Ivan Illich on deschooling, conviviality, and systems. Possibilities for education and social change

Ivan Illich on deschooling, conviviality, and systems. Possibilities for education and social change. Known for his critique of modernization and the corrupting impact of institutions, Ivan Illich’s concern with deschooling, learning webs, and the disabling effect of professions struck a chord among many educators and pedagogues. We explore some key aspects of his theories and his continuing relevance for education, pedagogy, and lifelong learning.

contents: introduction · early life · career stages · later life · ivan illich on deschooling, institutionalization and commodification · illich’s convivial alternative · systems · conclusion · further reading and references · links

Ivan Illich (1926 – 2002) rose to fame in the 1970s with a series of brilliant, short books on major institutions of the industrialized world. They explored the functioning and impact of ‘education’ systems (Deschooling Society), technological development (Tools for Conviviality), energy, transport and economic development (Energy and Equity), medicine (Medical Nemesis), and work (in The Right to Useful Unemployment and its Professional Enemies and Shadow Work). Ivan Illich’s lasting contribution from this period was a dissection of these institutions and a demonstration of their corruption. In the end, institutions like schooling and medicine tended to function in ways that reversed their original purpose.

Ivan Illich later explored gender, literacy, and pain. However, his work was the subject of attack from both the left and right. In the case of the former, for example, his critique of the disabling effect of many welfare state institutions – and his approach to gender were found problematic. From the 1980s on he became something of a forgotten figure. There remained, however, some writers and practitioners in the fields he wrote about who found significant possibilities in his analysis. Andrew Todd and Franco La Cecla (2002) have commented that his great contribution was as an archaeologist of ideas, ‘someone who helped us to see the present in a truer and richer perspective’. He continued to develop his thinking, notably in In the Vineyard of the Text where he explored ‘the passage from an age of instrumentality to an age of systems’ and the extent to which modernity can be studied as an extension of church history (Cayley 2021: 19-20). In this piece, we examine his legacy and continuing relevance – a process which has been considerably enriched over the last twenty years by the work of David Cayley (2005, 2014, 2021).

Early life

Ivan Illich was born in Vienna. His father, Piero Illich (1890-1942), came from a landed family in Dalmatia and was a civil engineer for a time. This meant that Ivan Illich, with his younger, twin brothers could live comfortably, attend good schools and travel extensively in Europe (Smith and Smith 1994: 434). However, his parent’s marriage broke down in 1932 (Ivan was six) and the children and their mother (Ellen Regenstreif, known as Maexie) returned to her father’s house in Vienna. Illich was a student at the Piaristengymnasium in Vienna from 1936 to 1941 but was expelled by the occupying Nazis in 1941. His mother had Jewish ancestry (his father was a Roman Catholic). From this point on Ivan Illich gradually became a bit of a wanderer – travelling the world and having the minimum of material possessions. He completed his pre-university studies in Florence (where he had moved with his mother and brothers in 1943). Ivan Illich appears to have registered to study histology and crystallography at the University of Florence. At the end of the war, he returned to Austria and registered to study history at the University in Salzburg. At around this point, Illich decided to enter, and prepare for, the priesthood. He took an advanced degree in theology and philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome. In 1951 he was ordained in Rome and completed his PhD at the University of Salzburg (an exploration of the nature of historical knowledge). One of the intellectual legacies of this period was a developing understanding of the institutionalization of the church in the 13th century – and this helped to form and inform his later critique.

Career stages

As David Cayley (2021: 16-21) has suggested, Illich’s career can be more or less divided into four broad stages. Cayley doesn’t use titles for these periods and rightly cautions against partitioning these periods too tightly. However, they provide us with a picture of the development of Ivan Illich’s thinking and the dramatic shifts in the treatment of his work. The case for deschooling, conviviality, equity in energy, limiting medicine, and constraining systems still requires wider and deeper exploration and action.

Stage 1. The priest and missiologist. Ivan Illich became an assistant parish priest in Washington Heights, New York in 1951. There he became particularly interested in the experiences and the communal orientation of his Puerto Rican parishioners. Illich was soon speaking out for Puerto Rican culture, ‘and against “cultural ignorance” on the part of the dominant culture’ (Smith and Smith 1994: 434, see, also, Illich’s reflections in Celebration of Awareness, pp. 29 – 38). He had become fluent in Spanish and several other languages (during his life he was to work in 10 different languages).

