by Ivan Illich
As Bruno had done by reasoning on general principles, so Kepler, concerned with ordering his observations, replaced a mechanism of spheres by heavenly bodies following their orbits. Voyaging from earth to other planets of the sun thus became a reasonable subject for intellectual speculation in 1609. Mundus became a new Cosmos interpreted by a new set of myths. Kepler confided his transgression of the ‘spheric taboo’ to a private diary written in the form of a dream. Through an indiscretion, some pages of this manuscript became known and led to the arrest of Kepler’s mother and her confrontation with the instruments of torture, an experience from which she soon died. The Somnium was published two years after Kepler’s death.
I am under the impression that the educational debate, no matter how radical, is still only concerned with a rearrangement of social spheres on the model of pre-Kepler stargazers. Correct observations on shared imagery and shared competence are still used, like those of Brahe, to fit a redundant paradigm. Discussion ranges, and research moves about the convenience or the necessity to redefine, to relate, to develop, or to appropriately add new epicycles within this one sphere. And when such educational policy alternatives pretend to be fundamental, the relationship of the educational to the other spheres takes prominence as an issue. Should production or politics be at the center of the social system? Or should the two be related in a more complex way, perhaps on the model of Tycho Brahe? Should we prefer an all-encompassing system of spheres on the Copernican model? Or is it better to muddle through without an overall system, but relying on the proven approximations that Al Shatir’s eccentrics and epicycles permitted one to calculate, even though such a theory deals with only one Ptolemaic planet at a time? Shall the school system remain at the center? Or shall school be but one adjunct to the education that goes on, for example, in a Chinese commune? How shall we rank the different tools of education? Or how shall we relate the spheres of education, health, welfare, research, finance, economics, politics? I think that research on the model of Copernicus is not what we need in education.
Following Kepler’s example, we now need to recognize that the educational sphere is a construct analogous to the sphere of Mercury, and that the need of humans to be educated can be compared with the need of humans to live at the static center of the universe. This educational construct is mapped by an ideology that brought into being our convictions about homo educandus. The construct is socially articulated by a specific set of institutions, for which Alma Mater Ecclesia is the prototype. It is implanted into the world view of each individual by a double experience: first, by the latent curriculum of all educational programs, through which vernacular learning is inevitably debased and, second, through life in the opaque, passive, and paralyzing lifestyle that professional control over the definition and satisfaction of needs inevitably fosters. Finally, the construct of the educational sphere is zealously guarded by the various bodies of educators who identify educational needs in terms of problems for which they alone possess the social mission to find institutional solutions in and out of schools.
This construct of an educational sphere is thoroughly consistent with other similar constructs, especially the spheres of economics and politics. The process through which each of these spheres has been disembedded to the point of achieving a radical monopoly that paralyzes its corresponding vernacular homolog can be studied separately for each one. But research on the educational sphere can claim a certain priority. Studying the process through which this sphere, in its ideological construction and in the degradation and replacement of vernacular languages by taught mother tongue after the invention of the loudspeaker, permits unique insights into the analogous elements that went into the constitution of other social spheres. Education as a subject matter and as a discipline has been defined by the construct and constrained by its basic assumptions up to now. This cannot be otherwise for research in education. But research on the relations of the educational domain to the global ideology of a society, together with the history of these relations, constitutes the kind of study which ought to be called research on education.
The History of Homo Educandus
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Opening Speech at the Plenum of the 5th World Congress of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies Sorbonne, Paris, July 1984
Monsieur Debeauvais, thank you for the invitation to address this assembly. My lecture will take the form of a plea. I plead for research on the history of homo educandus. The object of such a history is the social construction of homo educandus and of the societal context within which his learning constitutes a process of personal enrichment with values that are assumed to be scarce. The organization of society in view of a human being in need of information and programming must be understood as a neglected aspect in the history of homo œconomicus.
I conceive of the social history of homo educandus as the opposite of the history of education. The history of homo educandus deals with the emergence of a social reality within which ‘education’ is perceived as a basic human need. Some of its elements take shape in Greek antiquity where the invention of the full alphabet first allowed the detachment of knowledge from the speaker. Without this alphabetic technique to fix a text and transmit an original, neither the literature nor the science with which education deals can be imagined. Other key elements that are presuppositions for education take shape between Alcuin and Albert the Great. Because only at the time of Alcuin are words first visually separated from each other, and the text becomes visible to the eye.
From then on it was possible to grasp the meaning of a text by looking at it, instead of pronouncing the words to make them understandable to the ear. Without this visualization of the text, there is no idea of ‘knowledge’ that is laid down and deposited in books, of knowledge that can be reproduced and communicated.
