Schooling moves out of the classroom

If anyone has any doubts that Illich was correct in arguing that as schooling came in for criticism and questioning, the educational system would find new venues and channels for delivering its services, consider these remarks, made by some educational entrepreneurs speaking in New York recently. A website called GigaOm reports:

At the Founders conference in New York on Friday, author David Kirkpatrick asked the founders of startups Knewton, Codecademy, Skillshare, Kno and DimensionU, “Is anyone on this panel even close to making money?”

When no one piped up, he added, “I didn’t think so.”

However, given Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s projections that half of North American higher education will move online in the next ten years, followed by a significant portion of k-12 education a few years later, Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira said the margin creation opportunity is going to be “ridiculous.” As colleges and school districts increasingly adopt digital resources and course materials companies like Knewton, Kno and others have an opportunity to help provide the content.

The group also talked about the changing role of the traditional classroom teacher as students increasingly learn from virtual teachers, non-institutional teachers, games, software and potentially robots.

“[Technology] enfranchises everyone to become an educator,” said Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims. “[That] creates an interesting predicament for [traditional] teachers.” Since opening its platform all kinds of content creators in January, Codecademy has seen significant interest from people interested in teaching, he said.

My Dinner with Ivan

We're happy to present this memory of having Illich over for dinner as written up by one of our readers, Anne Marie Quin. (The title is ours, not hers.) Ms. Quin is currently looking into possible collaborations between Illich and Leopold Kohr.

On July 23 and 24 of 1984, Ivan Illich, at the invitation of Arthur Johnson, PhD, President of the University of Maine, spoke at the Augusta and Orono campuses of the university. One of the major focuses of his discussions was water and its multidimensional nature as spiritual force, domestic necessity, and cleansing agent.

Following the presentation in Orono, Ivan and ten of his friends joined Robert and Anne Marie Quin and ten of their friends at the Vickers-Quin home at 72 West Broadway in Bangor. It was a joyous occasion with surf and turf (Maine lobsters and roast beef) as the entrées de jour. Conversation was high-spirited and congenial as two groups of newly-acquainted people shared their experiences and thoughtful insights in the light of Ivan's writings.

Ivan’s mastery of many languages is well known. It is also true that he was able to communicate on many levels within a language, on this particular evening, English. Some guests held doctorates in, e.g., Engineering, Philosophy, Theology and Education; some were farmers, teachers, gardeners and entrepreneurs. One was Father D. Joseph Manship of Bangor, who was about to undertake a four-year program at the Jungian Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. Ivan was able to converse easily with every person at the table and to create an atmosphere of conviviality and friendliness throughout the three-hour meal.

What sheer delight to have hosted such an extraordinary person, one who had been influencing my thoughts, graduate studies and teaching for the previous eleven years, and who would, through his writings, continue to have great impact on my work during the following decades, including now.

The following day, Ivan traveled to Chicago where he addressed pre-medical students and medical school faculty at several Chicago universities; one of these students was our son, Christopher, who was then a pre-med student, majoring in Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Chris called that night to discuss with me the abstract nature of the human body, which Ivan had introduced during the Chicago seminars.

Oh, happy memory!!

Last year, we wrote briefly about Illich's visit to Maine.

Anyone with a memory of Ivan Illich, or of encountering or engaging with his work, is hereby invited to post a comment on this site, or even to write it up more formally for publication here. We've always thought that an oral history of Illich, who was, after all, such a remarkable person, would be an excellent idea, though we also tend to think he would have preferred to be remembered not for his personality and certainly not for his celebrity but for his work. The time is now, of course, to collect memories and observations, while the people who knew Illich best are still with us. What do you think?

"You have loaned us to each other"

Starting in 1966, Ivan Illich found himself in escalating conflict with the Vatican. At the time, Illich held the title of Monsignor and he was deeply involved with his CIDOC "thinkery" in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The Church saw CIDOC as highly subversive, mainly because of its sharp criticism of the international development project and the flood of missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers heading from the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere into Latin America.