In 1956 Ivan Illich became vice-rector of the Catholic university in Puerto Rica. He also established the Center for Intercultural Formation (CIF) (initially at Fordham University) to train American missionaries for work in Latin America. From the start he had wanted the institution to be based in Latin America – and after walking and hitchhiking several thousand miles he decided on Cuernavaca, Mexico. With the help of Feodora Stancioff and Brother Gerry Morris, he set up shop. However, he spent only four years there. He was forced out of the university in 1960 as a result of his opposition to the then Bishop of Ponce’s forbidding Catholics to vote for Governor Luis Munoz Marin (because of his advocacy of state-sponsored birth control).

The Centre was renamed the Centre for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC). It provided an opportunity for several hundred missionaries each year to join, in Ivan Illich’s words, ‘a free club for the search of surprise, a place where people go who want to have help in redefining their questions rather than completing the answers they have gotten’ (quoted in Smith and Smith 1994: 435). The critical and questioning stance of the Centre and its freewheeling ways of work began to cause some concern amongst key elements of the Catholic hierarchy. Illich was not one to mince his words:

Upon the opening of our centre I stated two of the purposes of our undertaking. The first was to help diminish the damage threatened by the papal order. Through our educational programme for missionaries we intended to challenge them to face reality and themselves, and either refuse their assignments or – if they accepted – to be a little bit less unprepared. Secondly, we wanted to gather sufficient influence among the decision-making bodies of mission sponsoring agencies to dissuade them from implementing [Pope John XIII’s] plan. (Illich 1973b: 47-8)

The Vatican ordered Ivan Illich to leave CIDOC. However, he held out, eventually resigning all of his offices and church salaries. The Centre had broadened its appeal considerably and was known for exploring the many themes identified with Illich.

While still committed to the Church, Ivan Illich was also opposed to Pope John XXIII’s 1960 call for North American missionaries to ‘modernize’ the Latin American Church. He wanted missionaries to question their activities, learn Spanish, and recognize and appreciate the limitations of their own (cultural) experiences. He believed they should ‘develop assumptions that would facilitate them to assume their duties as self-proclaimed adult educators with humility and respect’ (Smith and Smith 1994: 435). Illich was summoned to Rome where he faced criticism of his ‘dangerous’ doctrinal opinions and attitude toward the Church. Illich refused to engage with this, and in 1969, he withdrew from Church service. He did not renounce his priesthood but simply stopped exercising it. Many of his important writings from the 1960s were included in two books published a year or so later: Celebration of Awareness and The Church, Change and Development.

Stage 2. Exploring and outlining the limits industrial societies must endorse to retain their humanity. Between 1971 and 1976 an extraordinary series of books appeared that set out some of the key changes that needed to happen if social paralysis and an ecological catastrophe were to be avoided. These explorations began with Deschooling Society. His chronicling of the negative effects of schools and his development of a critique of the ‘radical monopoly’ of the dominant technologies of education in Deschooling Society (1973) echoed concerns held well beyond libertarian and anarchist circles.

Illich then applied his critique to energy consumption (Energy and Equity – 1974), and memorably to medical treatment (Medical Nemesis – 1976). In Tools for Conviviality (1975), Ivan Illich provided a more general exploration of his concerns and critique. He offered some possible standards by which to judge ‘development’ (with an emphasis on mutuality, human-scale technology etc.). Throughout he infused his work with an ecological understanding. He wasn’t just writing these ground-breaking texts, he was touring – giving lectures and interviews and participating in seminars and conferences.

Ivan Illich’s work continued. The pieces in Toward a History of Needs (1978) and Shadow Work (1981) largely look to the economics of scarcity, (i.e. that the predominant dynamic in both ‘developed’ and ‘under-developed’ economies lies in the desire to profit through the provision of goods and services in sectors where there is a ‘scarcity, rather than the wish to share subsistence). However, Illich’s thinking no longer resonated in the same way with the dominant mood in the discourses of northern education systems. At a time when there was increasing centralized control, a growing emphasis on nationalized curricula, and a concern to increase the spread of the bureaucratic accreditation of learning, his advocacy of deinstitutionalization (deschooling) and more convivial forms of education were hardly likely to make much ground.

