Deschooling Critique - gds17. Web viewDeschooling Critique. Background/Informational. Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia . Sustainability education (SE), Education for Sustainability

Deschooling Critique

Background/Informational

Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia Sustainability education (SE), Education for Sustainability (EfS), and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) are interchangeable terms describing the practice of teaching for sustainability. ESD is the term most used internationally and by the United Nations.[1] Agenda 21 was the first international document that identified education as an essential tool for achieving sustainable development and highlighted areas of action for education.For UNESCO, education for sustainable development involves:

integrating key sustainable development issues into teaching and learning. This may include, for example, instruction about climate change, disaster risk reduction, biodiversity, and poverty reduction and sustainable consumption. It also requires participatory teaching and learning methods that motivate and empower learners to change their behaviours and take action for sustainable development. ESD consequently promotes competencies like critical thinking, imagining future scenarios and making decisions in a collaborative way.[2][3]

The aspiration of sustainable development requires us to resolve common problems and tensions and to recognize new horizons. Economic growth and the creation of wealth have reduced global poverty rates, but vulnerability, inequality, exclusion and violence have increased within and across societies throughout the world. Unsustainable patterns of economic production and consumption contribute to global warming, environmental degradation and an upsurge in natural disasters. Moreover, while international human rights frameworks have been strengthened over the past several decades, the implementation and protection of these norms remain a challenge. For example, despite the progressive empowerment of women through greater access to education, they continue to face discrimination in public life and in employment. Violence against women and children, particularly girls, continues to undermine their rights. Again, while technological development contributes to greater interconnectedness and offers new avenues for exchange, cooperation and solidarity, we also see an increase in cultural and religious intolerance, identity-based political mobilization and conflict.[4]Education must find ways of responding to such challenges, taking into account multiple worldviews and alternative knowledge systems, as well as new frontiers in science and technology such as the advances in neurosciences and the developments in digital technology. Rethinking the purpose of education and the organization of learning has never been more urgent.[4]

Critical Pedagogy Aliakbari and Faraji 11 – Mohammad Aliakbari, Associate Professor in the English Department of the School of Humanities at Ilam University, Ph.D. in English Language Teaching from Esfahan University, Elham Faraji, M.A. in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Ilam University, 2011 (“Basic Principles of Critical Pedagogy,” IPEDR, Volume 17, Available Online at: http://www.ipedr.com/vol17/14-CHHSS%202011-H00057.pdf,, Accessed 6-15-17) Critical Pedagogy (CP) is an approach to language teaching and learning which, according to Kincheloe (2005), is concerned with transforming relations of power which are oppressive and which lead to the oppression of people. It tries to humanize and empower learners. It is most associated with the Brazilian educator and activist Paulo Freire using the principals of critical theory of the Frankfurt school as its main source. The prominent members of this critical theory are Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas. Critical theory is concerned with the idea of a just society in which people have political, economic, and cultural control of their lives.Thinkers of critical theory believe that these goals are satisfied only through emancipating oppressed people which empowers them and enables them to transform their life conditions. It is actually the starting point for critical pedagogy. The major concern of CP is with criticizing the schooling in

capitalist societies. As Gor (2005) puts it, the major goals of CP are awareness raising and rejection of violation and discrimination against people.CP of Freire like critical theory tries to transform oppressed people and to save them from being objects of education to subjects of their own autonomy and emancipation. In this view, students should act in a way that enables them to transform their societies which is best achieved through emancipatory education. Through problem posing education and questioning the problematic issues in learners’ lives, students learn to think critically and develop a critical consciousness which help them to improve their life conditions and to take necessary actions to build a more just and equitable society. Thus, it can be said that CP challenges any form of domination, oppression and subordination with the goal of emancipating oppressed or marginalized people. As Kessing-Styles (2003) points out, CP is an educational response to inequalities and oppressive power relations which exist in educational institutions. Major authors associated with CP include Paulo Freire, Wolfgang Klafki, Michale Apple, Peter McLaren, Ira Shor, and Henry Giroux.

Praxis Aliakbari and Faraji 11 – Mohammad Aliakbari, Elham Faraji, 2011 (“Basic Principles of Critical Pedagogy,” IPEDR, Volume 17, Available Online at: http://www.ipedr.com/vol17/14-CHHSS%202011-H00057.pdf,, Accessed 6-15-17) The purpose of the educator and the educated, the leader and the followers in a dialogue between equal partners is called praxis (Gur-Ze'ev, 1998). It is defined as “the self-creative activity through which we make the world. The requirements of praxis are theory both relevant to the world and nurtured by actions in it, and an action component in its own theorizing process that grows out of practical and political grounding”( Buker, 1990, cited in Lather, 1991, pp.11-12). In education praxis aims at bridging the gap between theory and transformational action. That is, praxis connects education which is libratory with social transformation (Boyce, 1996). Praxis for Freire is both reflection and action, both interpretation and change. As he puts it, “Critical consciousness is brought about not through intellectual effort alone but through praxis_ through the authentic union of action and reflection” (Freire, 1970, cited in Burbules & Berk, 1999). Boyce (1996) also asserts that learners equipped with praxis are well prepared to participate in collective actions. Praxis is critical reflection and action the purpose of which is to implement a range of educational practices and processes with the goal of creating not only a better learning environment but also a better world (Kessing-Styles, 2003). Admitting the importance and the effects of praxis Sadeghi (2008) maintains that only through dialogical process, the practice of praxis is likely to happen.

Explanation of Illich’s conceptual learning webs/networks. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) A good educational system should have three purposes : it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives ; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and , finally , furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Such a system would require the application of constitutional guarantees to education. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. Nor should the public be forced to suppor t, through a regressive

taxation, a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which in fact restricts the public's chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market . It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot get in by the door. Moreover, such new institutions should be channels to which the learner would have access without credentials or pedigree --public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon would become available.I believe that no more than four--possibly even three--distinct "channels" or learning exchanges could contain all the resources needed for real learning. The child grows up in a world of things, surrounded by people who serve as models for skills and values. He finds peers who challenge him to argue, to compete, to cooperate, and to understand; and if the child is lucky, he is exposed to confrontation or criticism by an experienced elder who really cares. Things, models, peers, and elders are four resources each of which requires a different type of arrangement to ensure that everybody has ample access to it. I will use the words "opportunity web" for "network" to designate specific ways to provide access to each of four sets of resources. "Network" is often used, unfortunately, to designate the channels reserved to material selected by others for indoctrination, instruction, and entertainment. But it can also be used for the telephone or the postal service, which are primarily accessible to individuals who want to send messages to one another. I wish we had another word to designate such reticular structures for mutual access, a word less evocative of entrapment, less degraded by current usage and more suggestive of the fact that any such arrangement includes legal, organizational, and technical aspects. Not having found such a term, I will try to redeem the one which is available, using it as a synonym of "educational web."What are needed are new networks, readily available to the public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and teaching. To give an example: The same level of technology is used in TV and in tape recorders. All Latin-American countries now have introduced TV: in Bolivia the government has financed a TV station, which was built six years ago, and there are no more than seven thousand TV sets for four million citizens. The money now tied up in TV installations throughout Latin America could have provided every fifth adult with a tape recorder. In addition, the money would have sufficed to provide an almost unlimited library of prerecorded tapes, with outlets even in remote villages, as well as an ample supply of empty tapes.This network of tape recorders, of course, would be radically different from the present network of TV. It would provide opportunity for free expression: literate and illiterate alike could record, preserve, disseminate, and repeat their opinions. The present investment in TV, instead, provides bureaucrats, whether politicians or educators, with the power to sprinkle the continent with institutionally produced programs which they-or their sponsors--decide are good for or in demand by the people. Technology is available to develop either independence and learning or bureaucracy and teaching. Four NetworksThe planning of new educational institutions ought not to begin with the administrative goals of a principal or president, or with the teaching goals of a professional educator, or with the learning goals of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the question, "What

should someone learn?" but with the question, "What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?" Someone who wants to learn knows that he needs both information and critical response to its use from somebody else. Information can be stored in things and in persons. In a good educational system access to things ought to be available at the sole bidding of the learner, while access to informants requires, in addition, others' consent. Criticism can also come from two directions: from peers or from elders, that is, from fellow learners whose immediate interests match mine, or from those who will grant me a share in their superior experience. Peers can be colleagues with whom to raise a question, companions for playful and enjoyable (or arduous) reading or walking, challengers at any type of game. Elders can be consultants on which skill to learn, which method to use, what company to seek at a given moment. They can be guides to the right questions to be raised among peers and to the deficiency of the answers they arrive at. Most of these resources are plentiful. But they are neither conventionally perceived as educational resources, nor is access to them for learning purposes easy, especially for the poor. We must conceive of new relational structures which are deliberately set up to facilitate access to these resources for the use of anybody who is motivated to seek them for his education. Administrative, technological, and especially legal arrangements are required to set up such web-like structures.Educational resources are usually labeled according to educators' curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four different approaches which enable the student to gain access to any educational resource which may help him to define and achieve his own goals: 1. Reference Services to Educational Objects -which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning . Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters; others can be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or on off hours.2. Skill Exchanges --which permit persons to list their skills, the conditions under which they are willing to serve as models for others who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can be reached . 3. Peer-Matching --a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry . 4. Reference Services to Educators-at-Large --who can be listed in a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, paraprofessionals, and free-lancers, along with conditions of access to their services . Such educators, as we will see, could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients.

1NC

1NC – Deschooling K

The affirmative’s attempt to reform the school system reinforces a schooled society that feeds children into capitalism’s industrial machine. Note* there are few links to specific things not highlighted – Educational technologists and R&D, the Free-school movement, teachers unions, behaviourists. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) I believe that the contemporary crisis of education demands that we review the very idea of publicly prescribed learning , rather than the methods used in its enforcement. The dropout rate--especially of junior-high-school students and elementary-school teachers-- points to a grass-roots demand for a completely fresh look . The "classroom practitioner" who considers himself a liberal teacher is increasingly attacked from all sides. The freeschool movement, confusing discipline with indoctrination, has painted him into the role of a destructive authoritarian. The educational technologist consistently demonstrates the teacher's inferiority at measuring and modifying behavior. And the school administration for which he works forces him to bow to both Summerhill and Skinner, making it obvious that compulsory learning cannot be a liberal enterprise . No wonder that the desertion rate of teachers is overtaking that of their students.America's commitment to the compulsory education of its young now reveals itself to be as futile as the pretended American commitment to compulsory democratization of the Vietnamese. Conventional schools obviously cannot do it . The free-school movement entices unconventional educators , but ultimately does so in support of the conventional ideology of schooling . And the promises of educational technologists , that their research and development --if adequately funded--can offer some kind of final solution to the resistance of youth to compulsory learning, sound as confident and prove as fatuous as the analogous promises made by the military technologists.The criticism directed at the American school system by the behaviorists and that coming from the new breed of radical educators seem radically opposed. The behaviorists apply educational research to the "induction of autotelic instruction through individualized learning packages." Their style clashes with the nondirective cooption of youth into liberated communes established under the supervision of adults. Yet, in historical perspective, these two are just contemporary manifestations of the seemingly contradictory yet really complementary goals of the public school system. From the beginning of this century, the schools have been protagonists of social control on the one hand and free cooperation on the other, both placed at the service of the "good society," conceived of as a highly organized and smoothly working corporate structure . Under the impact of intense urbanization, children became a natural resource to be molded by the schools and fed into the industrial machine. Progressive politics and the cult of efficiency converged in the growth of the U.S. public school .* Vocational guidance and the junior high school were two important results of this kind of thinking. [*See Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, Cuaderno No. 50. Centro Intercultural de Documentacin, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1971.]

It appears, therefore, that the attempt to produce specified behavioral changes which can be measured and for which the processor can be held accountable is just one side of a coin, whose other side is the pacification of the new generation within specially engineered enclaves which will seduce them into the dream world of their elders. These pacified in society are well described by Dewey, who wants us to "make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society, and permeate it with the spirit of art, history and science." In this historical perspective, it would be a grave mistake to interpret the current threecornered controversy between the school establishment, the educational technologists and the free schools as the prelude to a revolution in education. This controversy reflects rather a stage of an attempt to escalate an old dream into fact, and to finally make all valuable learning the result of professional teaching. Most educational alternatives proposed converge toward goals which are immanent in the production of the cooperative man whose individual needs are met by means of his specialization in the American system: They are oriented toward the improvement of what--for lack of a better phrase--I call the schooled society . Even the seemingly radical critics of the school system are not willing to abandon the idea that they have an obligation to the young , especially to the poor, an obligation to process them , whether by love or by fear, into a society which needs disciplined specialization as much from its producers as from its consumers and also their full commitment to the ideology which puts economic growth first . Dissent veils the contradictions inherent in the very idea of school. The established teachers unions , the technological wizards , and the educational liberation movement reinforce the commitment of the entire society to the fundamental axioms of a schooled world , somewhat in the manner in which many peace and protest movements reinforce the commitments of their members--be they black, female, young, or poor--to seek justice through the growth of the gross national income.

Schooled society reproduces dominant neoliberal values that cause social inequality, dehumanization, and the ecological destruction of Earth. Jandrić 14 – Petar Jandrić, Professor at University of Applied Sciences in Zagreb, Former Senior Lecturer at The Polytechnic of Zagreb, Ph.D. in Information Science from Sveučilište u Zagrebu, MSc in Education from The University of Edinburgh, 2014 “Deschooling Virtuality,” Open Review of Educational Research, Volume 1, Issue 1, pg. 84-98, December 2nd, Available Online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23265507.2014.965193?scroll=top&needAccess=true, Accessed 6-2-17) Implicitly or explicitly, educators have always recognized their position in and against dominant social forces commonly described as Gramsci's (1992Gramsci, A. (1992). Prison notebooks. New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]) superstructures: political power relationships, institutions, culture and the state. At the one hand, education is supposed to liberate people from ignorance and poverty; at the other hand, educational ‘liberation’ is brought by middle-class teachers who, often unwillingly and/or unconsciously, inculcate dominant value systems and reproduce traditional social inequalities . This power dynamic creates a vicious circle on all levels of educational praxis, including but not limited to the nature of teacher employment. Working within the current educational systems, educators are intrinsic parts of educational Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser,   2008 Althusser,   L.   (2008).   On ideology.   London:   Verso.   [Google Scholar] ) which contribute to increasing social inequality . (To make things worse, they are also blamed more than ever for any perceived shortcomings in ‘the system’.) Those who resign might feel better with themselves, but the next person in line will step into their places and perpetuate the system. Adapted from collective work of the small group of British scholars called London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group

(Mitchell et al., 1979Mitchell, J., Mackenzie, D., Holloway, J., Cockburn, C., Polanshek, K., Murray, N., McInnes, N., & McDonald, J. (1979). In and against the state. Retrieved 18 March 2013 fromhttp://libcom.org/library/against-state-1979 ), the concept in and against superstructures succinctly summarizes Illich's argument against schooling. However, while the majority of radical educators seek solution in opposition   from   this unfavourable position (Mitchell et al., 1979Mitchell, J., Mackenzie, D., Holloway, J., Cockburn, C., Polanshek, K., Murray, N., McInnes, N., & McDonald, J. (1979). In and against the state. Retrieved 18 March 2013 fromhttp://libcom.org/library/against-state-1979 ), Illich asserts that all such attempts are deemed a failure and looks for radically different approaches.Illich's argument departs from his wide critique of institutionalization of the contemporary society. ‘Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work’ (Illich, 1971Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. London: Marion Boyars. [Google Scholar], p. 3). Institutionalized society is dialectically intertwined with institutionalized education . ‘The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new’ (Illich, 1971Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. London: Marion Boyars. [Google Scholar], p. 3). Institutionalized educational systems are necessarily dehumanized . Hence, institutionalized society reduces people to producers and consumers . In the context of learning it could be argued that this is not always bad, as a form of the relationship between producers and consumers naturally underpins learning (beyond schooling). What makes institutionalized educational systems dehumanized , however, are the static models of ‘ delivering’ education and often perverse ways they feed into capital . Following the line of argument very similar to Frankfurt School critiques of technologies exposed in Herbert Marcuse's One-dimensional man (1964Ellul, J. (1964). The technological society. New York: Vintage Books. [Google Scholar]) and Martin Heidegger's ‘Only a God can save us' interview (1981Heidegger, M. (1981). “Only a God can save us": The Spiegel interview. In T. Sheehan (Ed.), Heidegger: The man and the thinker (pp. 45–67). Chicago, IL: Precedent Press. [Google Scholar]), Illich shows that stability of institutionalized society is based on constant economic growth . Deeply rooted in the spirit of 1960s and 1970s, he finally concludes that such a model inevitably leads towards ecological destruction of our planet .

The alternative is the deinstitutionalization of education and creation of sustainability learning networks to deschool society. This is crucial to formulate sustainability learning and critical, border pedagogy to unbind educational policy and thought from neoliberal perspectives. Blewitt 10 – John Blewitt, Senior Lecturer in Sustainability and Communication at Aston Business School, Former Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Huddersfield, Former Professor a the University of Exeter, Distinguished Schumacher Fellow, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Ph.D. from the University of Wales, MEd from Huddersfield University, 2010 (“Deschooling Society? A Lifelong Learning Network for Sustainable Communities, Urban Regeneration and Environmental Technologies,” November 12th, Sustainability, Volume 2, Issue 11, pg. 3465-3478, Available Online at: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/11/3465/htm, Accessed 5-29-17) 3. A Creative RuptureFor many decades the curriculum trajectory of formal education institutions at all levels in the ‘developed world’ has increased the salience of vocation and professional learning through the structuring learning that directly serves the needs of the economy and , in turn, promotes

excessive material consumption . As Illich wrote ([12], p. 46), “in a schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumer’s index”. This, together with his stress on deinstitutionalisation and deprofessionalisation of learning resonates with the need for a sustainability learning to politically abrade the cultural authority of neoliberal perspectives on education and learning . The capitalisation metaphor—human capital, financial capital, social capital economic capital, cultural capital, natural capital—dominates many discourses including those that shape with operations of formal education and the public pedagogy of a number of sustainability organisations, such as Forum for the Future, and although arguably the capital metaphor may in some instances be a useful heuristic device, Darlene Clover [14] and Chet Bowers [15,16,17] remind us that metaphors, particularly root metaphors, shape not only how we perceive and live but also the ways in which we may critique and penetrate the political implications and educational infractions of this conceptual framework. A shopping mall is both a constellation of capitals, good or bad, and a pedagogical opportunity that could conceivably nurture a transformation of meaning schemes and perspectives if set within learning processes and spaces of creative re-imagination, resistance and rupture. Similarly, in the sphere of training and vocational education the terms ‘ work ready’ ‘employable’ , ‘ employer led’ and ‘ relevan t’ too easily trip off the tongue because mainstream policy makers and educators have internalised the complacent rhetoric of the end of history with “the only show in town” being private enterprise and economic growth . There is an alternative . There has to be one. Given this, it is important that sustainability educators and practitioners recognise that formal education has historically been not so much a transformative experience but a socially reproductive one that rarely transforms base metal into gold doing little to turn an unsustainable into a sustainable world. Educators need to confront the routine behaviours, expectations, thinking and metaphors that has conceivably made our era an age of stupid . In this context, Franny Armstrong’s apocalyptic docudrama, The Age of Stupid (UK, 2009), is an important pedagogic space inviting a meditation on human nature and its financial, production and social relations. It is also an object lesson and potentially prefiguring an engaged and active political, media based, public pedagogy challenging fatalistic passivity and the infantisation of opinion. As Felix Guattari writes ([18], pp. 41-42).The increasing deterioration of human relations with the socius, the psyche and ‘nature’, is due not only to environmental and objective pollution but is also the result of a certain incomprehension and fatalistic passivity towards these issues as a whole, among both individuals and governments. (...) It is quite wrong to make a distinction between action on the psyche, the socius and the environment. Refusal to face up to the erosion of these three areas, as the media would have us do, verges on the strategic infantilization of opinion and a destructive neutralization of democracy. We need to ‘kick the habit’ of seductive discourse, particularly the ‘fix’ of television, in order to be able apprehend the world through the interchangeable lenses or points of view of the three ecologies.With a move towards deinstitutionalising formal learning and the rearticulation of public pedagogies through the cultural spaces and opportunities of co-operation, co-production, social and eco-entrepreneurship, lifelong learning practices need not be exclusively tied to the dictates of global capitalism that otherwise infuse our everyday lives and lifeworlds. There are new, clear and evident conditions of an alternative possibility for the experience of contemporary cultural capitalism is itself contradictory. Large multinational conglomerates and retail chains present themselves as ecologically responsible inviting consumers to buy into fundamental iniquities through the false promise that our purchases will benefit those who suffer as a result of those very relations of production that have made the commodity possible. Five pence of every purchase

goes to save a rainforest, feed a starving child, help a peasant farmer or save a tiger ... A consequence, Zizek writes ([19], p. 98) is that seemingly:

One can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, or oppose the copyrighting of genes, without ever confronting the antagonism between the Included and Excluded.

