Deschooling Society

Introduction

The author credits his interest in public education to Everett Reimer, with whom he began questioning the value of obligatory schooling in 1958. The book argues that universal education through schooling is not feasible and that the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.

• Core thesis: Universal schooling leads to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence through the institutionalization of values

  • Schools transform non-material needs into demands for commodities
  • Educational disadvantage cannot be cured by relying on education within schools
  • Current search for new educational methods must be reversed into search for educational webs

• Alternative vision: Educational webs that transform each moment of living into learning, sharing, and caring

  • Need institutions that serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction
  • Must define conditions that permit emergence of values not controlled by technocrats
  • Deschooling society would benefit not just education but family life, politics, security, faith, and communication

Why We Must Disestablish School

Schools confuse process with substance, teaching students that more treatment leads to better results and that institutional performance equals the values these institutions claim to serve.

• The fundamental confusion: Schools teach students to confuse teaching with learning, diplomas with competence, and service with value

  • Medical treatment mistaken for health care, social work for community improvement
  • Students learn that valuable learning results from attendance and can be measured by grades
  • This creates demand for more institutional services across all areas of life

• Economic impossibility of equal schooling: The costs make universal quality education economically absurd

  • Equal treatment in U.S. schools would cost $80 billion per year, more than twice current spending
  • In Latin America, per capita spending on graduate students is 350-1,500 times that on median citizens
  • Rich children stay longer in school and attend more expensive institutions, receiving ten times more public funds than poor children

• Schooling as world religion: School has become the universal church of modernized society

  • Creates social ranking through curriculum completion rather than competence
  • Generates guilt in dropouts and those with insufficient schooling globally
  • Even those who never attend school learn they should want more schooling

• The hidden curriculum: Schools initiate students into myths of consumption, measurement, and packaging

  • Myth of unending consumption: process inevitably produces value, therefore production creates demand
  • Myth of measurement: everything valuable can be quantified and compared
  • Myth of packaging: curriculum bundles meanings like consumer products

• Constitutional solution: Disestablish schools’ monopoly like churches were disestablished

  • “The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education”
  • Forbid discrimination based on educational credentials rather than performance
  • Protect citizens from being disqualified by their school career

Phenomenology of School

School is defined as the age-specific, teacher-related process requiring full-time attendance at an obligatory curriculum, based on three unquestioned premises that deserve examination.

• Age segregation and the invention of childhood: Modern childhood is a recent Western concept unknown to most historical periods

  • Before industrial society, children dressed, played, and were punished like adults
  • “Childhood” emerged with the bourgeoisie and became mass-produced through schools
  • Most people worldwide either cannot access or do not want modern childhood for their offspring

• Teacher-pupil relationships: Schools operate on the false axiom that learning results from teaching

  • Everyone learns most of what they know outside school, often despite teachers
  • Teachers create jobs for themselves regardless of student learning outcomes
  • Poor parents want certificates and money from schooling more than actual learning

• Full-time attendance creates total institutions: Schools claim total authority over students’ time and development

  • Teachers combine roles of custodian, moralist, and therapist in ways that would be unacceptable elsewhere
  • Students lack constitutional protections (First and Fifth Amendments) when facing teachers
  • This concentration of power is more restricted in other institutions like hospitals or courts

• Sacred space and ritual: Schools create a primitive, magical environment removed from ordinary reality

  • Physical incarceration allows suspension of normal social rules
  • Students must submit to judgments that conflate rule-breaking, moral transgression, and personal worth
  • The classroom serves as a “magic womb” from which students are periodically released

• Hidden curriculum effects: The ritual of schooling itself teaches dependence and consumption

  • Creates prejudice and guilt that compounds existing social discrimination
  • Serves as initiation into growth-oriented consumer society for rich and poor alike
  • Cannot be avoided even by the best teachers working within the school system

Ritualization of Progress

The university represents the final stage of the most comprehensive initiation rite in world history, creating a new form of alienation and serving as the knowledge industry’s primary institution.

