Deschooling Avant la Lettre: Anti-Institutionalism in Late Medieval and Modern Europe

• In Event: The Idea(l) of Deschooling: International and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on a Continuing Debate

Abstract

Since its formulation in 1971, the category of de-schooling has been inextricably linked to the radical critique of modern school systems and their shortcomings. At the same time, this critique advanced some proposals for the reorganization of learning beyond schools and school systems. This central argument has been directed against schools and their systemic negative effects, including the disadvantageous working of bureaucracy and state power. This critique supposes the very existence of a comprehensive school system with different levels of promotion and certification under public authority. In this sense, de-schooling in Illich’s formulations may be linked to forms of institutional criticism in the transnational movements associated with the long 1960s. However, this was not the first time in which these arguments were raised. In this paper, I will focus on earlier episodes of intellectual and actual de-schooling in Europe in a longue durée perspective. Under that light, it can be said that de-schooling has been a recurrent trend in Western social thought and discontent for many centuries. Movements towards the secular, disrupting the separate world of monastic schools, the rage against schools in the earliest phase of the Lutheran reformation, and radical projects of a new education in the context of the French Revolution can be seen as crucial processes of radical intellectual and political rejection of schools that sometimes enacted truly processes of de-schooling. These critiques and de-institutionalizations were purposeful processes and not merely an outcome of wider catastrophic situations, such as the factual de-schooling associated with the Thirty Years’ War in Central Europe. Taken from this viewpoint, Illich’s thesis of de-schooling shows a newer case of a broader tradition of anti-institutionalism in Western history. These cases show that even in non-primarily bureaucratic educational settings – like in late medieval and early-modern schools – anti-institutionalism has been a substantial element of the history of schooling. Repositioning the thesis on de-schooling in this longer tradition contributes to both relativizing its purported uniqueness and considering it in its wider cultural implications. The basis for this argument includes published contemporary sources as well as a reconsideration of available research works.

Author

• Marcelo Caruso