[D66] Schooling: The Ritual of Progress

[R.O.]

Schooling: The Ritual of Progress
Ivan Illich
DECEMBER 3, 1970 ISSUE NYBOOKS

I

The university graduate has been schooled for selective service among 
the rich of the world. Whatever his or her claims of solidarity with the 
Third World, each American college graduate has had an education costing 
an amount five times greater than the median life income of half of 
humanity. A Latin American student is introduced to this exclusive 
fraternity by having at least 350 times as much public money spent on 
his education as on that of his fellow citizens of median income. With 
very rare exceptions, the university graduate from a poor country feels 
more comfortable with his North American and European colleagues than 
with his non-schooled compatriots, and all students are academically 
processed to be happy only in the company of fellow consumers of the 
products of the educational machine.

The modern university confers the privilege of dissent on those who have 
been tested and classified as potential money makers or power holders. 
No one is given tax funds for the leisure in which to educate himself or 
the right to educate others unless at the same time he can also be 
certified for achievement. Schools select for each successive level 
those who have, at earlier stages in the game, proved themselves good 
risks for the established order. Having a monopoly on both the resources 
for learning and the investiture of social roles, the university co-opts 
the discoverer and the potential dissenter. A degree always leaves its 
indelible price tag on the curriculum of its consumer. Certified college 
graduates fit only into a world which puts a price tag on their heads, 
thereby giving them the power to define the level of expectations in 
their society. In each country, the amount of consumption by the college 
graduate sets the standard for all others; if they would be civilized 
people on or off the job, they will aspire to the style of life of 
college graduates.

The university thus has the effect of imposing consumer standards at 
work and at home, and it does so in every part of the world and under 
every political system. The fewer university graduates there are in a 
country, the more their cultivated demands are taken as models by the 
rest of the population. The gap between the consumption of the 
university graduate and that of the average citizen is even wider in 
Russia, China, and Algeria than in the United States. Cars, airplane 
trips, and tape recorders confer more visible distinction in a socialist 
country where only a degree, and not just money, can procure them.

The ability of the university to fix consumer goals is something new. In 
many countries the university acquired this power only in the Sixties, 
as the delusion of equal access to public education began to spread. 
Before that the university protected an individual’s freedom of speech, 
but did not automatically convert his knowledge into wealth. To be a 
scholar in the Middle Ages meant to be poor, even a beggar. By virture 
of his calling, the medieval scholar learned Latin, became an outsider 
worthy of the scorn as well as the esteem of peasant and prince, burgher 
and cleric. To get ahead in the world, the scholastic first had to enter 
it by joining the civil service, preferably that of the Church. The old 
university was a liberated zone for discovery and the discussion of 
ideas both new and old. Masters and students gathered to read the texts 
of other masters, now long dead, and the living words of the dead 
masters gave new perspective to the fallacies of the present day. The 
university was then a community of academic quest and endemic unrest.

In the modern multiversity, this community has fled to the fringes, 
where it meets in a pad, a professor’s office, or the chaplain’s 
quarters. The structural purpose of the modern university has little to 
do with the traditional quest. Since Gutenberg, the exchange of 
disciplined, critical inquiry has, for the most part, moved from the 
“chair” into print. The modern university has forfeited its chance to 
provide a simple setting for encounters which are both autonomous and 
anarchic, focused yet unplanned and ebullient, and has chosen instead to 
manage the process by which so-called research and instruction are produced.

The American university, since Sputnik, has been trying to catch up with 
the body count of Soviet graduates. Now the Germans are abandoning their 
academic tradition and are building “campuses” in order to catch up with 
the Americans. During the present decade they want to increase their 
expenditure for grammar and high schools from 14 to 59 billion DM, and 
more than triple expenditures for higher learning. The French propose by 
1980 to raise to 10 percent of their GNP the amount spent on schools, 
and the Ford Foundation has been pushing poor countries in Latin America 
to raise per capita expenses for “respectable” graduates toward North 
American levels. Students see their studies as the investment with the 
highest monetary return, and nations see them as a key factor in 
development.

