Deschooling Society (1970)
My god, when I read stuff like this (and some comments here), I think -- only someone who grew up in a society which benefitted from all the supposed ills of education and useful institutions could even have the luxury to write or seriously believe something like this.<p>This is like saying that because of a small percentage of (yes, I agree) non-ideal outcomes, one should dismantle the entire system that has gotten us to the state we are in today -- which is, to remind many people, a stable, more materially prosperous, more-free-of-conflict time than any in our past.   I hesitate to point out some parallels to our current social movements, for fear of being branded a counter-revolutionary.<p>More people are educated and out of poverty right now than any time previously in history.   You would seek to destroy the system that has gotten you here, because some of its imperfections are showing by the very nature of the progress it has produced?  Many people around the world would love to have the curse of educational systems that grind down your spirit by providing you textbooks, materials, teachers, computers, and corporate faceless healthcare systems that cruelly save you from life-threatening diseases.<p>How quickly we let the great become normal and disappointing.<p>We should fix things that are going wrong, and that expose and remedy the flaws in how the system was designed.   It&#x27;s true that in any system, unintended side effects and people seeking to gain from it start to emerge.  And that should be fixed.<p>But, often the people who lack proper perspective on all that a system has produced (at hard toil and accomplishment of their predecessors) -- usually those who are young and those who have nothing to lose -- are too willing to destroy something that has given them the luxury of thinking it should be destroyed.