path: root/contents/interview/1970-qa_session_toronto/en.txt

# Q & A Session in OISE of Toronto in December 1970

**QUESTIONER:** What is your alternative to professional accreditation?

**ILLICH:** In a general way, I would say, a possibility is that if you define yourself as a professional, put your name into a computer and let anybody who uses your services, if he has an opinion on you, let him put into that computer his name next to your name and say, _"I'm willing to give information how I was satisfied with your services"_. And if I would need a service of a category in which you have defined yourself, and want to find out who is good, I ask that computer to give me the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the people who claim that they have something good or pad to say about you. I know that at first sight this might give special advantage to the charlatan, the demagogue, the actor, the quack, but it would certainly not give the same advantages, with the same cover of hypocrisy, with which now teachers, doctors, and lawyers get the same advantages.

**QUESTIONER:** To what extent would the peer-matching network insure the scholastic achievement which we now obtain through the university?

**ILLICH:** It would make it ridiculous.

**QUESTIONER:** Isn't what is happening here an ideal example to refute your statement that learning is not the result of teaching? Here we are learning and here you are teaching.

**ILLICH:** I am asking questions and you are not compelled to learn. I am myself amazed. Why do you show up?

**QUESTIONER:** Because I believe you are a good teacher.

**ILLICH:** But are you sure that I take myself for a teacher? Perhaps I take myself for a clown. You put me in the category of teacher. I might list myself as "entertainer". It is quite evident that in such a discussion, just because you speak about this, a very uncomfortable relationship, when one is conscious of it, between a man standing up here with all the power of seven microphones at this disposal and there somebody asking a question. Therefore, what would be quite healthy across the dinner table, which is among civilized people a way of fast moving from idea to idea, automatically becomes nasty. These games are.

**QUESTIONER:** Why should any state permit you to dis-establish it's schooling system -- its central religion?

**ILLICH:** Very, very fast pupils laugh at the idea that they go to school because they learn from teaching. They go there because they like to meet each other, because they have to go there, because they need the certificate. When I was here not even a year ago, I suggested in Canada that one of the most moral things to do would be to suggest that people seriously consider, in large numbers, as a matter of principle, to cheat at examinations. At that time, only nine months ago, such a proposal called forth an entirely different reaction of shock. Well, today it seems to be taken as something quite reasonable, normal, acceptable, as something virtuous almost. It is today considered realistic. Changes go very fast. Society is in the process of de-schooling. It is quite evident by 1970, not by 1968, that school is for professional competence. At this moment only ten or fifteen percent of the people will accept this. Within another year this will be the general opinion in society. It goes very fast. That's the reason I speak about a sudden change, like the change in the vortex pattern in a whirlpool. Then, of course, we have two big choices. Either we go the way of the Jacobin -- give the educator control over increasingly more media so that what society considers desirable will be more effectively transmitted through other channels than the classroom to all ages -- Or move in the direction of increasing establishment of learning networks, bridges, circulation systems for the information containing things or skilled persons and access to people with whom I want to meet, the right to call town meetings applied to modern society, true freedom of speech.

**QUESTIONER:** In a historical sense, which do you consider more plausible?

**ILLICH:** Totally more plausible (is) increased social control through a system even more horrible than schooling. But someone earlier made here the distinction between hope and expectation. I do believe that unless we introduce the basic values of trust (I can't trust institutions, I can trust only persons) and hope (I can't hope anything from an institution or a process but only from a person), instead of the concepts of reliability and expectation. our society, with or without schools, will become unlivable. But, on the other hand, if we want to insure that I and others get something specified and planned. I have to move in the direction of expectation and predictability, and narrow the range of hope and trust. Someone earlier asked about "cultural revolution." Cultural revolution is basically a profound loss of credibility in modern large scale institutions, and, therefore, the turning to individuals, to the other, to personal exchange as the only hope in trusts. This means in a modern society using the technology which we have, instead of the way we use it now mainly, to produce results for the purpose of providing bridges enabling people to contact in which they are equally givers and receivers, building networks rather than funnels and production centers of learning. And it depends on each of us in which way we move.

**QUESTIONER:** You use the word "development" and the word "imagination" quite often. Could you use those words in a fresh way or give me a fresh example of what you mean when you put those two words together?