For the majority who primarily seek a college degree, the university has 
lost no prestige, but since 1968 it has visibly lost standing among its 
believers. Students refuse to prepare for war, pollution, and the 
perpetuation of prejudice. Teachers assist them in their challenge to 
the legitimacy of the government, its foreign policy, education, and the 
American way of life. More than a few reject degrees and prepare for a 
life in a counter-culture, outside the certified society. They seem to 
choose the way of medieval fraticelli and alumbrados of the Reformation, 
the hippies and dropouts of their day. Others recognize the monopoly of 
the schools over the resources which they need to build a 
countersociety. They seek support from each other to live with integrity 
while submitting to the academic ritual. They form—so to speak—hotbeds 
of heresy right within the hierarchy.

Large parts of the general population, however, regard the modern mystic 
and the modern heresiarch with alarm. They threaten the consumer 
economy, democratic privilege, and the self-image of America. But they 
cannot be wished away. Fewer and fewer can be reconverted by patience or 
co-opted by subtlety—for instance, by appointing them to teach their 
heresy. Hence the search for means which would make it possible either 
to get rid of dissident individuals or to reduce the importance of the 
university which serves them as a base for protest.

The students and faculty who question the legitimacy of the university, 
and do so at high personal cost, certainly do not feel that they are 
setting consumer standards or abetting a production system. Those who 
have founded such groups as the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars 
and the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) have been among 
the most effective in changing radically the perceptions of the 
realities of foreign countries for millions of young people. Still 
others have tried to formulate Marxian interpretations of American 
society or have been among those responsible for the flowering of 
communes. Their achievements add new strength to the argument that the 
existence of the university is necessary to guarantee continued social 
criticism.

There is no question that at present the university offers a unique 
combination of circumstances which allows some of its members to 
criticize the whole of society. It provides time, mobility, access to 
peers and information, and a certain impunity: privileges not equally 
available to other segments of the population. But the university 
provides this freedom only to those who have already been deeply 
initiated into the consumer society and into the need for some kind of 
obligatory public schooling.

The school system today performs the threefold function common to 
powerful churches throughout history. It is at the same time 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. Today the school system, and 
especially the university, provides ample opportunity for criticism of 
the myth and for rebellion against its institutional perversions. But 
the ritual which demands tolerance of the fundamental contradictions 
between myth and institution still goes largely unchallenged, for 
neither ideological criticism nor social action can bring about a new 
society. Only disenchantment with and detachment from the central social 
ritual and reform of that ritual can bring about radical change.

The American university has become the final stage of the most 
all-encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in 
history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the 
first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and 
expensive initiation into its myth. We cannot begin a reform of 
education unless we first understand that neither individual learning 
nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We 
cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that 
obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter 
what is taught in them.

The project of de-mythologizing which I propose cannot be limited to the 
university alone. Any attempt to reform the university without attending 
to the system of which it is an integral part is like trying to do urban 
renewal in New York City from the twelfth story up. Most current college 
level reform looks like the building of high-rise slums. Only a 
generation which grows up without obligatory schools will be able to 
re-create the university.

II

The Myth of Institutionalized Values

School initiates the Myth of Unending Consumption. This modern myth is 
grounded in the belief that process inevitably produces something of 
value and, therefore, production necessarily produces demand. School 
teaches us that instruction produces learning. The existence of schools 
produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need school, 
all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to 
other specialized institutions. Once the self-taught man or woman has 
been discredited, all nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect. In 
school we are taught that valuable learning is the result of attendance; 
that the value of learning increases with the amount of input; and, 
finally, that this value can be measured and documented by grades and 
certificates.

In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation 
by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather 
the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most 
people learn best by being “with it,” yet school makes them identify 
their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.

Once a man or woman has accepted the need for school, he or she is easy 
prey for other institutions. Once young people have allowed their 
imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are 
conditioned to institutional planning of every sort. “Instruction” 
smothers the horizon of their imaginations. They cannot be betrayed, but 
only short-changed, because they have been taught to substitute 
expectations for hope. They will no longer be surprised for good or ill 
by other people, because they have been taught what to expect from every 
other person who has been taught as they were. This is true in the case 
of another person or in the case of a machine.