Stage 3: Travelling new roads – and the impact of Gender. Somewhere around 1976, Ivan Illich ‘began to travel on new roads, spending time in India, Japan and Southeast Asia’ (Cayley 2021: 17). As we have seen, in that year, CIDOC had closed. He had begun to recognize that his efforts to contain and redirect medicine, schooling, and energy usage had been undermined ‘by myths or certainties lying below the level of everyday thought’ (op. cit.). As a result, he returned to the study of history. By 1982 he had concluded that gender was a key area for exploration:

As a historian, I want to trace the origins of women’s economic subservience; as an anthropologist, I want to grasp what the new gradation reveals about kinship where it occurs; as a philosopher, I want to clarify what this repetitive pattern tells us about the axioms of popular wisdom. (Illich 1983, 2011. Ch1.)

As he says early in the resulting book, ‘It was not easy to spell out what I have to say’ (op.cit.). When all this was first shared with colleagues and friends, a number counselled restraint and the need for care in how the arguments were approached. They also drew his attention to the necessity for further and more substantial research. Unfortunately, he did not take this advice. The book’s tone was ‘often polemical and, at times, pontifical… and abrasive’ (Cayley 2021: 205). It needed a lot more work to ensure that the book hit the right tone for the times – and addressed, in particular, the problem identified by Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1983) that he had mistaken the ideology of gender for its practice. The result was that Gender was both misunderstood and flawed. There was merit, for example, in his argument that ‘the fight against sexism converges with efforts to reduce environmental destruction and endeavours to challenge the radical monopoly of goods and services over needs’ (Illich 1983, 2011, p. 120). However, the task he had set himself was difficult to handle in the short text form he had adopted in earlier books. One of the results was that Illich’s reputation suffered – particularly amongst progressives – and, as Cayley (2021: 200) again comments, ‘his audience there mostly fell away’. Invitations to speak and write slackened.

Stage 4: The age of systems and modernity as an extension of church history. While there were some upsides to the fading of his ‘celebrity status’, it has meant that Ivan Illich’s later work did not gain the attention it should. He went on to explore the development of literacy practices in ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988). However, the arguments he develops in In the Vineyard of the Text (Illich 1993) merit particular attention. David Cayley (2021: 19-20) highlights two central themes from this period:

There had been a change in what Illich called the mental space in which many people live’. He described this as a shift from an age of instrumentality to an age of systems.
The hypothesis that modernity can be explored as an extension of church history. Aspects of this had appeared in Deschooling Society and Gender. However, he continued to develop this premise (see The Rivers North of the Future [Illich 2005]).

We return to these themes a little later (see systems).

Later life

Ivan Illich had set himself against building up a school of followers (Finger and Asún 2001: 7). However, as Carl Mitcham has argued, his thinking and life had influenced a small, but close circle of friends (listen to Mitcham’s [2020] conversation with L. C. Sachas). Representative of what might be called the Illich community of reflection are, for example, Barbara Duden’s The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Wolfgang Sachs’ The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, Lee Hoinacki’s El Camino: Walking to Santiago de Compostela and David Schwartz’s Who Cares? Rediscovering Community.

After the 1980s Ivan Illich divided his time between Mexico, the United States, and Germany. He was a Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Science, Technology, and Society at Penn State – and also taught at the University of Bremen. He continued to live frugally and ‘opened his doors to collaborators and drop-ins with great generosity, running a practically non-stop educational process which was always celebratory, open-ended and egalitarian’ (Todd and La Cecla 2002).

In the early 1990s, he was diagnosed as having cancer but continued to work. True to his thinking (as expressed, for example, in Medical Nemesis) he insisted on administering his medication. This was against the advice of his doctors, ‘who proposed a largely sedative treatment which would have rendered his work impossible’ (Todd and La Cecla 2002). He fought ‘against the loss of death as a personal act’ (Cayley 2021: 448).

Ivan Illich died at home in Bremen, Germany on December 2, 2002.

Deschooling, institutionalization, expert power, commodification and counterproductivity

As Ian Lister commented in his introduction to After Deschooling, What? (Illich 1976: 6), a central, coherent feature of Ivan Illich’s work on deschooling is a critique of institutions and professionals and how they contribute to dehumanization. ‘[I]nstitutions create the needs and control their satisfaction, and, by so doing, turn the human being and her or his creativity into objects’ (Finger and Asún 2001: 10).