A detailed account of this conflict has been published by scholars Jon Igelmo Zaldívar and Patricia Quiroga Uceda in the International Journal of Illich Studies. They describe how Illich's publication of two controversial articles, "The Seamy Side of Charity" and "The Vanishing Clergyman" (both appearing later in Illich's Celebration of Awareness), triggered events that eventually led to Illich getting called into a sort of star chamber hearing in a basement room at the Vatican. He kept quiet about this until 1969, when he told newspapers that he essentially had dropped his formal association with the Church.

In 1971, Illich gave a speech to an audience at Rosary College, located in River Forest, Ill. (It has since become known as Dominican University.) His host was a Joel Wells, editor of The Critic - "a Catholic magazine that provided a literary and intellectual bridge between the church's past and its life after the Vatican II reforms of the early 1960s," according to his obituary published in 2001.)

"I am very happy," one hears Illich smiling on a recording of the speech, "to open my mouth again, more or less addressing myself to the problems that face the Church that I love, after four years of silence imposed on me, which I accepted, because of an article I wrote in The Critic." (This was "The Vanishing Clergyman," later to appear in Illich's book, Celebration of Awareness.) He goes on to describe some problems that he believes Christians face in any attempt to "hand on the faith" to a new generation.

A friend recently provided us with a copy of this recording, made from a cassette and titled "The Evolving Church," and we thought we'd transcribe and publish its last few minutes. (We'll try to transcribe more of the talk in coming weeks.) Here, Illich elaborates on his thoughts about de-schooling (his book was a sly criticism of the Church, he admits) and offers a rare glimpse into his own faith. Particularly interesting to anyone familiar with his later work is this discussion's touching on one of the main themes running through what was essentially his last book, The Rivers North of the Future. This is the idea that the Incarnation gets prolonged, if only for a moment, when people come together, or turn to each other, completely freely, with no prompting, guidance, or schooling from an institution, system, or ethical (or ethnic) rules. Illich contrasts this with a Church that he sees as managing itself as yet another industrial producer of services - an insurance company, as he puts it elsewhere, that relieves its customers of the need to live and act as true Christians.

Illich ends his talk with a quite beautiful Aztec poem, one that we've found on several websites concerned with comforting those who are dying and the like:

… therefore, we can see that during the last few decades ... people came to view the Church as one more service institution. This happened in an industrial society in which all goods can be mass-produced according to international standards and services also began to be produced by professionals in professional, standardized institutions providing health, social welfare, education. And the Church provided religious services.

It is important that we understand that the people who today are most concerned with how to hand on the faith are usually concerned on how to make the Church produce those intangible commodities, those institutional outputs which we can now plan by rewriting the catechism or doing anything like that you want, to make sure that even tomorrow its output still will be Catholic -- or faith or teachings.

In this, the Church is caught in the same bind in which the educational system was caught. In fact, just here, talking among friends, mostly fellow Catholics, my only reason, personally, intimately, for moving into an analysis of the the school was in order to provide an analysis for what happened really to the Church. Speaking about the peculiar form the Church, in its most degraded form had taken in our generation as worldwide Catholic obligatory school system.

There is no possibility of handing on a faith through an institution which is designed on an industrial, managerial mode of production. Just as in the field of education we have to ask ourselves how can we provide people who want to learn with the books, or the encounters, or the opportunities they need in order to learn while living a meaningful life, rather than doing what we now do -- provide packaged teachings, education, which is a form of secularized grace for people -- [audience laughs] I can come back to this later on -- so we must ask ourselves how can we provide the things, the events, the persons, to which somebody called by the Lord needs access if he wants to approach Him, leaving it up to the Lord to show those who come after us how this happened in our generation, abdicating, therefore, in this instance, again, both the social science and the Marxist ideals of writing now the history of the future.

