Reply to Gotz on Deschooling B y Francis Schrag

I do not disagree with everything Ignacio Gotz says about deschooling and I have no inclination to discuss his essay in detail.’ But his argument, like that of many deschooling advocates, overlooks a very fundamental point, which makes his position seem much more persuasive than it really is. Consider his last sentence: “The real problem consists in maintaining this responsibility, and the requisite awareness, when men step into uncharted realms and, while marching, create structures to support their self-realizing efforts.” (p. 98, italics mine) Now substitute “children” for “men.” Immediately, we become bewildered rather than inspired. Let us admit that schools necessarily have a hidden curriculum and that is evil. Does it follow that schools ought to be eliminated? Not in the least unless we suppose that a child could grow toward self-realization without being “trapped” as Illich and Gotz would have it by institutions not of his own making. Does the family have a hidden curriculum? Does the super market? Does the peer culture? Do Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo? Does Illich‘s skill center? Does (or would) the child have a choice of participation in these institutions to say nothing of creating them? If not, let Messrs. Gotz and Illich give arguments why the school is (must be) more alienating (evil) than those other socializing institutions. Gotz and Illich note that schooling establishes a caste society, that it creates the notion that “institutions, especially existing ones, are absolutely necessary.” (p. 90) Schools have this tendency, let us admit. But how do more schooled societies fare in this regard relative to the less schooled? Is the caste system of twentieth-century America more or less rigid than that of eighteenth-century America or twentieth-century Peru? Is it an accident that the realization that all institutions are human artifacts emerged in the most highly schooled societies of the world? Is it an accident that this insight was first formulated by men who were themselves products of the most arduous and extended formal schooling available, men like Sartre and Illich and Marx himself? I think not.

The question is not whether to have structures or not to have them. The question is what sorts of structures to have. Gotz partially recognizes this when he says near the beginning of his essay that the deschooler will use structures, “only in so far, and only as long as, they contribute in some measure to the human becoming of man. His belief is not in the structures, but in man.” (p. 87) I say he partially recognizes this for he seems to set man against structures in such a way as to suggest that man might “become” with no structures whatsoever. And yet Gotz realizes this is not possible for he does not deny that the anti-institutionalist uses structures, only that he believes in them. (p. 86)

Perhaps Gotz and the reformist are not so far apart as he would have us think. Both believe that institutional structures are means rather than ends in themselves. Neither believes that “becoming” can take place without them. Now the extent to which the conventional school ought to be abolished or transformed is far from clear from either point of view. Everything depends on assessing the relative advantages and evils of the school as against proposed alternatives. There is as little reason to think that other arrangements must be better or even equally good as that they must be worse.

There is some reason to be suspicious of the anti-institutional deschooler however. He is usually highly schooled himself and sometimes has formal associations with schools

Francis Shrag is Associate Professor jointly in the departments of Educational Policy Studies and Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

I . lgnacio L. Gotz, “On Man and His Schooling,” Educational Theory, Vol. 24, No. I (Winter 1974), pp. 85-98.

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and universities. One wonders how one who has been exposed to the hidden curriculum for so many years can retain any objectivity about the institution. Secondly, he seems to underestimate powerful forces which have produced very similar institutions of schooling in cultures as diverse as the United States, Communist China and medieval France. He fails to take note of the profound continuity which exists even under the most “radical” alterations. Thus, for example, the besic features of school as Illich defines it exist in post-revolutionary China and Cuba just as they did before the revolution. All of this is not to say that schools are established by natural law, or are inevitable or anything of the kind. But one begins to wonder what purpose is served in calling for the disbanding or abolition of an institution that has weathered the most violent political and social storms of which we have record. One begins to wonder whether this end is not “a mere end, that is a dream,” as Dewey puts it. As he tells us in Human Nature and Conduct, “Only as the end is converted into means is it definitely conceived, or intellectually defined, to say nothing of being executable.” (Modern Library edition, p. 36)