Ivan Illich’s argument can be said to have four aspects (op. cit.):

A critique of the process of institutionalization. Modern societies appear to create more and more institutions – and great swathes of the way we live our lives become institutionalized. ‘This process undermines people – it diminishes their confidence in themselves, and in their capacity to solve problems… It kills convivial relationships. Finally, it colonizes life like a parasite or a cancer that kills creativity’ (Finger and Asún 2001: 10).

A critique of experts and expertise. Ivan Illich’s critique of experts and professionalization was set out in Disabling Professions (1977a) and in Medical Nemesis (1975b). The latter book famously began, ‘The medical establishment has become a major threat to health’ (ibid.: 11). The case against expert systems like modern health care is that they can produce damage which outweigh potential benefits; they obscure the political conditions that render society unhealthy; and they tend top expropriate the power of individuals to heal themselves and to shape their environment (op. cit.). Finger and Asún (2001: 10) set out some of the elements:

Experts and an expert culture always call for more experts. Experts also have a tendency to cartelize themselves by creating ‘institutional barricades’ – for example proclaiming themselves gatekeepers, as well as self-selecting themselves. Finally, experts control knowledge production, as they decide what valid and legitimate knowledge is, and how its acquisition is sanctioned.

A critique of commodification. Professionals and the institutions in which they work tend to define an activity, in this case learning, as a commodity (education), ‘whose production they monopolize, whose distribution they restrict, and whose price they raise beyond the purse of ordinary people and nowadays, all governments’ (Lister in Illich 1976: 8). Ivan Illich put it this way:

Schooling – the production of knowledge, the marketing of knowledge, which is what the school amounts to, draws society into the trap of thinking that knowledge is hygienic, pure, respectable, deodorized, produced by human heads and amassed in stock….. [B]y making school compulsory, [people] are schooled to believe that the self-taught individual is to be discriminated against; that learning and the growth of cognitive capacity, require a process of consumption of services presented in an industrial, a planned, a professional form…; that learning is a thing rather than an activity. A thing that can be amassed and measured, the possession of which is a measure of the productivity of the individual within the society. That is, of his social value. (quoted by Gajardo 1994: 715)

Learning becomes a commodity, ‘and like any commodity that is marketed, it becomes scarce’ (Illich 1975: 73). Furthermore, echoing Marx, Ivan Illich notes how such scarcity is obscured by the different forms that education takes. This is a similar critique to that made by Fromm (1979) of the tendency in modern industrial societies to orient toward a ‘having mode’ – where people focus upon and organize around the possession of material objects. They, thus, approach learning as a form of acquisition. Knowledge becomes a possession to be exploited rather than an aspect of being in the world.

The development of the principle of counterproductivity. Finger and Asún (2001: 11) describe this as ‘probably Illich’s most original contribution’. Counterproductivity is how a fundamentally beneficial process or arrangement is turned into a negative one. ‘Once it reaches a certain threshold, the process of institutionalization becomes counterproductive’ (op. cit.). It is an idea that Ivan Illich applies to different contexts. For example, for travel, he argues that beyond a critical speed, ‘no one can save time without forcing another to lose it…[and] motorized vehicles create the remoteness which they alone can shrink’ (1974: 42).

The lines of this critique and argument concerning schooling are reasonably clear when set out like this. But Ivan Illich in his earlier writings, it has been said, tended to ‘obscure the essential elements’ (Lister 1976: 5). He was ‘an intellectual maverick who deals in metaphors and allegories’ and those who did not read the related works ‘were often confused as to what deschooling was all about’ (ibid.: 5-6). Several things need to be said about this.

First, it is unfair and incorrect to describe Illich as a maverick in this respect. His work on schooling was based on substantial experience of, and reflection on, different education systems.

Second, his focus, and that of his colleague Everitt Reimer, was on the social impact of schooling. Hence the title of the book: Deschooling Society. He and Reimer had begun to see how mass compulsory schooling created, rather reduced, injustice.

