from "In Lieu of Education", in _Toward a History of Needs_ (Ivan Illich).
"the hidden curriculum is that students learn that education is valuable
when it is acquired in the school through a graded process of consumption;
that the degree of success the individual will enjoy in society depends 
on the amount of learning he consumes; and that learning *about* the 
world is more valuable than learning *from* the world."
"Pedagogy opened a new chapter in the history of the Ars Magna.  Education
became the search for an alchemic process that would bring forth a new 
type of man, who would fit into an environment created by scientific
magic.  But no matter how much each generation spent on its schools, it 
always turned out that the majority of people were unfit for enlightenment
by this process and had to be discarded as unprepared for life in
a man-made world."
"We often forget that the word 'education' is of recent coinage.  It was
unknown before the Reformation.  The education of children is first
mentioned in French in a document of 1498.  ...  Learning centers did 
not exist before the term 'education' entered common parlance.  You 'read'
the classics or the law; you were not educated for life."
"By the early 17th century, a new consensus began to arise: the idea that
man was born incompetent for society and remained so unless he
was provided with 'education'.  Education came to mean the inverse of 
vital competence.  It came to mean a process rather than the plain
knowledge of the facts and the ability to use tools which shape a man's
concrete life.  Education came to mean an intangible commodity that had
to be produced for the benefit of all, and imparted to them in the manner
in which the visible Church formerly imparted invisible grace.
Justification in the sight of society became the first necessity for a 
man born in original stupidity, analogous to original sin."
"Many decades of reliance on schooling have turned knowledge into a 
commodity, a marketable staple of a special kind.  Knowledge is now
regarded simultaneously as a first necessity and as society's most
precious currency. ... Education for a consumer society is equivalent
to consumer training."
"Further investments in school everywhere render the futility of
schooling monumental.  Paradoxically, the poor are the first victims
of more school.  The Wright Commission in Ontario had to report to its
government sponsors that postsecondary education is inevitably and without
remedy the disproportionate taxing of the poor for an education that will
always be enjoyed mainly by the rich."
"If a person is to grow up he needs, first of all, access to things, to 
places, and to processes, to events and to records.  He needs to see, to 
touch, to tinker with, to grasp whatever there is in a meaningful
setting.  This access is now largely denied.  When knowledge became a
commodity, it acquired the protections of private property ...  A first
step toward opening up access to skills would be to provide various
incentives for skilled individuals to share their knowledge.  Inevitably,
this would run counter to the interest of guilds and professions and
unions."
"Any peasant girl could learn how to diagnose and treat most infections
if medical scientists prepared dosages and instructions specifically
for a given geographic area ... [But] technological progress provides
the majority of people with gadgets they cannot afford and deprives
them of the simpler tools they need. ... The French say that it takes
a thousand years to educate a peasant to deal with a cow.  It would
not take two generations to help all people in Latin America or
Africa to [learn how to] use and repair outboard motors, simple cars,
pumps, medicine kits, and ferroconcrete machines if their design did
not change every few years."
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A good way to get a grasp of what Illich is saying here, is to
read a history book called _A People's History of the United
States_ by Howard Zinn.  Here's are Zinn's opening words:
"My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is 
different [from Henry Kissinger's]:  that we must not accept the 
memory of states as our own.  Nations are not communities and
never have been. ... I prefer to tell the history of the discovery
of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution
from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by
the Cherokees ..."
John Stockwell, a man who worked with Kissinger and George Bush,
has these words about Zinn's book:  "The first book everyone should
read in order to understand the United States, the American Way,
and the 'New World Order' the U.S. has formulated at the end of the
cold war ... Our histories traditionally recount events as they affected
the dominant interests of our nation.  Zinn re-examines those events
from the bottom up illustrating how the system of American capitalism
works, and in whose interests." (p153, _The Praetorian Guard_)
If it seems far-fetched how this relates to education and schooling,
you should begin to see that what Illich argues in fact is that _modern
education_ drives this world of inverted relations we see around us.
-michael
--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.30 [NR]
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