Essay on Ivan Illich - Deschooling Society

Education means something different for everyone. According to Mike Rose, “a good education helps us make sense of the world and find our way in it” (33). The truth to this is that education affects us in every aspect of our lives. Rose emphasizes the value in the experience of education beyond the value of education for the purpose of custom or intelligence; he explores the purpose of going to school in terms of how he defines himself and his personal growth in the stages of his academic career. In Rose’s exploration of the purpose of school, he also reflects on his personal experiences and how those experiences gave him tools that are applicable for his daily life. Mike Rose’s Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us persuades his audience of the importance of education beyond the classroom, emphasizing how those experiences become crucial to one’s personal growth and potential.

Morrison argues that a democratic form of education was rooted in pre-industrial societies. Imitation, modeling and communication were present through societal life in place of formal schooling (Koonce, 2015).

The area, Approaches to Learning, has the same subparts: Curiosity and Initiative, Engagement and Persistence, Reasoning and Problem Solving, and Play and Senses. The standard within the first subpart, Curiosity and Initiative, is “Children express curiosity, interest, and initiative in exploring the environment, engaging in experiences, and learning new skills (Early Childhood Iowa, 2012, p. 93). According to this standard, a child will: deliberately chose to explore a variety of materials and experiences to seek out new challenges; participate in experiences with eagerness, flexibility, imagination, independence, and inventiveness; ask questions about a variety of topics; repeat skills and experiences to build competence and support the exploration of new ideas. Adults can support these benchmarks through providing a safe environment with various developmentally appropriate experiences and materials for child-initiated exploration and play, encouraging each child to express their own ideas and exercise their imagination, sharing each child’s excitement in discoveries and exploration, encouraging each child to make choices and plan interactions, providing opportunities and time to explore various developmentally appropriate experiences and materials, modeling curiosity and openness about new ideas, asking open-ended questions, and directly supervising children (Early Childhood

Mandatory, enforced schooling is common all over the world, and is generally seen as a public good, and a privilege of first world countries. However, author and teacher John Gatto argues that mandatory schooling destroys your ability to be free thinkers and therefore should not exist, in his piece “Against School”. Despite his effective use of ethos, Gatto’s argument fails to be convincing due to logical fallacies, and a lack of evidence or first hand experience.

“The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things” (Jean Piaget).

(STEWE-1) In order to gain knowledge, education is clearly a necessity and schools are what give us that education. In Montag’s society, school has just about no learning involved. The government has made it so that “‘School is shortened, discipline [is] relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages [have been] dropped, English and spelling [are being] gradually gradually neglected, [and] finally

In a progressively more globalized world that necessitates more effective educational practices, the U.S., once the biggest global force in education, has seen its dominance slowly slip out, and its educational status fall even lower than that of several third-world countries. The decline experienced in American school system academic achievement is not as a result of lack of funding, but as a consequence of the overall educational system watering down. According to Gatto, educating children through the existing public school system of America is crippling rather than helping them. From his essay, ‘Against School,’ it is established that the goal of the whole public school system is to limit people’s intelligence in an attempt to create a society that is manageable. Gatto continues to state that action is needed to change this situation. He supports his assertions using current and historical information about the American school system and his personal experience. After reading his article, one realizes that most of Gatto’s arguments are true. It is true that the American education system is making the students comfort to the government and society norms, which is why they are easily bored. This essay’s goal will, therefore, be to support John Gatto’s beliefs.

Consequently, the rational step taken is to deconsecrate schools into outwardly irreversible place of esteemed value of social order (Kozol, 3). He further noted many ways of opening the issue in complete observation of the class, which he believed can be attained by the quotation of many respected people’s word, such as Horace Mann who was diffident in articulating the real utility of public schools. Nonetheless, he also provided some other ways of embarking on this which he conscientiously noted that has exposed their conjecture of public schools as adults (Kozol, 4). Additionally, he said the best way of achieving this is by disseminating this purpose to students through dialogue as recommended by Doris Lessing (Kozol 4). Finally, he stated that there is no deceit of learning to be a responsive, affectionate or sympathetic person.