**ILLICH:** I use "imagination" very much -- "imagination", "hope", "trust", "surprise" -- and personally would rather not use it in connection with the word "development" but with much more classical words "perfection", "maturity", "fulfillment". And I would use the words "expectation", "predictability", "growth", "development", more specifically when I speak about "progress". Because I would associate the first series of words with a state economy and with a subsistence world view, with a world view aimed at the concept that l1ife in a society can be as near as possible perfect, and not sometime in the future but right as it is now, while this second series of words -- "expectations", "predictability," "planning", "growth", "development", usually mean that society can be indefinitely in progress. In my opinion, the school system -- namely a system of graded promotion from teaching to teaching -- interiorizes, interjects the mentality of unending progress, while only learning networks can provide for the existence of a society with which we are basically content because it is such that we can learn what can be learned within that society. Do I answer your question?

**QUESTIONER:** Yes, but no one can see how we are going to disabuse ourselves of the notion of "progress".

**ILLICH:** Oh yes, the gentlemen over there pointed it out, by "progressing" our of existence.

**QUESTIONER:** Someone told me that your ideas were fine as long as they weren't made retroactive.

**ILLICH:** Hopefully not. My ideas are not meant to be retroactive. Let's face it, sometimes people ask me, "And where did you go to school?" Well, I was thrown out of school constantly. But anyway, I was associated with universities, and I must say, _"Long live universities which let themselves be exploited by individuals, by me for my purposes as those with which I've had contact"_. Right? This is a very nasty statement. Equally nasty would be the statement, _"Schools did move society from a sicklish late aristocratic, early bourgeois world of the late 18th century into a freer and more alive society of the late 19th and early 20th centuries"_. I do not want to criticize Jefferson's schools by which he wanted to rake a few geniuses textually from the ashes of the masses, or Horace Mann, the great man who invented (the idea) that if you put people who are evil into cages they become better. De Tocqueville, after all, came to the United States in order to study with Horace Mann about prison reform, but today Mann is known only for his brilliant ideas of putting young people into a brave new world of the classroom. What is significant I hope in the questions I raise -- I have no answers, friend, I really don't know where this all leads, and sometimes I'm frightened thinking of what one does when one demoralizes people's attachment to idols -- but if there is anything significant it is to point out what school means today, not in 1960, not in 1940. Do I make myself understood with this?

**QUESTIONER:** Yes, but people do not necessarily share your good opinion about the human race.

**ILLICH:** I don't know where the "human race" is, but I do have a very good opinion of most of the people whom I know. Two sentences of the Archbishop of Recife's which go in this direction: _"I believe that there is a little spark in the darkest human being and the size of its expansion depends on my looking at it and seeing it"_. And the second sentence, a beautiful poem: _"Lord, I'm so frightened sometimes because there are so many doors in me which can be opened only from the outside, and sometimes I think that the people whom you have given the keys aren't around anymore, that I won't meet them anymore"_. But certain institutions cannot look at you. By exposure to school the flame doesn't grow.

**QUESTIONER:** I'm under the impression that schools and churches have great social value as centers of convergence.

**ILLICH:** By all means. I do believe that the school at this moment is, in that sense, the world church of 1970. It has been adopted according to exactly the same liturgy or ritual of four times, four quanta, of four years each, of 500 to 1,000 hours of specialized sitting, from China to Indonesia, and from Peru to Canada. Everywhere, the school has the same ritual purpose of hiding the discrepancy between the goals which the idealogues propose of a humanistic society, the creation of the new man, the free society, the independent society, the egalitarian society, etc., and a growth economy which necessarily polarizes consumption and increases many more demands than it can satisfy. It is, therefore, the great instrument for convergence in the entire world of the contradictions which are basic in this world. Schools have become independent from the political system or the ideology proposed in a country. Do I make myself clear? Everywhere we reproduce the same consumer society, no matter what the ideologue tells you. That is the reason why it is so highly uncomfortable to speak about it and why I had to say the gentleman was right when he asked, _"What are the probabilities?"_

**QUESTIONER:** How can we educate people to be more human?

**ILLICH:** I can't educate people to be more human. I can only provide them with the access to the resources which they need, might judge to want, for their purpose.

