More On Education

"Deschooling Society" (Ivan Illich, 1971) is another take on the woes of modern education (other takes are linked, below). The central claim is that "universal education through schooling is not feasible"; instead "opportunities for learning, sharing, and caring" should be cultivated.

A distinction is made between drills, which maybe aren't popular but could get you good at counterpoint or shooting free throws, verses an open environment where the fruits of those drills could be explored. Instruction versus education.

Limiting employment to those who have sat around in school for long enough does seem a dubious practice. Without certificates, there could be tests for competence, or maybe a workplace could provide for suitable training on-site. However, few question the (recent) consignment of young humans to mandatory schools for a large number of years. Do you remember when you were first bundled off to a classroom? Is continuing education expected?

A point is made that grades and graduations are much like religious rites of passage. Good as far as rituals go, but maybe not ideal for learning or education. Kafka's castle is mentioned, as is usual when discussing such bureaucracies.

> Contemporary society is the result of conscious designs, and educational opportunities must be designed into them. Our reliance on specialized, full-time instruction through school will now decrease, and we must find more ways to learn and teach: the educational quality of all institutions must increase again. But this is a very ambiguous forecast. It could mean that men in the modern city will be increasingly the victims of an effective process of total instruction and manipulation once they are deprived of even the tenuous pretense of critical independence which liberal schools now provide for at least some of their pupils.

An analogy is made between institutions and the left-right political axis; the author places schools even more to the right (near total asylums) than the problematic public highway for the private car: "the law compels no one to drive, whereas it obliges everyone to go to school". My own experience suggests that doing without a car is workable, if problematic, but that going without a university degree would have been much more troublesome.

> A durable-goods economy is precisely the contrary of an economy based on planned obsolescence. A durable-goods economy means a constraint on the bill of goods. Goods would have to be such that they provided the maximum opportunity to "do" something with them: items made for self-assembly, self-help, reuse, and repair.

But that sort of repair and reuse may not help grow the GDP as much as it should.

time-for-plan-b.png

> Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.

This reminds me of some computer games.

> I believe that no more than four--possibly even three--distinct "channels" or learning exchanges could contain all the resources needed for real learning. The child grows up in a world of things, surrounded by people who serve as models for skills and values. He finds peers who challenge him to argue, to compete, to cooperate, and to understand; and if the child is lucky, he is exposed to confrontation or criticism by an experienced elder who really cares. Things, models, peers, and elders are four resources each of which requires a different type of arrangement to ensure that everybody has ample access to it.

A call for a right to education as a law in the constitution is made. This may not be self evident?

Another point is how the right to free assembly has been distorted through the obligatory stuffing of young humans into rooms and activities that fill most of their waking hours—how can they develop executive function if everything has been scheduled in advance? When can they learn to think? When can they explore, without risking being murdered by someone in a car?

> The disestablishment of schools will inevitably happen--and it will happen surprisingly fast. It cannot be retarded very much longer, and it is hardly necessary to promote it vigorously, for this is being done now.

And yet, in 2023, it is not hard to find folks complaining about the still extant mandatory education system. (Elsewhere the institutions are called inexorable.)

> Not to go where one can go would be subversive. It would unmask as folly the assumption that every satisfied demand entails the discovery of an even greater unsatisfied one. Such insight would stop progress.

Putting This Grind Into Practice

Someone while this article was being written coincidentally had to delete a bunch of records from an ad-hoc database. I asked whether they had guarded the statement in a transaction, so that if something went awry they could rollback. They had not done this, though had checked that the delete query looked okay before running it. All very normal. Now, this situation could be changed in various ways: why is someone who is not a Database Administrator (DBA) dabbling around with databases?

One approach would be to have specialized folks who handle all things database. Such specialization would have various advantages and drawbacks. Another approach would be to admit that non-DBA individuals will on occasion have need to run databases. Maybe the organization is not large enough to support a dedicated datastore service group, or the service group is too expensive or simply does not work for the specific need. In this case, it may be beneficial for the DBA to offer best practices through occasional training sessions, wikis, or so forth. Enough so that someone can learn where the sharp edges are, enough so that someone can then mostly learn on their own without having to stumble across or never hit on best practices. Maybe think about how to delete old data over time, since disk storage is finite? Or maybe rrdtool would be a better fit?

The specialist model here is very much the modern school model: DBA knowledge is kept scarce, is left to experts who perhaps have learned certain things in certain ways, and the job may be difficult for outsiders to break into. Especially if certification is used to raise barriers, and the knowledge is not shared. Ivan Illich advocates for something different than this artificial scarcity. Something of the "resources for self-learning and finding like-minded peers" does exist on the Internet, if you look around enough, though much of it may be locked into walled gardens or drowned out by all things popular or spam. So the Internet has some good, but also some bad.

> The wise student would periodically seek professional advice: assistance to set a new goal, insight into difficulties encountered, choice between possible methods.

The use of a DBA, above, is an arbitrary and accidental example. One can probably find other fields where the knowledge is even more scarce, or the barriers to entry are even higher. The ideal candidate must be able to B.S. about a relevant field.

/blog/2023/09/12/on-education.gmi

/blog/2023/08/30/education.gmi

gemini://perso.pw/blog/articles/rrdtool-light-monitoring.gmi