Deschooling Society

Treating education as a “web” which increases a person’s access to opportunities rather than as a “funnel” they are sent through.

Public schooling in current form as a means of institutionalization

Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect.

The poor have always been socially powerless. The increasing reliance on institutional care adds a new dimension to their helplessness: psychological impotence, the inability to fend for themselves.

School funding as a system of tuition grants; money for the child goes to an account which can only be used to purchase education services and accessories as the curriculum demands.

Poor children fall behind even with identical schooling since the higher class children have more opportunities to travel, and converse with other competent folk.

Calls to ban discrimination based on attendance of certain school programs; though acknowledges competency exams would be allowed.

Mandatory schooling creates a caste system based on attendance of institutions.

Treating a person’s public education budget as an electronic benefit card; the person spends it for whatever job training is needed at the time. This puts public market forces in charge of regulating education.

Calls for drill training (a la military bootcamp) over traditional academia.

The Brazilian teacher Paulo Freire knows this from experience. He discovered that any adult can begin to read in a matter of forty hours if the first words he deciphers are charged with political meaning. Freire trains his teachers to move into a village and to discover the words which designate current important issues, such as the access to a well or the compound interest on the debts owed to the patron. In the evening the villagers meet for the discussion of these key words. They begin to realize that each word stays on the blackboard even after its sound has faded. The letters continue to unlock reality and to make it manageable as a problem. I have frequently witnessed how discussants grow in social awareness and how they are impelled to take political action as fast as they learn to read. They seem to take reality into their hands as they write it down.

Remarks on conflation between the words of education, schooling and learning.

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