savvy and balls it takes to create CIDOC right in the middle of the superhighways of global secular salvation and religious salvation Missions—a language school so effective that even the CIA and the FBI found it irresistable; where, like a magnet, one man drew thinkers from lands distant and near; who could dare to say out loud to the presidents of “free” nations groveling with begging bowls before the Lords of Global Development: “No Golden Gossamer does he really wear! Here, Folks, the Emperor of Global Development stands shamefully Naked.”
Superstar featured dashing, sophisticated and elegant on the covers of newspapers and magazines, his real life, beyond the eyes of cameras, continued to exemplify austerity and askesis. Until his last, Illich remained un-seduceable by the pomp and circumstance of celebrity status. Wide awake, he revealed with fabulous clarity why his grand global successes remained abject failures to stop the Force of the industrial Machine with all of its Service Vendors and Self-Management.
Embracing his worldly failure fully, Illich showed us, that not being a commercial or professional success offers our ordinary genius unlimited contexts and untold possibilities for the humble, the tenuously human; for the “rebirth of Epimetheus”; whose hindsight revealed to him the traditional “art of suffering” as inextricably joined to the arts of dying and living – best practiced among friends.
**** 3rd Story—Beyond the Tragedy of Greek Myth: Organic, Humble Death and Dying at Home
Neither excruciating illness nor inevitable death daunted Illich in his last decades on earth. Vital and creative unto his last, he remained undaunted by both indescribable physical pain and profound sadness for homo miserablis [modern man’s misery made worse by growing addiction to techno-treatments, heaped on top of bereavement counseling and masturbatory self-help] on his quest for practicing, wherever he chose to be on his pilgrimage on earth, the virtues that define the rebirth of Epimetheus.
Simultaneously a wandering half-Jew and Catholic ex-priest, he carried his tent with him wherever he went; pitching it always in the down-to-earth settlements created by friends for nourishing friendship. Amongst his friends, Illich died in his simple bed, even as he had lived – free from all the state-of-the-art treatment technologies. He cultivated the art of dying which his much celebrated peasants practiced, even in the full face of the war on subsistence waged by moderns against them all over our good earth. The revulsion he received for the growing growth on his cheek drew from him even greater compassion for those caught in the professional clutches of Service and Self-Management therapies. Needing neither variety of crutch, Illich walked to the last on his own feet towards the Doorway of his Death, mowing down illusion after illusion of basic human needs—for Health Care and death-denying Techno-fixes for cancer prevention and care;[46] celebrating for others the freedom that comes from knowing the “enoughness” humans enjoy wherever they embrace graceful limits; the limits that come of necessity with tools for conviviality.
Almost two years after his “passing on,” his reappearance for some of us was most deliciously sensed in the gathering, “friends of Ivan Illich,” created last month by Dan Grego in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Our teacher’s art of hospitality, exquisitely brought alive and celebrated by Dan Grego, further reaffirmed for me that Illich stands in our midst larger than life when friends gather to break bread together; savor simple, good food and wine; laugh and weep, celebrate and mourn together the conditio humana; re-membering in the fragility and tenuousness of the good, shared with each other in breaking bread, in songs, story and myth; told and re-told; every little telling a part of the all-too-human unfolding epic.
Do we continue to enjoy the rebirth of Illich’s Epimethean women and men? As the wine and the conversation flowed within the warm heart of Milwaukee, at the center of Grego’s circle of Illich friends, again and again we sensed and celebrated the hope Illich cultivated. “To hell with good intentions” to “save the world” is as much a part of the cultivation of Illich’s hope, as is escaping the doomsday tales told by religious Fundamentalists, eco-minded Environmentalists and other promoters of Apocalyptic Randiness. Recognizing well that we constituted no “elite corps” of Epimethean women and men, I found myself grateful for the moments of clarity and common sense that come in little niches, little circles of friendship which flower despite the fact that we all still live in Absurdistan. Despite “growing up absurd,” despite the perversity of the wars being waged around us for no good reason; despite gazing at our own tragic role in the conditio humana, here we enjoy each others’ trust, just as Illich trusted the human goodness he smelled with his large Jewish nose. Illich reiterated for me the importance of trusting my own Punjabi nose (denigrated “underdeveloped”) that smelled out so well the “stuff” found in the commons of common men and women: n every culture, every tradition, still alive, even though surrounded by the plague of modernity.
**Author’s Bio**
Madhu Suri Prakash is a Professor of philosophy of education at The Pennsylvania State University. She is the co-author of Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures and Escaping Education: Living as Learning at the Grassroots. Both books have been inspired by the ideas of Ivan Illich. Most recently she is a contributor to YES! Magazine.
*** Understanding the Logic of Educational Encampment: From Illich to Agamben
**Tyson E. Lewis**
Illich’s call for “deschooling” society is well known. In the book that shares the same name, Illich argues against schools on two accounts. First, the common school has become “the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.”[47] Here a genealogical argument is made that links the school to the church, both of which mask the increasing “underdevelopment of self- and community-reliance” with the ideology of salvation and hope. In fact, schools perform the “three fold function” of powerful churches, acting as “the repository of society’s myth [which include the myth of unending consumption and social progress], the institutionalization of that myth’s contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality.”[48] In this model, the teacher acts as “custodian” who leads students through a series of institutionalized rituals and as a “moralist” who substitutes for God. In sum, Illich writes, “For the child, the teacher pontificates as pastor, prophet, and priest—he is at once guide, teacher, and administrator.”[49] In short, the school has become the new “World Church”[50] acting as a global, colonizing agent that simply reinforces modernized salvation myths while masking the on-going destruction of communities and ecosystems.
In Illich’s critique, the religious origins of the teacher are juxtaposed to another set of genealogical roots which link institutionalized, age-specific, compulsory schooling to capitalism. The relations between capitalism and religion are summarized by Illich through the concept of the hidden curriculum which “serves as a ritual of initiation into a growth-oriented consumer society for rich and poor alike.”[51] Drawing on the early writings of Marx, Illich argues that “School makes alienation preparatory to life” by equating education with disciplined consumption.[52] In fact, Illich observes that the school has become the “advertising agency” for contemporary capitalist society,[53] reinforcing the norms, values, and dispositions necessary to perpetuate capitalist social relations of production.
While the various connections, genealogies, and correspondences which Illich draws between the school, the church, and capitalism have been hotly debated, there is a third line of inquiry that has remained virtually absent from secondary discussions of Illich’s work. In 1988 Ivan Illich made the following, provocative observation concerning inner city Chicago schools:
I had come to Chicago to speak about schools, not camps. My theme was educational crippling, not Nazi murder. But I found myself unable to distinguish between Oskar Schindler in his factory in Crakow and Doc Thomas McDonald in Chicago’s Goudy Elementary, where he is the principal. I know Doc as indirectly as Shindler, I know him only from the Chicago Tribune, but I cannot forget him.
And for some weeks now I have asked myself: Why does he stay on the job? What gives him the courage?[54]
In a sense there is no way of comparing the class of historical events that go under the name of Hiroshima, Pol Pot Cambodia, Armenian Massacre, Nazi Holocaust, ABCstocks, or human geneline engineering on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the treatment meted out to people in our schoolrooms, hospital wards, slums, or welfare agencies. But, in another sense, both kinds of horrors are manifestations of the same epochal spirit. Illich clearly recognizes both the danger in making an analogy between schools and concentration camps and the necessity of thinking through these links (no matter how mediated) for understanding the pedagogical logic of late capitalism.
In the following paper, I will expand upon Illich’s metaphorical links through the work of Giorgio Agamben. In particular, we can use Agamben’s work on encampment as a way to give analytical weight to Illich’s observations. But before I can introduce Agamben’s central ideas, I will first make a slight detour through Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower. It is Foucault who theorized the complex assemblage between discipline-sovereignty-education that makes Illich’s connections a reality for many students. Coupling Foucault and Agamben, we then can rethink the economy of power that Illich’s intuitive analogy suggests—transforming a metaphor into a paradigm. In particular, we have to rethink (a) the gaze of power, (b) the subject of power, and (c) the spatial location of power. Through this analysis, I will demonstrate the need for a theory of “necropedagogy” or a pedagogy that promotes a certain form of educational extinction or disqualification according to a sovereign ban.
To begin I would like to offer a basic overview of Foucault’s genealogical analysis of power. According to Foucault, power today “differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes,” and “normalizes.”[55] The resulting “social orthopedics” of education ceases to punish individual infractions and instead focuses on “correcting their potentialities”.[56] Thus in terms of schooling, hierarchical observation (enabling the gaze of administration and performance qualification on state and federal levels access to the practices of teachers and students), normalizing judgment (in which students are ranked in terms of their perceived abilities and rewarded for their disciplined behaviors), and examinations (that articulate hierarchical observation with normalization in the form of intellectual, physical, and psychological tests) become pervasive techniques to manage various potentialities in children. In all such cases, disciplinary power is, as Foucault observes “exercised through its invisibility…and the examination is the technique by which power, instead of emitting the signs of its potency, instead of imposing its mark on its subjects, holds them in a mechanism of objectification.”[57] In other words, in schools, power shifts from erratic displays of public punishment over and against educational life (humiliation, expulsion, etc.) to internal regulation concerned with reforming individual behaviors through proper training, protecting individual lives through investment, and optimizing efficiency. Such social orthopedics connect Foucault’s genealogical analysis of the teacher and Christian pastoral power with Illich’s theory of the teacher as pastor, prophet, and priest cited above. For both, the modern school is not so modern after all, re-institutionalizing the Christian shepherd in a secularized form.
On the macro-level of the population, these micro-rituals of power that discipline and individuate bodies congeal into a philosophy of biopower wherein the management of the health of the nation becomes the principle problematic of the modern world.[58] Here bodies are transformed into statistics for the measurement of birth rates, migration statistics, consumption and production capabilities, and death rates in the form of censuses, surveys, and other quantitative tools of population measurement and calculation. Thus, disciplinary regimes function to correct and to regulate individual “free citizens” with rights while biopower manages a collective population on a macro-level. Two “series” are created: body-organism-disciplineinstitutions and population-biological processes-regulatory mechanisms-State.[59] The element or category that unites and separates these two series (and thus allows biopower to pass into the disciplinary and vice versa) is the norm which “can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize.”[60] In other words, biopower distributes disciplined bodies around normalities (in education, industry, politics, etc.) and in the process constitutes politics as immanent to life itself.
Overwhelmingly, Foucauldian scholars have focused on schools as disciplinary institutions. Yet this emphasis on disciplinary/pastoral power and its ability to train, homogenize, and invest in the body/mind of the student through subtle mechanisms does not adequately describe other forms of classroom interaction. Such as those students in the Chicago school system described above.
Extrapolating from Illich’s bleak description, we could argue that these schools are not facilitating disciplinary rehabilitation through the micro-management of student potentialities but rather an untimely educational abandonment that, as statistics now demonstrate, leads to high drop-out rates, expulsions, jobless futures, and various subaltern lifestyles outside of dominant disciplinary institutions. If schooling in capitalist America reproduces the student as a producer/consumer, then the frightening situation in Chicago schools falls short of social reproduction theory as well. There is a violence at work here which is not captured by the discourse of micro-management or the reproduction of capitalist social relations that inform many critical analyses of schooling, including Illich’s own. It is a violence of exclusion, an exceptional violence that does not weave students into a matrix of disciplinary power so much as make them bear witness to a power that judges them from the outside and above.
It is my contention that we need a new descriptive language to capture the full uniqueness of what Illich describes. In order to achieve this goal, we have to look back toward a theory of sovereign force, which, as we will see, maintains itself within disciplinary apparatuses as a disavowed anchoring point. Moving toward a language of sovereign force might seem counter intuitive to Foucauldian inspired educational theorists. In the literature cited above, sovereignty is more often than not described as an anachronism in two senses. Theoretically, sovereignty restricts our analysis of power to a reductive legalistic framework often associated with a critique of the oppressive state. It also focuses on questions regarding who has power rather than how power operates, its techniques, and its technologies. Phenomenologically, it is incapable of describing the reality of power relations existing in the modern world as they are distributed in networks that function continuously, silently, invisibly, and ubiquitously. As such we cannot dwell on questions of sovereignty but rather must refocus attention on the micro-physics of disciplinary power. This shift does not mean that sovereign force no longer operates in schools; it simply means that its functioning is increasingly peripheral to the daily routines of education. For instance Roger Deacon’s in-depth analysis of Foucault’s theory of education states that coercive power relations “still have their place” in modern schooling, but have been largely replaced by subtler forms of disciplinary training and “moral orthopedics.”[61] Likewise Robin Usher and Richard Edwards argue that “effective learning, the training of the body and soul, renders unnecessary the requirement for more direct forms of coercion, although these forms never entirely disappear.”[62] Sovereign force remains at sites where disciplinary normalization seems to break down. Key here is that sovereign force does not form a necessary category within an analysis of disciplinary power. It remains a left over, a shadow that haunts disciplinary power from the outside. Because sovereign force appears to be an anachronism in present day schooling, ethical analyses of Foucault in education speak to resistance against disciplinary normalization and to the production of contra-conduct rather than rebellion against overt forms of violence and or authority.[63]
At the same time, Foucault’s lectures have emphasized that while the modern world might be dominated by a disciplinary paradigm on an institutional level, on the level of the health of the population, on the level of biopower, sovereign force is far from a peripheral issue and in fact returns in the form of genocide against the “other” as biological threat.[64] As opposed to the above-mentioned studies, noted educational philosopher John Covaleskie has argued that sovereign force is a central issue for educational philosophy, thus opening up a line of investigation that enables us to reassess the internal role of sovereign force in modern schooling.[65] In fact, for Covaleskie, the figure of the teacher is one of the very last outposts for sovereign force in the modern world. While schools might be disciplinary institutions, the force that teachers wield over their students is a form of power sharing many qualities with classical notions of sovereignty: it is inconsistent, not regular; often overt, not subtle; visible, not invisible; vengeful, not indifferent. Because disciplinary power is diffuse, invisible, and ubiquitous it is difficult to resist, yet as Covaleskie points out, the sovereign force of the teacher is often a central catalyst for student resistance. Such resistance then provides the institutional motor for then re-inscribing students into an expanding disciplinary regime. Thus, sovereign force is not simply a marginal anachronism existing only when disciplinary mechanisms falter. It is rather a constitutive aspect of schooling (as both an institution and as a set of social relations within the classroom) with intimate ties to the extension and proliferation of disciplinary mechanisms. In relation to the politics of policy implementation in higher education, theorists such as Maarten Simons (2006) have argued that the European initiative “life long learning” has the very real potential to shift from a form of self-government into a form of sovereign decision to let die or make live.[66] Drawing on Foucault’s later biopolitical lectures and recent scholarship by Giorgio Agamben, Simons correctly pinpoints the persistence of sovereign force within the biopolitical state. From the now pervasive logic of neo-liberal, entrepreneurial ideology, the state invests in what will produce a viable and strategic outcome. Here learning becomes an investment in life, thus capitalizing learning within an overall “vital-economy.” “If,” as Simons states, “the expectation of possible incomes disappears, their [youth] very real existence and survival is at stake.”[67] The sovereign decision is in other words a decision based on a costbenefits analysis concerning long-term social payoffs of educating certain bodies over and against others. The economic calculus that functions within the biopower of the state acts as the sovereign determinate indicating which bodies have become socially superfluous. Thus, social abandonment lies at the very heart of the logic of social investment and a governmental logic of self-regulation.