After ten years in which Puerto Rico was “the showcase for development,” the poorer half of students still only had a one-in-three chance of completing the obligatory five years of schooling. Worse, in Illich and Reimer’s view, the two-thirds who didn’t get through five years inevitably tended to attribute their social inferiority to their lack of schooling, since, even as they failed, they were being taught to see schooling as the index of success. (Cayley 2021: 96)

Third, his experience of schooling, combined, in particular, with his reading of Max Gluckman’s work as a social anthropologist led him to explore schooling as a ritual. It became clear to Illich, that this led those involved in the process – teachers, students, parents, policymakers – to ‘overlook what they are actually doing’ (op. cit.: 100-101). Schooling creates a series of myths. These are summarized by David Cayley as follows:

[F]irst of all, that learning is the product of teaching. Second, that learning is accumulation—we accumulate information and credits, and they become our property. Third, that learning is a package deal… If you want any part of the package, you must accept the whole package… Fourth, that learning is competitive and hierarchical: success is judged relative to others and to one’s advancement up a graded ladder. And finally, that learning can be standardized so that all can pursue variations of the same curriculum. (2021: 103-4)

In some respects, Ivan Illich didn’t point strongly enough to the shape of the argument he was developing. Chapter One of Deschooling Society begins as follows:

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

The chapter has the title ‘Why We Must Disestablish School’. Illich’s view was that just as there had been a move in the USA two centuries earlier to disestablish the monopoly of a single church, something similar had to occur in schooling. In particular, there needed to be variety and student choice. Here, it would have helped if, in particular, he had highlighted and developed this argument. In a later chapter, he discusses what he described as the ‘Institutional Spectrum’. At one end we find what he calls manipulative institutions – dominant bodies that define the contemporary period. Amongst this group we find law enforcement, the military, and ‘social agencies which specialize in the manipulation of their clients’ (Illich 1971/1973a Chapter 4). Schools can be found at this end of the spectrum. At the other end, ‘lie institutions distinguished by spontaneous use – the “convivial” institutions’ (op. cit.). They offer ‘amplified opportunity within formally defined limits, while the client remains a free agent’. Illich argued for the containment of manipulative schooling, and the growth of convivial exploration. A rebalancing of formal and informal education.

At this point, Illich significantly weakened his argument by failing to return to the work of John Amos Komenský (‘Comenius’) (1592-1670) – which he mentions elsewhere in the book. Komenský had developed a liberal pedagogic philosophy, ‘the central feature of which was its effective blending of authority and freedom in a manner unprecedented hitherto in the history of educational thought’ (Murphy 1995 p.6). This omission is particularly odd. Comenius/Komenský explicitly advocated restricting formal activities within schools and opening up shared and self-organized opportunities (see Comenius 1896, Hábl 2017, Murphy op. cit.). In other words, it looked to deschool a significant proportion of schooling and replace it with convivial engagement and exploration (see Jeffs and Smith Chapter 2 – forthcoming).

Part of the problem here may have been caused by Ivan Illich’s tendency at times to rely on what Gajardo (1994: 719), describes as intuition, ‘without any appreciable reference to the results of socio-educational or learning research’. Gajardo suggests that this may explain the limited acceptance of his educational theories and proposals. In some respects, however, the problem here may be less about reliance on intuition, than a focus on observation and reflection without a strong engagement with key educational thinkers. The limited acceptance of his thinking can be seen as largely resulting from government demands for ideological changes and a focus on the achievement of centrally defined outcomes. It may also be that Illich’s critique ‘overrated the possibilities of schools, particularly compared with the influence of families, television and advertising, and job and housing structures’ (Lister 1976: 10-11).

Ivan Illich recognized the limits of schooling but hadn’t connected fully with alternative and informal educational traditions. As Finger and Asún 2001: 11) have commented,

Illich is not against schools or hospitals as such, but once a certain threshold of institutionalization is reached, schools make people more stupid, while hospitals make them sick. And more generally, beyond a certain threshold of institutionalized expertise, more experts are counterproductive – they produce the counter effect of what they set out to achieve.

All this said, Ivan Illich’s critique remains deeply suggestive. While not rigorously linked to data, nor fully located in its theoretical traditions, it nevertheless, draws some important lines for exploration and interrogation. It also provides us with a means to judge the impact of institutions and experts. The dominance of the school and institutionalized education in our thinking about learning has tended to obscure and undermine other everyday or ‘vernacular’ forms. We have moved into a period when knowledge has become more commodified (see, for example, Leadbeater’s 2000 discussion of the knowledge economy). It may well be that the nature of schools as institutions and as places of meaningful social interaction and exploration could change – and it is to that we now turn.

