Deschooling Society

we can depend on self-motivated learning instead of employing teachers to bribe or compel the student to find the time and the will to learn; that we can provide the learner with new links to the world instead of continuing to funnel all educational programs through the teacher.

Education did not compete for time with either work or leisure. Almost all education was complex, lifelong, and unplanned.

Technology is available to develop either independence and learning or bureaucracy and teaching.

A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives;

Deschooling Society contains a chapter on learning webs. Reading it again now, I find that Illich was strikingly prescient: ‘The current search for new educational funnels [i.e. curricula, schools, and the ‘hardware’ of education] must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: education webs which heighten the opportunity for eac

1. To liberate access to things by abolishing the control which persons and institutions now exercise over their educational values.