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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This panel, which brings together scholars from Europe and Latin America, will present historical and philosophical perspectives on the notion of deschooling, considered both as idea and ideal. As an idea, it epithomizes the critique of schooling as part of the institutionalization and bureaucratization of education, a critique famously represented by Ivan Illich’s work but that has a longer history in educational thought. As an ideal, it proposes the end of the mediation of teachers and curriculum, which will be replaced by learning networks or systems –usually machinic. The panel wants to explicitly engage with AERA 2018’s main theme, focusing on past and present challenges to schooling and how they have expanded or curtailed the dreams of public education.

Sub Unit

• International Relations Committee

Chair

• Ines Dussel, DIE-CINVESTAV/Mexico

Papers

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

• Fostering the Dream of Infallible and Efficient Instruction: Programmed Instruction and Teaching Machines in Cold War - Daniel Troehler, University of Vienna

• Deschooling, Feminism, and Inventing the Student as a Political Subject in the 1970s - Julie E. McLeod, University of Melbourne

• We Need to Bring More School Into Our Educational Institutions: A Plea for Reschooling - Jan Masschelein, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; Maarten Simons, University of Leuven