School, everyone summons different thoughts and connotations whenever they hear that word. Although people range in their opinions of school, many can agree that schools all have the same goal: to educate their students. This is proving to be false; John Taylor Gatto provides evidence of this in his essay, “Against School.” Within this text he explains how schools are not educating students to be the best they can be, instead teachers are teaching them to become role players in today’s society and to be desensitized from their natural creativity. Gatto, a three time New York Teacher of the Year, has had his fair share of teaching. Gatto provides evidence to the audience that they have been wrong all along about the way a school functions. His ideals prove that the schooling systems in today’s society are not what they seem; schools are thought to develop and help a student unlock their full potential but through the evidence that Gatto provides us he shows that the education system does anything but that. He shows us this by appealing to the audience’s logos and pathos or their logical and emotional natures.

He starts by stating arguments about how the education needed decades ago is not what we need now. The education many have today isn’t the necessary to succeed in this new technological era. In today’s world we need to learn more about financial and globally. He states that classes should now be more interactive and deal with real life lessons. Lessons that will encourage them to be more creative and interactive. Encourage the new way of thinking, critical thinking. Teach students to learn in different environments. A skill to learn is to be adaptable in any environment. At first this will scare your or be uncomfortable. The new way of teaching should make you come out of your comfort zone and adapt. As well as teaching them to question everything and find the truth. How to think for themselves and how to develop their own ideas. I will be using this article because it gives a different view point with facts about the new way of education. How adaptation is major key. As well as the education of real life situations. Why be all book smart but fail in real life because you don’t have the knowledge in other areas. Schools should teach how to think for yourself but guide you in a way where you learn and educate yourself. This is different from having vocational. This educates more on the situations that may occur in the real life and how to react to them the best way

These singular pieces must match and intertwine to create a scenic picture. Individuals must realize that they are part of something bigger than themselves, for the wellbeing of society. Education, along with a diploma, is physical proof that you can succeed in your profession as a functional being, fitting perfectly in an operative society. Moreover, with education, the idea of a good society will be further enforced. A good society as defined by Draper and Ramsay (6), is a society that can prosper by giving its citizens basic physical rights such as security and health. Furthermore, a good society should lend its citizens a political voice and give its people access to education that will help they make their own conclusions. To emphasize the last point, the essay states, “People who are illiterate are said to be ‘blind’”, which is an interesting allusion to Plato’s allegory. By stressing individualism through

But to fix the problems and to serve the students we must first have a vision of what good education is (Ravitvch). What is a good education? A good education isn’t just learning and comprehending, a good education should also teach us how to work well with others, to use our common sense, to expand our range of friends and how we think. Now, what are the goals of a true education? The goals of a true education are learning how to work for yourself by yourself, to grow and adapt as a whole person, to build up your character, and to have a desire to learn more. If our schools were to meet the goals of a true education, it would leave us with a thirst for knowledge that leaves you restless at night, that only education can fulfill.

Plato’s “Allegory of The Cave” and Paulo Freire’s “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education” both contend that education is a process of freeing the chains of deception and false images that make us prisoners in the cave of ignorance. I agree with both Plato and Freire in saying that without education, like the prisoners, our perception of reality is distorted by our lack of knowledge.

Bowles and Gintis also believe that schools are no longer about the teaching of a subject but the Social Principle or control of the pupils meaning that schools concentrate more on the hidden curriculum than the knowledge process. Equally, schools don’t reward independence and innovation, therefore meritocracy cannot exist within our capitalist society as capitalism is based on the principle of a ruling class (the bourgeosis) and a working class (the proletariat) and meritocracy would abolish the idea of the ruling class, society would be equal. According to Louis Althusser (1972), a French Marxist philosopher, the school serves to mould individuals into subjects that fit with the requirements of capitalism, they learn submission, deference and respect for the economy and their place in it. The school also works to ensure that the labour force is technically competent. Also, according to Althusser, the ruling class within any society exercises control over and through schooling and the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). The ideologies themselves express the material interests of the ruling class, so this control over and through the ISAs maintains what is called class hegemony, or domination. Althusser is also draws attention to the powerful effects of the ‘hidden curriculum’ of

The four learning goals are: knowledge (consists of facts, concepts, ideas, and vocabulary), skills ( small units of action that occur in short period of time), disposition ( respond to certain situations), and feelings ( emotional states) ( Katz 2003). With an successful care giving and early education, it can bring an positive outcome to a child’s life. What a child learns in their early years are things that will continue to helps them along in their future in school and in the real world. When a child is introduced