The fifth difficulty, therefore, which I find in transmitting the faith, in handing on the faith today, is the industrial mode and structure, the funnel-like mode, structure, and form which the Church has assumed in order to provide the faith which is precisely the contrary to an atmosphere of freedom in which people who want to approach the Lord know that they can go to celebrate in a very traditional and therefore thoroughly trivial form in an ever-new way the encounter with the other in the Lord. Therefore, the parish must become -- the parish, or whatever takes its place, the diocese -- the place, the moment, the space which we by common agreement reserve in this passing world for the commemoration of the Lord by seating [?] as much as we can how traditionally this commemoration was performed.

Let me end here with the prayer I said this morning, in lieu of breviary if you want, because some of you don’t accept the saying of breviary in other forms, but the bishop of Cuernavaca said to us many years ago, well, you can also recite some good poetry. So I recited this morning a poem, again and again, which comes from Stone Age. In Mexico, you realize that the neolithic age lasted until Cortez came, and one great Franciscan, Friar Bernardino de Sahagún -- he should be named the grandfather patron of anthropology because he went around and sometimes copied in Nahuatl language, the language of the Indians, the same poem or the same saying or the same story as it came out of five or ten mouths and then compared them with each other, and he noted down this poem.

Before I translate it for you, I must say this comes from a language, Nahuatl, an Aztec language in which one-third of all roots, of all words, refer to flowers. And it is directed at a god who is the god in whom all have [?] consciousness -- that’s what his name means. But it also means in whose juice all of us grow. You can translate it the way you want. It is directed at him and it says:

Oh, only for so short awhile
You have loaned us to each other
Because we take form in your act of drawing us,
And we take life in your painting us,
And we breath in your singing us.
But only for a short while
You have loaned us to each other
Because even a drawing cut into crystalline obsidian fades
And even the green feathers ["the crown feathers," as Illich explains] of the quetzal bird lose their color 
And even the songs of the waterfall die out in the dry season
So we, too, 
Because only for a short while you have loaned us to each other.

I wish we could go now to discuss the five different problems which I have tried to present to you for which at this moment it has become so difficult to share the faith now, and such a big problem to hand it on to the future as if we were responsible for it.

Thank you.

A Call for Papers - Education and Poverty, San Francisco, May, 2013

The Ivan Illich Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Education Research Association (AREA), has put out the following call for papers. (For those not familiar with it, the 1988 paper by Illich cited here is a powerful one, and one of the few written after Deschooling Society that explicitly discusses education.):

Ivan Illich SIG Call For Papers

AERA Conference, San Francisco 2013

When AERA convenes in San Francisco in May 2013, we warmly invite you to our table to add your voice in our discussions of Ivan Illich. May you find hospitality as you share our wine and embrace the ideas of Ivan Illich with us. We invite (and accept!) a wide variety of submissions, so please feel encouraged to submit!

Related to the conference theme – Education and Poverty: Theory, Research, Policy and Practice – we encourage papers that utilize Ivan’s critical stance toward education and current views of poverty. Ivan saw clearly that education was not a path out of poverty; the educational enterprise is not the secular Church offering salvation. The atheists of this secular Church, the refuseniks we call drop-outs, offer their own indifference to the power of schooling. Yet, we still believe that all citizens need schooling; poverty is a sign that their secular Church has failed them.

Guided by Ivan’s The Educational Enterprise in the Light of the Gospel (1988) and other writings, we encourage papers that question the salvation of schooling, particularly salvation aimed at the poor.

How are we defining poverty? The AERA call for papers describes our fight against “economic, intellectual, and moral poverty.” How might our understandings of Ivan’s writing and teaching help to make these qualifiers of poverty more problematic? How might we come to learn from other Schindlers of our time, those who “expect nothing from an evil system in which they have made their career but the chance to make its total victims feel that they can beat it”? (Illich, 1988) What are we to learn from the refuseniks, the atheists of our secular Church, who live below middle class means by choice?

Do the poor need salvation? Does lower-class status preclude a meaningful life? What role do money and power have in finding conviviality? Also, how might we address ways that AERA increasingly features a poverty of hospitality, especially for junior or emerging scholars who lack the name capital to ring in guaranteed sessions? The Illich SIG hopes resolutely to distinguish itself and make a space at the table for those that would join it.

