apcampbell

After Sebastian’s entry about Ivan Illich’s Learning Webs showed up in my aggregator last month, I ran out and got a copy of the book, Deschooling Society (1971). In it, Illich argues that a good educational system should have three purposes:

…it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Such a system would require the application of constitutional guarantees to education. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support, through a regressive taxation, a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which in fact restricts the public’s chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market. It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational. (p108)

Illich then proposes four approaches which enable the student accomplish these purposes: reference services to educational objects, skill exchanges, peer-matching, and reference services to educators-at-large. About these approaches, or ‘networks’, Sebastian writes:

I would argue that aspects of Illich’s vision start to surface in various recent projects and initiatives. Take a look , for example, at David Wiley’s work on (digital) learning objects, Sebastien Paquet’s match-making service and Philip Pearson’s Topic Exchange. It seems to me that the personal Webpublishing and Weblogging tribe has already developed rudimentary forms of Skill Exchanges, Peer-Matching, and Reference Services. Oliver Wrede rightfully reminds us in a recent post that we should not forget to look at “various other possibilities and ways to intensify socio-dynamic processes, emergent interactions and discourses” … but it sure looks like something is happening here, doesn’t it? Are we moving towards Illich’s Learning Webs vision? [Sebastian Fiedler]

Well, WE might be, meaning those of us who are already attuned to the possiblities, but Illich’s educational utopia of self-directed learning with free access to objects, peer and skill exchanges, and educators will only become a reality for the society at large once our institutions of education, at all levels, begin placing value on the process of learning rather than on “making things and manipulating people” (p146). This could mean the dismantling of compulsory education and accrediting bodies, doing away with grades and quid pro quo approaches to granting credit, and ending teacher certification. Only then would more people of all ages have the freedom to choose both the means and goals of learning while doing it in a meaningful, authentic setting.

To expect an immediate revolution of such subversive magnitude is folly. However, teachers can take immediate steps to incorporate subversion via ‘learning webs’ into their classrooms while administrators can give them more freedom to do so. Accrediting bodies must start relaxing their narrow and conservative regulations and policy makers must examine more closely what their systems are doing to the minds of the young. Concerning the institutional effect on students, Illich has this to say:

School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition. And school directly or indirectly employs a major portion of the population. School either keeps people for life or makes sure that they will fit into some institution. (p67)

While this was written more than 30 years ago, is the reality any different now? Technologically we are in a much better position to actualize Illich’s vision. What stands in our way is fear, confusion, and misunderstanding. For the moment, let us set up learning webs in our classrooms to fully utilize the information and human resources available on the internet in combination with pedagogical approaches that emphasize cooperation, openess, self-direction, and qualitative forms of evaluation.