• University as privilege distributor: Higher education grants the right to dissent only to those certified as potential money-makers or power-holders

  • American college graduates have educations costing five times the median life income of half humanity
  • Latin American students receive 350 times more public investment than median citizens
  • Universities coopt discoverers and potential dissenters through degree requirements

• Consumer standard setting: University graduates establish consumption expectations for entire societies

  • Gap between graduate and average citizen consumption is wider in socialist countries than capitalist ones
  • Cars, travel, and technology confer more distinction where only degrees, not money, can procure them
  • Universities fix consumer goals as a new function, unlike medieval universities that protected scholarly poverty

• School as world religion: The modern school system performs the threefold function of powerful churches throughout history

  • Repository of society’s myth (unending consumption and progress)
  • Institutionalization of myth’s contradictions (promising equality while creating hierarchy)
  • Ritual site that reproduces and veils disparities between myth and reality

• Myth of institutionalized values: School teaches that process inevitably produces value and that production creates demand

  • Students learn that valuable learning results from attendance and increases with input
  • This transfers responsibility from self to institution, guaranteeing social regression
  • Creates addiction to being taught and compulsive desire to teach others

• Myth of measurement: School initiates people into a world where everything can be quantified, including human imagination

  • Personal growth becomes measurable against curriculum rather than individual development
  • People apply institutional standards to themselves and put others “in their place”
  • Creates acceptance of rankings for nations, intelligence, and even peace progress

• Revolutionary potential requires deschooling: Liberation from other institutions depends first on liberation from school

  • School enslaves more systematically than other institutions because it claims to form critical judgment
  • Only by freeing themselves from school can people avoid becoming tools of their tools
  • Deschooling reveals resistance to limitless consumption and manipulation of others

Institutional Spectrum

Future planning should focus on choosing institutions that support spontaneous action rather than consumption, requiring criteria to distinguish growth-supporting from addiction-creating institutions.

• Two institutional types: Manipulative institutions (right side of spectrum) versus convivial institutions (left side)

  • Manipulative: require hard sells, create addiction, involve unwilling consumption (military, schools, hospitals)
  • Convivial: invite spontaneous use, are self-limiting, facilitate client-initiated cooperation (telephones, sidewalks, libraries)
  • Rules differ fundamentally: convivial institutions limit abuse, manipulative institutions force participation

• Modern military as paradigm of right-wing institution: Warfare has become professional enterprise focused on killing efficiency

  • Cost per dead Vietnamese rose from $360,000 in 1967 to $450,000 in 1969
  • Higher body counts create more enemies, requiring more expensive “pacification”
  • Illustrates how increased treatment creates opposite of intended results

• False public utilities: Highways serve as example of institutions that appear public but serve private interests

  • Highway systems mainly serve automobile owners rather than providing universal transportation
  • True public utilities (telephone, postal systems) serve all who wish to use them
  • Poor countries waste resources on elite transportation instead of universal access networks

• Schools as ultimate false utility: Schools appear open to all but serve only those who continuously renew credentials

  • Create regressive taxation where privileged graduates are subsidized by entire public
  • School dropout has no alternative route, unlike person without car who can still work
  • Perfect system of head tax on promotion, making underconsumption of schooling costlier than highways

• Technology and institutional choice: Same technology can create either independence or bureaucracy

  • Example: Latin American investment in TV (reaching few) versus tape recorders (enabling widespread participation)
  • TV provides bureaucrats power to distribute approved programs; tape recorders enable free expression
  • Choice between institutional styles determines whether technology serves freedom or control

Irrational Consistencies

Educational research operates within unquestioned assumptions that perpetuate the schooled society, requiring a fundamental inversion of research orientation and understanding of counterculture values.

• Current research limitations: Operational research optimizes efficiency within inherited framework without questioning basic structure

  • Treats education as funnel for teaching packages rather than network for autonomous learning
  • Reflects cultural bias confusing technological growth with technocratic control
  • Creates “irrational consistency” like Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia taxonomy that mesmerizes participants

• Three educational approaches converge on same goal: Despite apparent opposition, behaviorists, free schools, and establishment serve corporate schooled society

  • Behaviorists seek “autotelic instruction through individualized learning packages”
  • Free schools create “liberated communes” under adult supervision
  • Both reinforce belief that valuable learning results from professional teaching

• Shared unexamined tenets: All current educational approaches accept fundamental axioms of schooled world

  • Learning acquired under teacher supervision has special value for pupil and society
  • Social man is properly born only through school-womb maturation process
  • Youth must be burdened with responsibility for social transformation after school release

• Required inversion: Educational revolution needs new research orientation and counterculture understanding

  • Research must focus on educational networks rather than improved teaching packages
  • Must value semantic content over syntactic efficiency, personal encounter over certified instruction
  • Counterculture reaffirms unpredictable outcomes of self-chosen encounters over institutional programming

• Professional authority critique: Current system packages roles inappropriately, like hospitals making home care impossible

  • Teachers’ claims to comprehensive monopoly make them vulnerable to other professions reclaiming apprenticeship rights
  • School dependency on certified teachers can be broken more easily than other professional dependencies
  • Disestablishment of schools could begin with teacher dropout from authoritarian classroom structure

Learning Webs

Educational institutions should provide access to learning resources rather than force consumption of teaching packages, requiring four types of networks to replace schools’ comprehensive control.