Hardt and Negri [20] suggests, in their analysis of the new Empire, the current world order is one where compromise and accommodation falls far short of the radical, structural and philosophic requirement to resist its cultural seductiveness. Resistance requires an imagination and a will to be against . A tall order maybe, but Empire’s considerable impact suggests there is an intellectual appetite for political change that sustainability educators and practitioners and educators need to address. Again, with Mike Hulme’s [21] approach to understanding the nature of climate change as so brilliantly laid out in Why We Disagree About Climate Change, sustainability practitioners and educators have prime opportunities to square the circle, to reconcile sustainability with development , to both unbind politics and become a subject of and for politics . As the philosopher Alain Badiou ([22], p. 24) writes:

The essence of politics is not the plurality of opinions. It is the prescription of a possibility in rupture with what exists. Climate change is not a problem waiting for a solution . The environment is not just waiting for a new and more appropriate form of fungible capitalisation but learners are waiting for possibilities of a new learning that only broad based and grounded sustainability networks can provide. These networks must be “readily available to the public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and teaching” ([12], p. 79) . To effect this, a radical departure in current educational thinking and practice needs to be intimately and reflexively connected in a recursive succession of moments that bring forth a triadic process of reflective intuition encompassing mind, matter and mediation [23,24]. For Bergson, the moment of creativity emerges from a process of rupture , of discontinuity that transcends the quantitative discontinuities produced by dividing the world into separate and discrete segments, disciplines and professions but which are nonetheless infused with a plurality of continuities and rhythmic durations . These ruptures will gain strength from a rearticulation and re-apprehension of metaphor based on intuitive reflections of lived experience that imbue action with meaning and meaning with action. For Badiou [22], in our world where dialogue is reduced to a plurality of opinions and where democratic individuals seem largely indifferent to injustice and vast material inequalities, only through an “event”, a radical break or rupture with the status quo, can individuals regain their subjectivity and fashion a praxis that offers a genuine alternative . Networks of learning that can engage a multiplicity of participants , individuals, groups, organisations and sectors that may, or may not at first glance, share a great deal of common ground are nonetheless constitutive parts of a world of social learning enabling processes, spaces and practices of lifelong learning for sustainability to emerge. Thus instead of resembling sites of social and cultural reproduction , such a lifelong learning, and its constituent networks , must become an ecotone which is understood and lived both metaphorically and literally. To put it another way, a lifelong learning perceived and practiced as an ecotone is a transition area where different communities of practice , and interest, may come together thereby generating a richness in thought, action, knowledge, skills, understanding, creativity and philosophy not found within any one section, group, institution or community or in the wider educational environment . This transitional space offers the potentiality and possibility of rupture and a new ground for sustainability learning that is in essence

politically democratic and just . It is the cultural space for a critical, border pedagogy . For Illich ([12], p. 78) learning is a human activity which least needs manipulation by others. The most important learning is immeasurable re-creation and a good education system therefore should have three main purposes, ...it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.This new form of education and learning, he writes ([12], p. 80), should not start with the question “‘What should someone learn?’ but with the question, What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?” He outlines his proposal for a qualitative and quantitive transformation—a deschooling of society that challenges the hegemony of professional education and the ideology of credentialism tied completely to the economistic worldview. He prefers the term “opportunity web” to “network” for the latter is too often enlisted “to designate the channels reserved to material selected by others for indoctrination, instruction, and entertainment” ([12], p. 79). He explains further ([12], p. 80),Someone who wants to learn knows that he needs both information and critical response to its use from somebody else. Information can be stored in things and in persons. In a good educational system access to things ought to be available at the sole bidding of the learner, while access to informants requires, in addition, others’ consent. Criticism can also come from two directions: from peers or from elders, that is, from fellow learners whose immediate interests match mine, or from those who will grant me a share in their superior experience. Peers can be colleagues with whom to raise a question, companions for playful and enjoyable (or arduous) reading or walking, challengers at any type of game. Elders can be consultants on which skill to learn, which method to use, what company to seek at a given moment. They can be guides to the right questions to be raised among peers and to the deficiency of the answers they arrive at. Most of these resources are plentiful. But they are neither conventionally perceived as educational resources, nor is access to them for learning purposes easy, especially for the poor. We must conceive of new relational structures which are deliberately set up to facilitate access to these resources for the use of anybody who is motivated to seek them for his education . Administrative, technological, and especially legal arrangements are required to set up such web-like structures.

2NC/1NR Essentials

2NC/1NR – Overview

Educational reform inevitably reinforces a schooled society where neoliberal institutions determine our values. Schools serve as sites of social reproduction that instill this dominant value system into the mindset of young people. This causes structural violence via social inequality and dehumanization within schools themselves and makes extinction inevitable through the environmental destruction of earth.

Reject their solvency claims – policy makers and educators have internalized the rhetoric of private enterprise and economic growth. Absent the alternative, their reforms will be coopted by neoliberal perspectives that ensure serial policy failure – that’s Blewitt.

[Insert Turns Case Analysis]

The institutionalization of values makes extinction inevitable through environmental destruction – its try-or-die. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) Man has developed the frustrating power to demand anything because he cannot visualize anything which an institution cannot do for him. Surrounded by all-powerful tools, man is reduced to a tool of his tools . Each of the institutions meant to exorcise one of the primeval evils has become a fail-safe, self-sealing coffin for man . Man is trapped in the boxes he makes to contain the ills Pandora allowed to escape. The blackout of reality in the smog produced by our tools has enveloped us. Quite suddenly we find ourselves in the darkness of our own trap. Reality itself has become dependent on human decision. The same President who ordered the ineffective invasion of Cambodia could equally well order the effective use of the atom. The "Hiroshima switch" now can cut the navel of the Earth. Man has acquired the power to make Chaos overwhelm both Eros and Gaia. This new power of man to cut the navel of the Earth is a constant reminder that our institutions not only create their own ends, but also have the power to put an end to themselves and to us. The absurdity of modern institutions is evident in the case of the military. Modern weapons can defend freedom, civilization, and life only by annihilating them. Security in military language means the ability to do away with the Earth.The absurdity that underlies nonmilitary institutions is no less manifest. There is no switch in them to activate their destructive power, but neither do they need a switch. Their grip is already fastened to the lid of the world. They create needs faster than they can create satisfaction, and in the process of trying to meet the needs they generate, they consume the Earth . This is true for agriculture and manufacturing, and no less for medicine and education. Modern agriculture poisons and exhausts the soil. The "green revolution" can, by means of new seeds, triple the output of an acre--but only with an even greater proportional increase of fertilizers, insecticides, water, and power. Manufacturing of these, as of all other goods, pollutes the oceans and the atmosphere and degrades

irreplaceable resources. If combustion continues to increase at present rates, we will soon consume the oxygen of the atmosphere faster than it can be replaced. We have no reason to believe that fission or fusion can replace combustion without equal or higher hazards. Medicine men replace midwives and promise to make man into something else: genetically planned, pharmacologically sweetened, and capable of more protracted sickness. The contemporary ideal is a pan-hygienic world: a world in which all contacts between men, and between men and their world, are the result of foresight and manipulation. School has become the planned process which tools man for a planned world, the principal tool to trap man in man’s trap . It is supposed to shape each man to an adequate level for playing a part in this world game. Inexorably we cultivate, treat, produce, and school the world out of existence . The military institution is evidently absurd. The absurdity of nonmilitary institutions is more difficult to face. It is even more frightening, precisely because it operates inexorably. We know which switch must stay open to avoid an atomic holocaust. No switch detains an ecological Armageddon.In classical antiquity, man had discovered that the world could be made according to man's plans, and with this insight he perceived that it was inherently precarious, dramatic and comical. Democratic institutions evolved and man was presumed worthy of trust within their framework. Expectations from due process and confidence in human nature kept each other in balance. The traditional professions developed and with them the institutions needed for their exercise. Surreptitiously, reliance on institutional process has replaced dependence on personal good will . The world has lost its humane dimension and reacquired the factual necessity and fatefulness which were characteristic of primitive times. But while the chaos of the barbarian was constantly ordered in the name of mysterious, anthropomorphic gods, today only man's planning can be given as a reason for the world being as it, is. Man has become the plaything of scientists, engineers, and planners.We see this logic at work in ourselves and in others. I know a Mexican village through which not more than a dozen cars drive each day. A Mexican was playing dominoes on the new hard-surface road in front of his house--where he had probably played and sat since his youth. A car sped through and killed him. The tourist who reported the event to me was deeply upset, and yet he said: "The man had it coming to him."At first sight, the tourist's remark is no different from the statement of some primitive bushman reporting the death of a fellow who had collided with a taboo and had therefore died. But the two statements carry opposite meanings. The primitive can blame some tremendous and dumb transcendence, while the tourist is in awe of the inexorable logic of the machine. The primitive does not sense responsibility; the tourist senses it, but denies it. In both the primitive and the tourist the classical mode of drama, the style of tragedy, the logic of personal endeavor and rebellion is absent. The primitive man has not become conscious of it, and the tourist has lost it. The myth of the Bushman and the myth of the American are made of inert, inhuman forces. Neither experiences tragic rebellion. For the Bushman, the event follows the laws of magic; for the American, it follows the laws of science. The event puts him under the spell of the laws of mechanics, which for him govern physical, social, and psychological events.The mood of 1971 is propitious for a major change of direction in search of a hopeful future. Institutional goals continuously contradict institutional products . The poverty program produces more poor, the war in Asia more Vietcong, technical assistance more underdevelopment. Birth control clinics increase survival rates and boost the population; schools produce more dropouts ; and the curb on one kind of pollution usually increases another.Consumers are faced with the realization that the more they can buy, the more deceptions they must swallow. Until recently it seemed logical that the blame for this pandemic inflation of dysfunctions could be laid either on the limping of scientific discovery behind the technological

demands or on the perversity of ethnic, ideological, or class enemies. Both the expectations of a scientific millennium and of a war to end all wars have declined.For the experienced consumer, there is no way back to a naive reliance on magical technologies. Too many people have had bad experiences with neurotic computers, hospital-bred infections, and jams wherever there is traffic on the road, in the air, or on the phone. Only ten years ago conventional wisdom anticipated a better life based on an increase in scientific discovery. Now scientists frighten children. The moon shots provide a fascinating demonstration that human failure can be almost eliminated among the operators of complex systems-yet this does not allay our fears that the human failure to consume according to instruction might spread out of control.For the social reformer there is no way back, either, to the assumptions of the forties. The hope has vanished that the problem of justly distributing goods can be sidetracked by creating an abundance of them. The cost of the minimum package capable of satisfying modern tastes has skyrocketed, and what makes tastes modern is their obsolescence prior even to satisfaction.The limits of the Earth's resources have become evident. No breakthrough in science or technology could provide every man in the world with the commodities and services which are now available to the poor of rich countries. For instance, it would take the extraction of one hundred times the present amounts of iron, tin, copper, and lead to achieve such a goal, with even the "lightest" alternative technology.Finally, teachers, doctors, and social workers realize that their distinct professional ministrations have one aspect-at least-in common. They create further demands for the institutional treatments they provide, faster than they can provide service institutions.Not just some part, but the very logic, of conventional wisdom is becoming suspect. Even the laws of economy seem unconvincing outside the narrow parameters which apply to the social, geographic area where most of the money is concentrated. Money is, indeed, the cheapest currency, but only in an economy geared to efficiency measured in monetary terms. Both capitalist and Communist countries in their various forms are committed to measuring efficiency in cost-benefit ratios expressed in dollars. Capitalism flaunts a higher standard of living as its claim to superiority. Communism boasts of a higher growth rate as an index of its ultimate triumph. But under either ideology the total cost of increasing efficiency increases geometrically. The largest institutions compete most fiercely for resources which are not listed in any inventory: the air, the ocean, silence, sunlight, and health. They bring the scarcity of these resources to public attention only when they are almost irremediably degraded. Everywhere nature becomes poisonous, society inhumane , and the inner life is invaded and personal vocation smothered. A society committed to the institutionalization of values identifies the production of goods and services with the demand for such. Education which makes you need the product is included in the price of the product. School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is. In such a society marginal value has become constantly self-transcendent. It forces the few largest consumers to compete for the power to deplete the earth , to fill their own swelling bellies, to discipline smaller consumers, and to deactivate those who still find satisfaction in making do with what they have. The ethos of nonsatiety is thus at the root of physical depredation , social polarization , and psychological passivity . When values have been institutionalized in planned and engineered processes, members of modern society believe that the good life consists in having institutions which define the values that both they and their society believe they nee d. Institutional value can be defined as the level of output of an institution. The corresponding value of man is measured by his ability to consume and degrade these institutional outputs, and thus create a new-even higher-demand . The value of institutionalized man depends on his capacity as an incinerator . To use an image--he has become

the idol of his handiworks. Man now defines himself as the furnace which burns up the values produced by his tools. And there is no limit to his capacity . His is the act of Prometheus carried to an extreme.The exhaustion and pollution of the earth's resources is , above all, the result of a corruption in man's self-image , of a regression in his consciousness . Some would like to speak about a mutation of collective consciousness which leads to a conception of man as an organism dependent not on nature and individuals, but rather on institutions. This institutionalization of substantive values, this belief that a planned process of treatment ultimately gives results desired by the recipient, this consumer ethos , is at the heart of the Promethean fallacy. Efforts to find a new balance in the global milieu depend on the deinstitutionalization of values .

2NC/1NR – Alternative Explanation

The alternative is the deinstitutionalization of education and formation of sustainability learning networks to deschool society. Instead of maintaining socially reproductive structured learning which directly serves neoliberal interests, obligatory education should be abandoned in favor of life-long networks of learning accessible to all without restrictions. These networks will serve as transition areas wherein various individuals, groups, and communities will come together to facilitate a rupture with status quo schooling and value systems through sustainability learning and critical pedagogy.

That solves the case – the alternative removes any reason current education is bad and makes any benefit of education even better.

Sustainability learning networks are crucial to create a more ecological society and establish environmental and social justice for a more sustainable future – open webs of knowledge-exchange and non-restrictive learning are key. Blewitt 10 – John Blewitt, Senior Lecturer in Sustainability and Communication at Aston Business School, Former Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Huddersfield, Distinguished Schumacher Fellow, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Ph.d. from the University of Wales, MEd from Huddersfield University, 2010 (“Deschooling Society? A Lifelong Learning Network for Sustainable Communities, Urban Regeneration and Environmental Technologies,” November 12th, Sustainability, Volume 2, Issue 11, pg. 3465-3478, Available Online at: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/11/3465/htm, Accessed 5-29-17) This era of post ecological politics has followed closely on the heels of the post industrial society, post modern culture and a post feminist age emerged when gender inequality has only just about been dented and Chevron brandish their green credentials on global media networks while continuing to fund climate change deniers [7]. We are all green now and it is incumbent on all of us as learners to interrogate and make sense of this absurdity. To do this, learning must be rooted in the experience of living, of navigating the multifaceted and often frightening array of consumer attractions and the dangers of apprehending the real as being simply what you want it to be. There is a need for more analysis and more contemplation in, of and about everyday life, everyday working relationships and the global politico-economic environment enveloping us. Reflective diaries and logs, often a mainstay of many courses, reproduce learning theories that have been reduced to a few slogans—reflect in or on learning, learning is double or single looped or ripples to appear. But reflection is not the same as contemplation or meditation, of staying with or dwelling on. For Heidegger ([8], p. 147).

To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell. This word bauen also means to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine…

Reflection and meditation in learning needs to take on a political aspect that facilitates the contestation of an educational apparatus dominated by capital and its associated logics.

Knowledge is also increasingly being created politically , collaboratively and collectively in a world where the experts , the high priests of intellectual culture, take a place alongside the buff, the enthusiast, the loosely knit social network where we-think is clearly more generative than academic group-think and where [9,10] cultural and academic gatekeepers still delineate what constitutes knowledge and what methods may produce valid and reliable knowledge. The wiki world is the fast show of contemporary intellectual and popular culture and has profound implications for understanding the future for sustainability in learning and development. The world of what I know is, the world of wiki economics, wiki design and wikipedia is allied to the world of carbon accounting, biosynthesis and cloud computing. There are further risks and uncertainties in this world of shifting and multiple references and disappearing reference points and a further antagonism in securing a cultural space for meaningful, critical, contemplation in a world where the futures market operates to the beat of the nanosecond. This world, full of disruptive technologies and opportunities for the space of flows that encompass economic, social and human capital together environmental contamination, crime and tentative attempts at global citizenship, is lived through the everyday life practices of urban neighbourhoods and diasporic communities, of the phenomenological experience of glocal communication media and the connected lifeworlds of extended family networks that traverse time, space and culture [11]. Many professionals and para-professionals also tend to inhabit intellectual communities of interstitial spaces where transdisciplinarity, inter professional working and multi agency activity is an ideological given but where lifelong learning and education for sustainable development still needs to secure a greater purchase.As the libertarian thinker Ivan Illich remarked forty years ago learning may take place more effectively and more democratically without the hierarchical power structures and restrictive practices that currently dominate formal education . Illich ([12], p. 86) writes of lifelong, lifewide and city wide learning where the market for educational opportunity would be far more various if only “the goals of learning were no longer dominated by schools and schoolteachers”. Indeed, this is quickly happening as new digital media redefines the ecologies of lifelong learning . That the cyber environment could be a liberating force is not a new idea and neither is it one that has yet been realised as the current cultural/digital revolution is likely to be forever in the process of becoming. But what the present moment suggests is that change and continuity are never just two sides of the same coin for one technology simply does not replace another just as neoliberal economics necessarily relies on a strong state and the economy as a whole relies on healthy environmental and eco system services. The human social world may be viewed as a set of interlocking or nested systems but this is does not deny the crucial significance of human agency. Nothing will come of nothing so the emergence of sustainable communities , urban regeneration and design, the development and application of low carbon environmental technologies can only arise from a network of learning webs , political and economic relations and structures, that draw on the resources, intelligences, skills and capabilities of institutions and organisations, groups and individuals that offer due recognition to being part of , rather than separate from nature . These webs need to be facilitative open spaces where knowledge exchange , collaboration and co-operation generates innovation, creativity, leadership and pragmatic sense of the possible . The present moment is consequently both an end in-itself and a means to a better tomorrow in which leadership is distributed, networked and fluid. The keys to a sustainable future depend on nurturing capabilities , social and environmental justice rather than the accumulation of skills [13]. To effect this, sustainability educators, learners and other

practitioners must perceive themselves as cultural workers crossing borders and continually remembering that “intellectual leadership (...) depend[s] on superior intellectual discipline and imagination and the willingness to associate with others in their exercise” ([12], p. 101).