In sum, both Covaleskie and Simons suggest that an analysis of the relation between the educator and sovereign force is still necessary; only now the sovereign’s claim over life has been transformed into a biopolitical claim concerning the nature of the individual subject and his or her productive role in relation to the health and prosperity of the population. Yet questions still remain. For instance, Covaleskie and Simons remain silent on major issues concerning the relation between this power over death and race and class. Which bodies are subjected to the sovereign ban and how is this related to a racialized notion of the “entrepreneurial self”? Secondly, there is a question of the exact relation between the production of self-regulating subjects and the production of the sovereign ban. In Covaleskie’s argument, the sovereign decision reinforces disciplinary modes of power, enabling new lines of discipline to penetrate, describe, and control socially disruptive behaviors. In Simons’ case, he argues that the production of “bare life” via the sovereign decision to let die is the principle political object within biopolitics, yet he does not adequately analyze what role this object plays within an entrepreneurial, neo-liberal economy. Is the body simply the waste of an investment paradigm or does it serve a structural function as waste?
Here we have to reopen the question of sovereignty via Agamben’s theory of exceptionality.[68] For Agamben, sovereignty maintains its functioning within the modern era by producing a biopolitical body that includes life within itself through its exclusion. Biopolitics is thus at its most foundational moment grounded in a form of violence whereby life is exposed to the logic of the sovereign ban. Bare life is natural life (zoe) that has been banned, or rather politicized by a sovereign decision, and it is this form of life—stripped of civil rights and social investment—that forms the premiere political object of biopower. The space of bare life is, as Agamben argues “a no man’s land between a process of subjectivation and a process of desubjectivation, between identity and nonidentity.”[69] This is a space of pure survival without the supplement of bios. Thus bare life is a paradoxical location betwixt and between the inside and outside of the state, lacking the security of rights or legal processes and devoid of the investment of a normalizing, disciplining apparatus. It is a space of irrational excess based on a sovereign decision outside the law yet founding the law.
For Agamben, the quintessential spatial location of the sovereign decision over life is the camp. Agamben defines the camp as a “state of exception” functioning outside the normal state of the law. It is a spatial location where the law remains operative only through its suspension. As such, the camp has a paradoxical location. According to Agamben, “What is being excluded in the camp is captured outside, that is, it is included by virtue of its very exclusion…. The people who entered the camp moved about in a zone of indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the illicit, in which every juridical protection had disappeared.”[70] These individuals captured by the no-man’s-land of the camp are given over to the sovereign decision. They are, in other words, rendered sacred. Tracing the etymological roots of the sacred, Agamben argues that in Roman law, the sacred individual is the one who can be killed without the accusation of murder.[71] In the camp, the fate of the sacred individual is determined not so much by the normal rule of law as the arbitrary will of the sovereign who makes a decision. What is most disconcerting for Agamben, is that the logic of the camp functions as the “hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still live”.[72] It is not an anachronism to discuss the sovereign decision, rather it is the biopolitical question.
Here we can return to my example from Illich’s analysis of educational extermination in Chicago schools. Students in these schools are externally included, or, as Michelle Fine argues, they become the educational “disappeared.”[73] These children are not examples (which are “exclusive inclusions” of proper or improper action within a disciplinary regime)[74] but are exceptions (which are “included exclusions” totally invisible or disappeared). In other words, the student is rendered “uneducatable” and thus outside the field of normalization while remaining firmly within the very institutions which were meant to “educate” him or her. Schools become paradoxical locations of disappearance. In light of Agamben’s theory of the sovereign decision, the camp, and the sacred, Illich’s remarks concerning contemporary schooling gain a new urgency and relevance. For example, in passing, Illich argues that “Classroom attendance removes children from the everyday world of Western culture and plunges them into an environment far more primitive, magical, and deadly serious. Schools could not create such an enclave within which the rules of ordinary reality are suspended, unless it physically incarcerated the young during many successive years on sacred territory.”[75] The logic of the camp is clearly described in this passage: schools suspend the normal law, thus becoming sacred spaces of institutional abandonment.
What we see at work here is a form of necroschooling. This term is an adaptation of Achille Mbembe’s term necropolitics, which suggests that the function of politics today is no longer purely to regulate and invest in bios (political life) but rather to reduce bios to inhuman life through a power of death.[76] It is also a term that draws upon Paulo Freire’s observation that the pedagogy of oppression is itself necrophylic, or in love with death rather than biophylic or in love with life.[77] Such a necropower does not simply imply biological or actual death (although in its most extreme forms, massacre is certainly its final telos), but can include forms of social death wherein a productive civic identity is withheld from the subject. Necroschooling is a form of education that is more concerned with abandonment than with social investment, protection, etc. It reveals that at the heart of technologies of biopower lies an obscene sovereign decision that is predicated on a fundamental ban that separates the social from itself, creating an internal division that does not operate in terms of hierarchical normalization or examination. In order to fill out the specificities of necroschooling, I will now describe the mechanisms underlying the force of abandonment.
First, the gaze of necropedagogy has its origins in the long history relating education and medicalization.[78] Just as the clinical gaze understands life only in relation to the corpse as reference so too the normalizing gaze of education only understands knowledge in relation to ignorance/stupidity.[79] Thus the gazes of medicine and pedagogy are structurally similar, knowing the healthy through the referent of the sick and smart through the referent of the ignorant. Throughout the history of schooling in the U.S. (see in particular the history of educational eugenics) these two gazes have repeatedly conjoined to monitor and inspect the student as (potential) biological/intellectual corpse—thus linking eugenics with Freire’s pedagogy of oppression as a necrophylic pedagogy obsessed with death.[80] As such, the history of biopower and its internal relation to necropower are intimately linked through the macabre gaze of deficit thinking. This macabre gaze is certainly at work in Illich’s description. For Illich, students in these inner city schools are rendered educationally invisible, subjected to a new, intensified version of educational violence.
It is in the macabre gaze of necropedagogy that a critical distinction becomes clear. While Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power examines the technologies that produce and sustain the dialectic of the normal and the abnormal, the gaze of necropower ultimately distinguishes a different object entirely: the abject. The abject is not simply the extreme of the abnormal but rather falls outside the scope of the normalizing “bell curve.” As Joy James argues in her criticism of Foucault’s color blindness, the abject body is a racialized body that cannot be normalized through disciplinary apparatuses but is at the outset deemed unfit and thus given over to the field of necropower.[81] I would press her argument even further and suggest that the “health” of the normalized population (white, middle-class, etc.) is in fact sustained by the production of this abject for it is the foreclosure of abjection that sets the parameters of the field of the normal and the abnormal. Thus the racialized other as deficit is not simply a body that is abnormal (and thus capable of normalization) but a discounted body exposed to necropower as a power over whose life can and cannot be educated. It is this body that is marked for a certain form of social disqualification from the active life of the citizen subject—a body that ironically is forced to survive as a social corpse neither inside nor outside. This is not a subject that acts to further expand disciplinary mechanisms (as in Covaleskie’s model), nor is it simply a surplus (as in Simons’s analysis). Rather the life of the student subjected to necropedagogy is the excluded ground for defining the normalized, docile, disciplined body.
Thus, it is important to remember that for Foucault there are two types of disciplinary technologies. The first is perhaps the most widely commented upon: the panopticon. The goal of the panopticon is to “improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come.”[82] The panopticon renders all actions and behaviors visible through examination, careful cataloging, and recording so as to normalize and homogenize the subject. The other image of discipline is the “discipline-blockade” which is an “enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time.”[83] Stated differently, Foucault’s distinction between 18th century institutions which “reinforce marginality” and 19th century institutions which “aimed at inclusion and normalization” seems to have reversed itself in relation to those schools that serve low income, minority students.[84] Here urban schools such as those described by Illich appear to resemble the discipline-blockade of the 18th century; as I am arguing, this image of a negative institution forms the proper genealogical paradigm for understanding educational abjection or invisibility.
Agamben’s work pushes us even further and, as suggested above, forces us to confront the relation between the camp and the school. While it might seem outrageous to suggest that certain schools, such as those described by Illich, exist in the hazy realm between panoptic spaces of disciplinary power and camp-like spaces of sovereign force, there appears to be a pressing need to make such analogies in order to reveal the secrete kernel of sovereign force the underlies U.S. educational institutions.
To summarize, we can now formulate the exact differences between disciplinary power and sovereign force in relation to three questions:
a. What is the gaze of sovereign violence?
b. What is the object produced through sovereign punishment?
c. What is the educational space of sovereign force?
Distinct from the genealogies that link schools to churches and capitalist production, I propose a completely new set of terms that are necessary in order to understand educational sovereignty. Here the gaze is the gaze of macabre abandonment, the object produced is not an object at all but rather the abject (neither inside nor outside the school, locked in the zone of indifference), and the space of necropedagogy verges dangerously close to that of the camp or discipline-blockade.
How can we overcome the limit of the sovereign decision and thus end educational abandonment? Perhaps what we need is to draw a line in the sand between education and the logic that makes the school a sacred space of abjection. For Agamben, religion “removes things, places, animals, or people, from common use and transfers them to a separate sphere” thus rending them sacred.[85] The mechanism of the sacred is of course sacrifice. For Illich, schooling removes education from the sphere of common use, making us dependent upon the teacher as priest, prophet, or pastor. This separation is predicated on a sacrifice, an abandonment, of the child to a sovereign decision over and against life. In opposition, Illich proposes deschooling as the profanation of education. Profanation, for Agamben, “returns to use what the sacred had separated.”[86] Is this not exactly Illich’s formulation of deschooling? Isn’t deschooling the abolition of separation that divides education from social life and in turn the community from self-regulation? In sum, removing the sacredness of education embodied in the rituals of schooling, and thus releasing education back to the common, becomes the mission for radical educators today.
**Author’s Bio**
Tyson E. Lewis is Assistant Professor in the Educational Foundations Department at Montclair State University. He has published in a wide variety of journals including Rethinking Marxism, Historical Materialism, Theory and Event, Cultural Critique, Educational Theory, and Journal of Philosophy of Education. His research interests include biopolitics, critical theory, and critical pedagogy.
*** Critical Pedagogy Taking the Illich Turn
Richard Kahn
Che’s political perspective evokes a Promethean image of humans struggling to change their world. Contemporary globalists evoke Schopenhauer’s pessimism regarding the prospects of transforming capitalism. Today the fundamental theoretical and political conflict is precisely between Che’s Promethean perspective and the globalist Schopenhauerian pessimism and/or its euphoric Panglossian counterpart, holding that this is already the “best of all possible worlds.”[87]
We now need a name for those who value hope above expectations. We need a name for those who love people more than products....We need a name for those who love the earth on which each can meet the other....We need a name for those who collaborate with their Promethean brother in the lighting of the fire and the shaping of iron, but who do so to enhance their ability to tend and care and wait upon the other....I suggest that these hopeful brothers and sisters be called Epimethean men.[88]
For decades the educational left has dwelt at length on the iconic theories of critical pedagogy as developed by the radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and those under his influence. The result has been the wide adoption of a set of promethean ideas relating, in part, to the need to articulate a politicized definition of literacy in which one reads both the world and the word, to foment popular education as a form of historical praxis, to understand how educational institutions reproduce the oppressor and oppressed relationship, and to militate for schools as a possible source/site of human emancipation and resistance. However, the emphasis on Freire’s philosophy of education has served in many ways to occlude the concurrent history of anarchist educational theory that developed alongside it—itself following a trajectory that owes little to either the cynicism about the larger human project evinced by the positions of Drs. Pangloss and Schopenhauer or the revolutionary optimism of Guevara’s promethean hope for a new man.
