Recreating (and advancing) pk’s censored domains: Macroinformation.org &
Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / Social Order / DeGate / DeSchooling / Philosophers /
Thinkers Around Illich
Paul Goodman
Goodman refers to those with a “bland faith in the school” as
school monks
further believing that
| The schools provide the best preparation for everybody in a complicated world, are the logical haven for unemployed youth, can equalize opportunity for the underprivileged, administer research in all fields, and be the indispensable mentor for creativity, business practice, social work, mental hygiene, genuine literacy — name it, and there are credits for it leading to a degree. The schools offer very little evidence of their unique ability to perform any of these things — there is plenty of evidence to the contrary — but they do not need to offer evidence, since nobody opposes them or proposes alternatives. |
Note that Goodman published those words in 1962. Ivan Illich and associates designed learning webs in 1970, from which, also in 1970, pk designed a cheap internet: to replace all kleptocratic information structures.
Goodman Quotes: on the public’s faith in school-school-more-school as a panacea:
| I realize suddenly that I am confronting a mass superstition.
Since schooling undertakes to be compulsory, must it not continually review its claim to be useful? A perhaps outmoded institution [school] as become almost the only allowable way of growing up. … democracy begins to look like regimentation. It is said that our schools are geared to “middle-class values,” but this is a false and misleading use of terms. The schools less and less represent any human values, but simply adjustments to a mechanical system. Unqualified growth already does more harm than good. Major conditions of modern life are unprecedented and we do not know how to cope with them. Vigilant for freedom |
| 2013 04 19 Note the parallel here between the kleptocracy’s assumptions about school (an example of the kleptocracy’s own administrative skills) and the Marxist fallacy: that if governments which confiscate x% of resources are incompetent, granting the government 100% of resources will suddenly magically render their competence perfect. |
I wish I could claim to have been an early follower of Paul Goodman’s but I can’t. (I can claim to have been a guest at his house on Fire Island, to have known his daughter …) I was among the last of my friends to get hipped to Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, but better late than never. His teaching influenced my own teaching more than any other prior to my discovering Illich and founding FLEX
from the previous version of the file: One point that I iterated at every opportunity at FLEX I owe to Paul Goodman. Testing is a precious communication between teacher and student. It is fallible. It is private. Testing gives the teacher an opportunity to evaluate his and the student’s mutual progress with the subject: his at communicating it; the student’s at mastering it.
As Bucky Fuller observed, you can never do just one of anything. If you draw a square, you’ve drawn two squares: the one within the lines and another without. Both squares have four equal sides and four equal angles. Thus, testing is equally important as an opportunity for the student to see if his feedback is in fact communicating with the teacher. Do you hear me hearing you? The testing is not just top to bottom; the testing is mutual. I left NYU once I despaired of the English Department ever understanding or appreciating what I was trying to teach it. (Besides, I’d already founded FLEX: I needed the actual doctorate for nothing.)
I can see a case where, under FLEX, a parent hires a teacher for an underage (17 or younger) child. The contract is between the parent and the teacher. In that circumstance and in that circumstance alone, I see it as kosher for the teacher to divulge test “results” to someone other than the student: i.e. to the contract holder. Where the student does the hiring, whatever his age, then No. Absolutely no.
Furthermore, test results should be regarded by both teacher and student as ephemeral. OK, I see that you got it. Let’s move on. Or, OK, I don’t see that you got it. Let me try this.
Compulsory schooling invades your freedom. Making test results available to school administrators, police, prospective employers … is in addition an invasion of privacy: both students’ and teachers’. Business and industry have used government to trick the public into paying for its own enslavement and for its own “grading.” The sorting is more careful, more accurate (and more appropriate) with apples.
Notice, as Illich bids, that the terminology of school is alchemical, magic based: “grade” as in grading ore, “test as in “acid test.” See my comments from another file. And see whatever books of Paul Goodman you can find.
2009 01 11 Sorry, I have to revise this file without having the time to do it thoroughly now.
I’m just rereading my old 1962 paperback of Goodman’s Compulsory Miseducation and am being reminded of how very much Illich got from Goodman: more than I’d previously said. I now see more clearly than ever that it was my reading of Goodman in the early 1960 that set me up for understanding Illich in 1970.
Illich talked of “priesthoods” in secular areas; Goodman wrote of “school monks” in Compulsory Miseducation.
Goodman also characterizes the developed world’s faith in more and more schooling, in the teeth of experience, as a mass superstition.
Goodman also preceded Illich (in print) in pointing out how expensive the developed world’s superstition was: far too ruinous for beneficial export to the rest of the human world.
2013 04 19 Goodman is one of those thinkers, artists, philosophers, poets who influences us whether or not we’ve heard him, read him, heard of him … Like TS Eliot: The Wasteland just by its title, just by its fame, influenced millions: I don’t say accurately, I don’t say responsibly … Ditto Jesus, ditto Edgar Guest.
In the fifties my friend was reading Goodman, grinning, excited, quoting, forcing a line here and there on us. Did I know what Pete (or Paul) was talking about in 1958? (I was an anarchist myself, but I got it from Jesus, from Thoreau, from Twain (and Huck); I wasn’t ready to sit at Goodman’s feet. But: there was that title, Growing Up Absurd: staring at us from the book cover.
Growing Up Absurd. Exactly.
School is essential for the establishment of irrational authority: women accepting that papa knows best, children accepting that adults know best, citizens knowing that Washington (and Lincoln) know best. …
The Church had bamboozled everyone that priests knew best: school makes sure that a secular church reproduces all the errors we’d suffered so to escape from.
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