2NC/1NR – Framework

1. The critique is an impact turn – we access our offense in their framework.

2. The role of the ballot is to determine the best pedagogical strategy. View the plan and alternative as competing methods of instruction and determine the best educational model. Focusing on educational policy alone replicates the ignorance of policymakers and causes pedagogical underdevelopment and inconsistency. Cohen and Barnes 93 – David K. Cohen, John Dewey Collegiate Professor of Education and professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, Visiting Professor of Education at Harvard University, Ph.D from the University of Rochester, Carol A. Barnes, Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Neurology and Neuroscience, Evelyn F. McKnight Endowed Chair for Learning and Memory in Aging, Director of the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute, Director of the ARL Division of Neural Systems, Memory & Aging, and Associate Director of the BIO5 Institute at the University of Arizona, M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, 1993 “Pedagogy and Policy,” Teaching for Understanding: Challenges for Policy and Practice, Published by Jossey-Bass, ISBN: 978-1-55542-515-9, Available Online at: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dkcohen/downloads/CohenBarnesPedagogyPolicy.pdf, Accessed 6-12-17, p. 207-213) Much has been written about educational policy , but little has been written about how policy educates . That is curious, for nearly any policy must be educative for those who enact it. Policymakers may not intend such education, and in fact often are blissfully ignorant of the learning that their creations entail for enactors . But policies and programs regularly propose novel purposes. If they did not, they would be completely redundant. Some learning is required to achieve any new purpose, and that would be impossible without some education, even if it is only hasty self-education on the job. These points hold for policies of all sorts, It is relatively easy to see that the very innovative policies would require considerable education for enactors. For example, recent efforts to transform mathematics instruction from rote memorization to deep understanding would require extraordinary learning for most elementary school teachers. After all, they know only a little mathematics and seem to understand less. More important, the math that these teachers know usually is routine and algorithmic rather than deeply understood. The recent policies seek to remedy the consequences for children of teachers’ weak knowledge. But teachers could hardly help children to cultivate a much deeper and more complex understanding of mathematics unless they learned a different version of math themselves. And few could learn something so different without considerable education. Even much more prosaic policies require learning. When states reduced the speed limit to 55 miles per hour, motorists who had been in the habit of driving much faster had to learn to keep their speed down. Such learning was required even though drivers already knew, as a technical matter, how to slow a car down. Theirs may not have been very complex learning. Perhaps they had only to teach themselves to monitor the speedometer more carefully, or to begin their trips earlier. Simple though such things may be, each entails a bit of learning. And as many ticketed speeders can attest, such simple learning can be quite difficult. States and localities increasingly have organized driver reeducation programs to encourage the requisite learning. Hence learning for enactors is essential, whether or not policies and programs recognize the need for it. Most policies and programs at least tacitly recognize an educational need, as they offer regulations, guidelines, and the like. We might regard these as the most rudimentary curricula of

policy. They sometimes include step-by-step manuals for learning: they typically explicate the meaning of key terms; and they often define acceptable interpretations. In some cases the need for instruction is quite explicitly recognized, as when policymakers offer enactors formal “training” or “technical assistance.” But that sort of education may be only a beginning. The ambitious changes in mathematics instruction mentioned above would require much more extensive teacher learning. In contrast, many other policies are thought to have no educational requirements because they demand only “compliance.” Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act required that federal funds be cut off if public agencies practiced discrimination, a provision that proved to be a potent tool in southern school desegregation. Regulations, guidelines, and other technical guides to learning plated a key role in enacting this policy. But as it happened, legal and administrative compliance required considerable learning of rather different sorts, and often quite extraordinary education as well. For example, federal officials had to learn how to use Title VI to produce desegregation rather than die-hard resistance, damaging political explosions, and enforcement failures. Many local officials also had to learn their own version of these things if they wished to defuse local political dynamite. In those troubled years, when few white Americans had any experience with the enforcement of constitutional guarantees for African-Americans, such learning was no simple matter. Compliance with the Title VI also required that many students of both races learn to go to school together, for if schools collapsed in race riots compliance would be impossible. Many local educators also had to learn how to tolerate biracial schooling, and even how to encourage and support it. At a time when few Americans had any experience with equal-status contact between the races, such learning was an extraordinary task for Americans of all sorts. Yet it was essential for the enactment of a policy that seemed only to seek legal compliance. Our examples suggest that if the education of enactors is nearly always an element in policy, it can be a more or less important element. It has been increasingly important in education since the end of World War II, for policies and programs have made progressively greater demands for educators’ learning. The 1950s curriculum reforms sought to improve teaching, as did Head Start and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 and the “back to basics” movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. Each required that teachers learn a good deal in order to make the improvements that policymakers proposed, though these requirements seemed to go unnoticed by policymakers. The postwar policies and programs were educative in the general sense that is common to any policy. But they also were educative in a very specific sense: they sought to promote new pedagogies for pedagogues. That point holds with a vengeance for recent efforts to promote “higher-order thinking,” “teaching for understanding,” and much deeper knowledge of academic subjects. To say that most policies and programs entail learning and thus some education is only to make a logical or psychological claim. It tells us nothing about the education that actually was provided . That is our subject here: what kind of education has educational policy offered to enactors? What has been the pedagogy of policy? To answer these questions we must inquire about how policymakers actually tried to teach teachers to teach differently, and to do that we must consider policy as a sort of instruction . Such a reading of policy is of course more suitable in some cases than others, but it seems marvelously suitable for post-World War II education. In considering the pedagogy of policy, we employ a scheme that is familiar to students of instruction. We begin with purposes: what pedagogical aims have state and federal policymakers pressed on teachers? Then we turn to methods: what educational approaches have policymakers used as they have sought to teach teachers to teach differently? We also inquire about consistency: how do the pedagogies that policies enact compare with those that they press teachers to adopt? One thread in our answers to those question is paradoxical. Though policymakers have developed extraordinarily rich ambitions for schools, educational policies and programs have not been richly educative for enactors, The pedagogy of educational policy generally has been

didactic, much as teaching often is didactic. Policymakers are practiced at telling teachers what to do, but they rarely have done much more than lecture. Like many teachers they focus more on broadcasting their message and covering the material than on figuring out what learners make of it and framing instruction accordingly. Cases in which policymakers or program managers engaged educators in extended instructional conversations that were designed to encourage the desired learning are even more scarce than cases in which teachers engage students in such conversations. More troubling, policymakers seem to have learned little from experience . The pedagogy of policy remains quite undeveloped even though policymakers’ ambitions for classroom pedagogy have developed quite dramatically . In the last five or six years policymakers have advanced new and much more ambitious agenda for improving pedagogy, as they press schools to offer “higher-order thinking,” “teaching for understanding,” and the like. Yet for the most part these policies break little new ground in efforts to educate enactors . Though policymakers now seek dramatic revisions in classroom instruction, they make those instructional changes. Even that disjunction is only dimly and occasionally noticed by those who make policies and manage programs. Hence, we conclude by probing another issue: why has the pedagogy of education policy been so weakly educative? Policy and Pedagogy What educational aims have policymakers embraced as they have tried to teach teachers to improve their teaching? The answers vary, depending on the policies in question. We consider three of the great episodes in post-World War II education policy. The 1950s curriculum reforms sought intellectually ambitious instruction for America. Students were to become little scientists and mathematicians, “doing” mathematics and “messing about” with science. These were heady plans, especially in view of American educators’ previous efforts to do just the opposite. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, most educators and reformers had tried to concoct a “practical” education for most students on the grounds that few young Americans either wanted or needed anything more intellectually ambitious and that only a few could manage it in any event. If we view the fifties curriculum reforms against the background of such sad ambitions, it is probably unavoidable that they should seem elitist. Whether or not reformers intended improvements only for an elite, they did embrace a sort of academic seriousness that self-styled democratic reformers had been denouncing as elitist since 1900. Head Start and Title I of the 1965 ESEA were the leading programs in the second great postwar policy episode, and they were hardly elitist: both proposed to improve education for the poor. Their approach was quite plain in one sense—to provide more resources for schools, teachers, and families. But in another sense the approach was quite unclear, for initially both programs were agnostic about instructional content and pedagogy. How the resources were to be used was not an issue at the outset. For example, the Head Start and Follow Through Planned Variation experiments in the late 1960s and early 1970s included everything from open education on one end to highly structured behavior modification programs on the other. The “back to basics” movement of the 1970s and 1980s was the third postwar policy episode that we consider, and these reformers were not at all agnostic about curriculum and instruction. They believed that education had badly deteriorated for most students, including those from disadvantaged circumstances. They argued that students should at least be required to master the rudiments of knowledge, and pressed a largely traditional concept of the basics. Though some interpreted the basics as a traditional academic curriculum, most reformers adopted quite a different and much more narrow view of the ends of education, one that was light-years from the earlier curriculum reforms. Indeed, this movement was notable for didactic concepts of teaching and formulaic approaches to improvement. Reform and research abounded with lists and other tidy formulae, including the elements of “effective” schools and the steps in teaching with Madeline Hunter’s ITIP. A fourth great episode may be in the making, though it is too soon to tell. In the last five or six years another group of reformers has taken off in yet another direction. They demand more thoughtful and

intellectually ambitious instruction. They argue that students must become independent thinkers and enterprising problem solvers, and that schools should offer intellectually challenging instruction that is deeply rooted in the academic disciplines. These reformers envision instruction that is in some respects reminiscent of the Sputnik era. It certainly is much more thoughtful, adventurous, and demanding than was proposed by most advocated of back to basics. And it is a far cry from the rudimentary instruction that is found in most educational programs for the disadvantaged. In Just forty years, then, policymakers have embraced several different and sometimes divergent educational purposes. In fact, the aims of state and national education policy have changed so often since World War II that we can see no consistent vision of educational improvement in them. Yet these varied purposes have accumulated in schools and school systems. The ambitions for learning that policymakers pressed on teachers in the 1950s were only partly displaced by the new lessons that policymakers sought to teach in the 1960s. For instance, the innovative texts born in the 1950s continued in the use in many high schools—especially in the top tracks—throughout subsequent decades. And the 1960s lessons were only partly displaced by the newer purposes that policymakers pressed in the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter I and Head Start still thrive, and back to basics is alive and well in U.S. classrooms today, despite previous reforms and the subsequent turn toward teaching for understanding. Education policy has been an inconsistent teacher . Americans have tried to solve many different problems with formal schooling, but we have been divided about what education is good, what it is good for, and how best to educate . We also have been politically fickle, giving only brief attention to one great problem before turning to another. Policymakers have tried to teach teachers several different and sometimes divergent lessons in quick succession. What have teachers learned from this? They often say that whatever policy tells them today, it will tell them something different tomorrow . Upon hearing of a new policy or program, teachers often remind reformers and observers that they have been through something like this before. Though such evidence is important, it is only a beginning. To learn more about the educative character and effects of education policy, one also must investigate the specific instructional approaches that were employed and how they turned out. Those approaches varied, depending on how policy problems were framed and what policy instruments were used.

3. That’s predictable and fair – they should be prepared to defend the pedagogical value of the education system they propose reforming.

4. Modern schooling replicates flawed pedagogy and destroys the education of the affirmative. If we win our links, the plan can’t be separated from the system it reforms.

5. Debates about pedagogy are vital to stopping anti-democratic norms — addresses argumentative agency and leads to real change. Giroux 12 — Henry Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, 2012 (“Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie: The Education Deficit and the New Authoritarianism,” Truth-out, June 19th, accessible online at http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/9865-beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism, accessed on 10-12-14)Extreme power is now showcased through the mechanisms of ever-proliferating cultural/ educational apparatuses and the anti-public intellectuals who support them and are in turn rewarded by the elites who finance such apparatuses. The war at home is made visible in the

show of force aimed at civilian populations, including students, workers, and others considered disposable or a threat to the new authoritarianism. Its most powerful allies appear to be the intellectuals, institutions, cultural apparatuses and new media technologies that constitute the sites of public pedagogy , which produce the formative culture necessary for authoritarianism to thrive.While a change in consciousness does not guarantee a change in either one's politics or society, it is a crucial precondition for connecting what it means to think otherwise to conditions that make it possible to act otherwise. The education deficit must be seen as intertwined with a political deficit , serving to make many oppressed individuals complicit with oppressive ideologies. As the late Cornelius Castoriadis made clear, democracy requires "critical thinkers capable of putting existing institutions into question.... while simultaneously creating the conditions for individual and social autonomy."(41) Nothing will change politically or economically until new and emerging social movements take seriously the need to develop a language of radical reform and create new public spheres that support the knowledge, skills and critical thought that are necessary features of a democratic formative culture.Getting beyond the big lie as a precondition for critical thought , civic engagement and a more realized democracy will mean more than correcting distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods produced by politicians, media talking heads and anti-public intellectuals. It will also require addressing how new sites of pedagogy have become central to any viable notion of agency, politics and democracy itself. This is not a matter of elevating cultural politics over material relations of power as much as it is a rethinking of how power deploys culture and how culture as a mode of education positions power.James Baldwin, the legendary African-American writer and civil rights activist, argued that the big lie points to a crisis of American identity and politics and is symptomatic of "a backward society" that has descended into madness, "especially when one is forced to lie about one's aspect of anybody's history, [because you then] must lie about it all."(42) He goes on to argue "that one of the paradoxes of education [is] that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person . "(43) What Baldwin recognizes is that learning has the possibility to trigger a critical engagement with oneself, others and the larger society - education becomes in this instance more than a method or tool for domination but a politics, a fulcrum for democratic social change. Tragically, in our current climate "learning" merely contributes to a vast reserve of manipulation and self-inflicted ignorance. Our education deficit is neither reducible to the failure of particular types of teaching nor the decent into madness by the spokespersons for the new authoritarianism. Rather, it is about how matters of knowledge, values and ideology can be struggled over as issues of power and politics. Surviving the current education deficit will depend on progressives using history, memory and knowledge not only to reconnect intellectuals to the everyday needs of ordinary people, but also to jumpstart social movements by making education central to organized politics and the quest for a radical democracy.

They Say – “Permute – Do Both” Note* The cards/Blocks under Reforming Schools Possible should be used to answer the specific permutation in affirmative answers.

1. Not possible – the affirmative calls for a reform of schools while the alternative is a complete rejection of schools. The permutation either links or severs. Reject severance and intrinsic permutations because they make the affirmative a moving target that can dodge DAs and competition.

2. The alt is mutually exclusive because the system they aim to reform would no longer exist. Including the neoliberal perspectives of education policymakers in a permutation tanks alternative solvency by undermining its radical praxis while co-opting the formation of transition areas – that’s Blewitt.

3. If we win framework, they don’t get a permutation and the plan can’t be separated from its pedagogical strategy of reform. Evaluating competing pedagogical methods requires that those methods remain separate.

4. Pedagogical inconsistency DA – the continual provision of different educational methods causes enactor confusion and undermines each method introduced. The perm undermines alt solvency.

5. Every link is a DA to the permutation – proves including the plan in any way is bad.

6. No net-benefit – the alternative solves the whole case.

They Say – “Educational/Reform Policy Crucial To Pedagogy”

Educational policy fails as a pedagogical tool. Cohen and Barnes 93 – David K. Cohen, John Dewey Collegiate Professor of Education and professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, Visiting Professor of Education at Harvard University, Ph.D from the University of Rochester, Carol A. Barnes, Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Neurology and Neuroscience, Evelyn F. McKnight Endowed Chair for Learning and Memory in Aging, Director of the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute, Director of the ARL Division of Neural Systems, Memory & Aging, and Associate Director of the BIO5 Institute at the University of Arizona, M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, 1993 “Pedagogy and Policy,” Teaching for Understanding: Challenges for Policy and Practice, Published by Jossey-Bass, ISBN: 978-1-55542-515-9, Available Online at: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dkcohen/downloads/CohenBarnesPedagogyPolicy.pdf, Accessed 6-12-17, p. 207-213) Conclusion The pedagogy of educational policy has been didactic and inconsistent. Policymakers have told teachers to do many different, hugely important things in a short time . And in each case policymakers have acted as though their assignment was to dispense answers, not to provoke thought, ask questions, or generate discussion. The pedagogy of policy has been teacher-centered. As policymakers taught, they created few opportunities to listen as schoolteachers and other educators tried to make sense of new demands. Nor have policymakers cast policy as something that might be revised in light of what they learned from teachers’ experience. These features of policy seem ubiquitous. The curriculum reformers of the late 1950s and early 1960s were distinguished academics from great universities, yet they addressed teachers in quite didactic fashion. The reformers did not consider teachers as thoughtful learners and seemed largely unaware of vast problems that most would have in learning from the reforms. A didactic orientation is not peculiar to professors. The reformers who planned and operated Head Start and Title I of the 1965 ESEA were hardly professorial; they were cabinet officers, legislators, program managers, bureaucrats, and advocates for the poor. Yet they addressed teachers no less didactically than the professors, and they seemed similarly unaware of the great problems of teacher learning. Nor is didactic orientation peculiar to certain types of policies. The advocates of back to basics pressed relatively simple ideas about instruction on teachers, while the 1950s curriculum reformers pressed very complex ideas on them. But like other reformers, the advocates of basics acted as though teaching was active “telling” and learning was passive accumulation. How can we account for this uniformly didactic pedagogy of policy? In the back to basics crusade reformers urged a set of changes in the classrooms that fir relatively well with the established practice, which itself was didactic, teacher-centered, and oriented to skills and facts. They presented the reform ideas in practical, easy-to-adopt formats, and blanketed American education relatively effectively. The pedagogy of the reform fit quite nicely with the pedagogy that reformers urged on teachers. The 1950s curriculum reforms urged a very different sort of instruction that would have required immense changes in teaching. But while these reforms were pedagogically very ambitious, they were much less effective in reaching teachers. Reformers only weakly understood practice and the problems their ideas posed for practitioners. The changes that they urged would have been extraordinarily difficult to pull off even if reformers had been exquisitely sensitive to teaching and extraordinarily thoughtful in the education of teachers. In policy as in classrooms, learners ordinarily find it much easier to grasp material that is familiar and consistent with what they already know than material that is unfamiliar and inconsistent with extant knowledge.

Another reason for the generally didactic pedagogy of policy lies in American politics and political organization. This is a vast nation, in which several states are larger than many foreign countries. Local control is a tradition of school governance that is dearly held in states large and small. American government is extraordinarily fragmented at all levels and Americans are deeply divided about many matters of education policy . Under these circumstances it often is very difficult for state or national governments to do more that formulate policy and announce it . Given these circumstances and the political, administrative, and educational resources that a more ambitious pedagogy of policy would entail, a simple and square approach has been all that state and federal policymakers could manage in most cases. Most local school boards and administrators have not cultivated more sophisticated pedagogy in dealing with teachers, so politics alone cannot explain the prevalent pedagogy of policy. Americans’ expansive belief in the power of education is another explanation for the very limited pedagogy of policy that we have described. The 1950s curriculum reformers urged fundamental change on schools without considering that teachers might have to relearn their practice. Reformers believed students would learn quite nicely on their own if only they had good materials. The 1960s advocates of Head Start and Title I pressed sweeping changes in the education of disadvantaged children without much attention to what teachers would have to learn, in part because they believed students would learn much more if only they had more teachers and better materials. These reformers shared a characteristic American faith in the power of education. That faith allowed them to avoid careful consideration of instructional design, for if teaching and learning were as easily shaped as Americans have been inclined to believe, why spend lots of time carefully designing instruction? If learning and teaching were not difficult practices, reformers could easily imagine that students would learn independently from exciting materials and that teachers would find it easy to improve their practice. Lacking a sense that learning and teaching were often difficult, why should policymakers include instructional design framing policy? A last explanation for the limited pedagogy of policy is rooted in teaching itself. We have argued that policymakers behave little differently than most teachers. Like teachers, reformers have been in the habit of telling learners what they would learn, without much attention to what teachers thought, or already knew, or made of the policy. Like most teachers, policymakers have made few efforts to engage their students in conversations that could illuminate their grasp of the material or their interpretation of policy. Hence policymakers, like most teachers, have not been able to use learners’ ideas and understanding to revise instruction and advance learning. Like most teachers, policymakers focus on “putting the material across.” They have learned to consult various interested parties as part of the politics of policymaking, but they inquire little about what enactors may have to learn in order to respond constructively to policy, what it may take for them to learn, how they might best learn, and how policy might be redesigned in consequence of learners’ experience. Policy generally has been inattentive to learning , much as teachers often are inattentive.

Links

Link – Reforms

(1NC) The affirmative’s attempt to reform the school system is fundamentally oriented towards the improvement and promotion of a schooled society which feeds children into the industrial machine of capitalism. Note* there are few links to specific things not highlighted – Educational technologists and R&D, the Free-school movement, teachers unions, behaviourists. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) I believe that the contemporary crisis of education demands that we review the very idea of publicly prescribed learning , rather than the methods used in its enforcement. The dropout rate--especially of junior-high-school students and elementary-school teachers-- points to a grass-roots demand for a completely fresh look . The "classroom practitioner" who considers himself a liberal teacher is increasingly attacked from all sides. The freeschool movement, confusing discipline with indoctrination, has painted him into the role of a destructive authoritarian. The educational technologist consistently demonstrates the teacher's inferiority at measuring and modifying behavior. And the school administration for which he works forces him to bow to both Summerhill and Skinner, making it obvious that compulsory learning cannot be a liberal enterprise . No wonder that the desertion rate of teachers is overtaking that of their students.America's commitment to the compulsory education of its young now reveals itself to be as futile as the pretended American commitment to compulsory democratization of the Vietnamese. Conventional schools obviously cannot do it . The free-school movement entices unconventional educators , but ultimately does so in support of the conventional ideology of schooling . And the promises of educational technologists , that their research and development --if adequately funded--can offer some kind of final solution to the resistance of youth to compulsory learning, sound as confident and prove as fatuous as the analogous promises made by the military technologists.The criticism directed at the American school system by the behaviorists and that coming from the new breed of radical educators seem radically opposed. The behaviorists apply educational research to the "induction of autotelic instruction through individualized learning packages." Their style clashes with the nondirective cooption of youth into liberated communes established under the supervision of adults. Yet, in historical perspective, these two are just contemporary manifestations of the seemingly contradictory yet really complementary goals of the public school system. From the beginning of this century, the schools have been protagonists of social control on the one hand and free cooperation on the other, both placed at the service of the "good society," conceived of as a highly organized and smoothly working corporate structure . Under the impact of intense urbanization, children became a natural resource to be molded by the schools and fed into the industrial machine. Progressive politics and the cult of efficiency converged in the growth of the U.S. public school .* Vocational guidance and the junior high school were two important results of this kind of thinking. [*See Joel Spring, Education and the Rise

of the Corporate State, Cuaderno No. 50. Centro Intercultural de Documentacin, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1971.]It appears, therefore, that the attempt to produce specified behavioral changes which can be measured and for which the processor can be held accountable is just one side of a coin, whose other side is the pacification of the new generation within specially engineered enclaves which will seduce them into the dream world of their elders. These pacified in society are well described by Dewey, who wants us to "make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society, and permeate it with the spirit of art, history and science." In this historical perspective, it would be a grave mistake to interpret the current threecornered controversy between the school establishment, the educational technologists and the free schools as the prelude to a revolution in education. This controversy reflects rather a stage of an attempt to escalate an old dream into fact, and to finally make all valuable learning the result of professional teaching. Most educational alternatives proposed converge toward goals which are immanent in the production of the cooperative man whose individual needs are met by means of his specialization in the American system: They are oriented toward the improvement of what--for lack of a better phrase--I call the schooled society . Even the seemingly radical critics of the school system are not willing to abandon the idea that they have an obligation to the young , especially to the poor, an obligation to process them , whether by love or by fear, into a society which needs disciplined specialization as much from its producers as from its consumers and also their full commitment to the ideology which puts economic growth first . Dissent veils the contradictions inherent in the very idea of school. The established teachers unions , the technological wizards , and the educational liberation movement reinforce the commitment of the entire society to the fundamental axioms of a schooled world , somewhat in the manner in which many peace and protest movements reinforce the commitments of their members--be they black, female, young, or poor--to seek justice through the growth of the gross national income.