It is true that Freire himself was happy to extend an olive branch of solidarity to anarchistic comrades on occasion, and while there have been attempts to integrate a Freirian critical pedagogy with anarchist political/educational perspectives, the conceptual foundation for doing so is arguably tenuous.[89] While a self-avowed “libertarian” educator[90]—a moniker which thereby locates Freire within a tradition that includes social anarchist educators such as Paul Goodman, Paul Robin, Jean Grave and Francisco Ferrer—historians of libertarian education such as Joel Spring[91] note that this educational tradition is also composed of anarcho-individualists such as Max Stirner, as well as laissez-faire styled anarchists such as A. S. Neill, John Taylor Gatto, or many of those behind the Free School and Unschooling movements.[92] Most bear scant resemblance to Freirian liberatory pedagogy. Hence, the inability of “libertarian” to denote a particular type of political and pedagogical approach has led scholars such as Judith Suissa to want to more clearly differentiate between anarchistic, libertarian, and liberal educational philosophies.[93]
Unfortunately, although Suissa asserts that a tactical, multidimensional anarchism for social revolution is “reminiscent” of Freire’s situational method, she does not base this claim in a careful examination of Freire’s epistemology or in any of the specifics of his political biography.[94] Further, her oversight comes in the context of a flawed reading of Marxism, which she perceives as pedagogically prone to “offer abstract, general answers to political questions outside of the reality of social experience and experimentation.”[95] By these terms, Freire could not clearly be considered a Marxist educator. Yet, a more sophisticated reading of the aims of Marxist pedagogy in which structures are understood situationally, as well as a closer reading of Freire himself, would unquestionably find that the gnosiological aims of his work are consistent exactly with a Marxist theory of knowledge.[96] Moreover, although his personal politics were not always as clearly Marxist in flag, it can more assuredly be said that Freire did not chart a career that was classically anarchist. Indeed, during the beginning of Freire’s political life he even promoted forms of liberal social democracy, and then later worked for Brazil’s Workers’ Party as a supervisor of state state-sponsored schooling in Sao Paulo, as well as an officer for global bureaucracies such as the World Council of Churches and the United Nations, all the while espousing a version of radically participatory left theory. Therefore, Freire’s politics were ultimately eclectic. Taxonomically, they might be classified as something akin to revolutionary non-sectarian Marxist democratic socialism, not anarchism.
Regardless, the ideological ambiguity surrounding Freire’s libertarian politics has only served to assist his becoming undeniably the most curricularly visible of all the liberatory educators today. In this essay, then, I would like to explore a liberatory path less traveled by most contemporary educational theorists[97]—that of the anarchistic pedagogy of Freire’s friend cum critic, the renegade and apophatic theological philosopher, Ivan Illich.[98] Playing a sort of Bakunin and Tolstoy to Freire’s Marx,[99] Illich in fact helped to free Freire from prison in the 1960s, provided him with safe shelter at the Center for Intercultural Documentation,[100] and translated some of Freire’s first works. However, Illich spoke not for the “pedagogy of the oppressed” but initially for the social disestablishment of schools and then later of the dehumanizing aspects of social institutions and systems generally. Against the common sense defense of education as (at least potentially) a public good to be conserved, Illich counseled that people have always “known many things” without curricula and called for vernacular values and convivial tools that could meet people’s needs without becoming ends in themselves, as he felt contemporary public education systems had done.[101]
Illich’s greatest counsel, though, was in hailing the need for a return of Epimethean individuals—anarchists who would be wedded to the earth and its sustainable limits, support matriarchal principles of gifting and caring, and who would represent a political culture founded on a more holistic relationship to Reason than had previously been produced by postEnlightenment intellectuals. Interestingly, despite Illich’s obvious genius, fame, and continued importance for an age of social and ecological crisis, until very recently his work has been curiously absent from academic debates about the politics of education.[102] But even of that work which has emerged, almost none remarks upon Illich’s attempt to develop an anarchistic morality called “Epimetheanism”—a fact that Illich himself addressed, reflecting that the idea of Epimetheanism was to his mind the most important element of Deschooling Society and interestingly the one that was least discussed during his tenure as a public intellectual.[103]
**** Beyond Prometheanism
For those not accustomed to thinking about their lives in terms of Ancient Greek mythology, some additional context will prove useful for understanding Illich’s idea of an epimethean cultural turn. Prior to Illich, and definitely known to him, the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse attempted to provide imaginative epistemological and hermeneutical “conceptual mythologies”[104], which he thought would allow one to read the world in novel ways and provide openings for alternative modes of being. In Eros and Civilization, for instance, Marcuse offers the archetypal images of Orpheus and Narcissus as possible liberating “culture-heroes”[105] for the politics and counterculture of what he termed “the Great Refusal”[106] of the dominant social order’s psychic prometheanism in all of its repressive aspects.[107]
In Greek mythology, Prometheus was the Greek titan (whose name means “forethought”) who unapologetically stole the element of fire from the gods to give to humankind. According to the myth, he did so because his brother Epimetheus (or “after-thought”) was required to gift traits to all the beings of the earth but, lacking fore-thought, gave all he had away before reaching humanity. As a result of Prometheus’s theft of the divine fire, he was condemned to eternal bondage on a mountaintop where an eagle would perch to feed upon his liver in perpetuity. The figure of Prometheus has thus historically come to symbolize humanity’s prophetic, educative, and justice-seeking aspects, and in this way Prometheus also became the favorite classical mythological figure of Karl Marx. Via the Marxist reading, Prometheus is particularly emblematic of the human potential for daring political deeds, technological ingenuity, and general rebellion against the powers that be to improve social life, and it is in this sense that Freirian critical pedagogy can be described as a quintessentially promethean pedagogical movement for social change.
However, Prometheus is also representative of the industrial strivings of modernity to produce technical solutions to what are perceived to be the given problems of natural scarcity and worldly imperfection through the ideology of progress. It was in this sense that Marcuse sought liberation from the modern figure of Prometheus—whom he understood as representing “toil, productivity, and progress through repression…the trickster and (suffering) rebel against the gods, who creates culture at the price of perpetual pain.”[108] The reconstruction of promethean society might be accomplished, he surmised, not by placing artificial regulatory limits upon that same society, but rather through an inward and outward cultural transvaluation of social values made possible via the work of counterhegemonic social movements. The final writing of Marcuse’s life, “Children of Prometheus: 25 Theses on Technology and Society,” concludes hopefully:
This advance towards the new is emerging today in the women’s movement against patriarchal domination, which came of age socially only under capitalism; in the protests against the nuclear power industry and the destruction of nature as an ecological space that cut across all fixed class boundaries; and—in the student movement, which despite being declared dead, still lives on in struggles against the degradation of teaching and learning into activities that reproduce the system.[109]
Illich undoubtedly followed Marcuse in searching for an antidote to unbridled social prometheanism, which he perceived at work both in the shadowy future of supposed technoutopia as well as in the distributive social justice and environmentalist zeal of so-called modern progressives. Illich thus revisits the Prometheus story as the mythic origin of patriarchy and homo faber, or “man the maker.” In this way, Illich crucially highlights the important role of the feminine in the myth, portrayed by the figure of Pandora (the infamous keeper of the box containing all of the worldly evils, along with one good—hope).
In popular Ancient Greek accounts of the myth, Prometheus counsels his brother Epimetheus not to marry Pandora, as he foresees that she constitutes a form of Olympian punishment upon humanity for its reception of the Prometheus’s theft. Pandora is resultantly pictured as little more than a curious, seductive, and destructive influence upon the world. Alternately a mixture of Eve and Lot’s wife from the Book of Genesis, patriarchal society has since tended to represent Pandora as a root of human travails—it is she who, as a woman, brought evil and misfortune to life through the opening of her box and the unleashing of all of its negative contents.[110] By contrast, in Illich’s exegesis of the myth, Pandora was an ancient fertility goddess whose name meant “All Giver,” and in marrying her Epimetheus thereby became wedded to the Earth and all its gifts. Rather than identify her as the carrier of sin, Illich emphasizes that Pandora was the keeper of hope and he thus interprets Pandora’s box as a sort of Ark of sanctuary. Hence, for Illich, Epimetheus was not the dull-witted brother of Prometheusthe-savior but rather the ancient cultural archetype of those who freely give and recognize gifts, care for and treasure life (especially during times of catastrophe), and attend to the conservation of seeds of hope in the world for future others.
To Prometheans, Epimetheans are well-meaning simpletons who have not seen or responded to the future peril which is the context for their present deeds and, in fact, this has arguably been the enduring reception of Illich’s own legacy as a political theorist of anarchism. But from the reverse perspective offered by Illich, it is Epimetheus who remains freely convivial with the world as given while the progenitor of a new world, Prometheus, remains bound and chained by his own creative deed. Though Greek myth appears to portray Prometheus as humanity’s benefactor, from a counter-perspective perhaps the failure of Epimetheus to present humankind an additional trait was itself a type of important gift—a non-act that attempted to deliver the message to conserve hope in the face of growing expectations. Therefore, epimethean anarchism provides a collaborative standpoint to revolutionary promethean humanism, offering stoic hindsight on the utopian dream of human progress and justice, as it attempts to offer faith in humanity that is based, not in ideology—the epimethean world is in a sense after-thought, but in empathetic understandings of nature as inherently decent and complete.
**** A Pedagogy for Convivial Relations
As outlined by Illich, epimetheanism broadly represents a counter-pedagogy to both contemporary technocratic forms of institutional social reproduction and the versions of critical pedagogy that oppose technocratic education on behalf of an ethic of social justice that is conceived as the equitable distribution of modern life’s benefits. Through his adoption of an anarchistic ethos that questioned both the “progress” of industrial society and the social progressivism of its promethean emancipators, Illich became undoubtedly one of the most perceptive and radical theorists of the hidden curriculum to date.[111] For his work not only interrogated the overt curricular material of educational institutions in relationship to that which is systematically avoided therein, but he extended this analysis to the deepest cosmological level of society through the revelation of the overt global costs of a prometheanism that methodically avoids epimethean practices and values.
Having initially realized that society’s hidden curriculum manufactures schools in order to introject forces of domination into student bodies (akin to Freire’s idea of “banking pedagogy”), Illich went on in his later work to insist that, in a highly professionalized and commoditized media culture, all aspects of life either promote themselves as educative or increasingly demand some element of training as a cost of unchecked consumption. Under such conditions, the being possessing wisdom—homo sapiens—becomes reduced to homo educandus, the being in need of education.[112] Then, in an age when the computer becomes the “root metaphor”[113] of existence, this reduction then becomes further processed and networked into the cybernetic reality of homo programmandus.[114]
Illich therefore became increasingly concerned that contemporary education had become synonymous with a demand for globally systemic fascism, such that it was unthinkable from the perspective of institutional experts that a person or persons could manage to live decently, even amidst conditions of wealth and plenty, when left to dwell according to their own autonomous devices and needs. As a result, he came to propose a negative definition of education as the heteronomous formula: “learning under the assumption of scarcity.”[115] By contrast, he held that even in the face of chronic hardship the practice of cultural autonomy necessarily tends towards a dignified epistemological awareness of life’s natural abundance and human security within the worldly order of things.
In a manner quite congruent with Illich, Marx wrote in Capital:
In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labor proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workers are the parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages.[116]
But for Marx, the alienation of the worker’s productivity as it is subsumed within the industrial system through rationalized exploitation is not only inhumane but also an obstacle to the historical growth of human productive forces.[117] Hence, in response, Marxist prometheanism attempts to organize politically around normative demands for a more humane future that can only be realized, in part, through the liberated development of society’s technical productivity. Illich’s epimethean response to the inhumane industrial social system, by contrast, is closer to Audrey Lorde’s in the sense that “the master’s tools will never demolish the master’s house.”[118]
It is in this respect that Illich generally chose to speak of “tools,” and not technology or machines, both because it was a “simple word”[119] and because it was broad enough to
subsume into one category all rationally designed devices, be they artifacts or rules, codes or operators, and…distinguish all these planned and engineered instrumentalities from other things such as food or implements, which in a given culture are not deemed to be subject to rationalization.[120]
An Illichian “tool” accordingly includes not only machines but any “means to an end which people plan and engineer”[121], such as industries and institutions. Whichever, a defining characteristic of such tools is that they originate and belong to a human-scale of production and function.
It should be noted, though, that Illich’s anarchism did not seek to demonize large-scale technologies tout court in the manner that has taken place amongst extreme sects of anarchoprimitivism, such as in The Unabomber Manifesto. Illich himself was “neither a romantic, nor a luddite” and he believed “the past was a foreign country” not worth endorsing.[122] Neither a technophobe, nor anti-civilization, Illich’s views were instead wedded to a kind of impractical practicality. In this way he remained committed to a hope for “postindustrial” conditions and spent much of his life defending appropriate forms of “convivial tools” that represent the obverse of rampant technocracy and the globalization of corporate development.[123] By definition, Illich’s “tools for conviviality” promote learning, sociality, community, “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment.”[124] These tools work to produce a more democratic and sustainable society that is “simple in means and rich in ends”[125] and in which individuals can freely communicate, debate, and participate throughout all manner of a cultural and political life that respects the unique “balance among stability, change and tradition.”[126] Through the idea of conviviality, then, Illich proposed positive norms to critique existing systems and construct sustainable options using values such as “survival, justice, and self-defined work.”[127]
Tools do become counterproductive for Illich when they become systematically industrialized so as to additionally produce “new possibilities and new expectations” that “impede the possibility of achieving the wanted end” for which they were made.[128] When this occurs, he argued, tools turn from being “means to ends” into the ends themselves, and they thus alter the social, natural and psychological environments in which they arise.[129] Remarking that “Highly capitalized tools require highly capitalized men”, Illich implied that it is necessary that people struggle to master their tools, lest they be mastered by them.[130] For when people uncritically operate tools that amplify human behavior and needs beyond the limits of natural and human scales, tools move from being reasonably productive and rational to paradoxically counterproductive and irrational.[131] For instance, we see examples of this in the present development of the global communications network, in which members of society are subjected to the Moore’s law version of “keeping up with the Joneses.” You have a webpage, but do you blog? You blog, but do you Facebook? You Facebook, but do you tweet? At each step of the process failing to remain technologically contemporary veritably excludes one from partaking of and communicating with the dominant trends in social life generally.[132] Of course, from an epimethean perspective, ironically, this may be exactly the way out of the present problem.
