Technology and Experience: revisiting Ivan Illich's tools for conviviality

Throughout the pandemic, scholars, administrators, and developers have been asking: which tools and practices from emergency education during the coronavirus pandemic may become part of established practice? Related to this question is how scholars have responded to the present event by turning to past pedagogies to inform current practices. I focus on the tools for conviviality initiated by Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society (1970); defined by Illich in Tools for Conviviality (1973); and refined by Illich in Medical Nemesis (1975). There is renewed interest in Illich as part of contemporary discussions of emancipatory education. 

I historicise Illich’s tools for conviviality to make the point that remote learning and homeschooling during the pandemic has brought marginal pedagogies into mainstream focus. I divide this post into three parts: first, a brief explanation of Illich’s core idea of tools for conviviality using Deschooling Society as my primary text; second, critical receptions of Illich’s idea of conviviality from the 1970s; third, scholarly re-engagement with Illich’s conviviality during the coronavirus pandemic.

For the past five decades, many readers of Illich’s Deschooling Society believed that its central proposal was unrealistic. Suddenly, in the midst of a pandemic, schools and universities around the world closed their doors, and millions took up learning at home. In this context, some commentators are putting forward the idea that deschooling of society proposed by Illich finally happened, but not in a way that Illich intended. Illich’s emancipatory ideas had already occurred and that the circumstance during the pandemic brought Illich’s emancipatory education into stark focus: the marginal has entered mainstream consciousness. Philosopher, Axel Honneth sees “emancipation” is an ambivalent notion, but emphasises the cooperative structure of “Bildung” or education: “I stress the dependency of the child on others—be it peers or adults—by pointing out that his or her moral and cognitive development is deeply relying on different forms of recognition, starting in early childhood with love and care, followed by esteem in its many forms, and finally respect.” (Stojanov, 2020, p. 103).

For Illich, writing at the height of the Cold War (1945-91), emancipatory education was orientated by debates on the meaning of liberation. This had heightened relevance for Illich who maintained a lifelong base in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He was critical of schooling as a system of cultural reproduction. Illich argued that the school in both industrialised countries and poorer countries was the major factor in creating and preserving the consumer society. In schools the “hidden curriculum” preserves the power and privilege of the schooled. For Illich, a good schooling system should achieve three goals. Firstly, it should provide all those who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives. This implies the value of lifelong and life wide learning. Secondly, it should be a site of knowledge exchange: this is the basic principle of Illich’s concept of “learning webs.” Finally, it should be a catalyst for a participatory democracy. Schooling and education become diametrically opposed concepts for Illich. 

Sustainability was central to Illich’s tools for conviviality discussed in Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, and Medical Nemesis also published in the United States as The Limits of Medicine. Here, Illich was concerned with technological sustainability: “tool” includes not only machines, but also any ‘means to an end which people plan and engineer’ (Cayley, 1992, p. 109), such as industries and institutions. Illich did not demonise tool making, but tools do become problematical for Illich when they produce “new expectations” that “impede the possibility of achieving the wanted end” for which they were made. Doing so, tools turn from being “means to ends” into the ends themselves (Illich, 1973, p. 84). Illich implied that it is necessary that people struggle to master their tools, lest they be mastered by them (Illich, 1973, p. 22). Illich was one of the few critics who took seriously the embryonic environmental movement’s concern with “liberation” as implying interdependency and sustainability.

During the 1970s, the ideas posed in Deschooling Society were the subject of intense discussion in educational circles. The first division was between those who defended educational institutions and those who criticised them. The second division, among those who were critical of schools, who agreed with the deschooling argument and those who believed that it was possible to democratise the school system.  

Paulo Freire was critical of the school system, but considered it possible to reform. He noted two problems with the deschooling proposal. The first related to the prerequisites to engage in the learning webs. In order to study a subject, access information, find a learning partner, or establish communications with a specialist, learners were expected to have some basic level of education, including an acceptable command of numeracy and literacy. For Freire, the “learning webs” proposal failed to recognise the different levels of cultural, social and economic capital existing in society. This connects to the second problem, Freire argued that by abandoning universal public education and leaving learning activities to informal social interactions, Illich’s model had a bias in favour of more advantaged social groups. 

Illich published two commentaries to clarify his position, first in “The Alternative of Schooling,” published in Saturday Review in June 1971, and soon thereafter “After Deschooling, What?” published in the journal Social Policy in September 1971 and subsequently published as a pamphlet in 1973. In those pieces he acknowledged that deschooling would be “at the root of any movement for human liberation” (Illich, 1970, pp. 24 and 47). He also explained that his intention was not to end schooling, but to liberate education, to liberate it from the state and move the control to socially organised grassroots movements. He later clarified that he “never wanted to do away with schools” (cited in Cayley, 1992, p. 64), and by the end of the 20th Century he said that he hoped that his criticism of schooling may have helped some people reflect on the unintended pernicious effects of that institution and perhaps pursue alternatives to it, but at the same time he started to realise that his views were naïve and that he was “largely barking up the wrong tree” (Illich, 1995, p. vii). The influence of Freire eclipsed Illich throughout the 1980s and 1990s and by the time of Illich’s death in 2002 his ideas on emancipatory education had receded from public debate on education reform. 

It is primarily on account of the disruption of the schooling system in the context of the coronavirus pandemic that brought renewed interest in Illich’s vision of emancipatory education. Tara Bartlett and Daniel Schugurensky (2020) in a special edition of the educational journal Sisyphus revisit Illich’s ideas about Deschooling Society. They explore different ways in which our societies today, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, reorganise schooling: remote learning, homeschooling, microschooling, and unschooling. They investigate to what extent these ways are similar to Illich’s initial ideas and alternatives, and in what ways they do justice to values of critical awareness, equality, and sustainability as dimensions of emancipatory education. 

The pandemic spotlights a variety of related but distinct alternatives to conventional (in-person) schooling that were already growing, especially remote learning, homeschooling, microschooling and unschooling. It is unschooling that is the one that has close affinities to the ideas that Ivan Illich developed in Deschooling Society. There is a reason for this: unschooling was originally developed by John Holt, a close associate of Illich who visited him several times in Mexico. For Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better (1976), unschooling was both about social reform and about social change, and in this regard contemporary “unschoolers” contend that education should be authentic and situated within life and reject what in their view is an artificial separation of educational and non-education. 

The schooling system had appropriated aspects of emancipatory education within formalised learning objectives and accreditation. Illich staunchly rejected this formal dimension of schooling because he perceived it as an insidious means for cultural reproduction in favour of the interests of the politically and economically powerful. Each of the alternative learning models that have become visible during the pandemic, remote learning, homeschooling, microschooling and unschooling, bear some resemblance to Illich’s deschooling, and the needle may slowly continue to move that direction, but this remains to be seen. 

 

 

References

Bartlett, T. and Schugurensky, D. (2020). Deschooling Society 50 Years Later: Revisiting 

Ivan Illich in the Era of COVID-19. Sisyphus, 8(3),  pp. 65-84.

Cayley, D. (1992). Ivan Illich in Conversation. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press.

Holt, J. (1976). Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better. New York. E. P. 

Dutton.

Illich, I. (1975). Medical Nemesis. London Calder and Boyars. 

Illich, I. (1973). Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row.

Illich, I. (1970). Deschooling Society. New York: Haper & Row.

Stojanov, K. (2020). Education, Freedom, and Emancipation from the Standpoint of the 

Recognition Theory, Interview with Axel Honneth. Sisyphus, 8(3), pp. 101-105.