Link – Funding

The affirmative’s increase in funding rewards a failing system and trades off with localized deschooled learning methods – wastefully reinforcing schooling. Hern 98 – Matt Hern, Writer and activist based in East Vancouver, Founder of the Eastside Learning Center and Groundswell: Grassroots Economic Alternatives, Ph.D. in Urban Studies from the Union Institute & University, M.A. from the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfeild, Vermont, 1998 (“The Promise of Deschooling” Social Anarchism, Volume 25, Available Online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/matt-hern-the-promise-of-deschooling, Accessed 4-20-17) A Political ArgumentA political argument in favour of deschooling is a fairly simple one. Schools are huge businesses. They command massive amounts of capital, huge administrative apparatuses, they have enormous workforces and sprawling facilities, “Schooling is the largest single employer in the United States, and the largest grantor of contracts next to the Defense Department”. Over the course of a century, schools have developed into monumental undertakings, and the money that pours into them comes directly out tax dollars. Schooling is “a very profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state”. Schooling is about the triumph of the state over families and communities, and the spectacular entrenchment of bureaucracy at innumerable levels makes reform unthinkable. All across North America the pattern is relentless: tax money is appropriated in ever growing amounts and amassed in Ministries of Education, with colossal infrastructures and blanket mandates to license schools, accredit teachers and manufacture curricula. These Ministries then distribute that money to sanctioned school districts, themselves with huge bureaucracies who transfer money and required curricula to the actual schools. Teachers, also all accredited and sanctioned, are then given a series of groups of children, and are required to pass on a required curriculum in a required time frame. The effect is a seemingly endless hierarchy , with a downward spiral of tighter and tighter control, so that at the classroom level there is minimal flexibility. Teachers are given strict guidelines about discipline, achievement, pedagogy and time. They are reduced to information conveyers, passing on a prescribed set of knowledges to a prescribed population in a strictly regulated environment. And the real losers, of course, are the kids and their families. First, they are seeing only a sliver of their tax dollar returned to them, and have no political voice in how or where that sliver is spent. As John Gatto (1935- ), a past New York City and State Teacher of the Year and now vigourous deschooling advocate shows:Out of every dollar allocated to New York schools 51% is removed at the top for system-wide administrative costs. Local school districts remove another 5% for district administrative costs. At the school site there is wide latitude (concerning) what to do with the remaining 44%. but the average school deducts another 12% more for administration and supervision, bringing the total deducted from our dollar to 68 cents. But there are more non-teaching costs in most schools: coordinators of all sorts, guidance counselors, librarians, honorary administrators who are relieved of teaching duties to do favours for listed administrators... under these flexible guidelines the 32 cents remaining after three administrative levies is dropped in most schools to a quarter, two bits. Out of a 7 billion dollar school budget this is a net loss to instruction from all other uses equaling 5 1/2 billion dollars.This kind of pattern is recognizable in every school district across the continent. There is an incredible amount of money devoted to education, for example, “in Washington State nearly half of every tax dollar is spent on kindergarten through twelfth-grade education.”, and precious little of it is ever returned to those it was appropriated for, “New York State, for instance, employs more school administrators than all of the European Economic Community nations combined.” There is an amazingly pervasive myth that government schooling is cheaper than private education, and that opposition to schools is thus a

necessarily elitist proposal. It is a contention that is plainly absurd, and one that common sense, a priori evidence and statistics prove foolish.of the two forms (public and private) ... public school is by far the most expensive in direct cost (we’ll leave social costs out of it for the moment!), averaging $5500 a year per seat nationally, to a national average for all forms of private education of about $2200.The scale of school bureaucracy is monstrously wasteful , and as a government sponsored monopoly with guaranteed customers there is no pressure on schools to perform, in fact the opposite is true. Schools are rewarded for failure . When students emerge from schools with minimal skills and degraded personalities , the call inevitably goes up for more school money, more teachers, longer school years, more rigourous regulation. Schools are failing at even their own narrow mandates, and yet the response is to then increase their power and scope, which is the reverse of what is really needed. We need fewer schools and less schooling. The inherent logic of centralized monopoly schooling is faulty, both in terms of economics and pedagogy. Schools have always been conceived of in terms of warehousing and the efficient maintenance of a maximum number of children, and in a very limited way, contemporary schools are moderately effective at that, although hardly cost-effective. The difficulty with school logic is that kids habitually defy regimentation and families continue to demand that their children be given conditions to flourish in. What it means to flourish though, and what each individual family and child needs to grow into themselves is as variable as kids themselves. Every child is a unique and enigmatic individual with all the nuances and contradictions humanity entails, and each requires a specific set of circumstances and environments to learn, grow and flourish that only the kid and their family can even begin to comprehend. Necessitated by its very structure, compulsory schooling attempts to standardize and regulate all students’ patterns of learning, and plainly does not and will not work . This represents the street-level tragedy of schooling, and underlines a political argument for deschooling. The centralized appropriation of school money drains families and local communities of the resources to create locally and individually appropriate learning environments . What is needed is a vast, asystematically organized fabric of innumerable kinds of places for kids to spend their time. A decentralized, deschooled community vision includes homelearners of every stripe, learning centres , traditional schools, religious schools, Montessori, free schools, arts and performing centres, dance troupes, language training, athletic clubs etc., all organized on the basis of local need and interest . The resources should be available in every community to create a swath of local answers, and for each family and kid to develop their own educational and pedagogical approaches. The attempt to drive all children into centralized, compulsory and regimented schooling is an absurd scam and wasteful at every level . It is impossible for healthy children to thrive in such circumstances, and the century-long effort to enforce schooling has been hugely costly . It is a burden our communities should bear no longer .

The affirmative’s call for “more funding” directly supports the system of schooling – nurturing the worst in humanity and creating an anti-ecological culture. Hern 98 – Matt Hern, Writer and activist based in East Vancouver, Founder of the Eastside Learning Center and Groundswell: Grassroots Economic Alternatives, Ph.D. in Urban Studies from the Union Institute & University, M.A. from the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfeild, Vermont, 1998 (“The Promise of Deschooling” Social Anarchism, Volume 25, Available Online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/matt-hern-the-promise-of-deschooling, Accessed 4-20-17)

Politics, Pedagogy, Culture, Self-design, Community Control.It is virtually anathema in our culture, but I want to argue here that our society needs far fewer schools, not more. I believe that schools as we have conceived them in the late-20th Century are a parasite on our communities , a burden to our children and are the very essence of a hierarchical, anti-ecological culture . I further contend that dissolving the school monopoly over our kids may well hold the key to reconstructing our communities around local control and participatory democracy . Fortunately, there are a phenomenal number of alternatives to schools and schooling already flourishing in every community across the continent, representing a major threat to centralized institutional control. The abject failure of monopoly, state-controlled, compulsory schooling is evident to anyone who looks. The nightmare of schooling is costing our kids, our families and communities dearly in every way. Schools waste more money than anyone can fully conceive of, demand that our kids spend twelve years of their natural youth in morbidly depressing and oppressive environments and pour the energies of thousands upon thousands of eager teachers into demeaning and foolish classrooms. The sanctity of public schools has become so reified in our bizarre North American public political consciousness that people reflexively mouth support for ‘ education spending’ or ‘school dollars’ without any comprehension of what they are calling for. The reality that stands as background to the sordid liberal-conservative debate about how much cash to allocate to public schools is a system that systematically nurtures the worst in humanity and simultaneously suppresses individuality and real community. Deschooling is a call for individuals, families and communities to regain the ability to shape themselves . It is a political, a cultural and a pedagogical argument against schools and schooling, and the impetus to fundamentally reorganize our institutional relationships. For many good reasons I believe schools are the linchpin of the monopoly corporate state power over local communities, and actively resisting their grip holds much of the key to local power . I want to analyze and forward deschooling here in terms of three kinds of arguments: political, cultural and pedagogical, and draw each into a rubric of radical decentralism and direct democracy.

Link – Educational Equality

The affirmative’s goal of educational equality injects false hope into the modern religion of schooling. Only abandoning schools can solve prejudice and discrimination. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) The escalation of the schools is as destructive as the escalation of weapons but less visibly so. Everywhere in the world school costs have risen faster than enrollments and faster than the GNP; everywhere expenditures on school fall even further behind the expectations of parents, teachers, and pupils. Everywhere this situation discourages both the motivation and the financing for large-scale planning for nonschooled learning. The United States is proving to the world that no country can be rich enough to afford a school system that meets the demands this same system creates simply by existing , because a successful school system schools parents and pupils to the supreme value of a larger school system , the cost of which increases disproportionately as higher grades are in demand and become scarce.Rather than calling equal schooling temporarily unfeasible, we must recognize that it is, in principle, economically absurd , and that to attempt it is intellectually emasculating , socially polarizing , and destructive of the credibility of the political system which promotes it . The ideology of obligatory schooling admits of no logical limits. The White House recently provided a good example. Dr. Hutschnecker, the "psychiatrist" who treated Mr. Nixon before he was qualified as a candidate, recommended to the President that all children between six and eight be professionally examined to ferret out those who have destructive tendencies, and that obligatory treatment be provided for them. If necessary, their re-education in special institutions should be required. This memorandum from his doctor the President sent for evaluation to HEW. Indeed, preventive concentration camps for predelinquents would be a logical improvement over the school system.Equal educational opportunity is , indeed, both a desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with obligator;' schooling is to confuse salvation with the Church . School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition.Two centuries ago the United States led the world in a movement to disestablish the monopoly of a single church. Now we need the constitutional disestablishment of the monopoly of the school, and thereby of a system which legally combines prejudice with discrimination . The first article of a bill of rights for a modern, humanist society would correspond to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education." There shall be no ritual obligatory for all.

Link – Environmental Education

The affirmative call for environmental education relies on an anthropocentric greenwash of real environmental issues — crushes solvency and turns the case. Kahn 10 — Richard Kahn, Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Research University of North Dakota, Core Faculty in Education Antioch University in Los Angeles, PhD in Social Sciences and Comparative Education from the University of California, 2010 (“Ecopedagogy: An Introduction,” Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis, Published by Peter Lang Publishing, ISBN 978-1-4331-0545-6)However, the Zoo School is promoted within leading environmental education circles as a leader because it is, in the words of the Environmental Education & Training Partnership, “Meeting Standards Naturally.” That is, it is motivating students in a new way to go to school and meet or even surpass national curricular and testing standards of a kind consistent with the outcome-orientation of the No Child Left Behind Act. As with other schools that have adopted environmental education as the central focus of their programs, the Zoo School apparently shines – not because it is producing ecological mindsets and sustainable living practices capable of transforming society in radically necessary ways, but because its students’ reading and math scores have improved, and they have performed better in science and social studies, developed the ability to transfer their knowledge from familiar to unfamiliar contexts, learned to “do science” and not just learn about it, and showed a decline in the sort of overall behavior classified as a discipline problem. Obviously, regardless of whatever good pedagogy is taking place at the Zoo School, this laudatory praise of its environmental literacy program by environmental educators is little more than the present-day technocratic standardization movement in education masquerading as a noteworthy “green” improvement. Put bluntly: this is environmental literacy as a greenwash.Worse still, however, is that here environmental literacy ha s not only been coopted by corporate state forces and morphed into a progressively-styled, touchy-feely method for achieving higher scores on standardized tests like the ACT and SAT, but in an Orwellian turn typical of the Bush-era it has come to stand in actuality for a real illiteracy about the nature of ecological catastrophe, its causes, and possible solutions. As I have insisted, our current course for social and environmental disaster (though highly complex and not easily boiled down to a few simple causes or solutions) must be traced to the evolution of an anthropocentric worldview grounded in what the sociologist Patricia Hill Collins has referred to as a “matrix of domination,” a global technocapitalist infrastructure that relies upon market-based and functionalist versions of literacy to instantiate and augment its socioeconomic, cultural and environmental control. Conversely, the type of environmental literacy standards now showcased at places like the Zoo School as Michele Archie’s “Hallmarks of Quality” are those that fail to develop the type of radical and partisan subjectivity in students which might be capable of deconstructing their socially and environmentally deleterious hyper-individualism or their obviously socialized identities that tend towards state-sanctioned norms of competition, hedonism, consumption, marketization and a form of quasi-fascistic patriotism that they unflinchingly belong to “the greatest nation on earth.”It is clear, then, that despite the effects and growth of environmental education over the last few decades, it is a field that is ripe for a reconstruction of its literacy agenda. Again, while something like the modern environmental movement (conceived broadly) should be commended for the role it has played in helping to articulate many of the dangers and pitfalls that contemporary life now affords, it is

also clear that environmental education has thus far inadequately surmised the larger structural challenges now at hand and has thus tended to intervene in a manner far too facile to demand or necessitate a rupture of the status-quo. What has thereby resulted is a sort of crisis of environmental education generally and, as a result, recently the field has been widely critiqued by a number of theorists and educators who have sought to expose its theoretical and practical limitations.

Link – Funding for Poor Students

The affirmative does nothing to resolve educational inequalities for poorer students – funding doesn’t go to the poor and true equality is only possible absent current schools. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) The first is certainly true so long as the money has been spent through the school budget. The money indeed went to the schools which contained most of the disadvantaged children , but it was not spent on the poor children themselves . These children for whom the money was intended comprised only about half of those who were attending the schools that added the federal subsidies to their budgets. Thus the money was spent for custodial care, indoctrination and the selection of social roles, as well as education, all of which functions are inextricably mingled in the physical plants, curricula, teachers, administrators, and other key components of these schools, and, therefore, in their budgets.The added funds enabled schools to cater disproportionately to the satisfaction of the relatively richer children who were "disadvantaged" by having to attend school in the company of the poor. At best a small fraction of each dollar intended to remedy a poor child's disadvantages in learning could reach the child through the school budget. It might be equally true that the money was incompetently spent. But even unusual incompetence cannot beat that of the school system. Schools by their very structure resist the concentration of privilege on those otherwise disadvantaged . Special curricula, separate classes, or longer hours only constitute more discrimination at a higher cost. Taxpayers are not yet accustomed to permitting three billion dollars to vanish from HEW as if it were the Pentagon. The present Administration may believe that it can afford the wrath of educators. Middle-class Americans have nothing to lose if the program is cut. Poor parents think they do, but, even more, they are demanding control of the funds meant for their children. A logical way of cutting the budget and, one hopes, of increasing benefits is a system of tuition grants such as that proposed by Milton Friedman and others. Funds would be channeled to the beneficiary, enabling him to buy his share of the schooling of his choice. If such credit were limited to purchases which fit into a school curriculum, it would tend to provide greater equality of treatment, but would not thereby increase the equality of social claims.It should be obvious that even with schools of equal quality a poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one . Even if they attend equal schools and begin at the same age, poor children lack most of the educational opportunities which are casually available to the middle-class child . These advantages range from conversation and books in the home to vacation travel and a different sense of oneself, and apply, for the child who enjoys them, both in and out of school. So the poorer student will generally fall behind so long as he depends on school for advancement or learning . The poor need funds to enable them to learn , not to get certified for the treatment of their alleged disproportionate deficiencies. All this is true in poor nations as well as in rich ones, but there it appears under a different guise. Modernized poverty in poor nations affects more people more visibly but also-for the moment-more superficially. Two-thirds of all children in Latin America leave school before finishing the

fifth grade, but these "desertores" are not therefore as badly off as they would be in the United States.Few countries today remain victims of classical poverty, which was stable and less disabling. Most countries in Latin America have reached the "take-off" point toward economic development and competitive consumption, and thereby toward modernized poverty: their citizens have learned to think rich and live poor. Their laws make six to ten years of school obligatory. Not only in Argentina but also in Mexico or Brazil the average citizen defines an adequate education by North American standards, even though the chance of getting such prolonged schooling is limited to a tiny minority. In these countries the majority is already hooked on school, that is, they are schooled in a sense of inferiority toward the better-schooled. Their fanaticism in favor of school makes it possible to exploit them doubly: it permits increasing allocation of public funds for the education of a few and increasing acceptance of social control by the many.

Link – New/Better Education

The affirmative’s promise of new and better education corrupts the organic development of learning and spurs the ritual of rising deceptions – motivating increased investment in a schooled society. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) The Myth of Self-Perpetuating ProgressEven 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 open-ended process is counted in pupil-hours . 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 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 .

Link – Superficial Solutions

The affirmative’s proposed solution to schooling is superficial – only the alternative enables a rupture with schooling and hidden curriculum. Note* specific links to urban school administration and technology in schools. Illich 73 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1973 (“After Deschooling, What?,” After Deschooling What?, Published by Harper & Row, Available Online at: http://learning.media.mit.edu/courses/mas713/readings/Illich,%20I.%20After%20deschooling%20what.pdf, Accessed 6-13-17) Superficial SolutionsSince the crisis in schooling is symptomatic of a deeper crisis of modern industrial society, it is important that the critics of schooling avoid superficial solutions . Inadequate analysis of the nature of schooling only postpones the facing of deeper issues . But most criticism of the schools is pedagogical, political, or technological. The criticism of the educator is leveled at what is taught and how it is taught . The curriculum is outdated, so we have courses on African culture, on North American imperialism, on Women’s Liberation, on food and nutrition. Passive learning is old-fashioned, so we have increased student participation, both in the classroom and in the planning of curriculum. School buildings are ugly, SO we have new learning environments. There is concern for the development of human sensitivity, SO group threapy methods are imported into the classroom.Another important set of critics is involved with the politics of urban school administration . They feel that the poor could run their schools better than a centralized bureaucracy that is oblivious to the problems of the dispossessed. Black parents are enlisted to replace white teachers in the motivation of their children to make time and find the will to learn.Still other critics emphasize that schools make inefficient use of modem technology . They would either electrify the classroom or replace schools with computerized learning centers. If they follow McLuhan, they would replace blackboards and textbooks with multimedia happenings; if they follow Skinner, they would compete with the classical teacher and sell economy packages of measurable behavioral modifications to cos t-conscious school boards.I believe all these critics miss the point, because they fail to attend to what I have elsewhere called the ritual aspects of schooling- what I here propose to call the “ hidden curriculum,” the structure underlying what has been called the certification effect. Others have used this phrase to refer to the environmental curriculum of the ghetto street or the suburban lawn, which the teacher’s Curriculum either reinforces or vainly attempts to replace. I am using the term “ hidden curriculum” to refer to the structure of schooling as opposed to what happens in school , in the same way that linguists distinguish between the structure of a language and the use the speaker makes of it.

Link – Curriculum

The affirmative’s demand for new curriculum serves as advertisement for the product of schools – causing authoritarian management of learning and basing decisions off of marketable values. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) The Myth of Packaging ValuesSchool 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," "visuallyaided," or "issue-centered."The result of the curriculum production process looks like any other modern staple . It is a bundle of planned meanings, 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 marketable 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 U.S. levels of 1950-when reading difficulties became a major issue in U.S. schools.In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated . This resistance is due not 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.

Link – Hidden Curriculum

The affirmative’s focus on reform does nothing to resolve the Hidden curriculum of school – that inevitably promotes institutional dependence and the logic of consumption. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) This objection, however, underestimates the fundamental political and economic nature of the school system itself, as well as the political potential inherent in any effective challenge to it. In a basic sense, schools have ceased to be dependent on the ideology professed by any government or market organization. Other basic institutions might differ from one country to another: family, party, church, or press. But everywhere the school system has the same structure, and everywhere its hidden curriculum has the same effect . Invariably, it shapes the consumer who values institutional commodities above the nonprofessional ministration of a neighbor.Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent. Everywhere this same curriculum instills in the pupil the myth that increased production will"" provide a better life . And everywhere it develops the habit of self-defeating consumption of services and alienating production , the tolerance for institutional dependence , and the recognition of institutional rankings . The hidden curriculum of school does all this in spite of contrary efforts undertaken by teachers and no matter what ideology prevails. In other words, schools are fundamentally alike in all countries, be they fascist, democratic or socialist, big or small, rich or poor. This identity of the school system forces us to recognize the profound world-wide identity of myth, mode of production, and method of social control, despite the great variety of mythologies in which the myth finds expression.