Convivial alternatives

I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows to make and unmake, produce and consume – a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies. (Illich 1973a: 57)

The word ‘convivial’ has an appeal for many educators, pedagogues and animateurs. In everyday usage it looks to liveliness and being social (enjoying people’s company). However, while being concerned with individual interaction, Ivan Illich was also interested in institutions and ‘tools’ – physical devices, mental constructs and social forms. He argued for the creation of convivial, rather than manipulative institutions and saw conviviality as designating the opposite of industrial productivity.

Conviviality, Ivan Illich argued, involves ‘autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment’ (ibid.: 24). He sees this as being in ‘contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment’. He continues:

I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members. (op. cit.)

In convivial institutions (and the societies they make up) modern technologies serve ‘politically interrelated individuals rather than managers’. (Illich 1975: 12). Such institutions are characterized by ‘their vocation of service to society, by spontaneous use of and voluntary participation in them by all members of society (Gajardo 1994: 716). Ivan Illich (1975a) uses “convivial” as a technical term to designate a modern society of responsibly limited tools.’ He applied the term “convivial” to tools rather than to people, in the hope of forestalling confusion.

In many respects, Ivan Illich echoes the arguments of earlier practitioners and writers who recognized the power of association and the importance of local groups and networks in opening up and sustaining learning. He understands that the character of other institutions and arrangements needs to be changed if the ‘radical monopoly’ of schooling is to be overturned. Unfortunately, given the scope and depth of the literature and shared experience of these traditions of practice, Illich fails to attend properly to them. [Visit Association, la vie associative and lifelong learning for an introduction]. While he does advocate particular models of formal educational institutions he does not engage with the thinking and practice of earlier key explorers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (other than two brief references). As has already been noted, perhaps the most interesting developments in educational thinking in this area – those of John Amos Comenius (Komenský) (1592-1670) – are mentioned but also not properly explored.

Learning webs – new formal educational institutions

In Deschooling Society Ivan Illich argued that a good education system should have three purposes: to provide all that want to learn with access to resources at any time in their lives; make it possible for all who want to share knowledge etc. to find those who want to learn it from them; and to create opportunities for those who want to present an issue to the public to make their arguments known (1973a: 78). He suggests that four (possibly even three, he says) distinct channels or learning exchanges could facilitate this. These he calls educational or learning webs.

Exhibit 1: Ivan Illich on learning webs

Educational resources are usually labelled according to educators’ curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four different approaches which enable the student to gain access to any educational resource which may help him to define and achieve his own goals:

1. Reference services to educational objects – which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories and showrooms like museums and theatres; others can be in daily use in factories, airports or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or on off-hours.

2. Skill exchanges – which permit persons to list their skills, the conditions under which they are willing to serve as models for others who want to learn these skills and the addresses at which they can be reached.

3. Peer-matching – a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.

4. Reference services to educators-at-large – who can be listed in a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, paraprofessionals and freelancers, along with conditions of access to their services. Such educators… could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients. (Illich 1973a: 81)

____________________________

Such an approach to education found some enthusiastic proponents within non-formal education (see, for example, the work of Paul Fordham et. al.1979). More recently, such themes have appeared in a sanitized form in some policy pronouncements around lifelong learning and the so-called learning society. Writers like Leadbeater (2000: 112) rediscovered Ivan Illich, and argued for a partially deschooled society. ‘More learning should be done at home, in offices and kitchens’, he writes, ‘in the contexts where knowledge is deployed to solve problems and to add value to people’s lives’. However, there can be a cost for this. The reference to ‘adding value’ hints at this. As Ivan Illich himself argued, ‘educators freed from the restraint of schools could be much more effective and deadly conditioners’ (Illich 1975: 74). Without a full realization of the political and ethical dimensions of conviviality, what can happen is not so much de-schooling but re-schooling. The activities of daily life become more deeply penetrated by commodification and the economic and social arrangements it entails. Learning becomes branded (Klein 2001: 87-105) and our social and political processes are dominated by the requirements of corporations (Monboit 2001).

Informal education – changing the character of other institutions and formations

Ivan Illich argues for changes to all institutions so they may be more convivial for learning.