Illich’s critique of counterproductive tools is thus related to Max Weber’s concept of “instrumental rationalization,” as well as variant formulations proposed by Frankfurt School members like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. For Weber, the process of instrumental rationalization resulted in the bureaucratization and disenchantment of existence, a sort of mechanized nullity brought about by “specialists without spirit.”[133] Likewise, Horkheimer and Adorno sought to critique the irrationalism produced by culture industries bent on reifying the rational in the form of fetishized commodities.[134] Lastly, Marcuse, in his notion of a “one-dimensional” world in which modern technology and capitalist instruments organize a society of domination in which any possible opposition becomes rationally foreclosed by it, posited the Frankenstein’s monster of promethean technologization in a manner quite comparable with Illich.[135]
Again, it is important to consider that anarchists and other leftist political radicals respond differently to the problems outlined above. One avenue for political response would be to work to critically name the social system’s various aspects and to march through its institutions, or to otherwise act transformatively at its margins, in such a way as to attempt to turn the potentials of the social mechanism towards the greater good. This “Dare to struggle, dare to win!” philosophy is quintessentially promethean in character. For his part, Illich looked upon the growth of contemporary industrial system horrors, such as planned nuclear terror[136] or the ubiquitous Network society-styled “Techno-Moloch”[137] reality in which people more and more come to fashion their obedient lives, as the necessarily catastrophic outcomes of a modernity that has moved those who renounce it to a political position that is beyond words. As Adorno wrote, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, and Illich similarly believed that the most moral response we might now make in the face of unprecedented socio-ecological crisis is to silently refuse to engage in debate about it as we hate it with all our being.[138]
For the promethean progressive, this can be seen as amounting to a cynical answer (maybe even Schopenhauerian pessimism!) and, as such, would be a likely buttress to the “culture of silence” favored by the hegemony.[139] However, to the epimethean anarchist, it is a direct attempt to be the change that one wants from the world and Illich counseled that for those who feel impotent in the face of grave structural power (which today is no doubt a great many), such voluntary renunciation is a way back to a life of freedom and to the recognition that one always maintains some degree of agency that transcends the system.[140] Therefore, it may be concluded that promethean and epimethean activists maintain different orders of love for the world. The promethean impulse is towards loving the world enough to want to sacrifice our individual interests in the name of a collective fight for the global betterment of others’ suffering. However, epimethean love is conserved specifically to the domain of our individual convivial interests in as much as they emerge in relation to our own singular awareness of the excessive pain which limits and wounds friendship. Epimetheans, then, actively love the world through careful attendance to existential suffering and the immediate social conditions that provide for it.
**** In Hindsight, Another Way to Teach the Gift of Love
Even a casual reader of the work of Paulo Freire will immediately recognize that one of his primary themes is love. Like Freire, Illich’s pedagogy too is informed by meditations upon love, but it is necessary to understand the key difference between Freire and Illich on this point even as we recognize their similarity. Freire maintained a sensual love for people’s culture and an ethical love for people’s freedom based doubly in the teachings of both Marx and Jesus. As regards the latter, Peter Roberts notes, “Freire never wavered in his support for Christ’s call to ‘love one’s neighbour as oneself’.”[141] Yet, tolerance for one’s enemy was always put in dialectical relationship with a position informed by Guevara, who wrote, “Let me tell you at the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the genuine revolutionary is animated by feelings of love. It is impossible to imagine an authentic revolutionary without this quality.”[142] In this way, for Freire love is the precondition of a dialogical promethean pedagogy at work in the world:
Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people. The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and recreation, is not possible if it is not infused with love….No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause—the cause of liberation. And this commitment, because it is loving, is dialogical. As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love. Only by abolishing the situation of oppression is it possible to restore the love which that situation made impossible. If I do not love the world—if I do not love life—if I do not love people—I cannot enter into dialogue.[143]
Thus, love is the progenitor of thought, politics, and the generative naming of the world as part of the empowerment project that is a Freirian critical pedagogy’s “cultural action for freedom.”[144] Conversely, as an epimethean anarchist, Illich’s notion of love comes closer to being the free expression of self-renunciation from the quest to manage power, whether equitably or not. This is not a statement on his part about the ontological quality of love, but rather a deeply personal moral response to the historical awareness that something fundamentally terrible has occurred in the world that has an anthropogenic cause. As such, love does not aim in the direction of organized conscientization strategies or the development of social movements’ cognitive praxis for Illich, but rather it attempts to—by turns either in silence or through polemical denunciation—demonstrate a commitment to a solidary future, one guided by an ethical sensibility that freedom means the ability to opt out politically of a society predicated on the Big Lie. Or to put it another way: Illichian love is philia (i.e., friendly attendance) upon the subsistence of the Other amidst a global corporate regime bent on annihilating differences it cannot control. In this, Illich finds hope that wisdom may emerge through foolish acts that seek to renounce and renege from the discordant climate of perpetual war and so prefigure a peaceful alternative. Anarchistic epimetheanism is therefore convivially philosophical. As Illich reflected: “I remain certain the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.”[145]
In musing on love and friendship, the later Illich repeatedly returned to the Christian parable of the Good Samaritan as the paramount teaching on the corruption of care under modern industrial capitalism.[146] In this story related in the Gospel of Luke, a traveling Jew is robbed, beaten and left for dead by the side of road. In his miserable state, priestly castes of Jews look upon him and choose to pass him by. However, the suffering Jew is also seen by a traveling Samaritan (then an arch-enemy of the Jewish people[147]), who instead shows the Jew great mercy, gives him hospice, and takes personal responsibility for him. Interestingly, Illich interprets this parable as being not about the gift of active, charitable love by the Samaritan but rather about the “gift” made paramount by the fact of the Jew’s despair. By focusing on the peculiarities of Illich’s response, we can begin to tease out, however tentatively, the foundational differences between promethean and epimethean forms of liberation theology. As critical pedagogy is intimately connected to the tradition of liberation theology, gaining clarity on these differences should prove fruitful for imagining what an Illichian turn in critical pedagogy may mean in analogous contexts.
According to Illich’s interpretation of the Good Samaritan parable, the Jew’s immediate wretchedness provoked disease (dis-ease) in the Samaritan (i.e., it made him sick to his stomach) and this feeling was thus in some sense the Jew’s gift of the possibility of love and towards another way of life. By attending to this feeling, so as to abate it, the Samaritan was led to renounce the assurance of their respective identities—as both Jew and Samaritan—within the context of the larger society and to forge a new human relationship built out of their suffering together. Hence, for Illich, this foolish act of renunciation on the part of the Samaritan became the precondition for his acceptance of a common gift of freedom made imminent through his act of caring reciprocity.
Epimethean “care” is therefore far removed from liberal care. According to Illich, it is not to be confused with the gratuitous charity of the rich. Neither should it be mistaken for the commodity that is managed health care produced by professional experts who define the difference between the able and disabled, on the one hand, and the normal and abnormal, on the other. Epimethean care is also not an intellectual position in which one “thinks” one cares enough to want to transform the world in the name of abstract understandings of oppression in society—a potentially promethean gesture, or at least a possibly problematical outcome of promethean pedagogy generally. Quoting John McKnight, Illich described all of these forms of care specifically as “the ugly mask of love.”[148]
Once queried as to his feelings about media reports concerning rampant starvation and illness in African children, Illich responded emphatically:
My immediate reaction is, I will do everything I can to eliminate from my heart any sense of care for them. I want to experience horror. I want to really taste this reality about which you report to me. I do not want to escape my sense of helplessness and fall into a pretence that I care and that I do or have done all that is possible of me. I want to live with the inescapable horror of these children, of these persons, in my heart and know that I cannot actively, really, love them. Because to love them—at least the way I am built, after having read the story of the Samaritan—means to leave aside everything which I’m doing at this moment and pick up that person…I consider it impossible. Why pretend that I care?[149]
The existential pointedness of Illich’s final question—and its demand that we radically renounce our dreams for a better world to the degree that these dreams are not our own but rather the cultivated nightmares of various orders of political machinery—most likely takes us far a-field of much of the dominant discourse of education today.
Freire repeatedly asked that we dream “the possible dream.”[150] But, today, what dreams are in fact possible? We might rephrase this to ask: Can critical pedagogy receive the friendship offered by a collaborative pedagogy of anarchic epimetheanism? Or conversely: Is an Illichian pedagogy a possible source for gratuitous acts of kindness made by Good Samaritan critical pedagogues? The present re-gathering of anarchism as an important social movement that is working to challenge dominant paradigms in philosophy, politics, and pedagogy perhaps allows us to intone such questions with real seriousness for the first time in decades. Forever on the margins of academic life, the particular form of anarchist pedagogy articulated by Illich has been veritably ignored by major trends in educational theory and practice since the 1970s. This has been due in part to the epimethean practice of voluntary renunciation of the very professional posts and terms by which anarchist practitioners could have obtained institutional legitimacy and power.
The challenge now is not simply to restore Illich’s thought to intellectual/academic primacy and have him taught and taken seriously alongside Freire in schools of education and beyond—itself a promethean venture. Rather, the hope now at hand may lie in our scholarly capacity to opt-out of the excited drive to reconstruct education once again in the hope of a better world and to recognize the programmatic suffering of our institutionalized existence as students and teachers. In this manner, we may begin again to speak with one another quite simply and directly as friends born of the request and deliverance of epimethean aid; and in this way we may all realize the kind of dignity in our pain that asks not for more, but less. Terribly, those who know how to subsist well amidst horrible conditions may be the greatest teachers we can learn from in the 21st century. As we look to the coming decades, social and ecological catastrophe seems more and more totally unavoidable.
**Author’s Bio**
Richard Kahn is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations & Research at the University of North Dakota. A critical theorist of education who is internationally recognized as one of the leading architects of today’s ecopedagogy movement, he is the Editor of Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy (ISSN 1941–0948), and the author of Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement (Peter Lang; available January 2010); as well as of the forthcoming titles, Ecopedagogy: Educating for Sustainability in Schools and Society (Routledge) and Education Out of Bounds: Cultural Studies for a Posthuman Age (Palgrave Macmillan, co-authored with Tyson Lewis). His work has been collected in a wide variety of books and journals, including The Critical Pedagogy Reader (2nd edition), The Blackwell Companion to Globalization, Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, Theory & Event, and The Canadian Journal of Environmental Education. Additional information about him, including many of his essays, can be obtained at: http://richardkahn.org.
** [Book Reviews]
*** Everywhere All the Time: A New Deschooling Reader
**Edited by Matt Hern. Oakland: AK Press, 2008. 268 pp. ISBN 978–1904859833**
**Reviewed by Kirsten Olson**
When I first assign Grace Llewellyn’s The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How To Quit School and Get A Real Life and Education to my undergraduates in education, they are stunned, shocked, and repelled by Llewellyn’s message. Although most have just completed American high school, an experience they found intellectually draining, emotionally flattening, and at least a year and a half too long, they write in their first autobiographical essays for my class, “Never in my entire life have I read a book that said education could be bad for you.” In discussion they shake their heads and say, “Some kids might learn without school, but this is definitely not for everybody.”
In the early 1970s Ivan Illich asked why so many people—even ardent critics of schooling—became addicted to education as if to a drug. This is one of the big questions that animates Matt Hern’s new reader, Everywhere All The Time: A New Deschooling Reader, a collection of 37 deschooling and alternative schooling essays from the greats (Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Illich, John Holt), to newer and more self-consciously “global” accounts of democratic schools around the world. Homeschoolers, deschoolers, those who are just beginning to fledglingly critique the education gospel need bucking up, and courage in numbers, as they begin to travel to the outposty far margins of de-institutionalized learning. Hern’s reader attempts to guide them there, with assurances that people you’ve heard of came to regard school as psychically diminishing, colonizing and fundamentally about control (“Education is the action of one man upon another for the purpose of making the person under education acquire certain moral habits…”[151] wrote Tolstoy in the 1860s, in an essay that kicks off the reader), and that smart young folk such as Hern himself have successfully established new kinds of learning centers (Purple Thistle Center in East Vancouver) where teenagers can go, get away from adults, run their own learning collectives, and teach themselves what they really need to know. While Illich gently suggested, in his original introduction to the first edition of this reader in 1995, that those in the deschooling and homeschooling movement were perhaps still too “school centric” in their critiques, and had not freed their thinking sufficiently from these institutional paradigms—they were still acting out around the “bad parents” that schooling represents and that he himself had moved on—Illich would surely have approved of Hern’s central assertion, stated here: “We just can’t be waiting for politicians, administrators, leaders, or anyone else: we need to be building everyday alternatives right now, right where we live.”[152] We’ve got to get on with establishing new kinds of learning alternatives that are not compulsory, not ideological expressions of the state, and not state funded. Otherwise, we’re screwed.