This transfer of responsibility from self to institution guarantees 
social regression, especially once it has been accepted as an 
obligation. I saw this illustrated when John Holt recently told me that 
the leaders of the Berkeley revolt against Alma Mater had later “made” 
her faculty. His remark suggested the possibility of a new Oedipus 
story—Oedipus the Teacher, who “makes” his mother in order to engender 
children with her. The man addicted to being taught seeks his security 
in compulsive teaching. The woman who experiences her knowledge as the 
result of a process wants to reproduce it in others.

III

The Myth of Measurement of Values

The institutionalized values school instills are quantified ones. School 
initiates young people into a world where everything can be measured, 
including their imaginations, and, indeed, man himself.

But personal growth is not a measurable entity. It is growth in 
disciplined dissidence, which cannot be measured against any rod, or any 
curriculum, nor compared to someone else’s achievement. In such learning 
one can emulate others only in imaginative endeavor, and follow in their 
footsteps rather than mimic their gait. The learning I prize is 
immeasurable re-creation.

School pretends to break learning up into subject “matters,” to build 
into the pupil a curriculum made of these prefabricated blocks, and to 
gauge the result on an international scale. Men and women who submit to 
the standard of others for the measure of their own personal growth soon 
apply the same ruler to themselves. They no longer have to be put in 
their place, but put themselves into their assigned slots, squeeze 
themselves into the niche which they have been taught to seek, and, in 
the very process, put their fellows into their places, too, until 
everybody and everything fits.

Men and women who have been schooled down to size let unmeasured 
experience slip out of their hands. To them, what cannot be measured 
becomes secondary, threatening. They do not have to be robbed of their 
creativity. Under instruction, they have unlearned to “do” their thing 
or “be” themselves, and value only what has been made or could be made.

Once men and women have the idea schooled into them that values can be 
produced and measured, they tend to accept all kinds of rankings. There 
is a scale for the development of nations, another for the intelligence 
of babies, and even progress toward peace can be calculated according to 
body count. In a schooled world, the road to happiness is paved with a 
consumer’s index.

IV

The Myth of Packaging Values

School sells curriculum—a bundle of goods made according to the same 
process and having the same structure as other merchandise. Curriculum 
production for most schools begins with allegedly scientific research, 
on whose basis educational engineers predict future demand and tools for 
the assembly line, within the limits set by budgets and taboos. The 
distributor-teacher delivers the finished product to the consumer-pupil, 
whose reactions are carefully studied and charted to provide research 
data for the preparation of the next model, which may be “ungraded,” 
“student-designed,” “team-taught,” “visually-aided,” or “issue-centered.”

The result of the curriculum production process looks like any other 
modern staple. It is a bundle of planned meetings, a package of values, 
a commodity whose “balanced appeal” makes it marketable to a 
sufficiently large number to justify the cost of production. 
Consumer-pupils are taught to make their desires conform to marketed 
values. Thus they are made to feel guilty if they do not behave 
according to the predictions of consumer research by getting the grades 
and certificates that will place them in the job category they have been 
led to expect.

Educators can justify more expensive curricula on the basis of their 
observation that learning difficulties rise proportionately with the 
cost of the curriculum. This is an application of Parkinson’s Law that 
work expands with the resources available to do it. This law can be 
verified on all levels of school: for instance, reading difficulties 
have been a major issue in French schools only since their per capita 
expenditures have approached US levels of 1950—when reading difficulties 
became a major issue in US schools.

In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as 
they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance 
is not due to the authoritarian style of a public school or the 
seductive style of some free schools, but to the fundamental approach 
common to all schools—the idea that one person’s judgment should 
determine what and when another person must learn.