Sixty years ago Milman Parry introduced the distinction between orality and literacy into the study of epos and literature. His pupils have spelled out the importance of this detachment of language from the individual’s speech for the constitution of a new kind of truth. But their insights have not touched the core of educational theory, notwithstanding the great efforts made by Walter Ong and Jack Goody.
Even less has the importance of word division in the earlier Middle Ages been recognized in its importance to the ‘truth’ the educationalist presupposes. Only word division made it possible to copy texts by sight and, what is more important, to verify the textual identity of two books, thus conceiving the idea that an absolutely identical knowledge exists somewhere behind two individual copies. Even less than Milman Parry’s insights, has this touched education, except indirectly through the recuperation of Marshall McLuhan.
Without the historical evolution of this knowledge behind the text, John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) would have been unthinkable. It is this kind of truth which is needed by homo educandus whose history begins with him.
And so, at the time of Comenius the history of homo educandus begins, at least as a project and program: omnibus, omnia omnino docendi. With this intent to teach everybody everything thoroughly, the idea of homo educandus is defined. The new man is a being who ought to be taught whatever he should know or do.
The history of education stands in stark contrast to the history of homo educandus. The historian of education assumes the need for education as an a-historical given. The historian of education speaks as if, wherever there is human culture, there is also a knowledge stock that must be transmitted from generation to generation. He does not study the steps by which this need historically came into existence. He only studies how this need has been met by other societies in various times and in different ways.
The history of homo educandus must be distinguished from the history of education. But it must also not be reduced to the history of the interpretations that past societies have given to the pupil-teacher relationships which in their world were recognized as such. What meaning did Maimonides or Al Razi give to the teaching of young men? What meaning
did musiké have for Greeks before and after writing became one of its subjects at the time when Plato was a child? What did shastra mean for Brahmins and artes for Hugh of Saint-Victor? These are questions that have been well studied by our colleagues from different disciplines: in the history of ideas, the histoire des mentalités, historical semantics and philosophy. But from all these the history of homo educandus must be distinguished: first, because its object bears no comparison with any social reality outside of Western tradition and, second, because its object is currently considered a historically non-problematic fact.
As a result, the history of homo educandus has been neglected. Our colleagues are unwilling to recognize that education is a concept sui generis, inconceivable in other societies and therefore inapplicable for a historical description of their past. Education, as the term is now used, means learning under the assumption that this learning is a prerequisite for all human activities while, at the same time, the opportunities for this learning are by their very nature in scarce supply. Thus understood, learning is an aspect of life which can be adequately distinguished from other aspects. Learning precedes, if not temporally at least logically, the competent execution of a socially expected task. Starting from this idea, which fits education, innumerable social features of other societies can be classified as occasions for ‘learning.’ Wherever the historian of education finds a poetry recital, a ritual, an apprenticeship, an organized game, he smells educational activity.
All textbooks on the history of education that I have consulted deal with their subject under the assumption that learning as a scare entity has always existed and only appeared in different guise and form. Through this assumption even Neanderthal man is subsumed into the sub-species of homo educandus, and his transition to neolithic culture ascribed to more competent teaching how to split flint. Pedagogues are so anxious to prove their own legitimate descent from Socrates, Varro or Buddha, that for them the history of homo educandus has become a taboo. Economists have been faced with a similar taboo, but unlike educational theorists, they have tried to deal with it. In the late eighteenth century, they defined their science as the study of values under the assumption of their scarcity. Economics became the discipline dealing with the application of scarce means to alternate ends. As the concepts used by this discipline became more prestigious, economists too have tried to apply them to long past ages and very distant societies. In economics, however, right from the beginning, this practice, by which the past is homogenized to fit contemporary categories, has been challenged. In the first decade of our century, Elie Halévy demonstrated that social behavior regulated by utilitarian assumptions constitutes a radical break with any previously stated assumption about social relations. Thirty years later, Karl Polanyi focused on the emergence of markets in Greece, India, Mesopotamia. He documented the slow process by which a formal economy comes to be disembedded, but only in a certain society: social interactions based on the assumption of scarcity then appear, and for a long period remain limited to a very precise and narrow domain. By his teaching, Polanyi laid the foundation for the historical study of scarcity. Louis Dumont, more recently, has carefully described how, from Mandeville to Marx, a perception of human nature that fits the perception of scarcity came into being. He calls this construct of the human — man dependent on the use of and acquisition of scarce means — homo oeconomicus. I want to plead for analogous studies on the emergence of homo educandus.