Impacts

Structural Violence First

Slow violence outweighs — privilege displaced structural violence over inflated, flashpoint scenarios.Nixon 11 — Rob Nixon, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2011 (Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2011, Accessed Online through Emory Libraries, p. 2-4)Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink—politically, imaginatively, and theoretically—what I call “ slow violence .” By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight , a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence , a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous , but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or [END PAGE 2] climate change—are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions—from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential , operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded.Politically and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft. Falling bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches, volcanoes, and tsunamis have a visceral, eye-catching and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades, even centuries, cannot match. Stories of toxic buildup, massing greenhouse gases, and accelerated species loss due to ravaged habitats are all cataclysmic, but they are scientifically convoluted cataclysms in which casualties are postponed, often for generations. In an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant

political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time? [END PAGE 3]This book’s second, related focus concerns the environmentalism of the poor, for it is those people lacking resources who are the principal casualties of slow violence. Their unseen poverty is compounded by the invisibility of the slow violence that permeates so many of their lives. Our media bias toward spectacular violence exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems treated as disposable by turbo-capitalism while simultaneously exacerbating the vulnerability of those whom Kevin Bale, in another context, has called “ disposable people.” 2 It is against such conjoined ecological and human disposability that we have witnessed a resurgent environmentalism of the poor, particularly (though not exclusively) across the so-called global South. So a central issue that emerges is strategic: if the neoliberal era has intensified assaults on resources, it has also intensified resistance, whether through isolated site-specific struggles or through activism that has reached across national boundaries in an effort to build translocal alliances.

Impact – Capitalism

Current schools serve as the sites of introduction to the capitalist system and instill the mindset of economic growth in youth. Education policy and lifelong learning are controlled by neoliberal perspectives and private enterprise – only the alternative can unbind educational politics from capitalism.

[Insert Impact]

Impact – Laundry list

Schooling causes pedagocial warfare, environmental destruction, and civil repression – it outweighs and turns the case. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) 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 endanger the survival not only of the economic order built on the coproduction of goods and demands, but equally of 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 do not challenge the assumption that valuable knowledge is a commodity which under certain circumstances may be forced into the consumer, society will be increasingly dominated by sinister pseudo schools and totalitarian managers of information . Pedagogical therapists will drug their pupils more in order to teach them better, and students will drug themselves more to gain relief from the pressures of teachers and the race for certificates. Increasingly larger numbers of bureaucrats will presume to pose as teachers. The language of the schoolman has already been coopted by the adman . Now the general and the policeman try to dignify their professions by masquerading as educators. In a schooled society, warmaking and civil repression find an educational rationale . Pedagogical warfare in the style of Vietnam will be increasingly justified as the only way of teaching people the superior 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 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 II 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 Revolutions, 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 Ptolemaic world view. Quite suddenly, the Newtonian paradigm was accepted. The dissonance which characterizes many of the young today is not so much cognitive as 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.

2NC extension for this card:

Schooling outweighs and turns the case – three impacts

Pedagogical warfare – American warfare now serves the purpose of promoting the superiority of progress - Wars in Vietnam, Korea, and the Middle East that killed millions, destructive interventions in “failed states” that are endlessly created, and continuing tensions with communist Russia, China, North Korea all carry an educational rationale which makes conflict inevitable.

Environmental Destruction – Schooling feeds children into the industrial machine of capitalism ensuring the maintenance of current production levels which ensure inexorable destruction of our environment. Environmental destruction causes global warming, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification and the collapse of the global ecology – makes extinction inevitable.

Civil Repression – schooling lends repression an educational rationale – acts of pedagogical torture used to render a nation “teachable” cause structural violence.

Impact – Poverty

Schooling promotes dependence on institutions – makes endless new definitions of the poor inevitable. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) Everywhere not only education but society as a whole needs "deschooling." Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political, and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible. This monopoly is at the root of the modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty . Ten years ago in Mexico it was the normal thing to be born and to die in one's own home and to be buried by one's friends. Only the soul's needs were taken care of by the institutional church. Now to begin and end life at home become signs either of poverty or of special privilege. Dying and death have come under the institutional management of doctors and undertakers.Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will . Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect. In Mexico the poor are those who lack three years of schooling, and in New York they are those who lack twelve. The poor have always been socially powerless. The increasing reliance on institutional care adds a new dimension to their helplessness: psychological impotence , the inability to fend for themselves . Peasants on the high plateau of the Andes are exploited by the landlord and the merchant-once they settle in Lima they are, in addition, dependent on political bosses, and disabled by their lack of schooling . Modernized poverty combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency. This modernization of poverty is a world-wide phenomenon, and lies at the root of contemporary underdevelopment. Of course it appears under different guises in rich and in poor countries.

Impact – Education

Schooling harms the education of society – demotivating the poor and discouraging education in other formats. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) The twin deceptions of increased treatment, as actually provided in the United States and as merely promised in Latin America complement each other. The Northern poor are being disabled by the same twelve-year treatment whose lack brands the Southern poor as hopelessly backward. Neither in North America nor in Latin America do the poor get equality from obligatory schools. But in both places the mere existence of school discourages and disables the poor from taking control of their own learning . All over the world the school has an anti-educational effect on society: school is recognized as the institution which specializes in education. The failures of school are taken by most people as a proof that education is a very costly, very complex, always arcane, and frequently almost impossible task . School appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourage s other institutions from assuming educational tasks . Work, leisure, politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education . Simultaneously both schools and the other institutions which depend on them are priced out of the market.

Impact – Marginalization

Schools reproduce the dominant class – more schooling undergirds marginalization facilitating assimilation and preventing true challenges to discrimination and inequality. Varbelow and Griffith 12 – Sanja Varbelow, Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Angelo State University, Former Field-Based Teaching Specialist in Learning and Innovation and Lecturer in Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Brownsville, Member of the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Professors of Education, Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Texas A&M University, M.A. in Education from Humbolt University, Bryant Griffith, Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, 2012 (“Deschooling Society: Re-Examining Ivan Illich’s Contributions to Critical Pedagogy for 21st Century Curriculum Theory,” Education Resources Information Center, June 6th, Accessed Online at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED532618.pdf, Accessed 6-2-17) But if diplomas don’t represent knowledge and questions don’t get answered, then what is the purpose of education? Clearly, school is one of the most influential institutions in passing society from one generation to the next, so it seems important to wonder what its effects on society are. Proponents of Reproduction Theory would answer that the purpose of the institution school is the reproduction of the dominant class . This is accomplished by legitimizing and challenging “modes of self- representation, self-image, and social class identification which are the crucial ingredients for job adequacy” (Bowles and Gintis in Pinar et al., 1995, p. 245). But as long as we stratify the education system in accordance with the stratification of society, central to which is the economy , when we use affirmative action to determine who gets accepted into universities, when we create phenomena like a Hispanic scholarship fund, we undergird the marginalization of certain groups as these practices are not directed to empower the members of those groups but to afford them a chance to join the dominant class.

Impact – Violence against difference

Schooling causes violence against the abnormal. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) 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. People 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 .People 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 people have the idea schooled into them that values can be produced and measured, they tend to accept all kinds of rank' ings . 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.

Impact – Panopticon/Authoritarianism

Modern schooling serves as a panoptical state of perpetual surveillance – that legitimates and normalizes authoritarian monitoring. Hern 98 – Matt Hern, Writer and activist based in East Vancouver, Founder of the Eastside Learning Center and Groundswell: Grassroots Economic Alternatives, Ph.D. in Urban Studies from the Union Institute & University, M.A. from the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfeild, Vermont, 1998 (“The Promise of Deschooling” Social Anarchism, Volume 25, Available Online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/matt-hern-the-promise-of-deschooling, Accessed 4-20-17) A Pedagogical ArgumentAt root, any political or cultural arguments for deschooling have to rest on some specific pedagogical beliefs about the nature of learning and living. Years of considering pedagogy and five years of running a learning centre for young children has consistently shown me that kids and adults are perfectly capable of running and directing their own lives, given the opportunity and nurturing circumstances. The idea that there is an absolute body of knowledge that every child should access if they are to grow up healthily is a dangerous and debilitating one. Further, “it cannot be overemphasized that no body of theory exists to accurately define the way children learn, or which learning is of the most worth”. Every individual is an enigmatic creation of circumstance, personality, environment, desire and much else, and their learning interests, styles and needs are equally unique. It is absolutely true that there is no body of theory explaining how children learn, since it is absurd to speak of ‘children’ in any unified way, any more than we would speak of women or men as homogenous groups. Individual learning patterns and styles come in infinite varieties, and the only way to fit a vast number of children into a single pedagogical program and a regimented schedule is with a severe authoritarianism. To maintain a modicum of order, schools are reduced to the kind of crude control unschooling advocate and author of The Teenage Liberation Handbook Grace Llewellyn describes:

The most overwhelming reality of school is CONTROL. School controls the way you spend your time (what is life made of if not time?), how you behave, what you read, and to a large extent, what you think. In school you can’t control your own life. ... What the educators apparently haven’t realized yet is that experiential education is a double-edged sword. If you do something to learn it, then what you do, you learn. All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship. In school you shut your notebook when the bell rings. You do not speak unless granted permission. You are guilty until proven innocent, and who will prove you innocent? You are told what to do, think, and say for six hours each day. If your teacher says sit up and pay attention, you had better stiffen your spine and try to get Bobby or Sally or the idea of Spring or the play you’re writing off your mind. The onimost constant and thorough thing students in school experience — and learn — is the antithesis of democracy.

This centralized authoritarianism is the core of schooling, and it reduces learning to a crude mechanistic process . Alongside a deep distrust of self-designed learning, schooling teaches children that they are always being observed, monitored and evaluated, a condition French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984) has named as panopticism . In Discipline and Punish, Foucault described the prison panoptical model as a thin circular building, divided into a vast number of cells, with a guard tower in the middle. The cells have a window on either end, but none on the sides, leaving the inhabitants of each small box effectively backlit for viewing from the tower, but fully isolated from one another. All the prisoners can thus be viewed fully at any time by any one single person in the central tower, “the arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes upon him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility.” The critical factor in this

arrangement is that the prisoners do not ever know if or when they are being watched. They cannot see when the guards are in the tower, they can never know when they are being observed, so they must assume that it is always the case.Hence, the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power . So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearer.This is the essence of panopticism. The actual surveillance is not functionally necessary, the subject swiftly assumes responsibility for their own constraints, and the assumption of constant monitoring is internalized and they evolve into both the prisoner and warden .It is hardly a stretch to fit modern schools, hospitals, prisons or psychiatric institutions into this model. One of the cultural residues of mass compulsory schooling is a widespread panoptical imprint. People who have been rigorously schooled reflexively believe they are always being watched, monitored and evaluated. It is a condition many of us, myself certainly included, can recognize easily and identify working virtually constantly in our lives. Schools and schooling lead us to believe that we are always under surveillance , and whether or not it is actually true is insignificant, it is the impulse that the schooled person necessarily accepts , and adjusts their behaviour accordingly. The schooled panoptical mentality extends itself further into parenting and adult-child non-school relationships. At school children are always monitored, and schooled parents believe that they should similarly be constantly monitoring their offspring, in the name of safety . The last decades of this century has seen an exponential growth in concern for children’s daily safety, particularly in cities, and most parents I come into contact with want to keep a very close eye on their kids. This is a laudable concern, and one I share, yet I have a deep suspicion of the equation that safety = surveillance. There is a threshold where our concerned eye becomes over-monitoring and disabling, an authoritarian presence shaping our kids’ lives.If we want and expect our kids to grow up to be responsible creatures capable of directing their own lives, we have to give them practise at making decisions. To allow authority to continually rob our kids of basic decisions about where and how to play is to set our kids up for dependence and incompetence on a wide scale. Children who are genuinely safe are those who are able to make thoughtful, responsible, independent decisions. The panoptical society and schooling severely restricts individual self-reliance, and supports a disabling reliance on authoritarian monitoring . A deschooled antidote to this condition is trust. Parents have to trust their kids to make real decisions about their own lives, as Dan Greenberg, who founded the Sudbury Valley School in 1968 outside of Boston, describes:

We feel the only way children can become responsible persons is to be responsible for their own welfare, for their own education, and for their own destiny. ... As it turns out, the daily dangers are challenges to the children, to be met with patient determination, concentration, and most of all, care. People are naturally protective of their own welfare, not self-destructive. The real danger lies in placing a web of restrictions around people. The restrictions become challenges in themselves, and breaking them becomes such a high priority that even personal safety can be ignored. ... Every child is free to go wherever they wish, whenever they want. Ours is an open campus. Our fate is to worry.If we are to truly counter the disabling effect of schools, this is indeed our fate. A genuine democracy, a society of self-reliant people and communities, has to begin by allowing children and adults to shape themselves, to control their own destinies free of authoritarian manipulation.

Panopticonal surveillance is a disciplining power which creates docile bodies reduced to units of information by the state – that destroys value to life. Galič et al. 16 — Maša Galič, Ph.D. Researcher at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, Tjerk Timan, Researcher at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Twente, M.A. in Media and Culture from the University of Amsterdam, Bert-Jaap Koops, Professor of Regulation and Technology at Tilburg University, Researcher in the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, Ph.D. in Law from Tilburg University, 2016 ("Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation," SpringerLink, May 13th, Available Online at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-016-0219-1, Accessed 6-22-2017)The richness and variation within Bentham’s panoptic paradigm has been largely overlooked in surveillance studies. This is because the Panopticon is mainly understood through Foucault’s analysis and use of the concept. It is relevant to look into why Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon resonated in so many disciplines, for his analysis is not only rehabilitating (specific parts of) Bentham’s work, but also building upon and extending it into a broader perspective on power relations and networks in modern societies.In analysing the Panopticon, Foucault drew exclusively on Bentham’s prison design. He used the architecture and idea of the prison-Panopticon as a diagram, projecting it onto other parts of society to analyse power relations and models of governing (Foucault 1991a). Being a historian, Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison explains that since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western societies can be defined by a new form of power that is capillary and affects ‘the grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives’ (Foucault 1980, 39). In simpler terms, the Panopticon penitentiary system of governing has become present and active in many or most aspects of Western societies. Yet, and this is what Foucault tries to show through compelling examples, these systems often remain hidden or unnoticed, precisely because they are found in the fibres of daily life, which is what makes them so powerful and ubiquitous.Through an analysis of different institutions, such as the school, the military, the hospital and the factory, processes of action in daily life have been invaded with Panoptical mechanisms of watching and being watched and, consequently, of disciplining power . When everybody can potentially be under surveillance, people will internalise control , morals and values —discipline is thus a type of power, a strategy and a kind of technology. Accordingly, Foucault coined this type of society the disciplinary—or discipline—society, which (in the West) has seen a development towards technocratic approaches to governing. Foucault’s study of power consisted of formal and evident institutions, where the Panopticon was introduced as an ‘ideal’ system to discipline the individual. Why was this so evocative? Foucault shifted the perspective from the goal of governing to the mode of governing. The main goal is (still) to prosper as a society, delineated by geography or nation state. The mode of governance, however, shifts from a sovereign society (Foucault understood sovereign practices as seeking mainly to affirm control over a territory and secure the loyalty of subjects, in a somewhat static and rigid manner through binary prohibitions, see Valverde 2008) to one of discipline, which represents a shift in method as well as in object, from populations to individuals.In feudal and later sovereign societies, the question of power is linked to questions of how to organise a population and its land to ensure continuity. By learning from previous years about crop income, for example, or the spread of famine or disease, a sovereign can learn and predict, either to invest in food reserves or trade more crop with neighbouring states, or to control disease by disallowing citizens to travel, whereby early forms of predictive modelling were used to rule the state (Foucault 2007).

Statistics, after all, means numbers of the state. A key difference between modern Western societies that Foucault characterises as disciplinary and sovereign societies lies in the type of power at work. In the sovereign society, the sovereign is the one key decider and holder of power and (s)he is known and ‘visible’ in terms of power signals, such as ‘by decree of the King’. In the disciplinary society, power is dispersed and hidden in processes of conformity present in different places of society. Because of these characteristics, discipline is not an exclusive machinery of the State; rather, it moves across different institutions, it links and prolongs them, making them converge and function in a new way (Deleuze 2006). Although this power operates somewhat independently from the judicial and government apparatus, it nevertheless requires institutions and the state, since it works through them—‘the state, correctional institutions, and medical institutions [need to] be regarded as coagulations of practices’ (Valverde 2008, 18).Foucault explains that a phenomenon closely linked and resulting from the disciplining process, is normation . By this, he means the processes that force and create habits , rituals and how things are done, thereby creating norms of behaviour.6 In normation processes, the norm is central. It constitutes what one has to conform to and strive for; it is both standard and ideal. Being regarded as normal is to conform to the norm, hence to occupy the position of the invisible, i.e. unmarked by difference construed as abnormality, and putative universal subject. The abnormal is the one deemed deficient and inferior in relation to the norm(a l) (Dalibert 2013). This is specifically linked to the individual body, as Foucault argues that disciplining the individual body is a governmental utopia, where discipline produces subjected and practiced, ‘docile’ bodies (Foucault 1991b). As the body is subjected to discipline, it is ordered, subjected to normation. In Foucault’s understanding, normation is intrinsic to mechanisms disciplining the body, in which technologies are central (Foucault 2007, referred to in Dalibert 2013, 69).The process of individualisation in disciplinary societies is what Foucault called descending, as opposed to ascending, in feudal or sovereign societies (Foucault 1980). He explains that in the latter, the overall status of a society, e.g. its total production or health, was an aggregated, collective rather than an individual concern, thereby leaving room for individuals to diversify and develop within the parameters of collective ideals. In contrast, in disciplinary societies, processes of administration focus on individual rather than aggregated actions, rituals and habits, leading to a de-diversification of individual behaviour. Through the shifting focus, individuals are continuously measured against the norm; they become fictional, representative, as they have to be registered and held against a fictional norm. The sovereign power as the key decider and holder of power becomes less visible, and power structures are relocated and replaced by different institutions (schools, hospitals, etc.) in which behaviour is being watched.Foucault continues that one method and a key indicator of disciplinary societies is found in many institutions that uphold and apply the norm: the exam. The exam incorporates the power of discipline because it tests according to a ‘scientific’ method the suitability of individuals against a norm. Through different methods of bureaucracy and sequences of how to do things, bodies get disciplined. For instance, the army applies extensive training and testing on using guns, hospitals on procedures of treatment and schools on writing and handling a pen correctly. The product or goal of these disciplining methods is to create docile bodies. This makes for even more predictive and plannable societies in which docile bodies have become units of information, not communication. Here, the link becomes clear with Bentham’s prison architecture: it is a one-way street in which individuals are mouldable and re-mouldable.7 Modernity then, in the form of disciplinary societies, is formed by the advent of scientific methods of registration, record-keeping and normation through exams. Docile individuals are no longer governed as actors with whom they communicate, but as units of information that can be moulded . Surveillance is a key concept here

because this moulding and re-shaping is a result of the visibility of individuals’ ‘competencies’ through exams and record-keeping of their progress. Foucault briefly mentions, but does not elaborate upon, resistance to disciplining power, by stating that the entanglements of power also give rise to scattered points of resistance that have no cause but power itself, which they resist (Foucault 1998).