V

The Myth of Self-Perpetuating Progress

Even when accompanied by declining returns in learning, paradoxically, 
rising per capita instructional costs increase the value of the pupil in 
his or her own eyes and on the market. At almost any cost, school pushes 
the pupil up to the level of competitive curricular consumption, into 
progress to ever higher levels. Expenditures to motivate the student to 
stay on in school skyrocket as he climbs the pyramid. On higher levels 
they are disguised as new football stadiums, chapels, or programs called 
International Education. If it teaches nothing else, school teaches the 
value of escalation: the value of the American way of doing things.

The Vietnam war fits the logic of the moment. Its success has been 
measured by the numbers of persons effectively treated by cheap bullets 
delivered at immense cost, and this brutal calculus is unashamedly 
called “body count.” Just as business is business, the never ending 
accumulation of money, so war is killing—the never ending accumulation 
of dead bodies. In like manner, education is schooling, and this 
openended process is counted in pupilhours. The various processes are 
irreversible and self-justifying. By economic standards, the country 
gets richer and richer. By death-accounting standards, the nation goes 
on winning its war forever. And by school standards, the population 
becomes increasingly educated.

School programs hunger for progressive intake of instruction, but even 
if the hunger leads to steady absorption it never yields the joy of 
knowing something to one’s satisfaction. Each subject comes packaged 
with the instruction to go on consuming one “offering” after another, 
and last year’s wrapping is always obsolete for this year’s consumer. 
The textbook racket builds on this demand. Educational reformers promise 
each new generation the latest and the best, and the public is schooled 
into demanding what they offer. Both the dropout who is forever reminded 
of what he or she missed and the graduate who is made to feel inferior 
to the new breed of student know exactly where they stand in the ritual 
of rising deceptions and continue to support a society which 
euphemistically calls the widening frustration gap a “revolution of 
rising expectations.”

But growth conceived as open-ended consumption—eternal progress—can 
never lead to maturity. Commitment to unlimited quantitative increase 
vitiates the possibility of organic development.

VI

Ritual Game and the New World Religion

The school-leaving age in developed nations outpaces the rise in life 
expectancy. The two curves will intersect in a decade and create a 
problem for Jessica Mitford and professionals concerned with “terminal 
education.” I am reminded of the late Middle Ages, when the demand for 
Church services outgrew a lifetime, and “Purgatory” was created to 
purify souls under the Pope’s control before they could enter eternal 
peace. Logically, this led first to a trade in indulgences and then to 
an attempt at Reformation. The Myth of Unending Consumption now takes 
the place of belief in life everlasting.

Arnold Toynbee has pointed out that the decadence of a great culture is 
usually accompanied by the rise of a new World Church which extends hope 
to the domestic proletariat while serving the needs of a new warrior 
class. School seems eminently suited to be the World Church of our 
decaying culture. No institution could better veil from its participants 
the deep discrepancy between social principles and social reality in 
today’s world. Secular, scientific, and death-denying, it is of a piece 
with the modern mood. Its classical, critical veneer makes it appear 
pluralist if not antireligious. Its curriculum both defines science and 
is itself defined by so-called scientific research. No one completes 
school—yet. It never closes its doors on anyone without first offering 
him one more chance: at remedial, adult, and continuing education.

School serves as an effective creator and sustainer of social myth 
because of its structure as a ritual game of graded promotions. 
Introduction into this gambling ritual is much more important than what 
or how something is taught. It is the game itself that schools, that 
gets into the blood and becomes a habit. A whole society is initiated 
into the Myth of Unending Consumption of services. This happens to the 
degree that token participation in the open-ended ritual is made 
compulsory and compulsive everywhere. School directs ritual rivalry into 
an international game which obliges competitors to blame the world’s 
ills on those who cannot or will not play. School is a ritual of 
initiation which introduces the neophyte to the sacred race of 
progressive consumption, a ritual of propitiation whose academic priests 
mediate between the faithful and the gods of privilege and power, a 
ritual of expiation which sacrifices its dropouts, branding them as 
scapegoats of underdevelopment.

