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 papers1, 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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