Matt Hern, a popular and colorful figure in the deschooling movement who makes something of a point of being cool, casual, using the word “fuck,” and shooting his mouth off (don’t all movements need figures like him—but what happens when he reaches AARP age?), has updated his popular—now “classic” deschooling reader with several new essays, many more global and a few academic perspectives, and importantly, voices from unschooled students. (A whole new “whack” of essays, in Hern’s words.) The updated work is now less an unschooling how-to and more of a philosophical, global investigation of the problems of compulsory schooling. Is schooling necessary? Why do people think so? Why is there resistance to seeing the effects of schooling on so many people? From what paradigm do we constitute the necessity of schooling (scarcity, and the need for control). As the reader takes its name from Illich—Illich actually believed that schools should be “disestablished,” not society deschooled (meaning schools should be divested of their totemic power, special privileges and public funding)—the volume remains strongly Illich-influenced: a passionately argued set of essays about the ways in which, as a society, we are all schooled up, and have trouble rethinking what our culture might look like if we didn’t have “compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet,” pokes John Taylor Gatto.[153]
So some of the essays try to sketch this out. In India, Shilpa Jain describes Shikshantar, an organic learning community that hosts learning activists, not teachers, who, along with the community, explore questions that are important to them and also deeply tied to the real concerns of the larger village. “All work is flexible and shared,” writes Jain, “and we take the time to give feedback and support each other’s work as it develops.”[154] In another essay, over at the longrunning Windsor House School in North Vancouver, the school’s current leaders explain that they are willing to be directive about everything but student learning. “The philosophical bedrock on which Windsor House rests is non-coercive education, the belief that that human beings will eagerly learn what they are interested in learning, and resent being forced to do, say, think, or learn anything that does not interest them,” observes Meghan Hughes and Jim Carrico.[155] The vision of the person that underlies deschooling and unschooling—the natural learner, free, unencumbered by fear and institutional dehumanization, set abroad in the rich and abundant learning environment that is the world—is at the heart of many of the readings in this collection. “People are learners,”[156] says Mimsy Sadofsky, founder of the Sudbury Valley School in her essay, or “Learning is like breathing. It is a natural, human activity: it is part of being alive,” writes Aaron Falbel.[157] Most schools just get in the way. This is a fundamental catechism of unschooling—Learning is natural, Schooling is optional, in the words of an unschooling bumpersticker, and authoritarianism and control in learning don’t produce good results for anyone, not individuals or society.
But is schooling actually optional for everyone? Is everyone’s environment a rich array of possible, nearly enchanting, learning experiences, a cabinet of curiosities with meanings awaiting the ready mind to explore and unpack? One of the problems of this reader, and I’d say of the unschooling, deschooling and alternative education movements in general at the moment, is a kind of intellectual compression and a lack of real engagement with important questions about the relationship between education and social class—acquisition of the master’s tools— and whether having cultural capital doesn’t make it just a little bit easier to diss school. Matt Hern and many of his deschooling colleagues (I include myself here) already have advanced degrees from high status academic institutions, or teach at them. This may make it just a bit easier to say that those degrees don’t matter than for someone who has never had the opportunity to get them, or who suffers the consequences day to day in an employment market without them. Illich’s own scholarly achievements and academic degrees, occasional high-handed intellectualism and superciliousness, were very much a part of how he presented to the world, even as he roamed the world as a barefoot, possessionless priest.
The deschooling movement has long suffered from marginalization and disparagement from mainstream educators, and many of the viewpoints represented in the reader make the same points echoingly—as if products of too many late night bull sessions with the same sets of folks. Authoritarian control of the human mechanism is bad, and institutionalized education is an expression of control—these observations tend to be repeated again and again, like we have to keep saying this over and over, so someone will finally hear us and believe us. How colonization occurs, how we tend to become strangely sympathetic to and reliant on those mechanisms that oppress us—how they become normal—is not the stuff of these essays. To paraphrase Illich, why do we pull the lid closed on our own coffins? There is also not a single homeschooling voice represented here who is African American, urban, or chronically poor; there is no engagement in the Lisa Delpit argument that sometimes, for the purposes of social justice, you just have to flat out compel kids to learn to read and write a coherent essay and put together an Excel spreadsheet. (It’s hard to dismantle the master’s house without the skills to write and think and talk it into the ground.) Although Daniel Grego’s essay thoughtfully touches on the fact that if we are stuck in this society, one where “economic opportunities are divvied up according to school credentials”[158] and as long as schools deliberately create a class of untouchables who are intended to “slap hamburgers at McDonalds,” and “drive buses,” then we have to talk about privilege, political power and entitlement.[159] Mostly, the question of social class and how it relates to the capacity to chose not to school is undiscussed. To this point, the reader glaringly ignores overwhelming socioeconomic data that the more years you are in school, the higher your earnings are going to be—and the fact that this may be important to some people. Why pretend this doesn’t matter?
Like Matt Hern, I believe momentum for unschooling and deschooling is growing hugely and broadly, but not because we—all of us, this excellent reader included—have been so ardent and articulate at pointing out the flaws of compulsory education. As Illich might have predicted, new tools have changed the paradigm. With the advent of the internet, the usual assumptions about who gets access to knowledge—who owns it, how it is produced, who is authorized to “legitimate” it, what “it” actually is—are radically altering. Thus the cultural meanings of educational institutions, teaching, and the role of the student are also radically transforming— although most school systems haven’t yet caught on to this. Kids really don’t need school anymore, and they are figuring that out hour by hour with their own new, networked tools. Soon they are just going to walk right out of the classroom altogether, unless institutionalized education changes.
A new reader might catch that wave, Matt?
**Author’s Bio**
Kirsten Olson is the author of Schools As Colonizers (VDM Verlag, 2008) and Wounded By School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up To Old School Culture (Teachers College Press, 2009). She can be reached at kirsten@oldsow.net.
*** The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge Edited by Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson.
Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. 368 pp. ISBN 978–0813124773
Reviewed by Jason Lukasik
We approach with humility and with a promise…that the Tree of Knowledge will remain subordinate to the Tree of Life.
—Wes Jackson[160]
The original Pandora was sent to earth with a jar which contained all ills; of good things, it contained hope. Primitive man lived in this world of hope. He relied on the munificence of nature, on the handouts of the gods, and on the instincts of his tribe to subsist.
—Ivan Illich[161]
Long before the written word, wisdom was shared through stories. Common sense emerged from stories shared in the commons—knowledge of the land, people, and place. But stories are never complete. They change as they are told, and they become part of the person who tells it and the place where it is told. These stories are a partial truth, which is where their wisdom lies.
I walk through a prairie preserve, a planted restoration intended to recreate what once covered over 60% of my home state of Illinois. I walk its planned paths, set within the confines of its defined boundaries: a chain link fence that runs its perimeter, designating the end of wild and the beginning of development. My walk is a reflective journey in the inbetween space of knowledge and ignorance. Knowledge has made this place, just as knowledge has created the need to create this place. Knowledge of the land as a resource—to be exploited and turned into “something.” Turned into agricultural plots, turned into suburban developments of ranch homes and cul-de-sacs, turned into a preserve. But my walk also inspires a wonder of this place—a knowledge of its beauty, its sanctity and the importance of conservation.
At the end of Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society, he retold the cautionary tale of the brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus. Illich likens the institutions of modern society to a “Promethean endeavor”, looking forward with knowledge, so that we might meet the expectations and curb the social ills of an ever-developing society.[162] On the contrary, Prometheus’s brother, Epimetheus, marries Pandora, unleashing the ills contained in Pandora’s box, along with hope. This story may be interpreted as a lesson about the limits of knowledge, a suggestion to temper action with humility. Illich’s hope for the rebirth of Epithemean man entails an ongoing conversation about the limits of knowledge and the knowledge that underpins our actions.
Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson have revisited this conversation vis-à-vis environmental sustainability in their recent edited book, The Virtues of Ignorance. Vitek and Jackson take a cue from Wendell Berry (one of the contributors to the book and a long time colleague to Jackson), in their argument for an “ignorance-based worldview,” the philosophical foundation of the book that opposes what Jackson calls the “knowledge-based worldview.” In considering these frameworks, I wonder about the prospect of an ignorance-based worldview and how “the extent of our knowledge will always be, at the same time, the measure of the extent of our ignorance.”[163]
Recognizing the limits of knowledge is not a new endeavor. Some, including Jackson, have argued that this is a theme in the biblical story of Adam and Eve (they were thrust from the garden where everything was provided to them, left to fend for themselves after eating from the tree of knowledge).[164] Daniel Quinn’s popular novel, Ishmael, in which a learned gorilla teaches a human about the leavers and takers of this world, embraced a similar interpretation of the biblical “fall of man.”[165] Many scholars have raised this question, including, but not limited to, Erich Fromm, Madhu Prakash and Gustavo Esteva, Chet Bowers, and David Orr.[166] Framing the limits of knowledge through a lens or worldview of ignorance is a notable contribution, although notwithstanding critique.
Both Berry and Jackson have engaged this question of ignorance for some time. Berry is a well-known author and essayist, the agrarian ideals therein inspired by his personal history and life experience as a farmer. Jackson is the Executive Director of the Land Institute, an organization that seeks to integrate an understanding of farming within the limits of ecosystems—to address the problem of agriculture. His critique is not against knowledge, per se, but the way in which knowledge is qualified and the implications such knowledge has on the way people act upon and with their environment. An alternative to the dominant knowledge paradigm is humility—to accept unknowns as mysteries and to render knowledges as being relatively small. We are led to question the relationship between cultural assumptions that underlie knowledge and the way we act on that knowledge.
But the term ignorance is problematic. It encourages humility, but may do so at the cost of taking informed action. Jackson speaks to this when he says “acting on the basis of ignorance, paradoxically, requires one to know things, remember things—for instance, that failure is possible, that error is possible, that second chances are desirable (so don’t risk everything on the first chance), and so on.”[167] There is the question, of whose ignorance? Vitek and Jackson’s volume, for instance, incorporate multiple perspectives from people with various academic and professional backgrounds. However, this book still represents an authoritative center of knowledge, without effectively incorporating the subaltern knowledges of indigenous communities, international perspective, the nontraditionally educated, and the economically marginalized.
It is the need for this diverse discussion that prompts me to write this exploratory essay. It is important to engage in a dialogue about the limits of knowledge, as well as to revisit what Illich meant by the “rebirth of the Epimethean man.” Vitek and Jackson’s proposal for a worldview of ignorance is an intriguing and worthwhile contribution to an ongoing critical lens through which to evaluate the meaning of knowledge and the purpose of action. As we find ourselves in the midst of an ecological crisis, the need to question the knowledge through which we have learned to name our world is relevant.
I walk through the prairie and see no homes, no roads, just grasses, reaching high into the sky, giving a slight bend into the breeze. It is a common space in which various creatures co-exist. Complex webs and relationships define this space. But it is no longer common for humans. For we post closing times (dusk at this particular place). We must purchase the land in order to protect it. Not common, owned.
Identifying the commons—a place (physical, emotional, psychological) in which we might deliberate the limits of knowledge—is no easy task. Illich noted that the transformation of the environment from “a commons to a productive resource” is the “most fundamental form of environmental degradation.”[168] It was this transformation that Illich critiqued in the process of schooling—that schools sought to make people into something.[169] We become caged by the institutions and the knowledges and beliefs that underpin them. They come to define our existence. Education, in much of the Western world, has been rendered a commodity by the institution of schools, something to be bought and traded. In order to reclaim or “revitalize the commons”, we must reconsider our expectations for both physical and metaphysical space.[170]
Our knowledge of this destruction prompts actions—we read and we experiment, we work to repair the damage that has been brought upon the land. It is an improvement on our anti-ecological lives—we improve by setting up a nature preserve—it preserves the way of life (the knowledges, the assumptions, the practices) that has underpinned the idea of developing land into anything, be it “natural” or “productive.”
By privileging particular knowledges, we deny the balance of interdependency— of both living things and knowledge. Berry made this argument in his critique of the inequitable relationship between centers of knowledge and the periphery.[171] Centers of knowledge (universities, corporations, governments) dictate to the periphery, subordinating local knowledges to the dominant ways of knowing. Given that schools (another center of knowledge) privilege particular ways of knowing as a means of perpetuating the institutions that support those knowledges, we should consider what is left out—what have we ignored?
The centers of knowledge are ignorant—what Paul Heltne in this volume would call an “imposed ignorance”—ignorant to local ways and customs and ignorant to the complexities that persist despite knowing.[172] The value of recognizing the interdependence of knowledges in the commons—that our knowledge of a particular thing is not a universal knowledge (nor a correct knowledge, for that matter)—may help to foster humility in a time when it is most needed. To this end, Derek Rasmussen has critically examined “rescuers”—those who seek to help others when their very livelihood contributes to the detriment of the other.[173] In his work with the Inuit of Nunavut, he deconstructs the “welfare colonialism” that results in “creating dependencies, shattering links of sharing practices, [and] stealing children in order to give them a ‘proper’ education.”[174] Rasmussen writes about the dire medical concerns of the Inuit community as “over 60% of the Inuit children… and almost 40% of Inuit women… were found to have PCB body burdens exceeding ‘tolerable’ guidelines.” [175] Still, he argues, the Inuit do not need to be rescued. Instead, the medical issues impacting the Inuit of Nunavut are likely a result of dioxins produced as a byproduct of U.S. industry, and therefore attention should be directed to the source, not the recipient of the problem. Our knowledge helped us to build industry, but we are ignorant to the impact it has on people and place. By acknowledging the limits of our knowledge, we may “be humble and work on an appropriate scale,” mitigating our degradation of the commons.[176]
A worldview of ignorance may play a part in an ongoing effort to challenge the static knowledges that become ritualized. We live in a context where such knowledges are being challenged regularly—through user created media, through literature, through social movements, through contemplative action. What we know of the world—and how we sense it—is open to interpretation and dialogue. Evelyn Glennie, a virtuoso percussionist who is also profoundly deaf, teaches us that it is possible to listen with parts of our body other than our ears—parts of our body to whose ability to ‘hear’ we are ignorant.[177] As a musician who cannot ‘hear’ what she is playing, she argues that she has “no more idea of how [she] hears than [others] do.” Amanda Baggs, a YouTube director and autism rights activist who made the video “In My Language,” challenges the normalized “abled” (as opposed to disabled) population to consider the marginalized ways of knowing and experiencing the world—namely those ways lived and practiced by those institutionally labeled with (dis)abilities.
