From de-schooling to re-instruction: a couple of scenes of techno-political transformation in learning environments

 

'The de-schooling movement — advanced by Ivan Illich and others in the 1970s⁵ — argued for reducing the hegemony of formal instruction in education, aiming for an empowerment of diffused and emancipated forms of learning throughout society that could depart the normative and oppressive forms of top-to-bottom pedagogy of schooling institutions. Part of the analysis consisted in how normative social arrangements and institutional pedagogy form a reproductive loop informing and reinforcing each other, which works by keeping formal schooling as the fundamental site for learning. The constructive part of the proposal, which included computer-aided “learning webs” as possible informal arrangements for self-directed education, ironically clashes with the harsh reality of the large and centralized computationalist⁶ empires that relegate informal and self-directed exchanges to the periphery of the Internet. Moreover, the social arrangements and extractive behaviors that these giants enact are entering the reproductive loop described above via their privative infrastructures and commercial apparatuses, with their pedagogy-disguised-as-a-service. This outright *re-instruction of education is ongoing, business as usual, but it is not inevitable nor unopposed.

As this re-instruction of learning environments carries dangers and damages, as well as openings and possibilities in multiple forms, we felt the need to reflect on, and tackle this complexity in the form of different “scenes”, attending closely to their different aspects and agents. Describing is one step. Problematizing is another. Indicating simultaneous potentialities is hopefully a third one. Because when things get mixed, when vibration takes place and unhinging occur, there is always a potential to try otherwise and actively engage in a re-arrangement in other terms and by differentiated means, with more just, politicized and solidary forces.'

 

Full text, in L'Internationale Online: https://www.internationaleonline.org/opinions/1064_from_de_schooling_to_re_instruction_a_couple_of_scenes_of_techno_political_transformation_in_learning_environments/

The Relearning Series:  https://constantvzw.org/wefts/relearningseries.en.html