How institutions reproduce
A malign substitution and the exploitation of failure
Introduction
"Only if school is understood as an industry can revolutionary strategy be planned realistically." – Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, pg 46.
In his Deschooling Society, the Roman Catholic priest and social critic Ivan Illich makes the case that all emancipatory work must begin with “deschooling,” and that such labor requires an analysis of school and schooling as an industry.
Nonetheless, I think that we’re right to sense that contemporary schooling is not an industry in exactly the same way that a mining company or a bank might be. We sense that school does not seem fully subordinate to the ruthless logic of the market. After all, most colleges and universities, both public and private, are not quite businesses in the sense of selling goods or services at profit in order to maximize shareholder value.
Illich sees this too — he says that “the school system today performs the threefold function common to powerful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously the repository of society's myth, the institutionalization of that myth's contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality." (Deschooling Society, pg 37).
Whatever sort of industry schooling is then, we have to analyze it with an eye towards the social stories and rituals which it institutionalizes. The myths and subjective formation fostered by institutions provides the key to understanding how they grow and reproduce as an industry,. Human beings are the schooling industry’s product, so we’re part of the loop of its (re)productive process.
How then do these institutions reproduce themselves? The three points in Illich’s prior comments sketch for us the three logical moments in the institution’s reproductive process — (1) repository of society’s myth, (2) institutionalization of the contradictions, (3) and the ritual reproduction and mystification of these contradictions.
In the first moment, the institution produces the need for its own services by producing the subject who is in need of those services, then those it serves are changed through their interaction with the institution’s product, and finally the effects produced by the institution’s operation begin to multiple and require further management or fine-tuning.
Let us summarize like this — an institution can only grow by producing demand. Thus, institutions must first produce the customer who will demand their products, then design and operate a system for the delivery of those products, and finally, use the system’s shortcomings as opportunities for expansion.
(1) Producing Demand
Industries exist to serve a need, but contrary to the just-so stories of advocates of Capitalism, needs are not given — they must be created. To create demand then, first the customer who possesses a need must be produced.
Thus, a process must be undertaken whereby the human need to learn is transformed into the sense that one lacks an education. In the schooling industry, a substitution takes place — the activity we call learning is replaced by a product we call education.
This transformation of a verb into a noun constitutes the core of the institutional apparatus. The institutionalized human has had their drive, which enjoys the process and its own lack, converted into a desire, the hunt for a lost object of satisfaction. The industry then purports to sell the lost object back to the consumer, although it was precisely the industry which manufactured this lack.
School as the repository of society's myths and their contradictions means that schooling today inducts each of us into those founding fantasies which give rise to our desires and sense of self – these myths provide the categories of our own self-conception, supplying a reservoir of dreams and wishes, and engendering in us a specific awareness of our own lack and a corresponding desire to fill it. School teaches us what we are, and it comes to exercise control over us in so far as we believe what it teaches (after all, everybody else seems to believe it too).
Education serves as the gateway to the level of consumption which society holds out as the ideal vision of prosperity, and the first step on this path is becoming a student. By conforming themselves to the socially prescribed role of the student, the child submits themselves to the operative logic of the schooling institution which shapes their malleable and developing consciousness.
Within this system, the child comes to spontaneously perceive themselves through the archetypal fantasy of the student, and consequently becoming a bearer of certain deficits, duties, and dreams, as well as a potential recipient of future rewards or punishments.
A deschooling analysis insists that the truth of a system lies precisely in the individual’s formation within the institution, not the content which is taught or communicated.
Illich claims elsewhere in Deschooling Society that young people are “pre-alienated” by school (46), a condition which attenuates them to the alienation of modern capitalist living in which we are caught between the dual vocation of being at once both a producer and a consumer, all performed under the watchful eye of the authority figure who confers recognition upon us, and taking place within the context of a disciplinary milieu which monopolizes our time, attention, and drives.
(2) Delivering products
The schooling industry serves not only as the repository of the myths which we believe about ourselves, but it also operationalizes these myths by constructing a system for sustaining them, acting them out, and reinforcing them through discipline and rewards.
Through participation in school, the student’s lack is supposed to be remedied, preparing them for useful participation in our society’s forms and modes of production. The myth of school is that a student who lacks an education can have their need met by sitting in a classroom and receiving the teacher’s instruction according to a curriculum.
Curriculum is the gold standard of education today because it lends itself to all of the demands which scientific inquiry makes upon a process, including standardization, legibility, and repeatability. A curriculum can be designed and evaluated against a set of outcomes, it can be modified and tinkered with, and it can also be removed from its context, transplanted, and scaled.
A bureaucratic institution which takes the modern scientific model as both its principle of justification and method of operation can only test and verify the consistency of educational outcomes by defining and controlling the inputs, which is precisely the function served by curriculum.
But we have forgotten that curriculum was made for humans, not humans for curriculum. Science can only study that which fall within the parameters which define its perspective on reality, and curriculum serves as only a crude approximation of the learning process as seen from within the purview of the scientific framework.
By arranging concepts, readings, and milestones in a certain order, a curriculum attempts to formalize the ideal sequence most conducive for an abstract human mind to receive and connect information in order to arrive at understanding. However, no such theoretical mind exists – only specific body-minds we call persons.
The underlying assumption of curriculum then – that there exists one verifiably most effective information sequence to produce understanding – seems utterly implausible on its face.
Illich emphasizes how an institution begins to replace outcomes with its own measures. Measures like ‘attendance’ or ‘instruction’ come to represent where or how much learning is presumably happening. However, these are simply passive activities where one is the recipient of a service or institutional process, and crucially, one can attend school and undergo instruction according to a curriculum without learning ever taking place.