The recognition of homo oeconomicus as a modern social construction has made it possible to understand better what traditional cultures are. All known traditional cultures can be conceived as meaningful configurations that have as their principal purpose the repression of those conditions under which scarcity could become dominant in social relations. Such cultures enforce rules of behavior that obviate the appearance of scarcity, and therefore undercut envy and the fear of it. A clear and simple exposition of this has been made by Muchembled and Dupuy. No doubt, some cultures become so organized that they tolerate enclaves within which the assumption of scarcity can determine new social mechanisms: they allow spaces in which peddlers and hucksters, certain Sikhs, Jews or Chinese, sophists and medicinemen, can sell their skills at the going price. But the tolerance of such behavior in outsiders only underlines that it is perceived as immoral if it were pursued by the insider of the culture. The resistance to the spread of the regime of scarcity throughout society at large is a common feature that distinguishes the human condition from the regime of scarcity that you, Monsieur Debeauvais, have so aptly called: ‘L’univers concentrationnaire.’
I am not saying that the recognition of scarcity as a social construction by economic historians and anthropologists has shaped industrial society, or that it has significantly affected economic thought. Alternative economics have barely been washed by it. However, the recognition of traditional culture as a remedy to the spread of scarcity and envy has laid the foundations for new theoretical departures and a new realism in the history of cultures and mentalities. What I plead for is an analogous attempt by those of us whose bread and butter is education. Once we recognize that the fundamental concepts with which we operate — educational needs, learning, scarce resources, etc. — correspond to a paradigm which is far from natural, the way to a history of homo educandus will be opened.
For two distinct reasons it is important that researchers in comparative education recognize that ‘learning under the assumption of scarce opportunities’ constitutes an incomparable feature of our unique kind of world. First, this would allow comparatists to limit their research to phenomena that do have common phenomenological features. This self-limitation would make the discipline into a more legitimate undertaking. Second, the recognition that the discipline deals with an odd, modern social phenomenon would make it possible to engage in disciplined comparisons between education and other social features that are heteronomous to education and, therefore, cannot be reduced to it. If this were done, comparative education could become one of the rare fields that attempts to clarify one of the least recognized and most characteristic aspects of our age: the survival, even at the heart of highly developed societies, of fantasies, behavioral rules and patterns of action that have successfully resisted colonization by the regime of scarcity. I expect that even though most of you come from education, many of you still know that you have never learned to walk or breathe.
Taught Mother Tongue
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Prepared for a meeting on ‘The Need for New Terminology to deal with “Mother Tongues”’, held at the Central Institute of Indian Languages. The lecture was given to honor Prof. D.P. Pattanayak Mysore, India, 1978
Language has become expensive. As language teaching has become a job, a lot of money is spent on the task. Words are one of the two largest categories of marketed values that make up the GNP. Money is spent to decide what shall be said, who shall say it, how, and when, and what kind of people should be reached by the utterance. The higher the cost of each uttered word, the more effort has gone into making it echo. In schools people learn to speak as they should. Money is spent to make the poor speak more like the wealthy, the sick more like the healthy, and the black more like the white. We spend money to improve, correct, enrich, and update the language of kids and that of their teachers. We spend more on the professional jargons that are taught in college, and still more in high schools to give each teenager a smattering of these languages: just enough to make them feel dependent on the psychologist, druggist, or librarian who is fluent in some special kind of English. We first spend money to make people as exclusively monolingual in standard, educated colloquial, and then — usually with little success — we try to teach them a minority dialect or a foreign tongue. Most of what goes on in the name of education is really language instruction, but education is by no means the sole public enterprise in which the ear and the tongue are groomed: administrators and entertainers, admen and newsmen form large interest groups, each fighting for their slice of the language p
ie. I do not really know how much is spent in the United States to make words.
Energy accounting was almost unthinkable only ten years ago. It has now become an established practice. Today — but really only since a couple of years ago — you can easily look up how many BTUs or other energy units have gone into growing, harvesting, packaging, transporting, and merchandising one edible calorie of bread. The difference is enormous between the bread that is grown and eaten in a village of Greece and the bread sold by the A&P; about 40 times more energy goes into the latter. About 500 times more energy units went into building one cubic foot of St Catherine’s College in Oxford in the sixties than was needed to build one cubic foot of the Bodleian Library which stands next door, and which I like much more. Information of this kind was available ten years ago, but nobody felt like tabulating it, and it made only a few people think. Today it is available, and very soon will change people’s outlook on the need for fuels. It would now be interesting to know what language accounting would look like. The linguistic analysis of contemporary language is certainly not complete unless, for each group of speakers, we know the amount of money that was spent on the speech of each person. Just as social energy accounts are only approximate and permit — at best — identifying the orders of magnitude within which the relative values are to be found, so language accounting would provide us with data on the relative prevalence of taught language in a population — which would be sufficient for the argument that I would like to make.