andrew j. cerniglia

Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society is unique in its ability to expose the distorted rationale of public schooling. This is not to say that his argument is completely convincing, but the time spent reading the 116 pages or so is certainly worthwhile. My time with the text has presented two questions.

• What assumptions does Illich make in his critique of the public education system?
• How does Illich’s views of public education relate to his views of society as a whole?

My assessment of each is addressed below.

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Recently I came upon a Twitter post from Darren Draper, the context of which was the writing of Ivan Illich, a radical academic prominent in the early 1970’s. I’ve since ordered one of his books from Amazon. It arrives Tuesday.

The general idea behind what Illich wrote, as I understand it from reading the initial blog posting from Christopher Sessums and two papers^{1, 2} I found using EBSCO is that schools are problematic in that they reinforce economic disparity while being inherently problematic in the way in which curricula is standardized and teachers act as both mentor and evaluator. I must admit that I find what little I know about his philosophy appealing. There is a general principle in martial arts that I think provides a useful analogy for how I interpret what Illich is saying. That is the ability to use an opponent’s energy against them; to redirect, if you will, that energy back towards the individual from whom it originated. I’ve never understood why more of this philosophy isn’t used more in public schooling. It seems that educators spend the majority of their time learning and then employing strategies meant to overcome the implicit resistance of students to learning the majority of the material that they are required, via legislation, to be able to regurgitate on standardized assessments.

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I haven’t written in a while and so I feel the need to write something. I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the course of the past couple of weeks working on family items. I’ve migrated from using LightRoom to Aperture now that I have a new computer that is able to provide the processing power that Aperture requires. Classes start again rather soon, in a week or two.

I’m a little unsettled now as to what direction I’ll head in terms of my dissertation. Some other students, Dr. Ingram, and myself had a real nice and interesting conversation related to the potential use of a “studio model” in an online classroom setting. I dedicated a significant amount of time prior to that meeting looking at how researchers go about organizing their data, and subsequently sifting through that information as they progress through their own idiosyncratic writing process. And long ago (it seems) I began by focusing on cognitive load, motivation, and ways of manufacturing time for teachers and students to meet one-on-one for brief periods of time.

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Photographers have a plethora of options when it comes to managing their digital assets. Off the top of my head I can name four rather conspicuous members of the group, Aperture, Lightroom, Photo Mechanic, and Portfolio. Each of these, in their own way, allows the photographer to quickly add metadata, resulting in quicker and more focused queries after storage. There are an entire libraries of books instructing photographers on the nuanced manner in which they should store, back-up, and generally manage their RAW files.

Software programmers are required to manage vast quantities of cryptic text. Additionally, they most often work on projects in groups, sharing code and a common vision for the way in which code is used, reused, and the way in which annotations (comments) are added to the code to ensure readability and consistency. The number of programming environments is also large. Apple’s XCode and the Eclipse platform are two very powerful solutions that are also free.

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If you’ve ever done any type of research, you are probably familiar with “keywords” or “subject terms” used by databases that index journal articles related to your field of interest. My understanding is that most journals allow authors to tag their articles with keywords of their own choosing. Let’s look at some examples from the submission guidelines for several of my favorite journals.

Educational Research

Articles should begin with a structured abstract and up to six keywords, and should not normally exceed 5,000 words.

Journal of Educational Psychology

All manuscripts must include an abstract containing a maximum of 180 words typed on a separate page. After the abstract, please supply up to five keywords or brief phrases. In fact, every journal listed on this page has the same requirements.

Educational Psychology Review

Directly below the abstract, provide 3–5 key words that express the manuscript’s precise content.

and, Teachers College Record does not reference, or I assume require, keywords.

I could go on and on. Zero specificity or guidance. Lists of suggested keywords are not mentioned. Now I know why I’ve so often seen the phrase “author supplied keywords”.

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