What Is Deschooling About?
Before the words homeschooling and unschooling existed, the word “deschooling” filled their space.
I find it amazing how the words we use to explain things often confuse these things more. For instance, the words “homeschooling” and “unschooling” try to convey complements to conventional schooling, but in most people’s minds, these words stand for negating academics and doing whatever you want. Both words are offshoots from Ivan Illich’s groundbreaking book Deschooling Society (Harper & Row, 1971).
When Deschooling Society was published many liberal and conservative pundits knocked it as an unrealistic approach to dealing with school reform. Indeed, many who never read the book assumed from its title it was about destroying education! However, John Holt understood deeply what Illich was getting at in that book and he traveled to Mexico to study at Illich’s Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC). In a letter to Illich John wrote, “in working for the kind of changes we want, for a convivial society and non-suicidal technology, you and I may have slightly different functions. You may be somewhat more of a prophet and I somewhat more as a tactician.” (A Life Worth Living, p. 110)
After his visit to CIDOC, John’s next book, Freedom and Beyond, came out. John later wrote that this book
“is an intensively political book. I tried to make clear in the latter half of it why schooling, and things done in schools, could not alleviate or change, much less do away with, poverty, and indeed only reinforced poverty and inequality in a country.… From the point of view of the holders of wealth and power in this country, it was a stroke of absolute genius to get blacks (and other non-white minorities) to dissipate their political strength and political capital over a period of 25 years in a peripheral issue like “integrating schools,” rather than talk about the redistribution of income and wealth. A perfect strategy! Just get poor sections of society, white and nonwhite, quarreling with each other over a scarce supply of diplomas, and you can keep both groups in the place for generations. Which is what has happened.” (A Life Worth Living, p. 221)
In Freedom and Beyond John describes what could happen if we were inspired by deschooling: the prospect of a multitude of people, places, and things to engage with besides just conventional school for learning.
“In sum, a deschooled society would be a society in which everyone shall have the widest and freest possible choice to learn whatever he wants to learn, whether in school or in some altogether different way. This is very far from being a society in which poor kids would have no chance to learn things. On the contrary, poor kids, like poor people, and indeed all people, would have many more chances to learn things and many more ways of learning them than they have today. It would be a society in which there were many paths to learning and advancement, instead of one school path as we have now . . . a path far too narrow for everyone, and one too easily and too often blocked off from the poor.”
Slowly but surely, whether it is called homeschooling or unschooling, the overarching concept of a learning society proposed in Deschooling Society is gaining ground.
