After Deschooling What

The text of Ivan Illich's article on deschooling prefaces the critical response of active educators. Bibliogs

"Deschooling the Imagination: Critical Thought as Social Practice" is, first, a book that looks at what it means to be actively engaged in developing a critical/creative mindset against the prevailing ideology of our public schools. Second, it is a book about the social/cultural relationship between what and how we learn on one hand and our imaginative capacities on the other. Finally, but equally important, it is a book about how teachers can teach in the service of a revived critical/creative imaginary. In short, you may be interested in reading this book if you are curious about examining the following questions in more depth: How can educators and those involved and/or invested in public education in the United States learn to think about curriculum, assessment, pedagogy, school structures, knowledge, power, identity, language/literacy, economics, creativity, human ecology, and our collective future in a way that escapes the over-determined discourses that inform current attitudes and practices of schooling? What are some of the tactics and strategies that teachers, students, parents, administrators, and policymakers can learn and enact in the service of a future that we can barely imagine?

No one is immune to the byproducts of compulsory schooling and standardized testing. And while reform may be a worthy cause for some, it is not enough for countless others still trying to navigate the tyranny of what schooling has always been. Raising Free People argues that we need to build and work within systems truly designed for any human to learn, grow, socialize, and thrive, regardless of age, ability, background, or access to money. Families and conscious organizations across the world are healing generations of school wounds by pivoting into self-directed, intentional community-building, and Raising Free People shows you exactly how unschooling can help facilitate this process. Individual experiences influence our approach to parenting and education, so we need more than the rules, tools, and “bad adult” guilt trips found in so many parenting and education books. We need to reach behind our behaviors to seek and find our triggers; to examine and interrupt the ways that social issues such as colonization still wreak havoc on our ability to trust ourselves, let alone children. Raising Free People explores examples of the transition from school or homeschooling to unschooling, how single parents and people facing financial challenges unschool successfully, and the ways unschooling allows us to address generational trauma and unlearn the habits we mindlessly pass on to children. In these detailed and unabashed stories and insights, Richards examines the ways that her relationships to blackness, decolonization, and healing work all combine to form relationships and enable community-healing strategies rooted in an unschooling practice. This is how millions of families center human connection, practice clear and honest communication, and raise children who do not grow up to feel that they narrowly survived their childhoods.

Fully updated and revised, the second edition of New Learning explores the contemporary debates and challenges in education and considers how schools can prepare their students for the future. New Learning, Second Edition is an inspiring and comprehensive resource for pre-service and in-service teachers alike.

In the eighteen years since Ivan Illich’s death, David Cayley has been reflecting on the meaning of his friend and teacher’s life and work. Now, in Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, he presents Illich’s body of thought, locating it in its own time and retrieving its relevance for ours. Ivan Illich (1926–2002) was a revolutionary figure in the Roman Catholic Church and in the wider field of cultural criticism that began to take shape in the 1960s. His advocacy of a new, de-clericalized church and his opposition to American missionary programs in Latin America, which he saw as reactionary and imperialist, brought him into conflict with the Vatican and led him to withdraw from direct service to the church in 1969. His institutional critiques of the 1970s, from Deschooling Society to Medical Nemesis, promoted what he called institutional or cultural revolution. The last twenty years of his life were occupied with developing his theory of modernity as an extension of church history. Ranging over every phase of Illich’s career and meditating on each of his books, Cayley finds Illich to be as relevant today as ever and more likely to be understood, now that the many convergent crises he foresaw are in full public view and the church that rejected him is paralyzed in its “folkloric” shell. Not a conventional biography, though attentive to how Illich lived, Cayley’s book is “continuing a conversation” with Illich that will engage anyone who is interested in theology, philosophy, history, and the Catholic Church.

Teaching children to think creatively and critically has never been on the educational agenda and society suffers for it in many ways. The solution is not simply in throwing money at schools, in perpetual reorganisation of the British education system. Hern and his many contributors propose a much more radical approach. A fine collection of essays, both current and historical, examining the social effects and historical substance of education in society.