While the child will experience little difficulty with rote or ‘drill’ learning, she or he may have major difficulties in grasping conceptual distinctions involving generalization and abstractions.

Illich: The Hidden Curriculum

One of the most controversial writers on educational theory is Ivan Illich. He is noted for his criticisms of modern economic development, which he describes as a process whereby previously self sufficient people are dispossessed of their traditional skills and made to rely on doctors for their health, teachers for their schooling, television for their entertainment and employers for their subsistence. Illich argues that the very notion of compulsory schooling- now accepted throughout the world-should be questioned (1973). He stresses the connection between the developments of education and the requirements of the economy for discipline and hierarchy. Illich argues that schools have developed to cope with four basic tasks: the provision of custodial care, the distribution of people among occupational roles, the learning of dominant values and the acquisition of socially approved skills and knowledge. In relation to the first, the school has become a custodial organization because attendance is obligatory, and children are ‘kept off the streets’ between early childhood and their entry into work.

Much is learnt in school which has nothing to do with formal content of lessons. Schools tend to inculcate what Illich called passive consumption – an uncritical acceptance of the social order – by the nature of the discipline and regimentation they involve. These lessons are not consciously taught; they are implicit in the school procedures and organization. The hidden curriculum teaches children that their role in life is ‘to know their place and sit still in it’ (Illich 1973).

Illich advocates deschooling society. Compulsory schooling is relatively recent invention, he points out; there is no reason why it should be accepted as somehow inevitable. Since schools do not promote equality or the development of individual’s creative abilities, why not do away with them in their current form? Illich does not mean by this that all forms of educational organization should be abolished. Everyone who wants to learn should be provided with access to available resources- at any time in their lives, not just in their childhood and adolescent years. Such a system should make it possible for knowledge to be widely diffused and shared, not confined to specialists. Learners should not have to submit to a standard curriculum, and they should have personal choice over what they study.

What all these means in practical terms is not wholly clear. In place of schools, however, Illich suggests several types of educational framework. Material resources for formal learning would be stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories and information storage banks, available to any student. ‘Communications networks’ would be set up, providing data about the skills possessed by different individuals and whether they would be willing to train others and engage in mutual learning activities.

Are these proposals wholly utopian? Many would say so. Yet if, as looks possible, paid work is substantially reduced or restructured in the future, they appear less unrealistic. Were paid employment to become less central to social life, people might instead engage in wider variety of pursuits. Against this backdrop, some of Illich ideas make good sense. Education would not be just a form of early training, confined to special institutions, but would become available to whoever wished to take advantage of it.  

Illich’s ideas of 1970s become fashionable again in the 1990s with the rise of new communications technologies.