A radical alternative to a schooled society requires not only new formal mechanisms for the formal acquisition of skills and their educational use. A deschooled society implies a new approach to incidental or informal education…. [W]e must find more ways to learn and teach: the educational qualities of all institutions must increase again. (Illich 1973a: 29-30)

Again, unfortunately, Ivan Illich does not explore this in any depth – and it has been up to those seeking to encourage more dialogical forms of everyday living to develop an appreciation of what this might mean in practice for educators and policymakers. Ivan Illich’s critique of development and his ‘call for the creation of a radically new relationship between human beings and their environment’ has not played a significant part in the mainstream of policy and practice (Finger and Asún 2001: 14). In more recent years one of the strongest arguments for the need to examine the learning potential of institutions was from those like Peter Senge who ought to alter the character of business organizations (creating so-called ‘learning organizations‘). While some of these writers had a concern with dialogue and organizational forms that are more just, many have not had the sorts of interests and commitments that Ivan Illich described as ‘convivial’. In some respects, the interest in social capital (most significantly expressed in the work of Robert Putnam 2000) was more hopeful. The importance of convivial institutions is recognized in the sustaining of community – but social capital, because it is also linked to economic advancement, can be easily co-opted in the service of non-convivial activities (as the involvement of the World Bank in promoting the notion may suggest).

Pedagogy

Over the last twenty years, there has been a growing interest in pedagogy and social pedagogy in the UK and North America. Social pedagogy generally describes work straddling social work, social care and education. It embraces, for example, the activities of youth workers, residential and daycare workers (with children or adults), informal and specialist educators within schools, community educators and workers, and play and occupational therapists. As an idea sozial pädagogik first started being used around the middle of the nineteenth century in Germany as a way of describing alternatives to the dominant models of schooling. However, by the second half of the twentieth century, social pedagogy became increasingly associated with social work and notions of social education in many European countries. Within the traditions that emerged there has been a concern with the well-being or happiness of the person, and with what might described as a holistic and educational approach. This has included an interest in social groups – and how they might be worked with (see social groupwork). [See Social pedagogy: the development of theory and practice].

Pedagogy itself can be seen as a process of accompanying people and:

working to bring flourishing and relationship to life (animation)
caring for, and about, people (caring); and
drawing out learning (education).

This is a rather different understanding of pedagogy to that found in usage within mainstream English-language discussions within teaching and schooling – but will be familiar to many practitioners in mainland Europe (see Animate, care, educate – the core processes of pedagogy and What is pedagogy? A definition and discussion).

Illich rarely uses the term ‘pedagogy’ in his work. It might be that he simply fell in with the common confusion of pedagogy and teaching in much English language usage. Another possibility might be that the significant amount of time he spent in Austria and Germany was occupied by historical studies and later the Age of Systems. Had he engaged with the debates around, and practice of, sozial pädagogik his work around schooling and convivial alternatives might have had a more sustained presence in contemporary debates.

The Age of Systems

In a lecture given at the 1994 Qualitative Health Research Conference in Pennsylvania (and reproduced as the Preface to the 1995 edition of Limits to Medicine – Medical Nemesis) Ivan Illich reflects on a ‘serious flaw’ in the approach he took in the book.

I then conceived of health as ‘the intensity of autonomous coping ability’. When I wrote that, I was unaware of the corrupting effect that system-analytic thinking would soon have on perceptions and conceptions. I was unaware that by construing health in this self-referentially cybernetic fashion, I unwittingly prepared the ground for a worldview in which the suffering person would get even further out of touch with the flesh. I neglected the transformation of the experience of body and soul when well-being comes to be expressed by a term that implies functions, feedbacks and their regulation.

Profound changes had occurred and Illich in his own estimation had failed to attend to them fully in his work of the 1970s. We had entered, what he was to call, the Age of Systems. This entailed a major shift from ‘an age in which instrumental rationality had been the dominant note’ (Cayley 2021. p.246). Early editions of the book, David Cayley argues, took it for granted that:

… its readers are in a position to do something about the technical and institutional overgrow he describes. Whether he is talking about deschooling society, curbing medical nemesis, or drastically reducing dependence on energy slaves, Illich imagines a public that views schools, hospitals, and automobiles as tools (i.e., as means to an end) and that feels responsible for them. But to use a tool, or feel responsible for how it is used, one must stand apart from it. And this critical distance was exactly what Illich thought was collapsing in the age of systems. What if social space no longer possessed the clarity, stability, and dimensionality that would allow it to be restructured in the ways he had proposed?

