The sudden shift from in-person education to virtual learning this past spring has had paradoxical effects. The depopulation of physical schools and emptying of buildings, their exiles and refugees washed ashore on Zoomland without warning or preparation, was a genuinely traumatic event. On the one hand, the pandemic freed students, parents, and teachers from the tyranny of place and the extensive apparatus of surveillance and control that forced their bodies in and out of classrooms. On the other, it "emplaced" them violently and unnaturally, confining them to their homes, pulverizing their social networks, and subjecting them to new and different kinds of bureaucratic and surveillance techniques.
For the first time in over a century, millions of people in the Global North could experience, or at least imagine, a world without school - a scenario that Ivan Illich, the quintessential critic of modern education, couldn't have cooked up in his wildest fantasies. Not least because Illich forms a small part of my next book project on alternative ideas of economy and technology in the long 1970s, the time was ripe to sit down with his classic manifesto Deschooling Society (1971). Illich should be having a moment, in this and many other ways (see my next post).
Reading Illich in 2020 is like traveling through an uncanny valley. So many of his critiques obviously resonate with our present predicament while clearly originating in an entirely different political-economic milieu. The pandemic has exposed, perhaps fatally, the flawed business model of the Anglo-American university - perpetually living on the fiscal edge, relying on tuition, athletics, corporate partnerships, and inflows of foreign students paying top dollar (or pound) to stay afloat while exploiting staff and academic workers and richly remunerating a bloated managerial class of administrators. No shocking revelation, but a state of affairs that is still all-too-widely assumed to be a function of neoliberalism and the intrusion of market forces on the sacred terrain of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Many of us mourn the "golden age" of the 1950s and 60s, when tenure-track jobs were plentiful, enrollments were high, and life was good. In fact, as Illich shows, the logic of addiction and "escalation" is built into the very institutional model of education in a capitalist society; the golden age was just as rotten.
If the objective of schools and universities is to discipline and inculcate subjects qua students with the habits of standardization, hierarchy, and consumer demand (the curriculum as an engineered and packaged product), the only answer can be abolition (side note: it's surprising how quickly "Defund the police" emerged as a rallying cry, while "Defund schools" remains firmly on the fringes). Partially decommodifying universities by making them free while preserving the social status and class position of educators like myself can only go so far. Indeed, in the Vietnam-era context, Illich insists that "disarmament" or the shifting of resources from the military-industrial complex will only strengthen the education-industrial complex. If schools have not ultimately replaced corporations, as he predicted, but became corporatized themselves, this is merely a shuffling of the deck chairs on a sinking ship and not a fundamental transformation. Even the most radical utopias expressed in mainstream politics (the Bernie wing) limit their imaginary to replacing the Pentagon budget with free college. As for the standard liberal tropes, how many of us have concluded class discussions on just about any issue or problem with students smugly settling on "more education" as the obvious panacea? Or, at more elite universities like Harvard, how many of us have privately sneered at administrators' promises to make students into "global citizens" while desperately deploying this same rhetoric to justify our research on Asia or Africa?
A reader in 2020, after fifty years of right-wing mobilization around school choice and the imposition of MOOCs (given a new lease on life by the pandemic), may be forgiven for seeing in Illich the seeds of neoliberalism. But he is unambiguous in his condemnation of the professional "technologists" who will, in time, replace teachers as content (commodity) producers and turn students into even more passive consumers and thus more perfect market subjects. Like UBI, another piece of 1970s intellectual debris that can be appropriated by Right and Left alike, MOOCs are trapped in the familiar capitalist logic of the postwar years. Illich's "learning webs," publicly funded and reliant on investment in physical infrastructure (street-corner science labs and so on), are fundamentally different. In a famous passage, he equates the cost of installing television in Latin American countries with the free distribution of tape recorders as a democratizing technology. Silicon Valley vultures, who drew inspiration from the likes of Illich in their heady early days, would no doubt point to the smartphone as the perfect analogy. But these are private, closed-source products of the largest and most powerful monopoly corporations the world has ever known. Illich recognized this when he railed against the tyranny of "industrial design" and how it deliberately obscures how things work. Likewise, his proposed peer networks of reviews are not the "Yelp for graduate advisers" Leonard Cassuto controversially proposed late last year. True Illichian networks can only exist when educators are not dependent on institutions for their livelihoods and where students as consumers and activists (whether they are Campus Watch conservatives or call-out culture warriors) cannot threaten those livelihoods. One persuasive response to Illich is that such networks cannot exist at all, at least not without serious consideration given to power dynamics. But recent campus politics are not too far off in form and content from those of the late sixties. Eventually, they will reach the same impasse when confronting professors as allies or enemies in their many struggles. How do you democratize (or decolonize)? When do you reform and what do you abolish?
