O Ireland, My Country !

I found Ivan Illich's 'Deschooling Society' in the recycling centre. Published by Calder & Boyars, London in 1971, this copy had a footmark on the cover and the pages were quite marked, but it looked interestng and I brought it home.  Because it is quite an old book now, many of Illich's ideas have been superseded by today's technology. One example is his suggestion that rather than spend huge sums of money on television stations, a state should supply tape recorders and endless tapes and allow them to be borrowed at will by those who wished to learn and discuss. Obviously the possession of a computer, software and an internet connection is an improvement on this idea. Among his criticisms of the school systems which to his mind are the same the world over is that he feels they have a one size fits all mentality which produces education as it were in bundles, to be disseminated by teachers who all had followed the same road through education and are passing this unimaginative system on to their students; there is no creativity, the curricula are enforced, and students and teachers have to comply. He proposes that in fact the main function of formal schools is to create labour for the market and consumers for the goods in this same market. The practitiioners of skills cannot not pass them on unless they have the requisite teachers' qualifications.
Illich (dead since 2002) discusses many new ideas of his in this book He feels that schools, which need a vast financial investment on the part of a state, cater mainly for the better off in society. The sums poured into education, paying teachers, providing buildings and their necessary utilities, benefit the better off more than those who are disadvantaged. The disadvantaged often drop out of school for reasons to do with being needed to earn for the family, or because they cannot afford the hidden costs of schooling, or because they are alienated anyway from the whole system, or for any number of related reasons. . So even if the money invested purports to be equally for them as much as for others, they gain little from it.

Illich, in a development of his ideas, talks about roads, particularly in rural areas of so-called developing countries, and argues that they are not for the majority of the citizenry, but rather for the possessors of fast cars, or for lorries to ferry consumer goods to those areas which could be quite self-sufficient. He says lower speeds, and mechanical 'donkeys' would suit these populations far better and make their lives much easier. In other words, people can travel slowly but surely where they need to go. Another important point he makes is that such mechanical donkeys would be of necessity cheap to purchase and easy and cheap to repair, thus obliterating the need for another skill group to fix them, and giving independence to their owners. You may wonder what this has to do with deschooling society, but his point is that producing goods that only an esoteric group can maintain or repair is another way of institutionalising such knowledge too. Nowadays, looking at new motor cars with their complicated computers, no small deal financially or in terms of repair for their owners, (who can of course afford any maintenance or repairs needed anyway), we have to concede the point to Illich.

Personally I think that senior schools as we know them are in their last innings. Access to the internet and the web has made them redundant. Students are much maturer nowadays and would be well able to access their own learning from home, decide what and how to study, and as a result, be much better prepared for higher education. I'll bet that a grant to every secondary school age student to purchase a computer and towards the cost of broadband would cost the state a lot less money than the endless amount which is needed to maintain schools. Even the provision of a panel of mentors or advisors, accessible by phone or online for such students, would not come near the cost of providing the outmoded senior school system. All that is needed is one drop-in centre per area, where students can call in person if they wish, including a coffee shop for socialisation purposes and for participation in clubs catering for different interests. A laboratory attached to the centre, with a supervisor, would cater for practical experiments necessary for science courses. If you learn one thing from Ivan Illich's book, it is that nothing is set in stone. Every system can be changed for a better one.


I'm not one for ghost stories or conspiracy theories. But you know the shocked feeling you get when you open a newspaper and see someone you know has hit the headlines for some undesirable reason or other? You know that feeling? Well, that's what I felt when I came across Greg Palast's 'The Best Democracy Money Can Buy' on the recycling centre's shelf. Published by Robinson, London, in 2002, the first chapter was very interesting, describing a scenario we all know about now, the 'disappearing' of Texan Democrat voters, mainly black, off the voting register at the time when George Bush Junior lost an election which brought him into the White House, to paraphrase Palast. No surprises there, then. But it was the chapter entitled '   Sell The Lexus, Burn The Olive Tree' which shocked me, as I read the first pages and recognised a portrait of Ireland, my country, in disguise perhaps, but definitely Ireland. Oh, she was called Argentina and Bolivia and Ecuador, but it was Ireland, I recognised her immediately, and I recognised the Grim Reaper at her back. Our Taoiseach is right when he says we partied as a nation during the boom years, on money we didn't own. Anyone who doesn't see that is in denial. Also in denial are the many thousands who voted for 'that other party' during those same years. We took the sweets at the school gates, not recognising them for the drugs they were, and we were hooked. Okay, there's a lot of “Who we, Whiteman?” going around, and yes, there was always a particular party in those countries as well as our own that let down the drawbridge, but howsoever, it happened, and in their usual way, the World Bank, the IMF and the ECB (so much for Europe) walked in and insisted we pay the pushers. Palast describes the steps which then occur, including mass privatisation and selling off of a country's resources, wage cuts, cuts in public spending, the breaking of labour contracts and , overturning of minimum wage agreements and so forth, and how it's all in the cause of 'Globalization'. Which basically means, “What's yours is mine and what's mine's my own”. History repeats itself....the Trojan Horse with its unseen passengers got inside our gates....and it is going to be a hell of a job to get them out again. If you can face it, read this book. And, if you decide then that you want to read more of Greg Palast, here's his website: http://www.gregpalast.com/ 

O Ireland, my country !

While you're at it and if you really want to be scared, you could take a look at this too:

http://www.indymedia.ie/article/185?search_text=teachers unless of course you are already a GATS expert.

Did you notice the proliferation of books on cake making recently, and the endless newspaper articles on cupcakes – one well-known Irish author, Marian Keyes, saying that making cupcakes cured her depression?   'Any one can Bake' is an unusual one from the recycling centre, published in 1929 by Royal Baking Powder Co., U.S.A. I wonder who treasured this book and how it made its appearance on the recycling shelves? I myself can manage to bake quite well, and sustained my family on the results all the years they were growing up. What is particularly appealing about this book is that the cakes are all drawn and coloured by hand rather than photographed. I'm not sure why I like this, but I do. They have the honest and irregular shapes that mine used to have, maybe that's the reason. But all these cupcakes, during a recession and at a time that we have lost our economic sovereignty, why do I keep thinking of Marie Antoinette?