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I read Deschooling Society a decade after it first appeared.
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In the five decades since Deschooling Society first appeared, however, his vision has been effectively sidelined and, while he did become a regular on the academic circuit towards the end of his life, his proposals, not just for new ways of learning, but for more convivial ways of living, have been politely disregarded. For a time, educators seriously debated Illich’s critique, and the “learning networks” that he proposed as a remedy for institutional failure. The book was both timely and prophetic, foreshadowing a for-profit corporatisation of schooling that has only increased in the intervening years, and highlighting inequities that are all the more obvious in the age of Betsy DeVos, the former US education secretary, Trump University and, closer to the UK, the A-Level downgrading fiasco of 2020. A few months later, Calder & Boyars published Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society, a radical critique of how obligatory schooling perpetuates power elites all over the world. In early 1971, after years of desperate boredom, chronic frustration and random acts of rebellion, I was expelled from my working-class Catholic comprehensive school in Corby, Northants.