He was particularly concerned with how the tenants of modernism affected developing nations (where he lived for much of his life) by pushing traditional methods into forced obsolescence in favor of ever-increasing reliance on social institutions.
His views on policy may or may not be on point (he seems most comfortable in the area of principle and theory), but the conceptual core that relates his views on education to his views on cars and medicine merits consideration.
He similarly wasn't against scientific medicine, but he thought the medical bureaucracy had outgrown its utility: that advances in specialized medicine were too expensive and served to prop up artificially unhealthy lives.
A strong line of his argument is that past a tipping point of size/power, institutions will create the needs they serve. We create these artificial environments where it's hard for most people to thrive and then we create social institutions to compensate: a social prosthetic.
The result in Illich's view is increasing passivity and helplessness: a petulant society composed of a disempowered citizenry.
The argument no-doubt merits a balancing counter-argument, but I find it compelling and it goes deeper than a simplistic dismissal of school.
There's a recording of a teacher asking how to infuse lessons from deschooling into her classroom and his response is basically "you can't". He's actually a bit rude about it tbh.
Illich was opposed to schooling. He would have said he was in favor of "education". Nailing down what that would mean on the scale of a society, aside from learning webs, is a bit elusive.
I think Illich provided a fantastic prognosis of certain problems but didn't develop workable solutions.
Anyhow, the first step to a solving a problem is identifying it; they need not be atomic operations.
"...and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question."
That's where he veers into making a policy recommendation (defunding social institutions), and where he is no longer engaging in critical theory but in pushing a particular policy agenda, therefore opening his critique (some of which I'd even agree with) to practical criticism from people with more skin in the game.
I agree if his long-form critique takes the structure you claim, it is of poor quality because claiming desires in not critical of anything.
However, I do disagree with your claim the critique alone is not helpful. A harsh, well formed critique is typically the very first pillar in driving change. Expecting identification and resolution in the same piece is asking too much.
I would argue to say that a critique being invalidated because it somehow must include both framing and describing a phenomenon as well as suggesting changes, each weighted by their feasibility in remedying the systemic woes, is much more fallacious.
But times are different.
1. Most adults are literate — When kids have questions about letters or words while they are teaching themselves to read they have a huge supply of adults and older children to get help from.
2. Books are so cheap to produce that we literally throw them away when we are done and the internet has provided the material for a lifetime of education for what is essentially free — And formats (like 3blue1brown animations that couldn't have been imagined a century ago).
3. We don't need to train the population to be obedient for factories or the military. Society can continue without so many people pretending to work. Let them continue to educated themselves until they discover something that benefits the rest of society.
I had first grader during corona lock down and I can tell you that ability to read/write does not imply ability to help the kid to learn to read and write. This part about kids learning to read by themselves and by asking question of adults around of, frankly, complete nonsense for wast majority of kids.
Is this a historical reality that schools are built for factory style education? Citation is needed.
This is not true. I dont hate schools. My kids dont hate schools. My friends did not hated schools and my kids friends dont hate schools. There are people, both adults and kids who hate school, of course. And then there are very crappy schools. Speaking to my collegues, they dont hate schools and only two hated school as a kid. And even these do like their kids schools, but they took more care about what is going on there (like they put more effort into selection of school).
But I think that people HN are heavily biased against the schools, the way no other forum or social group I encountered is.
That is much milder sentiment through and I think the difference matters. And significant chunk of people perceives school positively or neutrally.
> This makes it an easy target, and a useful hook to get support for any anti social institution criticism.
My problem is that while I see this a lot on HN, I don't see it anywhere else. Including in people who loudly criticize this or that aspect of education or school. The positive attitude toward school is unrepresented on HN, despite being present in real life and in studies that measure attitudes.
Similarly, the people on HN are way more pushing homeschooling then anyone else I know ... including people on forums for stay at home moms or general mom forums (who would be in position to do it and tend to be biased more toward family/children interests). Reading HN, one would believe that the only reason to not homeschool is that you cant afford one parent at home. And that those parents are unhappy for having kids in school and that those kids are unhappy. That sentiment is not present among people who are actually at home and could theoretically homeschool if they were inclined to.
The whole thing seems to me political ideological. Some people here want everyone to hate the school, but it does not make it so.
It's all about the middle path...