Returning to the lockdowns, the response to the shift online (as any university professor and student can attest by the proliferation of e-mails in their inboxes since March) has been bureaucratized to an extreme, even absurd, degree. New syllabus policies and procedures have been put in place to manage and control online learning - all for the sake of preventing the scourges of cheating and Zoombombing, of course. Surveillance software promises to control and restrict student behavior with a degree of ruthless precision that would not have been possible if this pandemic had happened even a decade ago. Cries of "Don't be a cop", correctly establishing a link with racialized police violence (see also the poster above), gesture toward a deschooling agenda but fail to recognize that professors and teachers are always already cops (and priests, sovereigns, therapists, caregivers etc. in the sacred space of the classroom). Rightful suspicion of "learning outcomes" and standardized assessments, again only likely to be intensified by the online shift, never extends to questioning the very idea of reverse engineering learning from a set of top-down original principles. Is it enough to substitute vague humanistic justifications like "critical thinking" to keep students in the classroom? What would a practice of refusing to state our goals on the syllabus as contract (market subjectivity in its purest, most undisguised form) look like? Is it even possible? Can we recognize that students have an individual responsibility for their learning, and acknowledge the full diversity of their experiences and interests, without lapsing into crude libertarianism?
In a bitter irony that has become characteristic of public discourse around this pandemic, both the "doomers" (who want to keep schools closed indefinitely to save lives) and the "skeptics" (who want to open schools as the first priority, positing the harm to children as greater than the impacts of the disease itself) reinforce the sacrality of school - albeit for different reasons. The inherent compulsion to maintain control over who can "call a meeting" (in Illich's beautifully simple formulation) remains unquestioned. Either no one or everyone must attend school, for their own benefit. This has prevented the emergence of innovative solutions for mitigating risk, such as decentralizing and dispersing schools (for example by repurposing empty buildings, an echo of Illich's educational "storefronts"). Moreover, the heavy-handed public health response upholds the ideal of a "pan-hygienic world" in which all human contacts "are the result of foresight and manipulation." The child still encounters a pre-planned and engineered reality, this time entirely virtual.
Illich boldly concludes that deschooling will inevitably happen, by MOOC or by crook, and must be steered in the right direction. In this respect he was overly sanguine. It hasn't happened yet and may never, even if the pandemic has given us a glimpse of alternative possibilities and their limits.
We have few precedents to guide us. At the beginning of the pandemic, I looked back to the history of the Open University (an idea hatched, in part, by Michael Young - another key figure in my next project) for some hope. But reading Daniel Weinbren's fascinating history quickly brought me down to earth. I hadn't realized just how much of the OU model was "built on the assumptions of mass production" (see the image below of a warehouse for distributing teaching materials) and how it embodied the postwar managerial ethos both in its logistics and governance. The OU must have seemed like a nightmare to Illich, the apogee of the education-industrial complex; in our time, such a project would no longer make sense within the prevailing capitalist system in the UK or elsewhere. The perfect storm conditions of its emergence have entirely vanished.
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Another easy temptation when reading Illich today is to castigate him as a parochial Luddite. Yet one of the most striking passages is his refusal to give primacy to the neighborhood or local community when conceiving of his learning webs. He acknowledges that urban life brings with it the freedom to join and belong to different groups. In a favored tactic, he returns to premodern Catholicism for inspiration, noting that religions have always valued "far-off encounters," as in pilgrimage and monasticism. It's easy to see echoes of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, which condemned railroads for ruining India (especially by spreading the plague!) while extolling the slow and steady criss-crossing of the subcontinent by mendicants. Part of the reason why Illich was not a localist was surely his own transience - born in Vienna, studied in Italy, lived and worked in New York, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Germany, hopping around from one university and center to another. No wonder he described himself as an "errant pilgrim."