Even those who spend at best a few years in school—and this is the 
overwhelming majority in Latin America, Asia, and Africa—learn to feel 
guilty because of their underconsumption of schooling. In Mexico six 
grades of school are legally obligatory. Children born into the lower 
economic third have only two chances in three to make it into the first 
grade. If they make it, they have four chances in 100 to finish 
obligatory schooling by the sixth grade. If they are born into the 
middle third group, their chances increase to twelve out of 100. With 
these rules, Mexico is more successful than most of the other 
twenty-five Latin American republics in providing public education.

Everywhere, all children know that they were given a chance, albeit an 
unequal one, in an obligatory lottery, and the presumed equality of the 
international standard now compounds their original poverty with the 
selfinflicted discrimination accepted by the dropout. They have been 
schooled to the belief in rising expectations and can now rationalize 
their growing frustration outside school by accepting their rejection 
from scholastic grace. They are excluded from Heaven because, once 
baptized, they did not go to church. Born in original sin, they are 
baptized into first grade, but go to Gehenna (which in Hebrew means 
“slum”) because of their personal faults. As Max Weber traced the social 
effects of the belief that salvation belonged to those who accumulated 
wealth, we can now observe that grace is reserved for those who 
accumulate years in school.

VII

The Coming Kingdom: the Universalization of Expectations

School combines the expectations of the consumer expressed in its claims 
with the beliefs of the producer expressed in its ritual. It is a 
liturgical expression of a world-wide “cargo cult,” reminiscent of the 
cults which swept Melanesia in the Forties, which injected cultists with 
the belief that, if they but put on a black tie over their naked torsos, 
Jesus would arrive in a steamer bearing an icebox, a pair of trousers, 
and a sewing machine for each believer.

School fuses the growth in humiliating dependence on a master with the 
growth in the futile sense of omnipotence that is so typical of the 
pupil who wants to go out and teach all nations to save themselves. The 
ritual is tailored to the stern work habits of the hardhats, and its 
purpose is to celebrate the myth of an earthly paradise of never ending 
consumption, which is the only hope for the wretched and dispossessed.

Epidemics of insatiable this-worldly expectations have occurred 
throughout history, especially among colonized and marginal groups in 
all cultures. Jews in the Roman Empire had their Essenes and Jewish 
messiahs, serfs in the Reformation their Thomas Münzer, dispossessed 
Indians from Paraguay to Dakota their infectious dancers. These sects 
were always led by a prophet, and limited their promises to a chosen 
few. The school-induced expectation of the kingdom, on the other hand, 
is impersonal rather than prophetic, and universal rather than local. 
Man has become the engineer of his own messiah and promises the 
unlimited rewards of science to those who submit to progressive 
engineering for his reign.

VIII

The New Alienation

School is not only the New World Religion. It is also the world’s 
fastest growing labor market. The engineering of consumers has become 
the economy’s principal growth sector. As production costs decrease in 
rich nations, there is an increasing concentration of both capital and 
labor in the vast enterprise of equipping man for disciplined 
consumption. During the past decade, capital investments directly 
related to the school system rose. Disarmament would only accelerate the 
process by which the learning industry moves to the center of the 
national economy. School gives unlimited opportunity for legitimated 
waste, so long as its destructiveness goes unrecognized and the cost of 
palliatives goes up.

If we add those engaged in full-time teaching to those in full-time 
attendance, we realize that this so-called superstructure has become 
society’s major employer. In the US sixty-two million people are in 
school and eighty million at work elsewhere. This is often forgotten by 
neo-Marxist analysts who say that the process of de-schooling must be 
postponed or bracketed until other disorders, traditionally understood 
as more fundamental, are corrected by an economic and political 
revolution. Only if school is understood as an industry can 
revolutionary strategy be planned realistically. For Marx, the cost of 
producing demands for commodities was barely significant. Today, most 
human labor is engaged in the production of demands that can be 
satisfied by industry which makes intensive use of capital. Most of this 
is done in school.