From the twelfth to the twentieth century it was possible, according to Illich, to draw a line between tools and users (op. cit. pp. 248-9). We now live in a fundamentally different age in which artificial intelligence is employed to diagnose illness and manage treatments. This is how Illich talked about this shift in The Rivers North of the Future:

I realized that people were being absorbed or integrated into systems in a way that went beyond what I had at first thought. And I found the necessary rethinking very demanding. As long as I spoke of a successful university student as somebody who had swallowed the assumptions of the school system, I was still speaking of somebody who conceived himself as a producer and consumer of knowledge and, in some way, a citizen, somebody who could recognize his privilege as a citizen, and, by claiming a right to that privilege, provide grounds for its extension to everyone… But what of the person who has himself been swallowed by the world conceived as a system, a world represented or made present to his fantasy in a disconnected but seductive sequence of visiotypes? In this case the possibility of political engagement, and the language of needs, rights, and entitlements, which could be used during the 1960s and 1970s, ceases to be effective. All one can wish for now is to get rid of the glitches, as I think they are called in communication theory, or to adjust inputs and outputs more responsively. (2005, Chapter 13).

In some ways, Illich’s direction is echoed in Jonathan Haidt’s later (2024) work on the negative impact of smartphones and social media on the lives and development of children and young people. Haidt was particularly concerned by the various mechanisms and systems used by large tech companies to attract and retain large-scale usage of their products.

Companies that strive to maximize “engagement” by using psychological tricks to keep young people clicking were the worst offenders. They hooked children during vulnerable developmental stages, while their brains were rapidly rewiring in response to incoming stimulation. This included social media companies, which inflicted their greatest damage on girls, and video game companies and pornography sites, which sank their hooks deepest into boys. By designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale. (Haidt 2024, Introduction)

He goes on to argue for some sensible constraints on the use of these systems (op. cit., Part 4). These included not allowing smartphones before high school; social media before 16; and phones in schools. On the ‘positive side’ there was a fundamental need to encourage far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.

There can be little doubt that the excessive use of social media can have a significant impact on users. Over-reliance on smartphones etc. similarly reduces educational achievement (Amez and Baert 2020) and the capacity to develop meaningful face-to-face relationships with others. However, there remain some significant questions regarding the connection with mental health (see, for example, Odgers [2024]). This said, these mechanisms need to be seen and treated as tools, and their users are in a position to take responsibility for how they are used. As Cayley argues above, people must be able to stand apart from such processes. Illich had identified that this critical distance was collapsing in the age of systems.

Conclusion

Ivan Illich’s concern for conviviality – on the ordering of education, work, and society as a whole in line with human needs, and his call for the ‘deprofessionalization’ of social relations has provided an important set of ideas upon which educators concerned with mutuality and sociality can draw. His critique of the school and call for the deschooling of society hit a chord with many workers and alternative educators. Further, Ivan Illich’s argument for the development of educational webs or networks connected with an interest in ‘non-formal’ approaches, and with experiments in ‘free’ schooling. Last, his interest in professionalization and the extent to which medical interventions, for example, actually create illness has added to the critique of professions and a concern to interrogate practice by informal educators – especially those in more ‘community-oriented’ work. As Gajardo (1994: 717) has commented, ‘if… we separate Illich’s thought from its emotional context, it is interesting to realize how thought-provoking some of his suggestions and proposals are’.

Erich Fromm, in his introduction to Celebration of Awareness (Illich 1973: 11) describes Ivan Illich as follows:

The author is a man of rare courage, great aliveness, extraordinary erudition and brilliance, and fertile imaginativeness, whose whole thinking is based on his concern for man’s unfolding – physically, spiritually and intellectually. The importance of his thoughts… lies in the fact that they have a liberating effect on the mind by showing new possibilities; they make the reader more alive because they open the door that leads out of the prison of routinized, sterile, preconceived notions.

Forty years later Charles Taylor could similarly argue:

Illich, in his overall vision and in the penetrating historical detail of his arguments, offers a new road map, a way of coming to understand what has been jeopardized in our decentred, objectifying, discarnate way of remaking ourselves, and he does so without simply falling into the clichés of anti-modernism. (Foreword to Illich 2005)

Ivan Illich’s critique of the process of institutionalization in education and his setting of this in the context of the desirability of more convivial relationships retains considerable power. As Finger and Asún (2001: 14-15) have argued, the ‘forgotten Illich’ offers considerable potential for those wanting to build educational forms that are more fully human, and communities that allow people to flourish. For Illich, there was also the malaise created by the age of systems.