• Fundamental reorientation needed: Move from teacher-controlled instruction to learner-controlled access to resources

  • Current schools frustrate both teachers and students by packaging instruction with certification
  • Alternative must separate learning (acquiring skills/insights) from role assignment (social positioning)
  • Most learning happens outside school through casual participation in meaningful activities

• Four essential educational networks: Different types of resources require different access arrangements

  • Reference Services to Educational Objects: access to things and processes for learning
  • Skill Exchanges: directories of people willing to demonstrate skills
  • Peer-Matching: communications network connecting people with shared learning interests
  • Reference Services to Educators-at-Large: access to experienced guides and mentors

• Educational Objects network: Make learning materials and real-world processes accessible beyond school walls

  • Current design makes industrial products inscrutable and educational materials expensive
  • Schools monopolize simple educational objects by labeling them professional tools
  • Alternative: storefront learning centers, accessible workshops, apprenticeship opportunities in real workplaces

• Skill Exchanges: Connect learners with people who can demonstrate desired abilities

  • Most skills need only demonstration plus motivated practice, not pedagogical training
  • Current certification requirements create artificial scarcity of skill teachers
  • Solution: educational currency/credits earned by teaching, free skill centers, legal protection for teaching

• Peer-Matching systems: Enable people to find others sharing specific learning interests

  • Simple computer matching by book titles, topics, or activities
  • Overcomes school’s limitation of grouping peers only around teacher goals
  • Could operate through bulletin boards, classified ads, or computer terminals

• Professional Educators redefined: Three distinct roles replace current teacher monopoly

  • Network administrators: design and maintain access systems (like museum curators)
  • Pedagogical counselors: guide learners in using networks effectively
  • Educational leaders/masters: provide intellectual mentorship in specific disciplines

• Constitutional requirements: Educational reform needs legal framework protecting learning rights

  • Guarantee equal access to educational resources for all citizens
  • Prevent discrimination based on educational credentials rather than demonstrated competence
  • Protect freedom to teach and learn outside institutional control

Rebirth of Epimethean Man

Modern society resembles a self-sealing box that contains only mechanisms for closing itself, representing the triumph of Promethean expectations over hope and the need to rediscover Epimethean values.

• Hope versus expectation distinction: Fundamental difference between trusting faith in nature’s goodness and reliance on planned, controlled results

  • Hope centers desire on persons from whom we await gifts
  • Expectation looks to predictable processes that produce claimable results
  • Primitive man lived in world of hope; classical Greeks began replacing hope with expectations

• Promethean trajectory: From mythical participation to engineered institutions, from dreams to oracles

  • Apollo’s priests took over Earth Goddess Gaia’s temple at Delphi, turning dreams into planned prophecies
  • Classical man framed civilized context but knew he defied nature at his own risk
  • Contemporary man attempts to create totally man-made environment, remaking himself to fit it

• Urban alienation from reality: City children encounter only scientifically developed, engineered, planned, and sold items

  • Even trees exist because Parks Department decided to place them
  • Child concludes every desirable thing can be institutionally produced
  • Only “dirt, blunder, or failure” provide opportunities for creative fancy outside institutional process

• Institutional absurdity revealed: All major institutions now create needs faster than satisfaction while consuming Earth

  • Military defends life by threatening to annihilate it; security means ability to destroy Earth
  • Agriculture poisons soil; manufacturing pollutes; medicine creates more protracted sickness
  • School shapes people for planned world while being principal tool to trap people in human-made trap

• Consumption society logic: Institutional value defined as level of institutional output; human value as capacity to consume and degrade these outputs

  • Man becomes “furnace which burns up values produced by his tools”
  • Exhaustion and pollution result from corruption in man’s self-image and consciousness regression
  • Consumer ethos represents institutionalization of substantive values and belief in planned treatment

• Emerging alternative consciousness: New elite across all countries shares suspicion of structural problems

  • Wary of scientific utopias, ideological solutions, and expectations of equal distribution
  • Recognize that policies consistently produce results opposite to stated aims
  • Begin formulating suspicion that constant deceptions bind us to contemporary institutions

• Epimethean alternative: Need name for those who value hope over expectations, people over products, Earth over products

  • Collaborate with Promethean brothers in fire and iron but to enhance ability to tend, care, and wait upon others
  • Recognize each person’s world as private with “one excellent minute” and “one tragic minute”
  • These hopeful brothers and sisters should be called “Epimethean men”