Alienation, in the traditional scheme, was a direct consequence of work 
becoming wage-labor which deprived man of the opportunity to create and 
be re-created. Now young people are pre-alienated by schools that 
isolate them from the world of work and pleasure. School makes 
alienation preparatory to life, thus depriving education of reality and 
work of creativity. School prepares for the alienating 
institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once 
this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in 
independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close 
themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not 
predetermined by institutional definition. And school directly or 
indirectly employs a major portion of the population. School either 
keeps men and women for life or makes sure that they will be kept by 
some institution.

The New World Church is the knowledge industry, both purveyor of opium 
and the workbench during an increasing number of the years of an 
individual’s life. De-schooling is, therefore, at the root of any 
movement for human liberation.

IX

The Revolutionary Potential of De-Schooling

Of course, school is not, by any means, the only modern institution 
which has as its primary purpose the shaping of man’s vision of reality. 
Advertising, mass media, and the design components of engineered 
products play their part in the institutional manipulation of man’s 
demands. But school enslaves more profoundly and more systematically, 
since only school is credited with the principal function of forming 
critical judgment and, paradoxically, tries to do so by making learning 
about oneself, about others, and about nature depend on a pre-packaged 
process. School touches us so intimately that none of us can expect to 
be liberated from it by something else. We can only imagine other schools.

Many self-styled revolutionaries are victims of school. They see even 
“liberation” as the product of an institutional process. Only liberating 
oneself from school will dispel such illusions. The discovery that most 
learning requires no teaching can be neither manipulated nor planned. 
Each of us is personally responsible for his or her own de-schooling, 
and only we have the power to do it. No one can be excused if he fails 
to liberate himself from schooling. People could not free themselves 
from the Crown until at least some of them had freed themselves from the 
established Church. They cannot free themselves from progressive 
consumption until they free themselves from obligatory school.

We are all involved in schooling, from both the side of production and 
that of consumption. We are superstitiously convinced that good learning 
can and should be produced in us—and that we can produce it in others. 
Our attempt to withdraw from the concept of school will reveal the 
resistance we find in ourselves when we try to renounce limitless 
consumption and the pervasive presumption that others can be manipulated 
for their own good. No one is fully exempt from exploitation of others 
in the schooling process.

School is both the largest and the most anonymous employer of all. 
Indeed, the school is the best example of a new kind of enterprise, 
succeeding the guild, the factory, and the corporation. The 
multinational corporations which have dominated the economy are now 
being complemented, and may one day be replaced, by supernationally 
planned service agencies. These enterprises present their services in 
ways that make all men feel obliged to consume them. They are 
internationally standarized, redefining the value of their services 
periodically and everywhere at approximately the same rhythm.

“Transportation” relying on new cars and superhighways serves the same 
institutionally packaged need for comfort, prestige, speed, and 
gadgetry, whether its components are produced by the state or not. The 
apparatus of “medical care” defines a peculiar kind of health, whether 
the service is paid for by the state or by the individual. Graded 
promotion in order to obtain diplomas fits the student for a place on 
the same international pyramid of qualified manpower, no matter who 
directs the school.

In all these cases, employment is a hidden benefit: the driver of a 
private automobile, the patient who submits to hospitalization, or the 
pupil in the schoolroom must now be seen as part of a new class of 
“employees.” A liberation movement which starts in school, and yet is 
grounded in the awareness of teachers and pupils as simultaneously 
exploiters and exploited, could foreshadow the revolutionary strategies 
of the future; for a radical program of de-schooling could train youth 
in the new style of revolution needed to challenge a social system 
featuring obligatory “health,” “wealth,” and “security.”

The risks of a revolt against school are unforeseeable, but they are not 
as horrible as those of a revolution starting in any other major 
institution. School is not yet organized for selfprotection as 
effectively as a nationstate, or even a large corporation. Liberation 
from the grip of schools could be bloodless. The weapons of the truant 
officer and his allies in the courts and employment agencies might take 
very cruel measures against the individual offender, especially if he or 
she were poor, but they might turn out to be powerless against the surge 
of a mass movement.

