Analysis Of Consumerism In Deschooling Society

IVAN ILLICH in his book ‘Deschooling Society’ (1971), sees schools as a modern form of colonization. Schools, as a modern institution, persuades people to exchange their real lives for packaged substitutes. School education is taken for learning, where education is seen as the result of the consumption of certain treatments. The poor according to him are in fact further disenfranchised by schooling as they benefit from it proportionally less than the rich. To him, schooling in developing nations is used to create new elites with a consumerist mentality.

Illich sees schools as benign signs of disempowerment. In education, he focuses on credentials and the way that education is a package designed by technocrats being delivered to ‘consumer-pupils’,

The dream conjured up by schooling is one which makes “futile promises of salvation to a poor to the technological age”. Illich thinks deschooling central to the adjustment in order to bring society to a more humane level. He suspects Marxists and others who promote the cause of social change but see no problem with schooling. For Illich, the mentality of schooling goes to the heart of the impoverished lives we lead and also analyzes the multiple and total roles of the teacher in this enclosed institution. The teacher has three roles: as a custodian, therapist, and a preacher. At the same time, the school also has many roles to play- socialization, keeping the young children out of the workforce, training in the acceptance of the values of consumerism and obedience and so

He sees them as institutions which by requiring full-time compulsory attendance in ritualized programmes based on awarding credentials to those who can consume educational packages and endure it for the longest. It is thus a training in “disciplined consumption”. A radical programme of deschooling would, “endanger the survival not only of the economic order built on the coproduction of goods and demands but equally of the political order built on the nation-state into which students are delivered by the school”.

Illich opposes the idea that “learning is the result of teaching” with an idea of ‘learning webs’ which are about “the autonomous assembly of resources under the personal control of each learner. He argues that his call for deschooling is a more primary call than Marxist calls for social change, which do not call into question the idea of school, because without deschooling the alienation which he is averse to and which schools are the training ground for will continue to