This is already the case with our current schooling system; there double-digit percentages of school leavers who are functionally illiterate, and even more who are innumerate.
There are many who don't think COVID is a big deal, because it doesn't have anywhere close to a 1% fatality rate. But that's not quite the same thing.
Thankfully there have been reports that make us think the fatality rate is much less than 1%, but that doesn't change the fact that people though 1% was a tiny number.
My Illich-worship hit a bump when talking to an Aussie English Phd who was much cleverer than me. After my first sentence she said "the problem with people who like Ivan Illich is they just want to talk about Illich". Touche
But well worth reading, and a convivial life is a good life.
Because he was basically right, and not that many people are right (Rousseau was another one, Hobbes and Machiavelli too) so it's worth talking about those who are. Of course most of what he's saying is not "workable", but we tend to forget that the not being "workable" part is specific to a technological society like ours and thus maybe the "technological society" part is the problem itself.
Yes, if you want to keep nuclear power plants running you need a technocracy [1] that you need to have educated before the fact, but maybe we've been looking at all this the wrong way all the time and we don't actually need nuclear power plants and we don't need super-sonic flights.
It's the wrong level of abstraction. There is no answer.
If you can get the BBC - this radio program (In our time) is a good introduction. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08c2ljg
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23809211
One should be able to be convivial even with those who aren't companions.
Reflecting on his work now, I think Illich's anti-institutionism was extreme and his alternatives are genuinely not compelling.
Deschooling Society's critique is powerful, and Learning Webs is literally exactly how I learned how to program. But, it's an entirely unworkable alternative for like 60% of students. If we deschooled, we would absolutely end up with a double-digit percentage of the population either illiterate, innumerate, or both.
If you're honest with yourself, Medical Nemesis is has some great passages but in it is also the germs of the anti-vaccination and natural healing movements.
His critiques are powerful but the answer is not deinstitutionalism. The answer is taking his Tools for Conviviality to heart when engaging with/through institutions.
Without conviviality, Learning Webs will become a "Platform" with blood-sucking silicon valley middle men taking a 20% cut on all education spending and gig worker teachers languishing away in poverty. Of course, Illich would just say SV platform capitalism is also an institution^1.
With convivality, even the most institutional institutions can become places for human flourishing (Illich spent his life in the Catholic church, after all!)
So, I love Illich's critique. And Illich was a genius, in the sense that he proposed online education 30 years before the internet was invented.
But deschooling isn't the answer.
Conviviality is.
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[^1]: which is one of the reasons that Foucault is worth reading of Illich resonates -- Illich always sort of grounded out in a no-true-scottsman when you point out his alternatives don't work. Foucault provides a more robust theory by explaining how power and institutions relate to one another.