The Virtues of Ignorance is a worthwhile read, especially for Illich scholars. The questions raised throughout the book encourage a pause for reflection—on what we think we know and the implications our knowledge has on the world around us. It is a foundational pursuit that builds upon the work and vision of Ivan Illich—who sought to dismantle our dependency on institutional practice by understanding its complex implications for people, culture, and relationships. This book, while not intended as a contribution to a discourse on Illich is strikingly complementary. It encourages us to embrace ignorance as a virtue and disposition—a place to begin. Vitek and Jackson suggest that by acknowledging the limits to our knowledge, we may come to value a commons—a physical, emotional, and spiritual place—where we are able to share stories of wonder and contemplation, where we are able to talk and listen. We still strive to explain, but realize that our stories are partially true, and incomplete. The “rebirth of the Epimethean man” was Illich’s vision that we might move beyond products and come to “value hope above expectations.”[178] It is not about what we know, but what we might learn from each other, our world, our histories, and our hopes.
I know much about this prairie. I know the names of the plants that grow in the soil. I know the problematic history of prairie land in the state of Illinois. I know the irony of a place ‘preserved’ from the detriment of human impact. But in the moment, I am happy to simply wonder, and not know much, other than I am in the midst of something beautiful that cannot (nor should not) be easily captured by words. I look to the stories told and the dreams had about this place. In my wonder I find insightful knowledge, and a valuable ignorance.
**Author’s Bio**
Jason Michael Lukasik is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His dissertation analyzes the hidden colonial curriculum of zoos through the medium of a fictional novel. His research interests include out of school learning, education for human and ecological justice, zoo/museum education, and qualitative research methods. In particular, Jason is interested in looking at the underpinnings and assumptions of knowledge as they relate to ecological action. He can be reached at jason.lukasik@mac.com.
*** Place-Based Education in the Global Age: Local Diversity Edited by David Gruenewald and Gregory Smith.
New York: Taylor and Frances Group, 2008. 408 pp. ISBN 0-8058-5864-4
Reviewed by J. William Hug, Ph.D.
There are many things I think about as I go about my professional life as a university teacher educator and personal life as a parent, neighbor and friend. I wonder about how to better connect others and myself with the places where we live. How can I best reduce my impact on the earth’s natural systems? How can I appreciate and support diversity, liberty and justice? I wonder if what I am doing can be improved. I wonder how other people have approached similar problems, issues and dilemmas. Some of the most important thinking I do is to consider how to live in the reality of this world at this time, as well as how to make it better for future generations and myself. I also consciously or unconsciously calculate the risks and rewards of turning my thinking into actions in relationship to anticipated consequences and benefits for family, my neighbors and myself. Every moment is filled with thinking.
I believe that Ivan Illich enjoyed thinking. David Gruenewald and Gregory Smith enjoy thinking as well. In their edited book, Place-Based Education in the Global Age: Local Diversity (hereafter PBEGA) they have assembled 15 contributors who ponder these issues and share inspiring stories of action across the United States and the world. Gruenewald and Smith describe the purpose of the book in this way:
First, we wish to contribute to the theory and practice of place-based or placeconscious education by collecting instructive and inspiring stories that can serve as exemplars…[and] Second, we want to make the case through these stories of collaboration that place-based education can be viewed as the educational counterpart of a broader movement toward reclaiming the significance of the local in the global age.[179]
The book accomplishes these purposes and the contributors indeed tell compelling stories of reconnecting people and place through education.
One way I remember Ivan Illich is as a storyteller. Attending a few of his lectures at Penn State in the mid 1990s, I remember his stories of collaborations with friends, stories of dinner conversations and stories about his reading—all used as examples to illustrate philosophical arguments. David Gruenewald and Gregory Smith use story in their book as a way to extend the conversation about place-based education and highlight people who have successfully taken action. The book contains stories of both thinking and action that cause one to re-think and re-act appropriately, each to our own places. For instance, one chapter written by Clifford Knapp tells the story of his university course, “Integrating Community Resources in Curriculum and Instruction.” In another chapter, Mark Graham describes his thinking as a high school art teacher. The chapter composed by Mark Sorensen describes a K-8 charter school serving mainly Navajo youth in Arizona while Julie Bartsch describes in her contribution student stories of community-based service learning at a school in Skowhegan, Maine. Elaine Senechal describes ways in which she has involved students in environmental justice in the state of Massachusetts. Finally, Ray Barnhardt shows us the thinking of the Alaska Native Knowledge Network and how it is implemented in Alaskan schools. Each of these diverse stories provides us with the opportunity to look over the fence to see how others in their local contexts have responded to the challenges of place-based education. These distinguished contributors use their stories to highlight strategies for the reader to consider and then contemplate their own educational practice change. These stories will resonate well with those familiar with Ivan Illich’s work.
The chapters in the second section of the book “explore some of the reasons for adopting an approach to teaching and learning that is more grounded in students’ experiences of particular places” (135). In one of the more assertive chapters, Robert Michael Pyle describes modern Americans as “profoundly ignorant of the living and physical world around them.”[180] He details the decline of natural knowledge/experience, connects this decline to “alienation, apathy and inaction,” attacks “environmentally regressive governments,” advocates for “spontaneous placebased inquiry” for children and asserts, “place-based education, no matter how topographically or culturally informed, cannot fully or even substantially succeed without reinstating the pursuit of natural history as an everyday act.”[181] I concur. I experienced this disconnect recently when I was asked to review a draft of a park interpretive plan developed over many months by professional environmental educators. I noticed that there were no interpretive messages in the plan concerning the plants and animals of the region. While my friends and colleagues on the committee are dedicated professionals, we are all susceptible to the larger social trends and norms of the society in which we live. The contributors in PBEGA effectively call attention to these trends and encourage alternative pathways.
Other chapters in section two include the examination of cultural questions by David Gruenewald that explore how a “critical pedagogy of place posits two fundamental goals for education: decolonization and reinhabitation.”[182] A chapter on diversity by Theobald and Siskar examines diversity’s relationship to place and schooling. Each chapter in section two thoughtfully contributes to the dialogue about place-based education.
The third section contains chapters about how people apply these ideals in the university setting. Michael Morris, for instance, describes how the University of New Mexico develops community leaders that are attuned to the complex needs of local communities and how to implement long-term community improvement. Freema Elbaz-Luwisch explores the diverse ways teachers understand sense of place in the midst of the Israeli experience of conflict between Jewish and Palestinian people. Australian, John Cameron, discusses his thinking about university teaching and the emergence of the “Sense of Place Colloquium.” Finally, Matt Dubel and David Sobel describe the strategies employed in the teacher education program at the Antioch New England Graduate School. Each chapter provides a unique look at how place-based education informs their work at the university.
While there is much to like about PBEGA, dedicated Ivan Illich scholars may find some ideas and vocabulary that do not resonate very well. For instance, Illich wrote in his lecture The “History of Homo Educandus” that “Education, as the term is now used, means learning under the assumption that this learning is a prerequisite for all human activities while, at the same time, the opportunities for this learning are by their very nature in scarce supply.”[183] Illich points out that education separates learning from living and professionalizes teaching, which has dire implications for society. Further, Illich laments in Deschooling Society that people, “…depend on schools …which guide their lives, form their world view, and define for them what is legitimate and what is not.”[184] He provides reasoning for “why we must disestablish school” and suggests that the ideal independent, self-directed learner learns within the context of living and with the support of networks that replace modern schooling. Extending Illich’s thinking, Prakash and Esteva (1998) suggest that it is unlikely that modern schooling can be fixed or reformed, thus the authors look for exemplars among indigenous, remote and marginalized cultures where learning thrives without modern schooling.[185] Prakash and Esteva’s ideas contrast with a main assumption of most PBEGA contributors who accept the education and schooling endeavor while seeking to reform or improve it. Such an acceptance of traditional forms of education within PBEGA is expressed by statements like: “This does not mean abandoning the classroom, but rethinking it’s relationship to the wider community”[186] and “Although we may dream of a totally different approach to public education than the one that currently exists, it is necessary to work with, while trying to change, what we have.”[187] Readers will see the abandon it or reform it approaches through their own values and contexts. Some Illich scholars might also take exception to sentences such as, “Schools produce social capital – educated students – that is very often not reinvested in the local community, as many students leave upon graduation or are not being used to their fullest potential as community members while in school.”[188] I believe the intent of this sentence is to advocate for closer connections and participation in community life but the vocabulary will likely sustain critical arguments about how the use of economic language conveys insidious messages about the role of children in a community. While I point out these contrasts for Illich devotees, PBEGA also provided 358 pages of text that stimulated my thinking about the endeavor to re-connect people to place, community and environment.
Taken as a whole, PBEGA provides excellent opportunities to explore theoretical and practical extensions to Ivan Illich’s thinking. One example of this begins with Illich and Sanders’ assertion that, “The alphabetization of silence has brought about the new loneliness of the ‘I,’ and of an analytic we.”[189] In response to this, I envision practical scenes of common place-based strategies where children engage in quiet solo outdoor time next to a playground tree or a spontaneous conversation with a community elder on a walk outside the physical and structural institution of the school. These scenes contain the possibility for educators to help children explore silence without text and something of the Illichian “we.” Perhaps the heart of the PBEGA contribution is to invite further theoretical and practical thinking about how place-based education contributes to the practice of genuine friendship and through friendship reconnect people, community and place.
Each reader will encounter PBEGA differently. The book contains a valuable collection of accomplished educators, researchers, and activists with diverse views that contribute powerfully and deeply to the conversation about place-based education. As I read the chapters, I was pleased to be able to share and celebrate in the outstanding work of many individuals. I was reminded that I am not alone in this work. I realized once again that there are friends in many places who care deeply about the world in which we live, enjoy thinking about it and are practicing the act of living well. I believe this is something Ivan Illich would appreciate.
**Author’s Bio**
J. William Hug is an Assistant Professor of Education at the California University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on educational processes that facilitate learning which empowers people to improve the quality of life in the places where they live. Research areas include: elementary science teacher education; citzen scientific literacy; place-based curriculum design, implementation and evaluation; and ecology/natural history conceptual understanding.
More about him can be found at: http://www.placebasededucation.org.
*** Escaping Education: Living as Learning in Grassroots Cultures (2nd Edition) By Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva.
New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-4331-0061-1
Reviewed by T. Francene Watson
These simple men [Michael K and Bartleby] and their absolute refusals cannot but appeal to our hatred of authority. The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics. Long ago, Étienne de la Boétie preached just such a politics of refusal: “Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”
—Hardt and Negri[190]
Endear me—I am beginning with a story. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the chapter “On the Rainy River” unravels a moment of courage that has remained with me since teaching the novel as a (former) high school English teacher. In a true and fictionalized moment, O’Brien motors his character to a moral abyss in a little aluminum fishing boat on a northern Minnesota river—a kind of Odyssean inversion. Having received a draft notice, O’Brien is in the final struggle of whether to go to war or flee to Canada, with the brush of the Canadian refuge twenty yards away from his tiny vessel. Here, the 21 year-old character recounts his youthful theory of courage, having believed that it is something that “comes in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down.”[191] Weeping, with a silent (humming) witness of 81year-old Elroy Berdhal, O’Brien realizes he cannot flee—“Right then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave.”[192] O’Brien’s mind’s eye manifests an audience in the waning seconds decision—the whole universe looking at him—and feels the heat of their fantasized mockery, disgrace and patriotic ridicule. “Even in my imagination, I could not make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was. And right then I submitted. I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to.”[193] The chapter closes, poignant and inconsistent with socially prescribed mainstays; “I was a coward. I went to the war.”[194]
O’Brien captures important images in the light of a new paradigm for how we engage in teaching and learning, especially because “[b]y old habit or new force, carrot or stick, educators and education are rapidly changing…to stay unchanged.”[195] Inside of schooling and global education, we are collectively in a small aluminum boat on a rainy river of possibility and a choice is in front of us. In contrast to typical revolutionary acts, it begins with a simple, but deepseated refusal, and then, the courage to take action and create a new life. In Escaping Education, Prakash and Esteva celebrate the current and increasing choice of refusal by peoples across the globe, the “uneducated, miseducated, and undereducated,” who, in their own rich and ancient ways, are teaching each other to become “refuseniks” of the educational Colossus.[196] The initiating act of refusal is igniting a renewed way of being across the earth and is one that simply stops supporting a project that has never been sustainable. Escaping Education emerges from an ancestry that urges the deschoooling of society, and is a kind of refuge in its unyielding stance facing global education; “Enough is enough! ¡Ya Basta!” Its convergence, drawing largely from Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, and John Holt, marks a coalescing epic at the grassroots, one that Illich termed the “rebirth of the Epimethean man.”[197] Here we can swim away from a Promethean task of creating institutional boxes to fearfully and mechanistically contain the ills that escaped from Pandora, and refuse a world that creates ever-rising and intentionally impossible demands. Instead, we have gained deeper insight around what did not escape—hope; we are bringing forth a presence for people who “value hope above expectations” and “love people more than products”; people living in global commons. We are seeing the “meaning of the Pythos which Pandora brought from the gods as being the inverse of the Box: our Vessel and Ark.”[198] Collectively, we’re seeing that we have all of the courage that we’ll ever need.