School has become a social problem; it is being attacked on all sides, 
and citizens and their governments sponsor unconventional experiments 
all over the world. They resort to unusual statistical devices in order 
to keep faith and save face. The mood among some educators is much like 
the mood among Catholic bishops after the Vatican Council. The curricula 
of so-called “free schools” resemble the liturgies of folk and rock 
masses. The demands of high-school students to have a say in choosing 
their teachers are as strident as those of parishioners demanding to 
select their pastors. But the stakes for society are much higher if a 
significant minority loses its faith in schooling. This would not only 
endanger the survival of the economic order built on the coproduction of 
goods and demands, but equally the political order built on the 
nation-state into which students are delivered by the school.

Our options are clear enough. Either we continue to believe that 
institutionalized learning is a product which justifies unlimited 
investment, or we rediscover that legislation and planning and 
investment, if they have any place in formal education, should be used 
mostly to tear down the barriers that now impede opportunities for 
learning, which can only be a personal activity.

If we opt for more and better instruction, society will be increasingly 
dominated by sinister schools and totalitarian teachers. Doctors, 
generals, and policemen will continue to serve as secular arms for the 
educator. There will be no winners in this deadly game, but only 
exhausted frontrunners, a straining middle sector, and the mass of 
stragglers who must be bombed out of their fields into the rat race of 
urban life. Pedagogical therapists will drug their pupils more in order 
to teach them better, and students will drug themselves more to gain 
relief from the pressure of teachers and the race for certificates. 
Pedagogical warfare in the style of Vietnam will be increasingly 
justified as the only way of teaching people the value of unending progress.

Repression will be seen as a missionary effort to hasten the coming of 
the mechanical Messiah. More and more countries will resort to the 
pedagogical torture already implemented in Brazil and Greece. This 
pedagogical torture is not used to extract information or to satisfy the 
psychic needs of Hitlerian sadists. It relies on random terror to break 
the integrity of an entire population and make it plastic material for 
the teachings invented by technocrats. The totally destructive and 
constantly progressive nature of obligatory instruction will fulfill its 
ultimate logic unless we begin to liberate ourselves right now from our 
pedagogical hubris, our belief that man can do what God cannot, namely 
manipulate others for their own salvation.

Many people are just awakening to the inexorable destruction which 
present production trends imply for the environment, but individuals 
have only very limited power to change these trends. The manipulation of 
men and women begun in school has also reached a point of no return, and 
most people are still unaware of it. They still encourage school reform, 
as Henry Ford III proposes less poisonous automobiles.

Daniel Bell says that our epoch is characterized by an extreme 
disjunction between cultural and social structures, the one being 
devoted to apocalyptic attitudes, the other to technocratic decision 
making. This is certainly true for many educational reformers, who feel 
impelled to condemn almost everything which characterizes modern 
schools—and at the same time propose new schools.

In his The Structure of Scientific Revolution, Thomas Kuhn argues that 
such dissonance inevitably precedes the emergence of a new cognitive 
paradigm. The facts reported by those who observed free fall, by those 
who returned from the other side of the earth, and by those who used the 
new telescope did not fit the Ptolomaic world view. Quite suddenly, the 
Copernican paradigm was accepted. The dissonance which characterizes 
many of the young today is not so much cognitive but a matter of 
attitudes—a feeling about what a tolerable society cannot be like. What 
is surprising about this dissonance is the ability of a very large 
number of people to tolerate it.

The capacity to pursue incongruous goals requires an explanation. 
According to Max Gluckman, all societies have procedures to hide such 
dissonances from their members. He suggests that this is the purpose of 
ritual. Rituals can hide from their participants even discrepancies and 
conflicts between social principle and social organization. As long as 
an individual is not explicitly conscious of the ritual character of the 
process through which he was initiated to the forces which shape his 
cosmos, he cannot break the spell and shape a new cosmos. As long as we 
are not aware of the ritual through which school shapes the progressive 
consumer—the economy’s major resource—we cannot break the spell of this 
economy and shape a new one.

How may society become more aware of the ritual that now possesses it 
and how might learning take place if it did? I will turn to these 
questions in a later article.

Copyright © 1970 by Ivan Illich