Impact – Hierarchy/Control

Schooling reinforces hierarchy and centralized control of life. Hern 98 – Matt Hern, Writer and activist based in East Vancouver, Founder of the Eastside Learning Center and Groundswell: Grassroots Economic Alternatives, Ph.D. in Urban Studies from the Union Institute & University, M.A. from the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfeild, Vermont, 1998 (“The Promise of Deschooling” Social Anarchism, Volume 25, Available Online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/matt-hern-the-promise-of-deschooling, Accessed 4-20-17) A Cultural ArgumentA cultural argument for deschooling follows naturally and easily from a political analysis. The attempt to entrench compulsory schooling is felt throughout society, not only by children, and the corrosive effects of the school mentality reaches deep . Americanist culture is profoundly mired in what Wendell Berry calls simply ‘a bad way of life’: “Our environmental problems (are not) at root, political; they are cultural ... our country is not being destroyed by bad politics, it is being destroyed by a bad way of life. Bad politics is merely another result.” Clearly, the domination centralized, hierarchical and compulsory state schooling exercises over our children represents a major support for a bad way of life. A culture of compulsory schooling is a culture that reifies the centralized control and monitoring of our daily lives . A society that has been obsessively schooled from an early age swiftly becomes a place where self-reliance is abandoned in favour of professional treatments, and the most essential human virtues are transformed into commodities. As Ivan Illich put it in Deschooling Society: imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value.Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools and other agencies in question... the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery.A schooled society actively undermines the development of self and community reliance , in favour of institutional treatments. A directly democratic agenda has to include an explicit renunciation of the other-controlled mentality of compulsory schooling. There is an important set of distinctions to be made here, and it is a critical deschooling project to carefully define schooling, education and learning. Popular and professional usage tends to conflate the three cavalierly, and the differences in real and perceived meaning are useful. Schools practise a certain brand of schooling: they are institutions with their own particular ideologies and pedagogical approaches, and they are devoted to schooling , or imparting a certain set of values, beliefs and practises upon their clients. Schooling has found its ultimate (thus far) expression in the current state-run, compulsory child warehousing system we call public schools. But schooling can still take place outside of schools themselves, and clearly that is what many homeschooling families do, they school their children at home. Schooling is about people-shaping , it is about taking a particular set of values, an explicit view of the way things are or ought to be, and training students to be able to repeat that information in specific ways . The success of schooling can be evaluated in very quantifiable and obvious ways. Teaching is the practise of that transfer of information. The teacher is a professional,

someone trained in a variety of ways to coerce, cajole, plead, beg, drive, manipulate or encourage their students to receive, accept and repeat the information they are offering. The teaching profession often attempts to view its work as ‘sharing’, but the practise of teaching and the act of sharing are very different things. One is a service, with one person, very often unrequested, imparting a piece of information onto another, defining the knowledge and evaluating the other’s ability to describe that knowledge. Sharing is about offering one’s understanding freely, it is allowing another person access to a private understanding. One is professionalized manipulation, the other is friendship and genuine humanity. Further, I want to draw your attention to education. Education is the larger context, the meta-model, the excuse for schooling. The educative stance is an interpretation of what is good and important knowledge to have, a description of what every person ought to know to become a legitimate member of society. Educators describe what people should know, for their own goo d . As Boston writer and unschooler Aaron Falbel writes:

I believe that John Holt is right in saying that most people use ‘education’ to refer to some kind of treatment. ... It is this usage that I am contrasting with learning, ... this idea of people needing treatment. ... Many people use the words ‘learning’ and ‘education’ more or less interchangeably. But a moment’s reflection reveals that they are not at all the same... Learning is like breathing. It is a natural human activity: it is part of being alive. ... Our ability to learn, like our ability to breathe, does not need to be tampered with. It is utter nonsense , not to mention deeply insulting to say that people need to be taught how to learn or how to think. ... Today our social environment is thoroughly polluted by education ... education is forced, seduced or coerced learning.

This is clearly not a simple semantic discrepancy and begins to mark out important territory. Education is all about the centralization of control, self-directed learning is fundamental to a self- and community reliant culture. The deschooling argument I want to make here presumes that each and every individual is best able to define their own interests, needs and desires. Schools and education assume that children need to be taught what is good, what is important to understand. I refuse to accept this. Kids do not need to be taught. Our children should be supported to become who they are, to develop and grow into the unique, enigmatic, contradictory individuals that we all are, away from the manipulative and debilitating effects of education. The renunciation of education is imperative for the creation of a ecologically sane, decentralized and directly democratic society. As John Holt (1923–85), the Godfather of the unschooling and homelearning movements has written:

Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas and credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators and ‘fans’, driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy and fear. My concern is not to improve ‘education’ but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and let people shape themselves.

Deschooling suggests the renunciation of not only schooling, but education as well, in favour of a culture of self-reliance, self-directed learning, and voluntary, non-coercive learning institutions. A disciplined rejection of schooling and education does not insulate a person from the world, it engages them, demands that they make decisions and participate genuinely in the community, rather than waste time in institutions that have limited logic and meaning only internally. I believe that schooling and education are destructive forces across the board, with their implicit and explicit effects being to further entrench and reinforce hierarchy and centralized domination.

Impact – Morality

Schooling is immoral – the classroom warps children, denies rights, and blurs our values. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical . The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil . When the schoolteacher fuses in his person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life . A teacher who combines these three powers contributes to the warping of the child much more than the laws which establish his legal or economic minority, or restrict his right to free assembly or abode.Teachers are by no means the only professionals who offer therapy. Psychiatrists, guidance counselors, and job counselors, even lawyers, help their clients to decide, to develop their personalities, and to learn. Yet common sense tells the client that such professionals should abstain from imposing their opinion of what is right or wrong, or from forcing anyone to follow their advice. Schoolteachers and ministers are the only professionals who feel entitled to pry into the private affairs of their clients at the same time as they preach to a captive audience.Children are protected by neither the First nor the Fifth Amendment when they stand before that secular priest , the teacher . The child must confront a man who wears an invisible triple crown , like the papal tiara, the symbol of triple authority combined in one person. For the child, the teacher pontificates as pastor, prophet, and priest-he is at once guide, teacher, and administrator of a sacred ritual. He combines the claims of medieval popes in a society constituted under the guarantee that these claims shall never be exercised together by one established and obligatory institution--church or state. Defining children as full-time pupils permits the teacher to exercise a kind of power over their persons which is much less limited by constitutional and consuetudinal restrictions than the power wielded by the guardians of other social enclaves. Their chronological age disqualifies children from safeguards which are routine for adults in a modern asylummadhouse, monastery, or jail.Under the authoritative eye of the teacher, several orders of value collapse into one . The distinctions between morality, legality, and personal worth are blurred and eventually eliminated. Each transgression is made to be felt as a multiple offense. The offender is expected to feel that he has broken a rule, that he has behaved immorally, and that he has let himself down. A pupil who adroitly obtains assistance on an exam is told that he is an outlaw, morally corrupt, and personally worthless. Classroom attendance removes children from the everyday world of Western culture and plunges them into an environment far more primitive, magical, and deadly serious. School could not create such an enclave within which the rules of ordinary reality are suspended, unless it physically incarcerated the young during many successive years on sacred territory. The attendance rule makes it possible for the schoolroom to serve as a magic womb, from which the child is delivered periodically at the school days and school year's completion until he is finally expelled into

adult life. Neither universal extended childhood nor the smothering atmosphere of the classroom could exist without schools.

They Say: “All Institutions Aren’t Bad”

Illich doesn’t argue against all institutions but rather those which are manipulative and promote institutionalized values. We should instead embrace convivial institutions which are there for our use and don’t require manufactured values to justify their existence. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a life style which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a life style which only allows us to make and unmake, produce and consume-a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies. We need a set of criteria which will permit us to recognize those institutions which support personal growth rather than addiction, as well as the will to invest our techno-logical resources preferentially in such institutions of growth.The choice is between two radically opposed institutional types , both of which are exemplified in certain existing institutions, although one type so characterizes the contemporary period. as to almost define it. This dominant type I would propose to call the manipulative institution . The other type also exists, but only precariously. The institutions which fit it are humbler and less noticeable; yet I take them as models for a more desirable future. I call them "convivial " and suggest placing them at the left of an institutional spectrum , both to show that there are institutions which fall between the extremes and to illustrate how historical institutions can change color as they shift from facilitating activity to organizing production.Generally, such a spectrum, moving from left to right, has been used to characterize men and their ideologies, not our social institutions and their styles. This categorization of men, whether as individuals or in groups, often generates more heat than light. Weighty objections can be raised against using an ordinary convention in an unusual fashion, but by doing so I hope to shift the terms of the discussion from a sterile to a fertile plane. It will become evident that men of the left are not always characterized by their opposition to the manipulative institutions, which I locate to the right on the spectrum. The most influential modern institutions crowd up at the right of the spectrum. Law enforcement has moved there, as it has shifted from the hands of the sheriff to those of the FBI and the Pentagon. Modern warfare has become a highly professional enterprise whose business is killing. It has reached the point where its efficiency is measured in body counts. Its peace-keeping potential depends on its ability to convince friend and foe of the nation's unlimited death-dealing power. Modern bullets and chemicals are so effective that a few cents' worth, properly delivered to the intended "client," unfailingly kill or maim. But delivery costs rise vertiginously; the cost of a dead Vietnamese went from $360,000 in 1967 to $450,000 in 1969. Only economies on a scale approaching race suicide would render modern warfare economically efficient. The boomerang effect in war is becoming more obvious: the higher the body count of dead Vietnamese, the more enemies the United States acquires around the world;

likewise, the more the United States must spend to create another manipulative institution--cynically dubbed "pacification" in a futile effort to absorb the side effects of war.At this same extreme on the spectrum we also find social agencies which specialize in the manipulation of their clients . Like the military, they tend to develop effects contrary to their aims as the scope of their operations increases . These social institutions are equally counterproductive, but less obviously so. Many assume a therapeutic and compassionate image to mask this paradoxical effect. For example , jails , up until two centuries ago, served as a means of detaining men until they were sentenced, maimed, killed, or exiled, and were sometimes deliberately used as a form of torture. Only recently have we begun to claim that locking people up in cages will have a beneficial effect on their character and behavior. Now quite a few people are beginning to understand that jail increase s both the quality and the quantity of criminals , that, in fact, it often creates them out of mere nonconformists. Far fewer people, however, seem to understand that mental hospitals, nursing homes, and orphan asylums do much the same thing. These institutions provide their clients with the destructive self-image of the psychotic, the overaged, or the waif, and provide a rationale for the existence of entire professions, just as jails produce income for wardens. Membership in the institutions found at this extreme of the spectrum is achieved in two ways, both coercive: by forced commitment or by selective service . At the opposite extreme of the spectrum lie institutions distinguished by spontaneous use the "convivial" institutions . Telephone link-ups , subway lines , mail routes , public markets and exchanges do not require hard or soft sells to induce their clients to use them. Sewage systems, drinking water, parks , and side-walks are institutions men use without having to be institutionally convinced that it is to their advantage to do so . Of course, all institutions require some regulation. But the operation of institutions which exist to be used rather than to produce something requires rules of an entirely different nature from those required by treatment-institutions, which are manipulative. The rules which govern institutions for use have mainly the purpose of avoiding abuses which would frustrate their general accessibility. Sidewalks must be kept free of obstructions, the industrial use of drinking water must be held within limits, and ball playing must be restricted to special areas within a park. At present we need legislation to limit the abuse of our telephone lines by computers, the abuse of mail service by advertisers, and the pollution of our sewage systems by industrial wastes. The regulation of convivial institutions sets limits to their use; as one moves from the convivial to the manipulative end of the spectrum, the rules progressively call for unwilling consumption or participation. The different cost of acquiring clients is just one of the characteristics which distinguish convivial from manipulative institutions.

They Say: “Reforming schools Is Possible/Schools Not Irredeemable”

1. Reforming schools is impossible:

A. Gradual change inevitably fails and reinforces a flawed system. Gray 11 — Peter Gray, Research Professor at Boston College, Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Rockefeller University, 2011 ("Is Real Educational Reform Possible? If So, How?," Psychology Today, August 19th, Available Online at https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201108/is-real-educational-reform-possible-if-so-how, Accessed 6-24-2017)Real reform is not possible from within the existing conventional school system. My friend and colleague, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, uses the phrase "You can't get there from here" to refer to a basic principle of evolution that applies to cultural evolution as well as biological evolution. Organisms, whether they are biological organisms like dinosaurs or cultural organisms like our compulsory schooling system, are capable of gradual evolutionary change, but they are not infinitely capable of such change. Sometimes you just can't get there from here. The existing structure is built in such a way that it cannot be modified in ways necessary to produce a desirable , adaptive outcome . Dinosaurs reached a point where they couldn't change to meet the new conditions of life, so they died out and their niches were replenished with new, highly adaptable little creatures called mammals. Our system of compulsory schooling --which arose originally for purposes of indoctrination and obedience training (see A Brief History of Education)-- cannot be modified to serve effectively the function of real education.There is no way that gradual change in our current schooling system can result in the kind of educational reform that I am calling real reform. The small steps in what would seem to be the right direction , urged on by the progressive educators, fail within this system . They fail because they don't work when taken one by one or just a little at a time . A little " freedom" in a system where success is measured by tests doesn't work , because free children don't choose to learn the test answers. " Play" in a setting where children are segregated by age and are constrained in what they can play at is not a particularly effective learning tool . Moreover, like the dinosaur, the schooling system has by now grown so huge and cumbersome that it is refractory to forces for serious change . It is an enormous economic enterprise, employing many millions of people whose self-interest is to keep it going pretty much as it is. Since its customers are there by compulsion, not choice, it senses little need to change to please the customers. Instead, it operates for the self-interests of those who run it. And, because education has now been compulsory for several generations, nearly everyone has gone through the system and has difficulty imagining life without it. One thing that compulsory schooling teaches very well is the mistaken belief that we need compulsory schooling in order to learn. For all these reasons and more, real reform within our existing school system is not possible . (For more on this, see Why Schools Are What They Are: Forces Against Fundamental Change.)

B. Schools inevitably reproduce institutionalized systems of value and increase dependence on schooled society – that’s Illich.

C. Modern schools inevitably reproduce the harmful effects of schooling. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) The school system today performs the threefold function common to powerful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously 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 changeThe 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. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. 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 demythologizing 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 recreate the university.

D. Hidden curriculum inevitably promotes institutional dependence and the logic of consumption. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) This objection, however, underestimates the fundamental political and economic nature of the school system itself, as well as the political potential inherent in any effective challenge to it. In a basic sense, schools have ceased to be dependent on the ideology professed by any government or market organization. Other basic institutions might differ from one country to another: family, party, church, or press. But everywhere the school system has the same structure, and everywhere its hidden curriculum has the same effect . Invariably, it shapes the consumer who values institutional commodities above the nonprofessional ministration of a neighbor.

Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent. Everywhere this same curriculum instills in the pupil the myth that increased production will"" provide a better life . And everywhere it develops the habit of self-defeating consumption of services and alienating production , the tolerance for institutional dependence , and the recognition of institutional rankings . The hidden curriculum of school does all this in spite of contrary efforts undertaken by teachers and no matter what ideology prevails. In other words, schools are fundamentally alike in all countries, be they fascist, democratic or socialist, big or small, rich or poor. This identity of the school system forces us to recognize the profound world-wide identity of myth, mode of production, and method of social control, despite the great variety of mythologies in which the myth finds expression.

2. Schools themselves are bad – these flaws aren’t reform-able:

A. The method of Schools is dehumanizing – education is deemed a process to be “delivered” to objectified students in the banking model of education and dehumanized if they don’t meet the standards of “good students”, only education that is universally accessible and voluntary is good – that’s Jandric.

B. Modern schooling serves as a panoptical state of perpetual surveillance – that legitimates and normalizes authoritarian monitoring. Hern 98 – Matt Hern, Writer and activist based in East Vancouver, Founder of the Eastside Learning Center and Groundswell: Grassroots Economic Alternatives, Ph.D. in Urban Studies from the Union Institute & University, M.A. from the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfeild, Vermont, 1998 (“The Promise of Deschooling” Social Anarchism, Volume 25, Available Online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/matt-hern-the-promise-of-deschooling, Accessed 4-20-17) A Pedagogical ArgumentAt root, any political or cultural arguments for deschooling have to rest on some specific pedagogical beliefs about the nature of learning and living. Years of considering pedagogy and five years of running a learning centre for young children has consistently shown me that kids and adults are perfectly capable of running and directing their own lives, given the opportunity and nurturing circumstances. The idea that there is an absolute body of knowledge that every child should access if they are to grow up healthily is a dangerous and debilitating one. Further, “it cannot be overemphasized that no body of theory exists to accurately define the way children learn, or which learning is of the most worth”. Every individual is an enigmatic creation of circumstance, personality, environment, desire and much else, and their learning interests, styles and needs are equally unique. It is absolutely true that there is no body of theory explaining how children learn, since it is absurd to speak of ‘children’ in any unified way, any more than we would speak of women or men as homogenous groups. Individual learning patterns and styles come in infinite varieties, and the only way to fit a vast number of children into a single pedagogical program and a regimented schedule is with a severe authoritarianism. To maintain a modicum of order, schools are reduced to

the kind of crude control unschooling advocate and author of The Teenage Liberation Handbook Grace Llewellyn describes:

The most overwhelming reality of school is CONTROL. School controls the way you spend your time (what is life made of if not time?), how you behave, what you read, and to a large extent, what you think. In school you can’t control your own life. ... What the educators apparently haven’t realized yet is that experiential education is a double-edged sword. If you do something to learn it, then what you do, you learn. All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship. In school you shut your notebook when the bell rings. You do not speak unless granted permission. You are guilty until proven innocent, and who will prove you innocent? You are told what to do, think, and say for six hours each day. If your teacher says sit up and pay attention, you had better stiffen your spine and try to get Bobby or Sally or the idea of Spring or the play you’re writing off your mind. The onimost constant and thorough thing students in school experience — and learn — is the antithesis of democracy.

This centralized authoritarianism is the core of schooling, and it reduces learning to a crude mechanistic process . Alongside a deep distrust of self-designed learning, schooling teaches children that they are always being observed, monitored and evaluated, a condition French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984) has named as panopticism . In Discipline and Punish, Foucault described the prison panoptical model as a thin circular building, divided into a vast number of cells, with a guard tower in the middle. The cells have a window on either end, but none on the sides, leaving the inhabitants of each small box effectively backlit for viewing from the tower, but fully isolated from one another. All the prisoners can thus be viewed fully at any time by any one single person in the central tower, “the arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes upon him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility.” The critical factor in this arrangement is that the prisoners do not ever know if or when they are being watched. They cannot see when the guards are in the tower, they can never know when they are being observed, so they must assume that it is always the case.Hence, the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power . So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearer.This is the essence of panopticism. The actual surveillance is not functionally necessary, the subject swiftly assumes responsibility for their own constraints, and the assumption of constant monitoring is internalized and they evolve into both the prisoner and warden .It is hardly a stretch to fit modern schools, hospitals, prisons or psychiatric institutions into this model. One of the cultural residues of mass compulsory schooling is a widespread panoptical imprint. People who have been rigorously schooled reflexively believe they are always being watched, monitored and evaluated. It is a condition many of us, myself certainly included, can recognize easily and identify working virtually constantly in our lives. Schools and schooling lead us to believe that we are always under surveillance , and whether or not it is actually true is insignificant, it is the impulse that the schooled person necessarily accepts , and adjusts their behaviour accordingly. The schooled panoptical mentality extends itself further into parenting and adult-child non-school relationships. At school children are always monitored, and schooled parents believe that they should similarly be constantly monitoring their offspring, in the name of safety . The last decades of this century has seen an exponential growth in concern for children’s daily safety, particularly in cities, and most parents I come into contact with want to keep a very close eye on their kids. This is a laudable

concern, and one I share, yet I have a deep suspicion of the equation that safety = surveillance. There is a threshold where our concerned eye becomes over-monitoring and disabling, an authoritarian presence shaping our kids’ lives.If we want and expect our kids to grow up to be responsible creatures capable of directing their own lives, we have to give them practise at making decisions. To allow authority to continually rob our kids of basic decisions about where and how to play is to set our kids up for dependence and incompetence on a wide scale. Children who are genuinely safe are those who are able to make thoughtful, responsible, independent decisions. The panoptical society and schooling severely restricts individual self-reliance, and supports a disabling reliance on authoritarian monitoring . A deschooled antidote to this condition is trust. Parents have to trust their kids to make real decisions about their own lives, as Dan Greenberg, who founded the Sudbury Valley School in 1968 outside of Boston, describes:

We feel the only way children can become responsible persons is to be responsible for their own welfare, for their own education, and for their own destiny. ... As it turns out, the daily dangers are challenges to the children, to be met with patient determination, concentration, and most of all, care. People are naturally protective of their own welfare, not self-destructive. The real danger lies in placing a web of restrictions around people. The restrictions become challenges in themselves, and breaking them becomes such a high priority that even personal safety can be ignored. ... Every child is free to go wherever they wish, whenever they want. Ours is an open campus. Our fate is to worry.If we are to truly counter the disabling effect of schools, this is indeed our fate. A genuine democracy, a society of self-reliant people and communities, has to begin by allowing children and adults to shape themselves, to control their own destinies free of authoritarian manipulation.

