What School Teaches Us About Learning

What School Teaches Us About Learning

What would learning look like if schools lost their authority to decide who could teach and what counted as competence? Ivan Illich starts with two kinds of reformers. His “Jacobins” want to extend the classroom into everyday life through new media and planned instruction. His “Bourbons” want more selective schools. Both leave educators in charge of deciding how other people should learn.

1. 0:00 — When schools lose their claim to a monopoly on education
2. 3:43 — The Jacobins and Bourbons of school reform
3. 9:18 — Mutual education and the authority of professionals
4. 15:00 — How to dismantle the school monopoly
5. 21:00 — Credentials, competence and discrimination
6. 25:08 — Four ways to give learners access to resources
7. 31:20 — Skill exchanges and who gets to teach
8. 33:22 — Peer matching and finding a mentor
9. 37:35 — Audience discussion begins
10. 46:29 — The Roman Inquisition and schooling in Latin America
11. 49:00 — A world turned into a classroom, or a network for learning
12. 50:00 — Hope, trust and the limits of planning
13. 58:00 — Hélder Câmara and what institutions can change
14. 1:04:00 — What educators can provide
15. 1:12:00 — Learning to read as a by-product of shared purpose

Ivan Illich — 1 recording in the archive.

Related reading: Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich.

Schools, I assume many of us are agreed, are losing their claim to a monopoly on formal education. They are moving off the center of the stage. The imminent bankruptcy of schools or their inability to live up to their promise forces the educator and the client to look beyond their mutual frustration with each other and the lack of resources they get and recognize that school kind of has gone to put it the way of those soras when the mammals arose within the next few years. It is pretty clear that both the purveyors and the consumers of packaged education. We have to acquies to the end of the age of schooling where other ages ended. The end end established church ended. The age of royalty ended. Of course, you could maintain schools in the way in which I think Canada is still a monarch or belongs to monarch. In that sense, the school will be present with with us for a long time. School teachers will have to accept a fate similar to that which befilled priests and nobles in other times. Post scholastic consciousness is bound to appear all of a sudden. I think it will appear unexpected as the changes happen in a whirlpool. I remember as a child standing on a bridge and always waiting once I'll be the witness how the whirlpool the vortex pattern changes I never saw it because winter and summer they are alike but when one stone falls into the basin and the whole pattern changes from one moment to another this is the way how one falls in love or how consciousness changes also social consciousness I believe it to come surprising as the removal of the altar or the throne happened from the center of the stage in western society. The vision of an emerging pattern, whatever it is, threatens the reality of today, especially when this emerging pattern is destined to become the common sense of tomorrow. The facts we now know about education fit the vision of a society in which the school system is certainly out of control of central control with purposeful ed of purposeful education. What we now call the crisis in education is mostly a result of an effort to make the facts of life as we live them fit into our dogma that schools are necessary. mainly because the poor…