Pedagogy for the Soul: On Corrupting the Youth
Illich on The Purposes of Education, and How an Educator Started Homeschooling
We come to the final installment of our engagements with Illich: as schools start back nationwide, we come to Illich’s engagement on the possibilities and limits of educational systems. For Illich, educational systems are goods to be preserved, but the compulsory form is, for Illich, not a given, and a form to be questioned.
Given that the school year is around the corner, and the stakes are so high for getting schooling right, I’m unlocking this for everyone.
Two things are simultaneously true about me:
I believe that institutions of education are a real gift. As one who has been teaching in seminaries since 2009, I have dedicated my career to the proposition that theological education—and education more broadly—is intrinsic to the goodness that God has for us as creatures.
We homeschool our kids, and I credit Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society with flipping that switch.
Let me explain.
The Gifts of Educational Institutions
A personal narrative:
From very early on—probably by age 19—I knew that I wanted to be a college educator. It wasn’t just the love of learning; it was the aesthetics of universities, the rhythms of the calendar, the ability to mentor students that I saw in my own professors—all of it. There was a real romance to it that years of committee work, the rise of adjunctification, and endless committee paperwork has not yet ground out of me. In the university, both as originally conceived in the middle ages and as they still exist in some corners of the modern versions, the idea is that students have time to learn, and only that.
The goal was not that students enter into training programs to learn a trade first and foremost, but that students have the opportunity to integrate reflection on life’s integral logic into various practical forms of life: to engage in politics was not to be a technician, but to be a philosopher; to be a minister was to be a student of the ways of God. To do a job well was to do it humanely, as it was meant to be done within a cosmos. It sounds idealistic and remote now, but only because this vision has eroded so profoundly in most places: what learning occurs in the university is ordered toward preparation for a job, making success within a job as the main outcome of a university.
There were, in that arrangement, much that was aristocratic and uneven: to be college educated was accompanied by the promise of social advancement. To be able to afford college, even in its most modest days, was already to be among the upwardly mobile, or at least aspirationally. Oceans of scholarship are available on this, of how higher education became linked to industry, military development, and ultimately, finance, completing the transformation of higher education—even in faith-based corners—into an institution ordered toward job placements and wealth accumulation; vocation and integration into an orderly world became retained as vestiges of schools’ legacies, or worst, electives.
There is a way in which this story became justified by Christians: all work is good under God, and that what is needed is not to be a reflective soul but an industrious one. As such, proving one’s discipleship became a matter of putting your hand to the plough as well as you could, offering all of your labors to God, like Cain at the altar. And like Cain, what we found was that we were restless, always striving to do more, and well-off. I do not say this last part cynically, but lamentably: when education became coded with theological significance, it became endlessly necessary and lauded, at least in a Christianized culture. As American culture moves away from this status, the link lessens between work and worship, but not between work and education.
Education—of all kinds, long before university—becomes linked in this way, Illich argues:
Neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification. Learning and the assignment of social roles are melted into schooling. Yet to learn means to acquire a new skill or insight, while promotion depends on an opinion which others have formed. Learning frequently is the result of instruction, but selection for a role or category in the job market increasingly depends on mere length of attendance.1
Examine carefully what he says here: education becomes less about pedagogy of the person, and more about certification—that one has spent the time in the institutions, and that this is the mark of being learned. To be very clear: he is not opposed to educational institutions, but to the equation of compulsory education with learning. Rather, he says, compulsory schooling certifies you to be selected for the job market: you can’t pass GO and collect 200$ unless you’ve gone all the way around the board.
In the book, he proposes a variety of other forms of educational initiatives, which we don’t have time to get into, but would appear to us today as kinds of trade schools, Montessori options, immersive learning options. This runs against our grain of justice to say that not everyone should have to do school X, because we link educational access and equity to a good future. This vision breaks my humanities heart in some ways to say that not everyone should have to read Tale of Two Cities or Of Mice and Men.
But, and this is the important part, Illich is not wrong here. When education becomes ordered toward job fulfillment, it elides credentials with education, and more significantly, hides the inequalities of the world under the equality of having passed through an institution. Freddie DeBoer’s book The Cult of Smart is helpful here: the world is not distributed equally with respect to intellectual gifts, and will not be. Insofar as educational forms assume the same bar for all learners, it simply reifies whatever differences were in place already, slotting people into the job market wherever they fit prior to their education.
So Why Support Education at All?