With grief in one pocket and hope in the other, while reading Escaping Education, I began to newly imagine my own moment of truth, my own escaping of education. And similar to O’Brien’s literary artifacts, it was something I carried adolescently, everywhere. This seems, then and now, a child-like detail in the grown up world of academia, but the carrying of the book was somehow an embodiment that serves as the backbone of living as learning in grassroots culture; it enabled me to “re-member” that learning is an intrinsic part of who we are and life’s path simply allows its natural unfolding, if we can trust in that. My physical and metaphorical carrying of the book triggered the understanding that even now, in an ironic “going-to-help-you” doctoral track, I am mustering the courage to flee, and do what I know I should do despite the chorus of scrutiny. Prakash and Esteva act as witness to something each individual must decide, but they invite a (re)membering of self-and community, and of our wholeness and multiplicity— to “our commons, commonness and common sense.” The book is a reminder that in our “pluriverse,” woven through I and Thou encounters, there is a growing and strengthening grassroots practice of seeing one’s power reflected where no one “gives” it; it’s a power that the peoples of the planet already possess.[199] Escaping Education is the confluence of a steady (re)emergence of a holistic and courageous stand in our world—a stand for interconnectedness with dignity inextricably bound in bringing forth an ecologically sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilled human presence on the planet. This stand is rhizomatic, tectonically rising up across the earth, and (re)imagining education at its nexus. It is first a stand of courageous and ordinary refusal because we are no longer embarrassed; we want our lives back.
Like a strong and outstretched hand to the social minority in reform-quicksand, Prakash and Esteva build a frame which convincingly unseats the widely accepted truism of education as a human right (and the notion of a “human right” all together). The authors provide several powerful critiques of various versions of educational change under the name of reform, revamping, and radicalization—“Multicultural Education: An Oxymoron” for example—but their challenging of the assumption of education as a human right is the lynchpin. Characterized as the “contemporary Trojan Horse” of academic discourse and school reform, education as a human right is argued as problematic when considering that the need for human rights solely comes from the global manufacture of the independent western-state, after centuries of decimation of peoples and places of our planet by the “developed.” This backdrop is sobering.
The regime of the nation-state, fusing nationalism and statehood, was constructed at this same time, to keep the social order in a society exposed to the forces of the modern market, reducing the human condition to that of homo oeconomicus.[200]
Human rights are social constructions or cultural inventions. They are not, as some adherents claim, natural discoveries. Human rights are but the formal, juridical expression of a specific mode of being and living. They are defined by the kind of man, woman, and child who has appeared on the earth only very recently: Homo oeconomicus, the possessive individual. First born and brought up in the West, this modern “person”—the individual self—is now threatening the whole world with the plague of endless needs, legitimized under the moral mask of human rights.[201]
In this way, the master (false) narrative for disciples of a universal declaration of human rights (I am one of them, still in a kind of grief from the blows of this paradigm shift) is to stay hooked to a modern-era construct, rutted in a dualistic view of human capacity and intention, one of naming who is right and who is wrong in a “coat of philanthropy.”[202] And actually, it’s a little funny.
When we can let go of blame and just “look,” it’s funny that we defend that school, as we have lived/survived it (or not), is some kind of pinnacle experience, so much so that we need to protect it as a human right. Those of us participating in a western, industrialized model of learning have not unhooked from the absurdity that this is “it.” Escaping Education is a direct reminder that where we need to look instead, is to the Two-Thirds World, the peoples that have never needed to be dependent on a colonizing system of “learning.” Prakash and Esteva use Illich’s belief that the Two Thirds World has the crucial responsibility in the One Third World’s liberation; they are opening the way in the search of a style to learn for living, as its multitudes have never been trapped in the habit of consuming.[203] And we are seeing it happen. “Hopeful trust and classic irony (eironeia) [have conspired] to expose the Promethean fallacy.”[204] In an unprecedented moment in linear time, Escaping Education contextualizes our state of Blessed Unrest, where the multitude is refusing to pay attention to the middle man. The postmodern turn here is paradigmatic—a movement from E pluribus unum to out of one, many, where there is the possibility that we remain different so that we can discover the commonality that allows us to communicate and act together. “The multitude too might thus be conceived as a network: an open and expansive network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally, a network that provides the means of encounter so that we can work and live in common.”[205] Prakash and Esteva might call this refusenik culture our “pluriverse.”
A refusenik culture moves beyond the simple starting point of refusal and begins the act of constructing “a new mode of life and above all a new community. This project leads not toward the naked life of homo tantum but toward homohomo, humanity squared, enriched by the collective intelligence and love of the community.”[206] What is emerging now might be compared to the body’s immune system, a kind of living that is learning to respond to the centuries-old attack on our humanity and commonness; “We became human by working together…faith and love are literally buried in our genes and lymphocytes, and what it takes to arrest our descent into chaos is one person after another remembering who and where we really are.”[207] For example, Prakash and Esteva take from margin to center the refusenik Zapatistas and the reclaiming of their commons to help us understand the postmodern nature of grassroots, network power. Here, a “country of 90 million changed in a few months, following the initiatives of a few thousand ‘powerless’ people who dared to declare with all dignity in their local spaces, that the emperor had no clothes. He was naked.”[208]
The initiatives now being taken by the people at the grassroots are opposing, first and foremost, those [developed] elites. They are turning a bad thing into a good thing: using their marginalization as the context for creating new opportunities; transforming their conditions as the desperate, the passive left-overs, the dropouts, into becoming active and creative refuseniks; transforming their unfulfillable demand for education and other economic goods and services into a new awareness of the false promises of development or progress. They are recognizing and celebrating the reliability of their own traditions to achieve their cultural ideals of a good life.[209]
Here’s the kicker. It’s right in front of us. As Illich et al. posed, living as learning in grassroots culture is all but 20 yards away. Emerging from the river of decades—centuries—of passionate and brilliant writing calling for the restructuring of education and deschooling of society, we have reached a moment where the dam of schooling’s impenetrability has broken open, and we are in a state of flow. Unlike that of a self-protected nation-state, or even that of global corporations, here’s an old thought: “Liberation from the grip of schools could be bloodless. The weapons of the truant officer and his allies in the courts and employment agencies might take very cruel measures against the individual offender, especially if he or she were poor, but they might turn out to be powerless against the surge of a mass movement.”[210] Prakash and Esteva further affirm Illich’s call for “institutional inversions” (already) being created by political networks of the commons who by virtue of their marginalization have been deinstitutionalized or damaged—the dropouts, the unemployed. And we are seeing, in the present, that “the people at the grassroots have not forgotten the skills required to live and flourish outside the academic ‘cave’—with its shadows, its dark doubts that are mistaken to be liberatory or emancipatory certainties.”[211]
Our options are clear enough. Either we continue to believe that institutionalized learning is a product which justifies unlimited investment or we rediscover that legislation and planning and investment, if they have any place in formal education, should be used mostly to tear down the barriers that now impede opportunities for learning, which can only be a personal activity.[212]
With the courage, knowledge and leadership of the Two Thirds World, “we have learned to free our imaginations from the clutches of classroom information; to recover our common sense before it was extinguished by underuse or denigration.”[213] In other words, we are writing a story in which we are seeing our non-finite courage, even in our imaginations and we are brave in our stand with fervor like that of a hummingbird, unparalleled in action, strength and who is uniquely able to fly backwards, mirroring the gift of Epimetheus. We’re in a time of going back to something we’ve never seen before, one of (re)membering our capacity.
**Author’s Bio**
T. Francene Watson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural Studies and Social Thought at Washington State University.
** [End Matter]
*** [FOIA Request: Declassified FBI Files of Ivan Illich]
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[1] Ivan Illich, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005), 60.
[2] Wendell Berry, What are People For? (Berkeley, California: North Point Press, 1990), 123–125.
[3] According to the Oxford Universal Dictionary, the phrase “out of whack” means “not in proper condition” or “disordered.”
[4] See for example: Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Energy and Equity (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); and Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, New York: Pantheon Books, 1976).
[5] See for example: Ivan Illich, Shadow Work (London, Marion Boyars, 1981); and Gender (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).
[6] Ivan Illich, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005), 146.
[7] Ibid, 60–61.
[8] A detailed examination of the problem of evil is beyond the scope of this essay. Susan Neiman has proposed the history of contemporary European philosophy can best be understood as attempts by modern thinkers to come to grips with the problem of evil from the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon to Auschwitz. See Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002).
[9] Quoted in Max Keiser, “The Month,” The Ecologist 35, no. 1 (2005): 14.
[10] Rupert Sheldrake, “Listen to the Animals,” The Ecologist, 35, no. 2 (2005): 18.
[11] Vandana Shiva, “The Lessons of the Tsunami,” The Ecologist, 35, no. 2 (2005): 22.
[12] Ivan Illich, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005), 60–61.
[13] Uwe Poerksen, Plastic Words (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).
[14] To protect themselves from parochialism and stagnation, communities must also make room for what Wendell Berry calls “waywardness,” what many traditional cultures associate with a “trickster” character, in North America often taking the form of a coyote. Illich had a bit of the trickster in him. See Wendell Berry, “The Wild Birds” in That Distant Land (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004). Also, Paul Radin, The Trickster (New York: Schocken Books, 1972).
[15] Quoted in David Cayley, “Part Moon, Part Traveling Salesman: Conversations with Ivan Illich,” Ideas, CBC Radio, 1989.
[16] See John McKnight’s essay in Ivan Illich et al, Disabling Professions (London: Marion Boyars, 1977).
[17] David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1992), 61–62.
[18] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 113.
[19] David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1992), 147–148.
[20] Ivan Illich, Gender (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982); and David Schwartz, Who Cares?: Rediscovering Community (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997); David Schwartz, “Ivan Illich’s Concept of ‘Rests’: Glimpses of a World Past,” in The Challenges of Ivan Illich, eds. Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2002).
[21] From Daniel Grego, One Winter Night: Collected Poems 1966–1996 (1997) 183. Independent Manuscript.
[22] I have in mind the base communities in Latin America, the Chipko movement in India, the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain, the Seikatsu Clubs in Japan, the Old Order Amish in the United States, among others. I have written about this more extensively in The Tiniest Chill: Explorations of the Confluence of Educational and Environmental Philosophy, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The Union Institute & University, 1997.
[23] Personal conversation.
[24] Quoted in David Cayley, “Part Moon, Part Traveling Salesman: Conversations with Ivan Illich,” Ideas, CBC Radio, 1989.
[25] Ivan Illich, “Brave New Biocracy: Health Care from Womb to Tomb,” New Perspectives Quarterly 11, no. 1 (1994): 10.
[26] Arun Gandhi,,World Without Violence (New Delhi: Wiley Eastern Limited, 1994), 16.
[27] Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation trans. Kristen Ross (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1991).
[28] David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Concord, Ontario: Anansi Press, 1992), 193.
[29] See http://ivan-illich.org.
[30] Ivan Illich, In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978–1990 (London: Marion Boyars), 180.
[31] Ibid, 159.
[32] Ivan Illich, Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 180.
[33] Ibid, 186.
[34] Ibid, 188.
[35] Ibid, 188–89.
[36] Ibid, 189.
[37] Matt Hern, Deschooling Our Lives (Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1996).
[38] Ivan Illich, “Forward to Deschooling Our Lives” in Deschooling Our Lives, ed. Matt Hern (Gabriola Isand, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 1998).
[39] Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001). Schlosser tells true tales of the grotesque, grizzly, torture and torment meted out to the workers of fast food industrial empires.
[40] Scott Simon, Affluenza. National Public Radio, 2000.
[41] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Marion Boyars, 1972), 166–167.
[42] David Cayley, The Corruption of Christianity: Ivan Illich on Gospel, Church and Society (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2000), 9.
[43] Ibid, 9.
[44] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Marion Boyars, 1972), 157.
[45] Ibid, 157.
[46] Manu Kothari and Lopa Mehta, The Nature of Cancer (Goa, India: The Other India Press, 1973).
[47] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (London: Marion Boyars, 2002), 10.
[48] Ibid, 37.
[49] Ibid, 31.
[50] Ibid, 43.
[51] Ibid, 33.
[52] Ibid, 46.
[53] Ibid, 113.
[54] Ivan Illich, “The Educational Enterprise in the Light of the Gospel” Lecture , Chicago IL, November 13, 1988.
[55] Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 183.
[56] Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 (New York: The New York Press, 2000), 57.
[57] Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 187.
[58] Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
[59] Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended (New York: Picador, 2003), 250.
[60] Ibid, 253.
[61] Roger Deacon, “Moral Orthopedics: A Foucauldian Account of Schooling as Discipline,” Telos 130 (2005): 90.
[62] Robin Usher and Richard Edwards, Postmodernism and Education (London: Routledge, 1994), 100.
[63] Frank Pignatelli, “Mapping the Terrain of a Foucauldian Ethics: A Response to the Surveillance of Schooling,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 21, no. 2 (2002): 157–80; and “Dangers, Possibilities: Ethico-Political Choices in the Work of Michel Foucault,” in Philosophy of Education Yearbook, 1993 Audrey Thompson ed. (UrbanaChampaign, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 1993).
[64] Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended (New York: Picador, 2003).
[65] John Covaleskie, “Power Goes to School: Teachers, Students, and Discipline,” in Philosophy of Education Yearbook, 1993, ed. Audrey Thompson (Urbana-Champaign, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 1993).
[66] Maarten Simons, “Learning as Investment: Notes on Governmentality and Biopolitics,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 38, no. 4 (2006): 523–40.
[67] Ibid, 535–536.
