Deschooling Society (Education)

The poor need funds to enable them to learn, not to get certified for the treatment of their alleged disproportionate deficiencies.

They are making the discovery that no amount of dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness of welfare institutions, once the professional hierarchies of these institutions have convinced society that their ministrations are morally necessary.

renders them increasingly incapable of organizing their own lives around their own experiences and resources within their own communities.

And nowhere else should it be so evident that poverty- once it has become modernized-has become resistant to treatment with dollars alone and requires an institutional revolution.

and disabled by their lack of schooling. Modernized poverty combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency.

The poor have always been socially powerless. The increasing reliance on institutional care adds a new dimension to their helplessness: psychological impotence, the inability to fend for themselves.

We need research on the possible use of technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction and the emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by technocrats. We need counterfoil research to current futurology.

In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery.

in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.