Ivan Illich thought school was the problem, not the solution
In 1971, he published a book arguing that mandatory schooling had become the world's most powerful instrument for keeping people in their place.
Ivan Illich was an Austrian-born philosopher and Catholic priest who spent much of his adult life in Cuernavaca, Mexico, running a center for cross-cultural research. He watched what happened when development programs arrived in poor communities, and what he saw disturbed him. The programs delivered more of what the wealthy world had — more schools, more hospitals, more credentials — and called it progress.
In Deschooling Society, published in 1971, Illich argued that school is not the opposite of ignorance but one of its engines. The institution, he wrote, teaches a specific lesson above all others: that life's goods are distributed by certified experts, and that people who lack the right qualifications are rightly excluded from them. The credential becomes the thing, displacing learning entirely.
His proposal was not to reform schools but to dismantle the legal requirement to attend them and replace them with what he called learning webs — open networks connecting people who want to learn something with people who know how to do it.
The idea sounds utopian. It also sounds, half a century later, remarkably like the internet, which has made Illich's learning webs technically possible even as formal schooling has grown more, not less, compulsory worldwide. The gap between his vision and current reality is its own argument about what institutions protect.