We encourage your interpretation of these and any other questions that Ivan Illich found interesting. Whatever path brings you to Ivan’s writings, we hope you will share your paper with us. Please submit!

Please be encouraged to ask any questions you have. Copied below are instructions from AERA on the submission process.

Sincerely,

Your (possibly incoming) SIG Chair and Program Chair,

Kristin and Dana


Kristin D. Jones - Concordia University, Chicago

Dana Stuchul - Penn State

Harvey Cox remembers Illich

'"R-r-read me the last three sentences you have written." It was the summer of 1968, and the voice, slightly accented, with the trilled "r," issued from a tall figure in a brown and gray serape lying prone on the floor of my small study at the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Dutifully, I read for Ivan Illich, the founder and director of "CIDOC," the most recent scribblings on the book I was then writing. Then he responded. His comments, as usual, were apt and dazzling. He could conjure historical analogies out of the air, suggest alternative phrasing, pose probing questions.'

So begins an obituary and appreciation of Ivan Illich that we stumbled onto recently. We actually had seen this piece back in 2003, shortly after Illich died, but we'd forgotten about it. It's written well - by Harvey Cox, a Harvard theologian perhaps best known for The Secular City, published in 1965 - and offers some interesting observations of the man and his reputation and of the vibrant scene that arose around CIDOC.

Of Cuernavaca in the 1960s, Cox writes: "The outdoor cafes around the lovely old piazza with its central gazebo and refreshment stands provided only one of the many venues reminiscent of the crackling atmosphere along the Boulevard St. Michel in Paris."

There was a decided buzz about Cuernavaca, especially among young countercultural types, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They arrived in droves, with their backpacks, jeans and recently purchased serapes and sandals. They thronged the boarding houses and inexpensive hotels. Some wanted to learn Spanish, and the center had an excellent language school. Others just wanted to hang out. All wanted to warm themselves in the already legendary glow of Ivan Illich and the cluster of intellectual enfants terribles that surrounded him. But many soon became disillusioned.

Illich, whose ideas on education--spelled out in his 1971 book De-Schooling Society--were indeed revolutionary, had utterly no patience with academic slackness. He couldn't abide people who used language--any language--sloppily. He hated empty chatter. He was just as critical of hippy laxity as he was of the moralistic smugness and rigidity of his own church. The young people climbing off the rickety buses may have expected a merry prankster, but instead they found an old-world aristocrat with a hawk nose and piercing eyes who made stringent demands on them, and whose stinging critique of bureaucratic modernity arose from his love of tradition rather than from some Haight-Ashbury version of doing your own thing.

Deschooling Society, the Greek translation

A PDF scan of Deschooling Society, translated into modern Greek, is available for viewing and downloading at Scribd, here. Here is what the book looks like:

Universidad de la Tierra

We've mentioned Gustavo Esteva, a Mexican activist and friend of Ivan Illich, in a previous post, here. Recently, we came across an article by him and streaming video of him speaking about the same topic at a conference.

The article is entitled, "The Meaning of the Global Crisis and 'Recovery' for Study Abroad: What Are We Preparing Students For?" Esteva presented it in 2010 at a conference called "Fostering Multicultural Competence and Global Justice," put on by an organization called SIT, in Vermont. (SIT was founded as the School for International Training, but has gone by the acronym since 2007.) The essay is available in PDF on this page (click Download on the right) and so are two video streams (at the very bottom of the page, labeled Keynote Speech Parts 1 and 2).

A description of the piece:

There is universal consensus that we are at the end of an historical cycle. But the consensus vanishes when you try to identify the corpse: we cannot accept that it is not just another business cycle, as the pundits still proclaim, but neither can we assume the end of globalization, neoliberalism, capitalism or the modern era, as many critics currently argue. Raised with a promise of infinite prosperity, beyond business cycles, at 'the end of history' after the marriage of capitalism and liberal democracy, our students have suddenly entered an era of decreasing expectations and increasing uncertainty. How to reformulate their hope, any hope? How can they be inspired by what the people are doing, all over the world, when they take again in their hands their own lives and destinies, reclaiming their own definition of the good life?

