Deschooling Society
by Ivan Illich · first published 1970
48% recommend50% neutral2% critical
Why HN recommends it
Radical critique of compulsory schooling that questions what we assume about education; its Learning Webs chapter anticipates networked, self-directed learning. Suits unschoolers, homeschoolers, and edtech founders.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
A denounciation of present-day schooling with radical suggestions for reform.
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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…books to read: John Taylor Gatto: Dumbing Us Down, Weapons of Mass Instruction and The Underground History of American Education. Charlotte Iserbyt: the deliberate dumbing down of america. Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society. John Holt: Anything at all, but particularly How Children Fail and How Children Learn. ---------- Besides Sudsbury schools, there's several other alternative school models: anarchistic free schools…
on “How Does This Not Blow Your Mind?” ↗…The latter have a pretty huge list of undesirable properties and negative externalities, especially in how they limit diverse experiences and learning. An eye-opening read on this front for me has been Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich [0]. It's insane how much of what he wrote 40 years ago still holds true. [0] http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1970_deschooling.html
on “Request for Education Startups” ↗…that grading and testing is a bunch of crap. And that's entirely correct, IMHO. We should restructure our whole Western (and Eastern, for all I know) education system on the lines of Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society which (simplified) suggests that everyone gets an educational grant that they can spend about which and who they study with they can freely choose. But…
on “Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate” ↗I also strongly recommend Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society" [1]. It's not mentioned in the wikipedia article but Illich makes a very good case for looking at Government's support for higher education as basically a regressive tax on the poor, as they (meaning…
on “Forget Bribery – The Real Scam Is Pretending That Degrees Have Value” ↗…soul destroying than invigilating a written multi-hour exam. It put me off teaching in higher education. IMHO to solve many problems we should go with Ivan Illich's ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society and make education about education, not testing and certification.
on “Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown University” ↗Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society. Read it. This is exactly the sort of technological revolution that is required before we can achieve true universal education.
on “An Interview with Alan Kay: "The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas."” ↗And if you've watched nerds sell you'd agree that there's some extra layer of complexity which only marketers understand. If you haven't read them you may enjoy Deschooling Society by Illich or The Spectacle of Society by Debord, though Debord gets a little postmodernist/heglian at points. http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf
on “Growth Hacking Is Bull” ↗Why is it that you immediately associate avoiding public school with identity politics? I think you'd be well served reading the works of Ivan Illich (in particular Deschooling Society), John Taylor Gatto and John Holt that all just about debunk the fundamental idea of schooling as inherently inefficient and originating in a rather peculiar turn of events during the 19th century which…
on “Why You Should Tell Your Children How Much You Make” ↗…narrow to engage in a discussion of this nature. If that is implemented, coming generations would be well civilized and well behaved as it eliminates many societal problems. Oh boy. Not even wrong. See: Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, Compulsory Miseducation by Paul Goodman, anything written by John Taylor Gatto, John Holt and A.S. Neill. It's also trivially disprovable by mere observation.
on “China Shows How Surveillance Leads to Intimidation and Software Censorship” ↗No one has mentioned Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society yet? I obviously haven't read Bryan Caplan's book that's discussed in this article, but from the looks of it, none of his ideas are new. They've been explored before. I find his title interesting though,…
on “School Is to Submit” ↗You should learn what unschooling means. It’s not about curriculum or not attending any classes. I suggest Ivan Illich’s book “Deschooling Society.” As long as your frame of reference is modern formal schools you can only interpret alternatives from that perspective.
on “How do unschoolers turn out? (2014)” ↗…independently discovered what is called unschooling, a form of homeschooling, which is itself a form of self-directed learning. The closest you can get in a formal school is Montessori. See Ivan Illich’s book Deschooling Society, anything by John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, Grace Llewellyn. Wikipedia is a decent resource but I wouldn’t base an entire education on it.
on “Ask HN: Why aren't education systems based on Wikipedia?” ↗Check out The True Beleiver by Eric Hoffer or Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich for some explanations for this long observed effect. Schooling trained myself and my best friends to expect to be able to use what we learned, even though there were no roles in society…
on “The Hedonic Treadmill” ↗'Deschooling society' by Ivan Illich.
on “Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?” ↗…Holt. The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher by John Taylor Gatto (online) https://www.wanderings.net/notebook/Main/SevenLessonsTaughtI... Dumbing Us Down and Weapons of Mass Destruction by John Taylor Gatto. Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich. The Unschooled Mind by Howard Gardner. Anything by Maria Montessori. We kind of fell backwards into it. Our first child went to Montessori school at first, she loved it. Then we moved…
on “Ask HN: Planning for Parenthood” ↗