We see this today in American public schools where students are simply never held back, and consequently we have vast swathes of high schoolers who read at a 5th grade level. We all know the experience of cramming for a test and forgetting everything the next day.
Because heaping up more or better curriculum can never amount to learning, it’s precisely at this second step in the institutional process of reproduction where a gap emerges — when the student receives curriculum, an opportunity arises where they might realize that this was not what they craved. Whenever the substitute is administered, it becomes possible to notice the difference between the counterfeit and the genuine article, but only if one has ever tasted the delight of real learning or curiosity.
Unfortunately, this means that the schooling industry must resort to laws, propaganda, and credentialing cartels to retain a monopoly in society on “learning” and “teaching” so that no unauthorized discovery can occur to threaten their supply of the much-needed product. This deserves its own analysis, but I leave that for another time.
(3) Managing effects
Illich worried about a time that was coming when the institutions which run modern society would become so complex and entangled with their own dysfunction that things would start breaking down in unprecedented ways.
While it’s unwise to bet against capitalism’s ability to turn its worst failings into surprising revolutions, we would be hard pressed to describe the schooling industry as anything other than collapsing.
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, parents are abandoning the public schooling system like rats fleeing a sinking ship, education outcomes and test scores continue to drop unabated, declining fertility means that fewer children are being born to fill the seats in classrooms, and we’re also witnessing a mass exodus of teachers from the profession. In higher education, we’re seeing more colleges and universities folding as declines in college admissions and soaring tuition prices combine to ruthlessly cull an industry grown fat on public money and cheap debt.
Nonetheless, the institution’s reproductive drive has the capacity to exploit this failure to fuel its own growth. I explored this logic in a recent post about Dr. Seuss’ parable of The Bee-watcher Watchers from his book Have I ever told you how lucky you are? When adding a bee-watcher to watch the bee to ensure its productivity does not yield the increased measures the villagers expected, the response is not to re-evaluate their theory of productivity, but rather to add another watcher who will watch the bee-watcher.
This absurd tale provides a microcosm of bureaucratic institutions in which the remedy for declining results as indicated by key performance metrics is to add more managers and policies to ensure that the current theory is being followed with maximum rigor and efficacy.
The system is presumed to work if only there could be enough of it consistently applied, and the less than desirable outcomes are read as evidence that not enough is being done, rather than a fundamental flaw in the institution’s theory about its work or its customers.
The institutional logic of ‘More!’ thus allows administrators, managers, and researchers to argue that the system’s failures are due to things which require more funding to remedy, whether that be more administrators for designing and enforcing policy, more education and professional development for teachers, or more researchers to investigate how to improve curriculum or school conditions.
Within this institutional logic, failure feeds growth by indicating that the institution is under-resourced and in need of expanded capacity to serve the population.
We should also note that the system grows by exploiting not only its own failures, but also the failures of the other systems with which it interacts — when social and economic conditions contribute to families where finances are tight and parents are overwhelmed or absent, the ripple effects of the breakdown of the family find their way into the classroom, disrupting the ability of school to effectively deliver its product.
The institutional response to problems of this kind consists in advocating for greater authority to act to mitigate these problems, such as how in California children 12 or older are now legally empowered to consent to be treated by a licensed school counselor without the knowledge or consent of their parents. A counselor can even arrange for a 5150 to have the child temporarily detained in a psychiatric hospital for 72 hours without the parents’ consent or any disclosure of the factors leading to the decision.
Thus, we can see that adverse social conditions create the opportunity for school to expand the scope of its mission, and consequently demand more resources to meet the needs of its expanded purview.
Conclusion
“A political program which does not explicitly recognize the need for deschooling is not revolutionary. It is demagoguery calling for more of the same.” — Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, pg 75.
Borrowing the framework we’ve been developing, I would summarize the current state of the schooling industry in this way — the second step (delivery of the product) has begun to break down at unprecedented and unacceptable levels, and as the ripple effects in step three have become unmanageable, the spell cast in the first step is rapidly losing its hold on people.
A combination of more learning options to compete with School and an ongoing degradation of the schooling industry’s product has caused people to see their needs differently, and no longer look to School as the remedy for their lack in the way that prior generations did.
However, as we’ve noted in the previous section, bureaucratic institutions in crisis tend to double down on their methods rather than engage in radical change or self-reflection. We should expect that things will continue to get much worse from here, and the deschooling movement should start working to figure out how to create as many quality off-ramps as possible for people looking to leave.
We can’t afford to ignore the reality that this state of affairs does create an opportunity for grifting and low quality instruction, a danger which the schooling industry endlessly beats its drums about, but educational systems in this country have become so sclerotic that people are increasingly willing to take the chance with something else, anything else.
Bureaucratic institutions across the board in our society are experiencing what happens when they abuse people’s trust for too long by consistently overcharging, underdelivering, and shaming people when they complain.
The bright side is that there has never been a better opportunity for the deschooling movement to capitalize on the growing momentum created by the convergence of so many disparate social forces – from the wheels falling off our once-venerable educational system to the ease with which people can upload free videos to YouTube. The rapid spread of communally organized maker spaces is also a cause for celebration. This chaos is an opportunity for those who know how to seize it. We’re in a time for experimenting with novel approaches, delivering more enriching experiences to curious minds, and pushing for greater freedom and autonomy from the schooling industry.
At the moment, Illich says, “the radical deschooling of society is still a cause without a party.” Who will take up this work, not simply of dismantling the institutions which school society today, but also of learning how to learn again?
If you want to continue exploring how institutions exercise power in our society today (and what this means for how we understand ourselves too), I would encourage you to take a look at a 4-week seminar I’ll be leading starting on February 27th, 2025. It’s called “The Violence of Care: A Critical Inquiry into Bureaucratic Power.” To learn more or enroll, click the button below.