Esteva is identified as founder of the Universidad de la Tierra, a learning center (?) in Oxaca. More about that organization is available here, among other sites. Here is a photo of a sign seen there:

Ivan Illich and Stanley Hauerwas on Crisis, Time, Panic, and Patience

Another paper referencing Illich has come to our attention: "Outflanking the Bureaucratic Production of Urgency: Ivan Illich and Stanley Hauerwas on Crisis and the Cultivation of Patience," by Ben Kautzer of University of Nottingham. It is available in PDF format here. It's a thoughtful essay that reflects on Illich's thoughts about crisis, speed, and time and then, following Stanley Hauerwas, suggests "that an alternative perception of time capable of resisting the politics of panic is best rooted in the practice of patience."

We first encountered Mr. Kautzer's name at his blog, Musings East of the City, where in 2009 he wrote a sympathetic piece about Illich's reading of the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Hugh on friendship

In our last post, we mentioned a radio show in which Jerry Brown, now governor of California and then mayor of Oakland, interviewed Ivan Illich and Carl Mitcham. The following is an excerpt from the transcript of that show, which is available at the site of Brown's We the People organization.

Jerry Brown: OK, this is Hugh of St. Victor, a man who lived in the 12th century, and here is what he says. He says, "Charity." Now when he says charity does he mean love?

Illich: Yes.

Brown: OK, so I'm going to use that. When he says love never ends. "To my dear brother Ronolfe from Hugh, a sinner. Love never ends. When I first heard this I knew it was true. But now, dearest brother, I have the personal experience of fully knowing that love never ends. For I was a foreigner. I met you in a strange land. But that land was not really strange for I found friends there." And it goes on. You want me to go on some more?

Illich: It's so beautiful.

Brown: "But the land was not really strange for I found friends there. I don't know whether I first made friends or was made one, but I found love there and I loved it and I could not tire of it for it was sweet to me and I filled my heart with it and was sad that my heart could hold so little. I could not take in all that there was but I took in as much as I could. I filled up all the space I had but I could not fit in all I found so I accepted what I could and weighed down with this precious gift I didn't feel any burden because my full heart sustained me. And now having made a long journey I find my heart still warmed and none of the gift has been lost for love never ends."

Illich: Isn't that a marvelous little letter?

Brown: It's wonderful.

Illich: Today we would immediately say if a man writes to a man like that he must be a gay. Why not? But anyway if he writes to a woman they would say what a marvelous sexual relationship. But do I need these alienating concepts? I want to just go back to a great rabbinical and also as you see, monastic, Christian development beyond what the Greeks like Plato or Cicero already knew about friendship. That it is from your eye that I find myself. …

We the People, in Oakland, Calif.

The following article appeared in the New York Times for Sept. 17, 2000. A website still exists for We the People, and it provides access to many papers and other materials relating to the proceedings described here. Particularly interesting is the transcript of Jerry Brown's radio show with Ivan Illich and Carl Mitcham as guests. (Just follow the links at the left side of the page.) Unfortunately, the phone numbers provided for We the People are not in service, so there's no information available about where one might obtain the audio recordings of this broadcast that also are mentioned on the site.

Intellectual Forum Brings Jerry Brown to the Table

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

OAKLAND, Calif., Sept. 16 — The phrase ''back to school'' has acquired new meaning here. It's time to grab the ballpoints, the highlighters and the 450-page binder of reading materials and head over to the mayor's house for a little ''Medieval Philosophical Latin: Part 1.''

Call it Jerry 101. Mayor Jerry Brown, former presidential candidate, former governor and former Jesuit seminarian, has invited the citizenry of this city on the move to participate in the Oakland Table, a casual intellectual exchange over six weeks -- a sort of Ivory Tower in a loft -- in which two dozen scholars, headlined by the historian and philosopher Ivan Illich, have been brought in to ponder the city, citizenship and the deep meaning of it all.

