Deschooling Society (Open Forum S)

3. To liberate the critical and creative resources of people by returning to individual persons the ability to call and hold meetings—an ability now increasingly monopolized by institutions which claim to speak for the people. 4. To liberate the individual from the obligation to shape his expectations to the services offered by any established profess

It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.

with which to acquire fundamental skills. Beyond that minimum, further credits would go to those who earned them by teaching, whether they served as models in organized skill centers or did so privately at home or on the playground. Only those who had taught others for an equivalent amount of time would have a claim on the time of more advanced tea

After a short visit to New York, a woman from a Mexican village told me she was impressed by the fact that stores sold “only wares heavily made up with cosmetics.” I understood her to mean that industrial products “speak” to their customers about their allurements and not about their nature. Industry has surrounded people with artifacts whose inner

What is common to all true master-pupil relationships is the awareness both share that their relationship is literally priceless and in very different ways a privilege for both.

We must first construct a society in which personal acts themselves reacquire a value higher than that of making things and manipulating people.

Invariably, it

doctor. If schools ceased to be compulsory, teachers who find their satisfaction in the exercise of pedagogical authority in the classroom would be left only with pupils who were attracted by their style.

Someone who wants to learn knows that he needs both information and critical response to its use from somebody else. Information can be stored in things and in persons. In a good educational system access to things ought to be available at the sole bidding of the learner, while access to informants requires, in addition, others’ consent. Criticism