Reviews for Deschooling society

The average rating for Deschooling society based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-12-28 00:00:00 Edward Wojan Illich questions the basic assumption that most liberal (or for that matter non-liberal) people in the US have: more educational = more gooder. Attacking the idea that compulsory schooling is constructive, Illich offers one of the more radical analyses of the educational system I've ever heard of of, much less read. What, after all, is the relation between schooling and learning, if any? As someone who has spent a huge portion (like one over one) of their life in school and now teaches at a university, I found this book seriously compelling. You might not swallow Deschooling wholesale, but Illich shines the light on so many of the unspoken (I know I'm mixing metaphors here) axioms of the educational system---always a healthy endeavor---and challenges us to either defend or discard.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-06-15 00:00:00 Bruce Haggar This book challenged my views more than any book I've ever read. Illich's case for the need to deschool society is not only compelling it is transformative. As a person who has become highly critical of public schooling, I was already familiar with where he was going, but to abandon every type of institutional school system including free/democratic schools as well as universities seemed a bit much to me, until he went into detail about the repressiveness of such institutions and how we learn mostly everything we know outside of schooling. He suggests an alternative type of schooling which uses social networking to pair up people with similar interests to form apprenticeship style mentoring. For a book written in the 1970's. It feels like he is talking about something similar to facebook as a way of bringing people with similar interests together to build learning atmospheres. Interesting read.