Part salon, part graduate school seminar, it may be the northern California equivalent of Dorothy Parker's Round Table at the Algonquin in the 1920's in Manhattan, except that instead of whiskey and cigarettes, there are tai chi and yoga classes in an adjoining room.

''Socrates said, 'The unexamined life is not worth living,' so we're examining it,'' Mr. Brown said the other day, having spent two hours ''in colloquy,'' where the discussion drifted from Daedalus to whether washing dishes constituted slavery.
''The big question is,'' Mr. Brown said, '' 'How do we create a place?' The 'Oakland Think Tank' sounded too cerebral. The word 'table' is a great metaphor for urban civitas.''

The Table, which will be held twice a year for three years, is being financed with $120,000 from the We the People Foundation, the nonprofit educational organization Mr. Brown started in the mid-1990's before becoming mayor. The speakers, who have turned Mr. Brown's quasi-communal loft building in Jack London Square into a Zen-like faculty club, include the architectural theorist Joseph Rykwert and the Mexican intellectual and activist Gustavo Esteva. One result will be a book, Mr. Brown said.

The seminars, alternately resembling town meetings and academic encounter groups complete with surreptitious doodling, have been drawing an eclectic following, from faithful students of Mr. Illich, the author of the 1970 book ''Deschooling Society,'' which influenced the home-schooling movement, to people like Bruce Miller, a banker, who says he finds the subjects, which focus on civic engagement, ''provocative.''

''It's just like college,'' Mr. Miller said, ''except that you don't have to write papers.''

The Table has also attracted plenty of interlopers from nearby Berkeley, including Debbie Moore, organizer of the ninth annual Nude and Breast Freedom Parade to be held on Sunday in Peoples Park, who believes that the presence of nude bodies can soften cities and ''tenderize the sidewalk,'' she said.

Not present were Brown critics like Wilda White, president of the Jack London Neighborhood Association and an Oakland school board member, who do not approve of pointy-headed table-talk. They are concerned about the rising homicide rate and, with dot- coms in ascendance, the ''Jerrification'' of Oakland at the expense of the poor.

''I'm sure it's fun,'' Ms. White said of the Table, with subjects like ''Historical Conceptions of Place'' and ''Proportionality in Architecture.'' ''But with the lack of affordable housing, the high murder rate and schools in disarray, it's a luxury.''

Mr. Brown said he was seeking ways to instill more ''hospitality, friendliness and give and take'' in the city, bringing to Lake Merritt, in Oakland, perhaps, the spirit of Lake Wobegon and making the city more than a blip in the Berkeley-Stanford intellectual firmament.

''Instead of cost-benefit analysis,'' he said, ''let's take a look at the common good, at Oakland from the view of early Christianity and 2,000 years ago.''

Mr. Brown continued: ''Potholes are being filled, drug dealers are being arrested, buildings are going up. But that's not the whole story.''

For the former Governor Moonbeam, who made out-of-the-box thinkers like E. F. Schumacher, Herman Kahn and R. Buckminster Fuller regents of the University of California, the daily grind of governing never has been. [sic?]

So far in his mayoralty, ''pragmatic agendas have crowded out Jerry's New Age style, at least publicly,'' observes Bruce E. Cain, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. ''Now it's re-emerging on the radar screen.''

Former Mayor Ed Koch of New York City, who used to bring in scholars for debates at Gracie Mansion, says of the revving up of politicians by intellectuals: ''It goes back to Pericles. ''It's a recycled idea. In the golden age of Greece the brightest minds discussed the issues of the day, like chariot traffic and its adverse effect on the Parthenon.''

Democracy may be a big topic at the Table but that's not the whole story. ''Why am I doing this?'' said Mr. Brown, before heading off to a group dinner of anadama bread and Moroccan sausage. ''The primary reason I'm doing this is because I find it interesting.''