Deschooling and the Disadvantaged : Implications of the Illich Proposals. IRCD Bulletin, Volume 7, Number 5 / Gertrude S. Goldberg.

Illich will not succeed in disestablishing the school, but he is teaching us to deschool our values. Proponents of deschooling are not only offering a brilliant critique of contemporary schooling but are also stimulating us to make education freer. Without basic political change we cannot disestablish the school; nor do we think it desirable to do so. Meantime, we should attempt to find out what some of the educational effects of partial deschooling would be. We can develop experimental programs to test the results of freer education on selected groups of people, disadvantaged and privileged, educationally stimulated and apparently unmotivated. We can also examine the effects of deschooling on the secondary level. If a voucher system is tried experimentally, we can evaluate the effects of changing the locus of educational control from school and state to family and informal community. A voucher system would afford parents the right to choose among various alternatives for schooling their children: minority moral education, integration, technical education, apprenticeship, self-motivated learning, etc. It will, however, need to demonstrate its ability to encourage democratic pluralism rather than to license discriminatory division. With these experiments and others that freer learners, parents, and educators will be stimulated to devise, we can cease to justify educational freedom solely by declaring it an "inalienable right." (Author)

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