[68] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
[69] Jason Smith,“‘I Am Sure that You are More Pessimistic than I Am…’ An Interview with Giorgio Agamben,” Rethinking Marxism 16, no. 2 (2004): 17.
[70] Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 40–41.
[71] Giorgio Agambem, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
[72] Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 37.
[73] Michelle Fine, Framing Dropouts: Notes on the Politics of and Urban High School (New York: SUNY Press, 1991), 24.
[74] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 22.
[75] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (London: Marion Boyars, 2002), 32.
[76] Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
[77] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 2000), 77.
[78] Tyson Lewis, Sovereignty-Discipline-Education: Essays on Biopedagogy. PhD diss., UCLA, 2006.
[79] Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
[80] Steven Selden, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teachers College, 1999).
[81] Joy James, Resisting State Violence: Racism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1996).
[82] Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 209.
[83] Ibid, 209.
[84] Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 (New York: The New York Press, 2000), 79.
[85] Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 74.
[86] Ibid, 74.
[87] James Petras, in Paulo Freire, Che Guevara, and the Pedagogy of Revolution by Peter McLaren (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 107.
[88] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1972), 115–116.
[89] By “Freirian critical pedagogy” I mean both the critical pedagogy developed by Freire himself and its first-order reinvention by a wide-range of primarily North American critical pedagogy theorists. Critical pedagogues like Peter McLaren have identified interest in Mexican anarchism such as developed classically by Ricardo Flores Magon or more recently by the E.Z.L.N, as well as in the work of Emma Goldman. See Peter McLaren, Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Towards a Political Economy of Symbols and Gestures (New York: Routlege, 1999) and Paulo Freire, Che Guevara, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). Others such as Curry Malott and Mark Pruyn have sought to unite versions of Marxism and anarchism, primarily through the promotion of the pedagogical potential of subversive punk culture, and Abe DeLeon has theorized anarchism as a strategic contribution to the present organization of critical pedagogy as a movement. See for instance Curry Malott and Mark Pruyn, “Marxism and Critical Multicultural Social Studies” in The Social Studies Curriculum (3rd ed.), ed. E. Wayne Ross (Albany, NY: SUNY Press), 157–170, and Abraham DeLeon, “The Time for Action is Now! Anarchist Theory, Critical Pedagogy, and Radical Possibilities,” Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies 4, no. 2 (2006). Still, it is important to note that critical pedagogy’s main theoretical inheritance has not been anarchism but rather Frankfurt School critical theory, Marxism and neo-Marxism, liberal and critical multiculturalism, and second and third-wave feminism amongst other influences. Though Ivan Illich is himself listed as a founding influence for the tradition in the Introduction to The Critical Pedagogy Reader, eds. Antonia Darder, Marta Baltodano and Rodolfo Torres (New York: Francis & Taylor, 2008) and Donaldo Macedo has edited books such as Chomsky on MisEducation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004) and Howard Zinn on Democratic Education (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), it is probably not unfair to say that most of critical pedagogy’s interest in anarchism to date has had more to do with the cultural politics of subversive style than with it as an specific historical form of political organization.
[90] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000), 54.
[91] Joel Spring, A Primer of Libertarian Education (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998).
[92] Indeed, the political category of “libertarian” is of course further problematized in the United States, where it also identifies anarcho-capitalist and orthodox free market philosophies such as espoused by Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, or Robert Nozick that have veritably nothing to do with either critical pedagogy or an emancipatory anarchism proper.
[93] Judith Suissa, “Anarchism, Utopias and the Philosophy of Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 35, no. 4 (2001): 627–646.
[94] Ibid, 640.
[95] Ibid, 640.
[96] Paula Allman, Revolutionary Social Transformation: Democratic Hopes, Political Possibilities and Critical Education (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999).
[97] A notable exception is offered by Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva in their Escaping Education: Living as Learning in Grassroots Cultures (2nd Ed.) (New York: Peter Lang, 1998).
[98] For good biographical accounts of Illich see the Introductions in David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press, 1992); The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (Toronto, CA: House of Anansi Press, 2005); and various reflective essays in Lee Hoinack and Carl Mitchum’s The challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2002).
[99] It should be pointed out that both Illich and Freire espoused forms of liberation theology, but Illich’s anarchism more closely resembled that of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement that was based in attempts to ground apostolic kindness, while Freire’s ecumenicism-from-below was more congruent with the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez such as his A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1971).
[100] Drawing in part upon funds from the Catholic Church, in 1961 Illich established cross-cultural and language immersion centers in Cuernavaca, Mexico and Petropolis, Brazil. These ultimately took the name of Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC). Ostensibly, CIDOC’s primary mission was to prepare Catholic missionaries for work in Latin America but it quickly turned into an anarchist educational institution that functioned with an Epimethean ethos.
[101] David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press, 1992), 71.
[102] See Raymond Allen Morrow and Carlos Alberto Torres, Social Theory and Education: A Critique of Theories of Social and Cultural Reproduction (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1995) and G.A. Gabbard, Silencing Ivan Illich: A Foucauldian Analysis of Intellectual Exclusion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993).
[103] David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press, 1992).
[104] Douglas Kellner, Introduction to “Marcuse’s Challenges to Education” in Policy Futures in Education 4, no. 1 (2006): 1–5.
[105] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954), 161
[106] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 149.
[107] Many commentators, including Kellner, have been puzzled by Marcuse’s choice of these personages as offering emancipatory forms of identity (See Douglas Kellner’s Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). However, it seems clear to me that Marcuse here anticipated the “flower power” youth of the late 1960s in which Illich’s own ideas of epimetheanism were also clearly anchored. Notably, Orpheus was a sort of shamanic figure who is often pictured as singing in nature and surrounded by pacified animals, while Narcissus portrays the dialectic of humanity gazing into nature and seeing the beautiful reflection of itself on new terms. Marcuse’s Great Refusal, then, must be thought as intending a post–anthropocentric form of cultural work in which nature and the nonhuman are profoundly humanized, meaning that they are revealed as subjects in their own right. As Marcuse writes, through the Great Refusal, “flowers and springs and animals appear as what they are—beautiful, not only for those who regard them, but for themselves.” Herbert Marcuse, OneDimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 166.
[108] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 161.
[109] Herbert Marcuse, “Children of Prometheus: 25 Theses on Technology and Society” in Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Emancipation: The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Volume Five eds. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (New York: Routledge, 2010).
[110] The sexual symbolism is obviously directly intended.
[111] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Marion Boyars, 1972), 74.
[112] Ivan Illich, In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978–1990 (New York: Marion Boyars, 1992).
[113] Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didasacalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
[114] Ivan Illich, “Statements by Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich” in Technology in Society 17, no. 2 (1995): 231–38.
[115] Ivan Illich, In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978–1990 (New York: Marion Boyars, 1992), 165.
[116] Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 548.
[117] Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 66.
[118] Audrey Lorde, “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds. R. Ferguson, et. al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 287.
[119] David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press, 1992), 108.
[120] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 22.
[121] David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press, 1992), 109.
[122] Ibid,188.
[123] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
[124] Ibid, 27. Illich loved bicycles as convivial tools appropriate for transportation needs. Anarchist projects like community bike programs (http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/White_bicycles) represent, then, something like an Epimethean political and cultural alternative to mass transit systems. Similarly, Illich would have championed much of the D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) movement in response to the hegemony of commodity culture.
[125] David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press, 1992), 17.
[126] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 82.
[127] Ibid, 13.
[128] Peter Tijmes, “Ivan Illich’s Break with the Past” in The Challenge of Ivan Illich, eds. Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), 207–208.
[129] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 84.
[130] Ibid, 66; 22.
[131] Ivan Illich, Gender (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 15.
[132] Another way of putting the problem: Initially, being able to speak on the phone with a friend long-distance or to email a correspondent provides an increase in fraternity and personal liberty calculated as a growth in one’s leisure time. However, as information-communication technologies (ICTs) have moved from being means to systemic social ends, people’s lives have become commodified by peripherals, and further, emailing, texting, and other forms of digital communication now dominate the large part of many people’s days. In short, the result of people living their lives ever-more online is that local intimacy between persons and individual leisure time have become increasingly uncommon.
[133] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 182.
[134] Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
[135] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
[136] Ivan Illich, In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978–1990 (New York: Marion Boyars, 1992), 3233.
[137] Ivan Illich, “Statements by Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich” in Technology in Society 17, no. 2 (1995): 237.
[138] Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 210.
[139] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000).
[140] David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (Toronto, CA: House of Anansi Press, 2005).
[141] Peter Roberts, Education, Literacy, and Humanization: Exploring the Work of Paulo Freire (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2000), 7.
[142] John Gerassi, Venceremos: The Speeches and Writings of Che Guevara (New York: Macmillan Company, 1968), 398.
[143] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000), 89–90.
[144] Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom: 2000 (Cambridge MA: Harvard Educational Publishing Group, 2000).
[145] Ivan Illich, “The Cultivation of Conspiracy” in The Challenge of Ivan Illich, eds. Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), 235.
[146] David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press, 1992); The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (Toronto, CA: House of Anansi Press, 2005); and Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham, The Challenges of Ivan Illich eds. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002).
[147] Illich noted that the closest relationship to the Jewish/Samaritan relationship today would be the bitter enmity between opposed Israelis and Palestinians. See David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (Toronto, CA: House of Anansi Press, 2005).
[148] David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press, 1992), 215.
[149] Ibid, 216–217.
[150] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed trans. Robert R. Barr (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1997), 76.
[151] Matt Hern, ed., Everywhere All the Time: A New Deschooling Reader (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008), 5.
[152] Ibid, 116.
[153] Ibid, 55.
[154] Ibid, 205–204.
[155] Ibid, 166.
[156] Ibid, 159.
[157] Ibid, 62.
[158] Ibid, 79.
[159] Ibid, 78.
[160] Wes Jackson, “The Changing Relationship between the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge,” The Land Report 68 (2000).
[161] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York and London: Marion Boyars, 1971), 106.
[162] Ibid., 151.
[163] Wendell Barry, The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays (Emoryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005), ix.
[164] Wes Jackson, “The Changing Relationship between the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge,” The Land Report 68 (2000).
[165] Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (New York: Bantam, 1992).
[166] See Eric Fromm, To Have or To Be? (New York: Continuum, 1976); Madhu Prakash and Gustavo Esteva, Escaping Education: Living as Learning within Grassroots Cultures (New York: Peter Lang, 1998); Chet Bowers, Educating for Eco-Justice and Community (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Mindful Conservatism: Rethinking the Ideological and Educational Basis of an Ecologically Sustainable Future (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Revitalizing the Commons: Cultural and Educational Sites of Resistance and Affirmation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006); and David Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994).
[167] Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson (eds), The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 2008), 22.
[168] Ivan Illich, “Silence is a Commons,” The CoEvolution Quarterly Winter (1983). Retrieved September 2009 from http://www.oikos.org/ecology/illsilence.htm.
[169] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York and London: Marion Boyars, 1970).
[170] See Chet Bowers, Revitalizing the Commons: Cultural and Educational Sites of Resistance and Affirmation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006) and Madhu Prakash and Gustavo Esteva, Escaping Education: Living as Learning within Grassroots Cultures (New York: Peter Lang, 1998).
[171] Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays (Emoryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005).
[172] Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson (eds), The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 2008), 135.
[173] Derek Rasmussen, “Cease to Do Evil, Then Learn to Do Good” in Rethinking Freire: Globalization and the Environmental Crisis, eds. C.A. Bowers and F. Apffel-Marglin (Mawah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 115–132.
[174] Ibid,123.
[175] Ibid, 128.
[176] Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays (Emoryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005).
[177] Evelyn Glennie, “The Hearing Essay,” Retrieved September 30, 2009 at http://www.evelyn.co.uk/live/hearing_essay.htm.
[178] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York and London: Marion Boyars, 1971), 115.
[179] David Gruenwald and Gregory Smith, eds., Place-Based Education in the Global Age: Local Diversity (New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 2008), xiii.
[180] Ibid, 155.
[181] Ibid, 156.
[182] Ibid, 149.
[183] Ivan Illich, In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978 — 1990 (New York: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1992), 115.
[184] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1972), 2.
[185] Madhu Prakash and Gustavo Esteva, Escaping Education: Living as Learning within Grassroots Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 1998).
[186] David Gruenwald and Gregory Smith, eds., Place-Based Education in the Global Age: Local Diversity (New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 2008), 149.
[187] Ibid, 350.
[188] Ibid, 180.
[189] Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, (The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), 123.
[190] Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 204.
[191] Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway Books, 1990), 40.
[192] Ibid, 57.
[193] Ibid, 59.
[194] Ibid, 61.
[195] Ibid, 1.
[196] Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva, Escaping Education: Living as Learning in Grassroots Cultures (2nd Edition) (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), 1.
[197] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York and London: Marion Boyar, 1972).
[198] Ibid, 115.
[199] Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva, Escaping Education: Living as Learning in Grassroots Cultures (2nd Edition) (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), 28.
[200] Ibid, 19.
[201] Ibid, 21.
[202] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays (New York: Bantam Classics, 1990), 137.
[203] Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva, Escaping Education: Living as Learning in Grassroots Cultures (2nd Edition) (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), 112.
[204] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York and London: Marion Boyar, 1972), 114.
[205] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books, 2004),xii-xiv.
[206] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 204.
[207] Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World (New York: Viking Penguin, 2007), 165.
[208] Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva, Escaping Education: Living as Learning in Grassroots Cultures (2nd Edition) (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), 50.
[209] Ibid, 112.
[210] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York and London: Marion Boyar, 1972), 49.
[211] Ibid, 111.
[212] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York and London: Marion Boyars, 1972), 49.
[213] Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva, Escaping Education: Living as Learning in Grassroots Cultures (2nd Edition) (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), 111.