However, it is also worth recalling Illich's 1968 address to American students in Cuernavaca, when he told them to "freely, consciously and humbly give up the legal right you have to impose your benevolence on Mexico." As we continue to anguish over the big business of volontourism and laugh at White Savior Barbie on Instagram, and as so much of our area studies teaching in universities continues to be linked, in more or less subtle ways, to humanitarian-philanthropic neocolonialism, his arguments have lost none of their force. So we can safely conclude Illich would scoff at 21st century universities' stubborn and exasperating insistence on producing "global citizens" who believe they can, and feel entitled to, "change the world."
Here it is possible to take this critique in a more resolutely localist direction, which I am growing more sympathetic to as a fellow "errant pilgrim" once perpetually on the move. Another book I read this summer was the inspiring collection Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place (1996), edited by William Vitek and Wes Jackson. Two of the essays in particular speak to academics' pandemic concerns in quite direct ways.
One is "The Rootless Professors" by Eric Zencey, originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1985. Zencey observes that the majority of American students attend universities close to home (this is certainly still true at Maryland today) yet are taught by what he terms "cosmopoles" or "transient exotics" (Illich's pilgrims seen from the outside). Guilty as charged. How many professors, he asks, can describe their local watershed? I know I can tell you much more about the Thames and the Yamuna than about the Potomac and the Chesapeake, and that's a problem. Zencey argues forcefully that the embrace of abstraction and (a certain kind of) cosmopolitanism does not fulfill students' "emotional need to belong" and urges academics to become native to their places, acquiring "dual citizenship" in the world of ideas and in their own surroundings.
Speaking personally, I've tried to embrace my own "emplacement" during lockdown and have had the privilege to not feel it as a burden. Spending my time exploring not Vienna or Delhi but the streets and parks of DC (see previous post), the Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary, and the Assateague Island National Seashore (working toward that understanding of the watershed!), has helped me connect to where I actually live and work. Whether all this survives the pandemic remains to be seen, but I will take it as a challenge. Among other good ideas, Zencey suggests including more local content in our courses, which at first seems impossible for a South Asianist and "global" capitalism historian. But I've already done so with a field trip to Baltimore in my deindustrialization seminar (it fit perfectly well alongside the Bombay textile strike and structural adjustment in the Zambian copper mines), and surely a walk down the National Mall would help students understand Lutyens' Delhi much more intuitively than all the slideshows and documentaries I could show in my Indian cities course.
The other essay that struck a chord was "Pseudocommunities" by David Ehrenfeld, which opens with a depressing and slightly maudlin anecdote about students laughing in class because they do not see the professor as real. Quaintly blaming television, e-mail, and voice mail (!) for the decline in attention spans and the loss of face-to-face communication, Ehrenfeld argues that professors "cannot compete" in the brave new electronic world of the 90s. Yet he optimistically concludes that students, like all of us, will reject the "illusion of proximity" as unsatisfying and try to (re)build "real" communities. Before March 2020, we could have dismissed all of this as trite and dated; aren't we all on our phones all the time? Yet when faced with only teaching, learning, and socializing on Zoom by diktat, to return to where this post began, most of us have indeed rejected the illusion. It turns out that students do value physical interaction and community (all too easily dismissed as selfish "partying") a lot, and they viscerally recognize online education as inferior and not worth it (even when they can't exactly articulate why). Rather than cyborg vanguardists of the digital revolution, as Ehrenfeld might have seen them in the 90s, young people actually turned out to be some of the last holdouts and fiercest defenders of "analog" humanity.
Whether we have entered a "new normal" of permanent Zooming (a verb that would become, in this universe, as ubiquitous as Googling), or whether 2020 will be a largely forgotten anomaly like the three-day week in 1974, both deschooling and becoming native require building "real" communities in place. Neither is possible exclusively online in our existing nuclear households or pods. Yet without breaking the sleepwalking rhythms of late stage capitalism, which the lockdowns achieved so spectacularly, we might never have realized how far off we've wandered.
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