**QUESTIONER:** But someone may want to be a scientist.

**ILLICH:** What does it mean to be a scientist?

**QUESTIONER:** Let's say someone wants to learn to send a rocket to the moon. How could you humanize that person?

**ILLICH:** I don't see why you should do that. It has nothing to do with education.

**QUESTIONER:** What I mean is that before teaching a skill a person should be rendered more human. I'll be specific. In Germany highly trained and skilled people supported Hitler. Isn't it necessary to educate people to become more humane?

**ILLICH:** I agree with you completely. Of course it is a necessity. But I don't see any other way in which we can provide for it but opening the world, making it more transparent, not believing that we can bring a phony world into the classroom, or permit children to re-constitute their world in the classroom, but making the street corner, and the candy store, and the commons, to speak in old terms, accessible both for a give and a take. That's all.

**QUESTIONER:** Are you saying that the child in the classroom should be left to learn only what he wants to learn?

**ILLICH:** I don't want him to go to the classroom. I want the child to learn what he wants to learn, and only what he wants to learn.

**QUESTIONER:** Why not in the classroom?

Ilich: I'm not interested in the classroom. I'm not interested in prison education.

**QUESTIONER:** But we have classrooms. That's where we find the children.

**ILLICH:** All right. That's your business. I would tell the kids, "Go away from there, you don't have to stay there." I would tell them to shop around.

**QUESTIONER:** Do you have any children?

**ILLICH:** May I answer this question in kind? Even if you have offspring, why do you have to transform it into children? Why do you have to maintain the culture of childhood? It's a luxury which we can not afford. Look here, up until the 16th century the idea did not exist in Western culture, at least between the 6th and the 16th century, which I know. In the 16th or 17th century people began to produce children. It was only school which had to be invented in order to mass produce the sub-culture of childhood. I'm not saying there are not some good things about it. But Marx points out that forbidding children to work is really no solution, because it only provides excuses for making work inhuman. Unless we are committed to absolutely a growth society producing increasingly more demands in order to be able to satisfy them in increasingly more costly products or services, there is no reason why we couldn't develop a leisure society in which all people have the privileges which we now suggest that only children should have. But as long as we stay with the society which we now are committed to have, all over the world most people will not have childhood. The poor in rich countries will increasingly and constantly complain that they can't have the childhood or the youth of the rich. And those that get childhood will rebel against it because it is a definition which they don't feel is corresponding to their own self-image.

**QUESTIONER:** Are you suggesting that adults should behave like children?

**ILLICH:** I would like to make a distinction between being childish and childlike. I'm in the midst of trying historically to understand this distinction. I'm running into great difficulties. I find out that the ideal of childlikeness, which through the Christian tradition, particularly Gospel tradition, came into the Western world, doesn't refer to childhood at all, but to a healthy relationship to one's parent, especially to one's father. Therefore, _"Blessed are those that are childlike"_, might mean, _"Blessed are those that have a balanced, healthy relationship to their parents"_. It may not have anything to do with: _"Blessed are those that are little kids"_.

**QUESTIONER:** Does cable television offer possibilities for doing what you want done in making resources available to everyone?

**ILLICH:** In Latin America with the amount of money which we spend now on television we could provide every seventh Latin American with a tape recorder and make tapes as amply available as you want. A tape recorder gives everybody the equal opportunity to produce a program or to listen to one. Cable television is far better in this, even in the very best of cases. I just heard of the possibility in the United States of hooking yourself up nationally with any five or ten people fir two dollars an hour on a one hour telephone conversation. For a certain level of people and for a certain task it already goes in the direction of the equal access of everybody to everybody else.

At the end of the question and answer period Illich said:

To sum up this whole evening, I'm suggesting that we are in front of a major choice. For a variety of reasons, the simplest one and most evident one (of which is) the unbearable cost to provide people with the amount of classroom learning they have learned to expect, the school is moving into a crisis. The necessity of de-schooling will be quite evident within the next twelve to eighteen months. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just by saying it, it will happen. There's no question about it. The key question is: Will we move in one of the two ways in which we can move in order to de-school education without de-schooling society, to use slogan. Namely, the Bourbon one, which states, let us have some schools for some people and finance them well rather than disperse the limited resources which we have for education, trusting that people will use learning resources put at their disposal. The second way is the Jacobin answer which says we must expand the classroom beyond its walls by using every aspect of society in order to teach. Or, from the point of view of educators and free people who want to learn, say: _"I want to learn. What I need in order to learn are access to things, skill exchanges, peer matching, and finding masters"_.