A Christian response to this will differ from others, and since that’s what I’m concerned with, I’ll leave to the side other objections. The Christian support of an educational process stems from two premises, I think:
We are not born complete persons but works in process. This is a deeply theological conviction, and one that the ancients held is true of us both before and after the Fall: to be born into the world is an invitation to be made more fully into God’s likeness, to be cultivated and developed, to offer gifts and to mature. Education is a part of that process, in learning how to think well, to reason, to express reasons, to delight in the world, and to offer all of it back to God in wonder for being alive.
This is the vocation of all persons. The accidents of being born into a wealthy country (or part of the country) are not judgments upon a person, but the effects of that same Fall. As such, Christians are invited into the repair of creation, to offer that opportunity for cultivation and worship to all persons. What we do in church extends outward into this space accordingly.
BUT: this does not mean that compulsory schooling is the form in which that should take place. Again, Illich:
…A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.2
We bought in the modest neighborhood that we did in part because of the elementary school. And then COVID happened right as our oldest was approaching kindergarten. I was sitting in the bleachers of a local gymnastics arena, while Eliot played for a birthday party, and Illich’s arguments flipped the switch for me in that way. All of the things I had been seeing in both higher education and primary school came into focus. COVID and the concerns for their health was the material occasion for making the shift to homeschooling, but it was these arguments of Illich that pushed me over: education had more than one form, and perhaps there were other forms that might work better.
Two caveats here: the first—I am not against public schools, at least in principle, and neither is Illich. I have many, many friends in all levels of education who do amazing work. But the key here is whether a public school teaches for the flourishing of the person, or for compliance and preparation for their slot in the job market. That’s a stark way of putting it, but it’s the unconscious presumption that Illich wants to surface and wants us to be honest about in how we think about educational institutions. That we are seeing such a mass exodus of teachers from the system now in the wake of COVID comes not only from gifted teachers who want to teach well leaving, but also from the pressure that they feel from parents who want to see education as indoctrination or ideology (both pro-CRT, and anti-CRT, as only the latest examples): these pressures are two sides of the same coin, both of which think of education as slotting into social and economic hierarchies, and not as cultivation and inquiry.
To be clear: homeschooling, for the first two years, was no cake. My wife and I both work, which meant that for nearly two years, I stayed home two days a week while Sarah worked. But having seen the possibility, we couldn’t unsee it. There’s been tons of benefits to it: the flexibility for family schedules, the ability to tailor the curriculum, our two kids being able to have a ton of time together and make up their own games. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
The other element here is this: in keeping with the two commitments above, regarding why a Christian believes in education at all, home schooling should not be thought of in reactionary terms, but constructive ones. If, with Illich, we hold that there are multiple forms in which education can and should occur, then what we do with education should be a shared venture. We have, over the last two years, discovered a lot of travelers on the road—some of which are the reactionary types—but most of whom are wanting to pilot a different road for education, and to share that burden and journey with others. And isn’t that what an educational institution supposed to be? An organization which facilitates attention, offers connection, and supports growth? That it provides a credential at the end is incidental, not primary, to its existence.
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FOR SUBSCRIBERS: I’ll be emailing you all this week to gauge interest in having a time to read Illich’s Convivial Tools together. It’s the lodestone of his work, and provocative for all kinds of reasons. Also, if you have folks you think might be interested in being subscribers, I’m running this deal til the end of August.
Reading: Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries. I’ve absorbed most of what he says here second-hand for years, but finally getting around to reading it. Planning on following it up with John Rawls’ The Law of Peoples, which I think will make a more positive case for things that Taylor is (rightly) negative about. Various articles and essays in bioethics for class prep.
Paying Attention:
The war in Ukraine continues to escalate in surprising directions, now involving Crimea. Crimea was “annexed” by Russia nearly a decade ago, and that Ukraine is now declaring Crimea part of its strategy means that this conflict has a very long way to go.
One of the most consequential pieces of legislation in recent memory passed the Senate last week, including money for climate shifts. America remains firmly in the grips of a for-profit medical imagination, which killed many of the big asks. Illich, not surprisingly, wrote a banger of a book on medicine as well.
In Canada, a long-standing course in religion and culture is being phased out, and replaced by a citizenship course. It is right and fine to teach what religions believe in public education, and a mistake, just on cultural and political grounds, to remove it. The singularity of what it means to be a citizen and the singularity of compulsory education go hand in hand: to remove a course emphasizing empathy signals a reduction in educational pluralism and educational freedom, many of the things Illich was concerned with.
Deschooling Society, 16.
Ibid., 19. It’s not longer proper form in publishing to use “ibid”. For 40 years, I’ve used Ibid, and it’ll be Ibid til my last days.