I realize I’m not getting at these Illich moments in a very organized manner, but it is interesting here at the outset to play a little game: what parts of this book do I remember, two weeks after finishing it? Or to put it more vividly, which ideas have lodged themselves in my head like a good melody or a powerful set of chords?

I’m doing some work now on my own chord-cluster, trying to orchestrate Engelbart’s idea of the “integrated domain” with ideas about metaphor, gaming, and conceptual thought. Thus one of the most arresting chord-sets for me in Illich’s Deschooling Society comes in a chapter called “Learning Webs,” a chapter that has obviously been extremely influential in the conversation about teaching and learning technologies (Bryan Alexander, for example, has spoken very powerfully about Illich’s influence on his own work).

The passage I have in mind begins as follows:

The man-made environment has become as inscrutable as nature is for the primitive. At the same time, educational materials have been monopolized by school. Simple educational objects have been expensively packaged by the knowledge industry. They have become specialized tools for professional educators, and their cost has been inflated by forcing them to stimulate either environments or teachers.

The connection with the entire “CMS” or “LMS” or “IMS” industry is obvious. Giving students a wiki-like personal learning environment, on the other hand, with both straightforward and oblique prompts for its uses, as well as a forum for them to share their own discoveries and innovations in the use of such an environment, might break up the CMS monopoly and the monopolies that CMS’s serve. After all, even the most repellent of course management systems does not emerge from a vacuum. It serves (or services) a particular institutional structure and set of emphases.

Martha drives this point all the way home:

If CMSs are off-base by valuing the course as a unit of measurement aren’t they really just guilty of reflecting what’s valued by the institutions? When are schools going to start to value people over courses?

Yet schools no doubt believe they are already doing so, and that courses serve people in a uniquely effective (scalable, sustainable) way. There’s a little truth to this, perhaps, and perhaps also a good measure of self-deception and arrogance. I think Illich would encourage us to examine “prior art” for school generally, not just for contested patent decisions involving Blackboard. What do schools as they are currently constructed feel they have invented or have proprietary rights to? The modern and fairly recent model of the German research university is not the last word in education by any means, just as K-12 schooling as currently implemented does not necessarily represent the most advanced models of education imaginable.

The example of supermarket tomatoes comes to mind: this item can be provided in mass quantities with greater ease than ever before. In other words, they scale very well. But they have very little flavor.

Of course, schools don’t emerge from a vacuum either, which is one of the failings of Illich’s book in my view: we have built the schools we want, obviously. These institutions emerge from our decisions as a society, as a people. That said, school should be the place where self-correction (for we are emphatically not the prisoners of our own separate consciousnesses) must thrive and flourish, and a real school will take continual care to nourish humane and caring disruptions and innovations, especially within its own boundaries.

The teacher is jealous of the textbook he defines as his professional implement. The student may come to hate the lab because he associates it with schoolwork. The administrator rationalizes his protective attitude toward the library as a defense of costly public equipment against those who would play with it rather than learn. In this atmosphere the student too often uses the map, the lab, the encyclopedia, or the microscope only at the rare moments when the curriculum tells him to do so. Even the great classics become part of “sophomore year” instead of marking a new turn in a person’s life. School removes things from everyday use by labeling them educational tools.

These are strong words. Jealousy, hatred, rationalization. Illich delights in extreme language for its provocations, but there’s more to it than that, I think. Illich believes we face a crisis, one in which education becomes divorced from personhood. School removes things not just from everyday use, but from personal use. I would further argue that we can know the truly personal because of a special component of intimacy that is always present to a greater or lesser degree. To invoke Bryan Alexander again, one of the things I remember most vividly from the first talk I heard him give on mobile learning was the idea that part of the charming power of mobile computing devices lay in the intimate relationship between them and their users. I think that size is only part of that intimacy. I think that another, vital part of that intimacy has to do with the way we can know and be known by those devices. Of course those devices don’t really “know” us, but they are built to reflect us and in that respect know us as we know ourselves.

An example: I do not have to tell my students to construct a playlist on their iPods or compile a list of buddys on their IM clients. By contrast, I am continually frustrated and a little mystified by their apparent unwillingness to write in the margins of their books. I know they want to sell the books back, and there are no doubt other reasons for their reluctance to mark up their books, but I do believe that some part of their reluctance has to do with their feeling estranged from the heart and arteries of their own educations. (For more along these lines, Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” is indispensable, as is the question David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky proposed as an assignment for students: what is the difference between a common tourist and a complex tourist?”)

So here’s a follow-up question: to what extent are the citizens (staff, faculty, students, administrators) of formal educational communities estranged, not-intimate, with the very tools they make available, or use themselves?

If we are to deschool, both tendencies must be reversed. The general physical environment must be made accessible, and those physical learning resources which have been reduced to teaching instruments must become generally available for self-directed learning. Using things only as part of a curriculum can have an even worse effect than just removing them from the general environment. It can corrupt the attitudes of pupils.

To which I would add: it can corrupt the attitudes of the institutions themselves.

Now here is the part that resonated most powerfully for me. It has to do with play and thought.

Games are a case in point. I do not mean the “games” of the physical education department (such as football and basketball), which the schools use to raise income and prestige and in which they have made a substantial capital investment. As the athletes themselves are well aware, these enterprises, which take the form of warlike tournaments, have undermined the playfulness of sports and are used to reinforce the competitive nature of schools. Rather I have in mind the educational games which can provide a unique way to penetrate formal systems. Set theory, linguistics, propositional logic, geometry, physics, and even chemistry reveal themselves with little effort to certain persons who play these games. A friend of mine went to a Mexican market with a game called “‘Wff ‘n Proof,” which consists of some dice on which twelve logical symbols are imprinted. He showed children which two or three combinations constituted a well-formed sentence, and inductively within the first hour some onlookers also grasped the principle. Within a few hours of playfully conducting formal logical proofs, some children are capable of introducing others to the fundamental proofs of propositional logic. The others just walk away.

In fact, for some children such games are a special form of liberating education, since they heighten their awareness of the fact that formal systems are built on changeable axioms and that conceptual operations have a gamelike nature [emphasis mine]. They are also simple, cheap, and–to a large extent–can be organized by the players themselves.

I remember Wff ‘n Proof very fondly. What I lacked in my own experience of that game was someone to play with. Among its other missions, real school must surely be a place where the “gamers” who are mastering conceptual operations can find each other and play more skillfully under the tutelage of those who have been engaged in advanced conceptual operations for some time and with conspicuous success.

EDIT: I just realized that this is my 400th post. When I hit 500, I’m throwing a party for my best buds in the blogosphere. Watch for the wiki we’ll use to organize the potluck.