C. Panopticonal surveillance is a disciplining power which creates docile bodies reduced to units of information by the state – that destroys value to life. Galič et al. 16 — Maša Galič, Ph.D. Researcher at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, Tjerk Timan, Researcher at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Twente, M.A. in Media and Culture from the University of Amsterdam, Bert-Jaap Koops, Professor of Regulation and Technology at Tilburg University, Researcher in the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, Ph.D. in Law from Tilburg University, 2016 ("Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation," SpringerLink, May 13th, Available Online at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-016-0219-1, Accessed 6-22-2017)The richness and variation within Bentham’s panoptic paradigm has been largely overlooked in surveillance studies. This is because the Panopticon is mainly understood through Foucault’s analysis and use of the concept. It is relevant to look into why Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon resonated in so many disciplines, for his analysis is not only rehabilitating (specific parts of) Bentham’s work, but also building upon and extending it into a broader perspective on power relations and networks in modern societies.In analysing the Panopticon, Foucault drew exclusively on Bentham’s prison design. He used the architecture and idea of the prison-Panopticon as a diagram, projecting it onto other parts of society to analyse power relations and models of governing (Foucault 1991a). Being a historian, Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison explains that since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western societies can be defined by a new form of power that is capillary and affects ‘the grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives’ (Foucault 1980, 39). In simpler terms, the

Panopticon penitentiary system of governing has become present and active in many or most aspects of Western societies. Yet, and this is what Foucault tries to show through compelling examples, these systems often remain hidden or unnoticed, precisely because they are found in the fibres of daily life, which is what makes them so powerful and ubiquitous.Through an analysis of different institutions, such as the school, the military, the hospital and the factory, processes of action in daily life have been invaded with Panoptical mechanisms of watching and being watched and, consequently, of disciplining power . When everybody can potentially be under surveillance, people will internalise control , morals and values —discipline is thus a type of power, a strategy and a kind of technology. Accordingly, Foucault coined this type of society the disciplinary—or discipline—society, which (in the West) has seen a development towards technocratic approaches to governing. Foucault’s study of power consisted of formal and evident institutions, where the Panopticon was introduced as an ‘ideal’ system to discipline the individual. Why was this so evocative? Foucault shifted the perspective from the goal of governing to the mode of governing. The main goal is (still) to prosper as a society, delineated by geography or nation state. The mode of governance, however, shifts from a sovereign society (Foucault understood sovereign practices as seeking mainly to affirm control over a territory and secure the loyalty of subjects, in a somewhat static and rigid manner through binary prohibitions, see Valverde 2008) to one of discipline, which represents a shift in method as well as in object, from populations to individuals.In feudal and later sovereign societies, the question of power is linked to questions of how to organise a population and its land to ensure continuity. By learning from previous years about crop income, for example, or the spread of famine or disease, a sovereign can learn and predict, either to invest in food reserves or trade more crop with neighbouring states, or to control disease by disallowing citizens to travel, whereby early forms of predictive modelling were used to rule the state (Foucault 2007). Statistics, after all, means numbers of the state. A key difference between modern Western societies that Foucault characterises as disciplinary and sovereign societies lies in the type of power at work. In the sovereign society, the sovereign is the one key decider and holder of power and (s)he is known and ‘visible’ in terms of power signals, such as ‘by decree of the King’. In the disciplinary society, power is dispersed and hidden in processes of conformity present in different places of society. Because of these characteristics, discipline is not an exclusive machinery of the State; rather, it moves across different institutions, it links and prolongs them, making them converge and function in a new way (Deleuze 2006). Although this power operates somewhat independently from the judicial and government apparatus, it nevertheless requires institutions and the state, since it works through them—‘the state, correctional institutions, and medical institutions [need to] be regarded as coagulations of practices’ (Valverde 2008, 18).Foucault explains that a phenomenon closely linked and resulting from the disciplining process, is normation . By this, he means the processes that force and create habits , rituals and how things are done, thereby creating norms of behaviour.6 In normation processes, the norm is central. It constitutes what one has to conform to and strive for; it is both standard and ideal. Being regarded as normal is to conform to the norm, hence to occupy the position of the invisible, i.e. unmarked by difference construed as abnormality, and putative universal subject. The abnormal is the one deemed deficient and inferior in relation to the norm(a l) (Dalibert 2013). This is specifically linked to the individual body, as Foucault argues that disciplining the individual body is a governmental utopia, where discipline produces subjected and practiced, ‘docile’ bodies (Foucault 1991b). As the body is subjected to discipline, it is ordered, subjected to normation. In Foucault’s understanding, normation is intrinsic to mechanisms disciplining the body, in which technologies are central (Foucault 2007, referred to in Dalibert 2013, 69).

The process of individualisation in disciplinary societies is what Foucault called descending, as opposed to ascending, in feudal or sovereign societies (Foucault 1980). He explains that in the latter, the overall status of a society, e.g. its total production or health, was an aggregated, collective rather than an individual concern, thereby leaving room for individuals to diversify and develop within the parameters of collective ideals. In contrast, in disciplinary societies, processes of administration focus on individual rather than aggregated actions, rituals and habits, leading to a de-diversification of individual behaviour. Through the shifting focus, individuals are continuously measured against the norm; they become fictional, representative, as they have to be registered and held against a fictional norm. The sovereign power as the key decider and holder of power becomes less visible, and power structures are relocated and replaced by different institutions (schools, hospitals, etc.) in which behaviour is being watched.Foucault continues that one method and a key indicator of disciplinary societies is found in many institutions that uphold and apply the norm: the exam. The exam incorporates the power of discipline because it tests according to a ‘scientific’ method the suitability of individuals against a norm. Through different methods of bureaucracy and sequences of how to do things, bodies get disciplined. For instance, the army applies extensive training and testing on using guns, hospitals on procedures of treatment and schools on writing and handling a pen correctly. The product or goal of these disciplining methods is to create docile bodies. This makes for even more predictive and plannable societies in which docile bodies have become units of information, not communication. Here, the link becomes clear with Bentham’s prison architecture: it is a one-way street in which individuals are mouldable and re-mouldable.7 Modernity then, in the form of disciplinary societies, is formed by the advent of scientific methods of registration, record-keeping and normation through exams. Docile individuals are no longer governed as actors with whom they communicate, but as units of information that can be moulded . Surveillance is a key concept here because this moulding and re-shaping is a result of the visibility of individuals’ ‘competencies’ through exams and record-keeping of their progress. Foucault briefly mentions, but does not elaborate upon, resistance to disciplining power, by stating that the entanglements of power also give rise to scattered points of resistance that have no cause but power itself, which they resist (Foucault 1998).

D. Schooling is immoral – the classroom warps children, denies rights, and blurs our values. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical . The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil . When the schoolteacher fuses in his person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life . A teacher who combines these three powers contributes to the warping of the child much more than the laws which establish his legal or economic minority, or restrict his right to free assembly or abode.Teachers are by no means the only professionals who offer therapy. Psychiatrists, guidance counselors, and job counselors, even lawyers, help their clients to decide, to develop their personalities, and to learn. Yet common sense tells the client that such professionals should abstain from imposing their opinion of what is right or wrong, or from forcing anyone to follow their advice. Schoolteachers and ministers are

the only professionals who feel entitled to pry into the private affairs of their clients at the same time as they preach to a captive audience.Children are protected by neither the First nor the Fifth Amendment when they stand before that secular priest , the teacher . The child must confront a man who wears an invisible triple crown , like the papal tiara, the symbol of triple authority combined in one person. For the child, the teacher pontificates as pastor, prophet, and priest-he is at once guide, teacher, and administrator of a sacred ritual. He combines the claims of medieval popes in a society constituted under the guarantee that these claims shall never be exercised together by one established and obligatory institution--church or state. Defining children as full-time pupils permits the teacher to exercise a kind of power over their persons which is much less limited by constitutional and consuetudinal restrictions than the power wielded by the guardians of other social enclaves. Their chronological age disqualifies children from safeguards which are routine for adults in a modern asylummadhouse, monastery, or jail.Under the authoritative eye of the teacher, several orders of value collapse into one . The distinctions between morality, legality, and personal worth are blurred and eventually eliminated. Each transgression is made to be felt as a multiple offense. The offender is expected to feel that he has broken a rule, that he has behaved immorally, and that he has let himself down. A pupil who adroitly obtains assistance on an exam is told that he is an outlaw, morally corrupt, and personally worthless. Classroom attendance removes children from the everyday world of Western culture and plunges them into an environment far more primitive, magical, and deadly serious. School could not create such an enclave within which the rules of ordinary reality are suspended, unless it physically incarcerated the young during many successive years on sacred territory. The attendance rule makes it possible for the schoolroom to serve as a magic womb, from which the child is delivered periodically at the school days and school year's completion until he is finally expelled into adult life. Neither universal extended childhood nor the smothering atmosphere of the classroom could exist without schools.

They Say: “No Impact/Extinction (Environment)”

Environmental degradation causes extinction. Roberts 17 — Paul Craig Roberts, Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, Former Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Former Professor of business administration and Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Former Inaugural William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at Georgetown University, Ph.D. in Economics from The University of Virginia, 2017 ("The Globalization of Environmental Degradation," Global Research, February 14th, Available Online at http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-globalization-of-environmental-degradation/5574752, Accessed 6-13-2017)Figuratively speaking, a ginormous asteroid is hurtling to a cataclysmic rendezvous with earth, but we are not supposed to notice. The asteroid is the rising threat from environmental degradation . Evidence is accumulating that environmental degradation is becoming global.We can either act responsibly by accepting the challenge or take refuge in denial and risk the consequences.There is nothing new about climate change. It has been ongoing for as long as earth has had an atmosphere. Through change nature produced an atmosphere supportive of life. We know for a fact that human activities can have adverse impacts on the air, water, and land resources. If these impacts become global, as independent scientists believe, life on earth might be at risk.We’re in a state of perpetual crisisMoreover, environmental degradation can contribute to, and be worsened by, other changes that are not under our control. Presently humanity is challenged by three revolutions which collectively constitute a perpetual crisis: the technological revolution that is displacing humans in the production of goods and services, the volatility and instability of the global financial system, and environmental degradation. Our focus is on environmental degradation.It’s a matter of balanceThe weight of the atmosphere , at 14.7 PSI, has remained relatively constant throughout much of earth’s existence. What has varied is the makeup of the atmospheric gaseous mix. The mixes that existed prior to the current era would prove toxic to the contemporary biosphere. As the biosphere evolved over the hundreds of millions of years prior to the current era, the gaseous mix of the atmosphere and the biosphere came into perfect, or indeed as some might say, heavenly balance.Indeed, our very existence as well as the existence of the biosphere depends on this balance . There is no question that human activities can affect this balance. Perhaps not enough that nature wouldn’t eventually be able to reset the balance, but perhaps enough to end civilization before nature could correct the disturbance. While some are cavalierly dismissive, others have concluded that things are already so irreversibly out of balance that civilization as we know it will cease before the middle of this century.Easter Island is an example of death by environmental degradation on a local level. When the island was first settled, it was covered by a forest. Soil analysis suggests that the natural environment was reasonably diverse and, absent human settlement, resilient enough to recover from natural disturbances that included volcanic eruptions. The humans that settled on Easter Island thrived until the population degraded the environment to the point that it could not support the population.Tree removal was one of the activities that proved detrimental to the island’s natural balance. As trees were removed, so too was the island’s natural diversity and its ability to support human habitation. Many have wondered what Easter Islanders were thinking as they cut down the last tree.Environmental degradation’s role in the collapse of civilizations is well told in Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse. At least two pre-Columbian empires fell to sudden environmental collapse. Environmental degradation even contributed to Rome’s fall. Throughout history, empires and

civilizations have collapsed once they degrade the environment below its capacity to carry the human footprint imposed on the environment.Global warming introduces a difference. In the past environmental destruction was local or regional. But what is now underway appears to be global. It can take a long time to unbalance the biosphere, but once the line is crossed, collapse can be rapid and irreversible . Global Warming a hoax?Humans and animals convert oxygen to carbon-dioxide, and trees and plants convert carbon-dioxide to oxygen. It’s a simple truth that burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric carbon-dioxide. Carbon-dioxide is one of several greenhouse gases so named because they contribute to atmospheric warming. The atmospheric carbon-dioxide molecular count has steadily increased since measurements were first made decades ago. Analysis of ice cores extracted from glaciers and polar ice indicate that carbon dioxide levels were never as high as they are now for millions of years prior to the Industrial Revolution. In addition, vast amounts of woodlands have been cleared thus reducing the biosphere’s capacity to absorb and process carbon-dioxide. For example, by 2030 it’s predicted that just 40% of the Amazon rain forest, itself a massive percentage of the biosphere, will remain.But carbon-dioxide isn’t the only concern. In addition, vast amounts of methane, also known to be a potent greenhouse gas, are also being released into the atmosphere.The oceans also contain gasses that if released into the atmosphere could prove toxic to the biosphere. The earth itself contains gasses, such as methane, which is routinely released into the atmosphere through coal and petroleum extraction operations. Animal farming adds more methane. Even larger amounts of methane are estimated to be locked up in polar ice. Based on recent measurements and observations, vast amounts of methane, estimated to be in excess of ten times as much as is presently contained in the atmosphere, are predicted to be released in a sudden volcanic-like eruption as the ice melts. A sudden release of methane could cause the atmosphere to rapidly heat to a temperature where most agricultural activities, except perhaps for hydroponic operations housed in controlled environments, would cease.The Pace is QuickeningFrom one day to the next it is difficult to discern changes in the environment. Yet those of us old enough to have been around for decades know that the weather has changed. Predictions made by scientists are being met sooner than expected. Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster and glaciers and polar ice are melting faster. The release of methane locked in arctic ice could quicken environmental change so that it is noticeable in real time.The simple truth is that the atmospheric gaseous mix is changing and altering the natural balance . This is in addition to the historical kinds of local and regional environmental degradation associated with human activity. When humans destroy watersheds with deforestation, turn fertile lands into deserts, and pollute local sources of water, they can move on. But when the global environment degrades, there is no where else to go .As climate changes, so does the geographical location for the best crop yields. Climate change has produced a new occupation: climatologists who predict for Wall Street investment bankers the best geographical locations for the highest crop yields.Environmental changes, even a temporary one such as a multi-year drought , can cause turmoil in societies that result in deadly conflict . During the three years that preceded the “Arab Spring” of 2011, the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean) suffered from an extended drought. In Syria as water became more scarce, the government favored the most loyal elements of the population. Crop failures in the unfavored regions prompted a migration to the cities and produced political unrest. The US used this unrest to intervene against the Assad government which had alienated the US by pursuing an independent foreign policy.The global spread of corporate monoculture agriculture and the global timber corporations’ exploitation of the remaining virgin forests are spreading environmental fragilities. On Easter Island the population

declined into disappearance. For a thousand years after the Roman Empire collapsed the Italian peninsula was an environmental disaster with soils so depleted, agriculture was reduced to marginal subsistence farming barely sufficient to support a population a fraction of what it had been. Unlike our time, the Romans achieved environmental degradation without burning fossil fuels or fertilizing their fields with toxic petrochemicals and herbicides known to deplete soils to the point where continued land use is predicated on artificial fertilizers and ever larger applications of herbicides, the runoffs from which produce algae blooms and destroy marine life.Today in locations where multinational agribusiness has replaced traditional farming, it can take years for soils to regain their natural fertility and for the societies to regain their economic balance from the imbalance that agricultural monoculture produces.Environmental degradation can be destructive irrespective of global warming . Throughout history, humans have degraded their environments to the point that their societies failed or were weakened to the point that they were conquered in whole or part by invaders. However, global environmental failure can terminate life in general .Environmental failure can result from ignorance, careless practices, and the short time horizon associated with profit maximization which encourages disposing of waste products directly into the environment where they damage, air, water, and land resources. When emissions alter the atmospheric balance, what has historically been local and regional damage becomes global.In other words, human activities can put life in general at risk. This risk is too total to justify dismissing accumulated evidence as a hoax or as “a plot against capitalism.” We must assess the risk without being shouted down by material interests . There is no prospect of finding a solution to an unacknowledged risk.Just as Easter Islanders did not understand the consequences for them of deforestation, today many in government do not acknowledge the risks of global degradation. President Trump has appointed a climate change skeptic as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. This is not enough for US Rep. Matt Gaetz who wants the EPA abolished. Is humanity now globally on the same path and in the same denial as led to the extinction of human life on Easter Island?

Environment collapse coming – biodiversity collapse and climate changeSutter 16 — John D. Sutter, Sutter is an award winning columnist for CNN and creater of the networks “2 degrees” project, which aims to invlolve readers in climate change, 2016(“We have 20 years -- at the very most -- to prevent mass extinction”, CNN, October 27, http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/27/opinions/sutter-wwf-sixth-extinction/index.html, Accessed 6/22/17)(CNN)The Earth's next mass extinction -- the first caused by people -- is on the horizon. And the

consequences are almost unthinkably dire: Three-quarters of species could disappear. This has happened only five times in

the planet's history -- including the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs. What's different now is that humans are causing these changes. How? Well, we're burning fossil fuels and consequently heating up the planet; turning massive chunks of land into farms; spreading invasive species and diseases around the world; boosting our own numbers and consuming more and more resources; and causing all sorts of trouble for the oceans, from overfishing to filling them up with plastic. (Did you know researchers expect the ocean to be equal parts fish and plastic, by weight, as soon as 2050?) This subject certainly is alarming, especially when you consider the global picture. Another frightening data point in this trend toward extinction emerged on Thursday in a report from the World Wildlife Fund, an

environmental advocacy group. The report claims 58% declines in certain vertebrate animal populations since 1970 and says that if trends continue, then two-thirds of all of these individual birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals will be gone by 2020. Some scientists see those numbers as potentially misleading. Stuart Pimm, the Doris Duke chair of conservation ecology at Duke University, told me that 58% is "a fairly silly kind of number to report because it mixes what's going on in the ocean with what's going on in the land." He continued, "It mixes studies of bird populations in Europe with mammal populations in Africa. It has very few data points in South America. The idea that you in the media can only handle a single number to summarize the state of the planet -- you should be insulted by that." I agree with Pimm that these numbers can be misleading, but that's

only if people misunderstand them. I also spoke with Anthony Barnosky, executive director of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve at Stanford University. He told me the most important thing to remember is that this report is limited in scope -- it has little data from some important tropical regions, for example, and only covers animals with backbones. But it highlights an important and little-considered fact: It's not just that species are going extinct at an alarming rate -- at least 100 times what could be considered "normal," and maybe much higher than that -- but that

populations of still-common animals are declining very rapidly. "I don't think I would quibble with the trend they're pointing out -- we're losing individuals of species and geographic ranges at a really rapid rate," he told me. "If you keep that up, extinction of lots of species is inevitable." Importantly, the WWF report

deals with individual animals disappearing, not with entire species. A mass extinction, by definition, means three-quarters of all species disappear. That could happen in 100 or 200 years, Barnosky said, but not by 2020.

Don't look at that figure and think we have time to count our blessings. Barnosky told me we have maybe 10 to 20 years to stop the sixth extinction from becoming an inevitability. If we do nothing, expect three-quarters of species to disappear over the next century or two. In other words, what we do (or don't do) right now will shape generations on this planet. "Yes, species are going extinct very, very much faster than they should be," Pimm said, "which means we are depriving countless generations to come the extremely rich diversity we inherited from our parents." And others experts, including Paul Ehrlich, the Bing professor of population studies at Stanford University, say the sixth extinction is already here. "We've probably lost, say, 200 species -- kinds of big animals -- over the last couple of hundred years, but we may well have lost on the order of a billion different populations," he said. "We are basically annihilating the life on our planet and that is the only known life we know about in the entire universe. And it's life that shaped the planet, that made it possible for us to live here. And it's life that still makes it possible for us to live here. (If) we don't have the diversity of other organisms, we're done." Pimm told me we have "about a human generation" to do something before it's likely too late. "If we don't start doing a lot of things to stop extinction, we are going to see very significant losses of species," he said. "There are a lot of things we can do and I would rather concentrate on the positive (rather) than just wallow in this really appalling number" presented by the World Wildlife Fund. "In the last 50 years, roughly, we've lost 50% of the individuals in these species," Barnosky said. "If we lose another 50% in the next 50 years we're down to 25% of the original. Basically, in a couple hundred years you'd have almost all of these species we're talking about blinking out -- if we

keep going at that rate." We know how to slow the rate of extinction. We need to ditch fossil fuels to blunt climate change. We need to protect more of the land and ocean on behalf of biodiversity. (The biologist E.O. Wilson has called for half of the world to be protected, a bold and exciting proposition.) We need to stop the spread of invasive species, and we've got to get a handle on illegal trades like that in ivory, which Barnosky said could wipe out Africa's elephants in 20 years if poaching rates continue. The first step, however, is waking up to the crisis and its monstrous scope. "The best way to envision the sixth mass extinction," he told me earlier this year, "is to look outside and then just imagine that three out of every four of the species that were common out there are gone." I'd rather imagine a world where we stop anything close to that from happening.

