Against Education

The Japery has a roundup of some articles reflecting on the ideology of Education. Good old Ivan "Deschooling Society" Illich makes a showing, of course.

Particularly striking is one comment from this piece stating:

Comenius is the patron Saint of those who would transform creation into a classroom and humanity into students. Comenius legacy is the dis-enchantment of the world. The path of Comenius leads us, as Illich has pointed out, to the terrors of a world understood as a yet another device for the use of education and not as a good creation of a creators imaginative and windy engagement with chaos. Creation as a technique or method or as raw material to be used to manufacture the new humanity is the alchemical black magic of such noxious views as Skinnerian behaviourism or the re-education camps of the cultural revolution or even more insidious the liberal Christian view that salvation is won through proper schooling.

Secularization is possibly at work even in the putatively most backward arena of biology, "Creation Science."

An interesting passage from an interview with Illich:

I remember on my next trip to New York going to Princeton to see Jacques Maritain, the philosopher, who was then living there. We had met up in Rome in a seminar and he had become a dear friend and advisor. His imaginative Thomism meant a lot to me. He was then an old man with a face, as Ann Freemantle once said, cut from a stained glass window in Chartres. In 1957, I was now sitting there with him again. He had a teacup in his hand and was shaking when I talked to him about the question which bothered me, that in all his philosophy I didn't find any access to the concept of planning. He asked me if this was an English word for accounting, and I told him no ... if it was for engineering, and I said no ... and then at a certain moment he said to me, "Ah! Je comprends, mon cher ami, maintenant je comprends." Now I finally understand. "C'est une nouvelle espèce du pêche de presomption." Planning is a new variety of the sin of pride.

These pieces also bring to mind a short critique of John Henry Cardinal Newman's philosophy of education, Knowledge for the Sake of Knowledge