They Say: “Environment Resilient”

Environmental resilience theory gets co-opted by corporate elites and is wrong.Nixon 11 — Rob Nixon, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2011 (“Slow Violence, Neoliberalism, and the Environmental Picaresque,” Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, ISBN: 0674049306, pgs. 21-22)That said, we need to be cautious about romanticizing the noncom-pliance that may inhere in a targeted resource: relative to the accelerated plunder involved, say, in the "second scramble" for Africa—as American, Australian, Chinese, European, and South African corporations cash in on resource-rich, regulation-poor, war-fractured societies—the resistance posed by nature itself should not be overstated.42 The recent turn within environmental studies toward celebrating the creative resilience of ecosystems can be readily hijacked by politicians , lobbyists , and corporations who oppose regulatory controls and strive to minimize pollution liability . Co-opting the "nature-and-time- will-heal" argument has become integral to attempts to privatize profits while externalizing risk and cleanup , both of which can be delegated to "nature's business." This was dramatically illustrated by the Deepwater Horizon disaster— in the laxity that contributed to the blowout and in the aftermath. Big Oil and government agencies both invoked natural resilience as an advance strategy for minimizing oversight. Before the blowout, the Minerals Management Service of the U.S. Interior Department had concluded that "spills in deep water are not likely to affect listed birds. .. . Deepwater spills would either be transported away from coastal habitats or prevented, for the most part, from reaching coastal habitats by natural weathering processes."43 Even after the disaster, this line of reasoning persisted. Oil industry apologist Rep. Don Young (R-AK), testifying at congressional hearings on the blowout, knew exactly how to mine this "natural agency" logic : the Deep- water Horizon spill was "not an environmental disaster," he declared. "I will say that again and again because it is a natural phenomenon. Oil has seeped into this ocean for centuries , will continue to do it. ... We will lose some birds, we will lose some fixed sea-life, but overall it will recover ."44 BP spokesman John Curry likewise explained how industrious microbes would cleanse the oil from the gulf: "Nature," he concluded sanguinely, "has a way of helping the situation."45 BP representatives repeatedly invoked the capacity of marine life to metabolize hydrocarbons and the dispersing powers of microbial degradation. But in conscripting nature as a volunteer clean up crew , BP and its Washington allies downplayed the way ravenous microbes , in consuming oxygen, thereby starved other organisms and exacerbated expanding oceanic dead zones .46 What will be the long-term cascade effect of the slow violence, the mass die-offs, of phyloplankton at the food chain base? It is far too early to tell. In short, the very environment that high-risk, deep-water drilling endangered was conscripted by industry through a kind of natural out-sourcing. And so Big Oil's invocation of nature's healing powers needs to be recognized as part of a broader strategy of image management and liability limitation by greenwashing. Natural agency can indeed take unexpected, sometimes heartening forms, but we should be alert to the ways corporate colossi and governments can hijack that logic to grant themselves advance or retrospective absolution . Crucially, for my arguments about slow violence, the time frames of damage assessment and potential recovery are wildly out of sync . The deep- time thinking that celebrates natural healing is strategically disastrous if it provides political cover for reckless corporate short-termism .

They Say: “Tech Solves”

Tech can’t solve —

A) Perishability and thermodynamics. Kerschner 10 — Christian Kerschner, Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Leeds, PhD in Ecological Economics from ICTA, M.A. in Economics from the University of Vienna, 2010 (“The Steady State Economy,” Critical Economics, Accessible Online at https://pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/ec/jec10/ponencias/410kerschner.pdf, Accessed On 03-20-2016)The so-called weak interpretation of sustainability is also based on factor substitutability. Human-made capital is assumed to be a perfect substitute for natural capital. Thus the loss or degradation of the stock of natural capital (resources and sinks) to future generations is being compensated by what is being created by humans (structures erected, technologies developed, knowledge gathered, etc.). The fact that virtually all human produced artefacts are ‘ perishable’ (Ricardo 1817), i.e. they depreciate, is completely ignored . Most of them will probably have to be replaced entirely within 100 years time (Viktor 1991) (the same could be argued for technology and knowledge).Natural capital and man-made capital are indeed supplements and not substitutes . This has often been illustrated on the example of the fishing industry. Historically, in an ‘empty-world-economy’ (see below), the scarce factor were the fishing boats (manmade capital). This role has been changed over the last decades. Now that we live in a ‘full-world-economy’ the scarce factor is fish (natural capital). New fishing boats equipped with high-tech instruments are in total not increasing the amount of fish caught, instead the opposite is true. Meanwhile overfishing has lead to a decrease in the world stock of fish, which has dramatically reduced their reproductive capacity. Hence the fishing industry has clearly exceeded the limits of the newly scarce factor (Costanza, Norgaard et al. 1997).Secondly, the mechanical value concept has a strong impact on the treatment of time in neoclassical economic theory. It is argued hat often even its very existence is denied. In those cases, where time is taken into account, it is treated in a mechanical way. There is no such thing as uncertainty; everything is known either with absolute certainty or in the form of some probability distribution (Georgescu-Roegen 1971 ch. 5-8; Edmonds and Reilly 1985; Perrings 1987). Furthermore the interaction between the economy and the environment is assumed to proceed in infinitesimal, qualitatively identical and reversible steps without the consideration of possible thresholds or points of no return (Söllner 1997). Reversibility therefore leaves humanity free to cut down forests, because they could be replanted; contaminate its freshwater supply, because it could be de-polluted; exploit species to extinction, because they could be re-introduced from stocks in zoos and botanical gardens or be reproduced in genetic engineering laboratories, etc.; In reality, “of course, all real economic (and other) processes are irreversible.”(Söllner 1997 p. 181, own emphasis)Finally technological optimism seems to act as a reinforcing and ‘ gap-filling’ mechanism in neoclassical economic theory . It facilitates both, the assumption of factor substitutability (i.e. the rejection of absolute scarcity) as well as the assumption of reversibility. Human tech nological progress appears to be the panacea for mainstream economists . This optimism is by no means substantiated (Aage 1984) as the laws of thermodynamics will always impose limits . Of course physical laws have been found untrue in the past, but according to most physics, among those

Albert Einstein, the laws of thermodynamics are the least likely ever to be overthrown (Daly 1992a).

B) Speed of innovation. Speth 8 — James Gustave Speth, law professor, Served as President Jimmy Carter’s White House environmental adviser and as head of the United Nations’ largest agency for international development Prof at Vermont law school, former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, former Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching environmental and constitutional law, former Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, 2008 (“The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability,” ISBN: 9780300145304, EBrary, pg. 114-5)

The needed rates of tech nological improvement are thus high, and they must be continuously sustained. And there are many , many areas where such tech nological changes must occur , beyond those affecting carbon dioxide emissions— in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, transportation, and elsewhere. In the carbon dioxide example, almost half the required rate of change is needed simply to compensate for the effects of economic growth. It is like running up a down escalator— a very fast down escalator . Perhaps it can be done. I am doubtful,10 but here is a key point: it is not being done today , and no government that I know of is systematically, adequately promoting the universal, rapid, and sustained penetration of green tech nology , at home and abroad, on the scale required. Governments are , however, profoundly committed to promoting growth . Real speed is required for technological change to stay well ahead of growth, but the social and political institutions that can create the incentives for rapid tech nological change can be slow to respond , as can the needed science and technology. The development of international environmental law and regulation is painfully slow, for example. But the world economy and urbanization surge ahead, faster than societies can respond. Chlorofluorocarbons were produced for decades before scientists raised concerns. Then it took a decade to agree on a phaseout, which took another decade. Yet the problem was relatively simple compared to most, and the response was fast by international standards. Our capacity to anticipate and respond effectively today has not greatly improved. Yet by the time today’s university students reach leadership positions, the world economy will likely be twice its current size.

C) No adoption. Speth 04 — James Gustave Speth, law professor, Served as President Jimmy Carter’s White House environmental adviser and as head of the United Nations’ largest agency for international development Prof at Vermont law school, former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, former Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching environmental and constitutional law, former Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, 2004 (“Red Sky at Morning : America and the Crisis of the Global Environment,” New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press, ISBN: 9780300128321, 2004, Ebrary, pg 131)

So the bottom line on technology is much like that for consumption. Public attitudes toward technology have generally been supportive, welcoming, and trustful. This receptivity continues today with information technology, robotics, nanotechnologies, and even genetic engineering despite

the controversy about the health and ecological impacts of genetically modified organisms. The control of tech nologies has been largely in the hands of large corporations that benefit from their deployment and are clearly in no position to be impartial judges of the public’s best interests. The current market fails to guide tech nology toward good environmental choices , and governments have failed to correct poor market signals. And once a tech nology has reached a certain level of deployment, it gains an often unwelcome lifespan , something one could say with equal truth about both the inefficient QWERTY keyboard on which we type and the internal combustion engine that has powered our cars for a century .

D) Tech can’t solve the environment. Godhaven 09 — Merrick Godhaven is an environmental writer and activist. He co-authored the Corporate Watch report Technofixes: A Critical Guide to Climate Change Technologies, 2009 ( “Swapping technologies fails to address the root causes of climate change,” The Guardian, July 15th, Accessible Online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/jul/15/technofix-climate-change, Accessed On 03-20-2016)

Technology is part of the solution to climate change. But only part. Techno-fixes like some of those in the Guardian's Manchester Report simply cannot deliver the carbon cuts science demands of us without being accompanied by drastic reductions in our consumption . That means radical economic and social transformation. Merely swapping technologies fails to address the root causes of climate change. We need to choose the solutions that are the cheapest, the swiftest, the most effective and least likely to incur dire side effects. On all counts, there's a simple answer – stop burning the stuff in the first place. Consume less. There is a certain level of resources we need to survive, and beyond that there is a level we need in order to have lives that are comfortable and meaningful. It is far below what we presently consume. Americans consume twice as much oil as Europeans. Are they twice as happy? Are Europeans half as free? Economic growth itself is not a measure of human well-being, it only measures things with an assessed monetary value. It values wants at the same level as needs and, while it purports to bring prosperity to the masses, its tendency to concentrate profit in fewer and fewer hands leaves billions without the necessities of a decent life. Techno-fixation masks the incompatibility of solving climate change with unlimited economic growth . Even if energy consumption can be reduced for an activity, ongoing economic growth eats up the improvement and overall energy consumption still rises. We continue destructive consumption in the expectation that new miracle tech nologies will come and save us . The hope of a future techno-fix feeds into the pass-it-forward, do-nothing-now culture typified by targets for 2050. Tough targets for 2050 are not tough at all, they are a decoy. Where are the techno-fix plans for the peak in global emissions by 2015 that the IPCC says we need? Even within the limited sphere of technology, we have to separate the solutions from the primacy of profit. We need to choose what's the most effective, not the most lucrative. Investors will want the maximum return for their money, and so the benefits of any climate technologies will, in all likelihood, be sold as carbon credits to the polluter industries and nations. It would not be done in tandem with emissions cuts but instead of them, making it not a tool of mitigation but of exacerbation. Climate change is not the only crisis currently facing humanity. Peak oil is likely to become a major issue within the coming decade. Competition for land and water, soil fertility depletion and collapse of fisheries are already posing increasing

problems for food supply and survival in many parts of the world . Tech nological solutions to climate change fail to address most of these issues . Yet even without climate change, this systemic environmental and social crisis threatens society, and requires deeper solutions than new technology alone can provide. Around a fifth of emissions come from deforestation , more than for all transport emissions combined. There is no tech nological fix for that . We simply need to consume less of the forest , that is to say, less meat, less agrofuel and less wood. Our level of consumption is inequitable. Making it universal is simply impossible. The scientist Jared Diamond calculates that if the whole world were to have our level of consumption, it would be the equivalent of having 72 billion people on earth. With ravenous economic growth still prized as the main objective of society by all political leaders the world over, that 72 billion would be just the beginning. At 3% annual growth, 25 years later it would be the equivalent of 150 billion people. A century later it would be over a trillion. Something's got to give. And indeed, it already is. It's time for us to call it a crisis and respond with the proportionate radical action that is needed. We need profound change – not only government measures and targets but financial systems, the operation of corporations, and people's own expectations of progress and success. Building a new economic democracy based on meeting human needs equitably and sustainably is at least as big a challenge as climate change itself, but if human society is to succeed the two are inseparable. Instead of asking how to continue to grow the economy while attempting to cut carbon, we should be ask ing why economic growth is seen as more important than surviva

They Cite: “Lomborg — Growth Sustainable”

Lomborg is wrong about limits to growth — he’s overly optimistic. Watson 13 — Iain Watson, Assistant Professor of International Relations at Ajou University, 2013 (“Nostalgia of a green skeptic,” The Korea Times, July 15th, Accessible Online at http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2013/07/197_138696.html, Accessed On 08-22-2016)Lomborg argues that limits to growth proponents ignore human ingenuity. This is rather disingenuous . The 1970s were coming off the back of the space race, whilst technology for the Internet was being born and the 1970s was all about new kids on the block such as Apple and Microsoft. There were oil discoveries in the North Sea and oil discoveries in states such as Nigeria. After all this was the beginning of the "resource curse'' and "Dutch disease' development debates. Limit to growth was a common sense warning , wrong in places of course, but this doesn't mean the need for a wholesale rejection characteristic of Lomborg's peculiar doublethink style . By shifting the goal posts from climate change , then to water and air pollution and then to natural resource depletion, a consistent anti-green argument is often difficult to fathom . Consequently, there is also a potential logical flaw in his argument . Maybe limits to growth actually spurred on such innovations which don't just happen in a social and political vacuum . On China for instance, Lomborg confusingly suggests that during the 1970s the Beijing government was so influenced by limits to growth inspired fears of an overpopulation crisis it embarked on what Lomborg terms a "self-destructive'' one-child policy. What is ignored here are the historical specifics of the aftermath of Mao's regime. Moreover, the one-child policy was sustained by Deng Xiaoping in order to create economic growth to which Lomborg applauds brought million out of poverty. Again the exaggerated (and selected) influence of limits to growth even on communist states is undoubtedly a key to Lomborg's strategic use of limits to growth. But could it be that limits to growth was used as a justification for already agreed upon policies rather than the cause of policy change itself? Lomborg's debating strategies tend to also miss historical context by generating inferences from specific yet unconnected points and thus leading to inconsistent diagnoses and solutions . There is no mention either of how green growth initiatives from non-European and emerging countries such as South Korea are challenging the false choices . For these countries economic growth is good, but this does not necessarily eradicate poverty or even lead to green solutions as if by some magic wand. Mitigation issues are highly political and anyone living in Korea would know about the concerns over yellow dust and air quality brought about by economic growth. Yet one could hardly call South Korea part of the developing world. Indeed, if limits to growth had been followed by the Western elite instead of economic globalization, then this would have allowed the developing world to "catch up'' even faster. Presumably Lomborg's point here is that as economic development reaches a certain GDP per capita through an emerging middle class, then green awareness and ingenuity automatically follows. However Lomborg's original point was that it is in fact poverty that often causes environmental damage to air and water so this in effect would cancel out any gains from green awareness resulting from industrialization. The nature of relationships and consequences between these variables is often rather opaque in Lomborg's work . In today's post-economic crisis era, global consumption is the catalyst for businesses . Lomborg's argument is bereft therefore of identifying policy specifics , rejected in favor of what is at best abstractly termed "human ingenuity.'' It may well be, as Lomborg notes, that humans don't need or could ever consume all these resources. The point is that the current economic system

certainly does. But then who defines and controls this ingenuity? Who owns it and who has access to it? Who has the opportunities to harness ingenuity? The perpetual round of needing scientific evidence to prove this or that pro or anti-climate change argument (depending on who finances the research), and even the climate change debate itself, indicates a constant desire for reassurance . And even without such reassurance, this need not imply that we are all panicking . States such as South Korea are retooling and creating a smart grid green economy by becoming a "me first mover.'' Emerging countries are simply sidestepping the straw men created by Western climate change debate romantics .

Alternative

1NC Alternative – Deschooling

The alternative is Deschooling – this escapes the circular process of research and reform while enabling the transition to educational networks and a rupture of the established educational order. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) The American controversy over the future of education, behind its rhetoric and noise, is more conservative than the discourse in other areas of public policy. On foreign affairs, at least, an organized minority constantly reminds us that the United States must renounce its role as the world's policeman. Radical economists, and now even their less radical teachers, question aggregate growth as a desirable goal. There are lobbies for prevention over cure in medicine and others in favor of fluidity over speed in transportation. Only in the field of education do the articulate voices demanding a radical deschooling of society remain so dispersed. There is a lack of cogent argument and of mature leadership aiming at the disestablishment of any and all institutions which serve the purpose of compulsory learning. For the moment, the radical deschooling of society is still a cause without a party. This is especially surprising in a time of growing, though chaotic, resistance to all forms of institutionally planned instruction on the part of those aged twelve to seventeen. Educational innovators still assume that educational institutions function like funnels for the programs they package. For my argument it is irrelevant whether these funnels take the form of a classroom, a TV transmitter, or a "liberated zone." It is equally irrelevant whether the packages purveyed are rich or poor, hot or cold, hard and measurable (like Math III), or impossible to assess (like sensitivity). What counts is that education is assumed to be the result of an institutional process managed by the educator . As long as the relations continue to be those between a supplier and a consumer, educational research will remain a circular process . It will amass scientific evidence in support of the need for more educational packages and for their more deadly accurate delivery to the individual customer, just as a certain brand of social science can prove the need for the delivery of more military treatment.An educational revolution depends on a twofold inversion : a new orientation for research and a new understanding of the educational style of an emerging counterculture. Operational research now seeks to optimize the efficiency of an inherited framework --a framework which is itself never questioned. This framework has the syntactic structure of a funnel for teaching packages . The syntactic alternative to it is an educational network or web for the autonomous assembly of resources under the personal control of each learner. This alternative structure of an educational institution now lies within the conceptual blind spot of our operational research. If research were to focus on it, this would constitute a true scientific revolution. The blind spot of educational research reflects the cultural bias of a society in which technological growth has been confused with technocratic control. For the technocrat the value of an environment increases as more contacts between each man and his milieu can be programmed. In this world the choices which are manageable for the observer or planner converge with the choices possible for the observed so-called beneficiary. Freedom is reduced to a selection among packaged commodities .

The emerging counterculture reaffirms the values of semantic content above the efficiency of increased and more rigid syntax. It values the wealth of connotation above the power of syntax to produce wealth. It values the unpredictable outcome of self-chosen personal encounter above the certified quality of professional instruction. This reorientation toward personal surprise rather than institutionally engineered values will be disruptive of the established order until we dissociate the increasing availability of technological tools which facilitate encounter from the increasing control of the technocrat of what happens when people meet.Our present educational institutions are at the service of the teacher's goals. The relational structures we need are those which will enable each man to define himself by learning and by contributing to the learning of others .

1NC Alternative – 21 st Century Deschooling

The alternative is to vote negative to endorse 21 st Century Deschooling . This process of rejecting and resisting public schooling is crucial to deconstruct false educational narratives and establish individual authority over education. Shouse 13 – Roger Shouse, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership in Penn State University’s Department of Education Policy Studies, 2013 (“Deschooling Twenty-First Century Education,” The International Journal of Illich Studies, Volume 3, No 2, 2013, Available Online at: https://journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/article/view/59293/59018, Accessed 6-2-17) Recently evolving educational memes (e.g., “21st Century Schooling ,” “NCLB ,” “Common Core”) work to efficiently convey the message that American youth achieve their greatest potential as learners and workers through state-centralized, standardized, and mandated schooling structures . This is a complex, puzzling, yet attractive narrative that offers students future social and economic security and fulfilment in exchange for restrictions on their educational freedom and responsibility. In a real sense, the narrative frames educational opportunity and innovation as narrowly whittled commodities to be administered and distributed through the various arms of state public schooling policy. The practical deconstruction of this narrative begins as “ 21st Century Deschooling ” is conceived not as ideal vision, but as a set of continual incremental acts of leadership and resistance to promote decentralized , local, and individual authority and responsibility over education al desire and design . 21st Century Deschooling thus becomes the process of imagining and gradually building a wall of separation between school and state . Such efforts will likely cause intense cognitive and emotional struggle for those tightly invested at various levels of the present public schooling apparatus. Consider, for example, the difficulty faced by scholars and educators who, though highly alarmed by current policy trends, cannot release themselves from various longstanding, shared, affectively toned entanglements among ideas such as “public schooling,” “democracy,” “learning gap,” and STEM. In short, 21st Century Deschooling requires suspending one’s belief in public schooling as a n administratively manipulable tool for repairing large scale social or economic problems. Without this, public schooling will continue to serve not just as a structure of social control , but as a perpetual source of “crises” and “solutions” to be used for larger political ends .

Alternative Solvency – Deschooling

Abandoning compulsory schooling is crucial to facilitate the creation of alternative learning methods, systems, and networks while creating a more ecological and sustainable society. Hern 98 – Matt Hern, Writer and activist based in East Vancouver, Founder of the Eastside Learning Center and Groundswell: Grassroots Economic Alternatives, Ph.D. in Urban Studies from the Union Institute & University, M.A. from the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfeild, Vermont, 1998 (“The Promise of Deschooling” Social Anarchism, Volume 25, Available Online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/matt-hern-the-promise-of-deschooling, Accessed 4-20-17) A conclusion and hopefully, a beginningI believe that deschooling represents a fundamental piece in the construction of an ecological society . To resist compulsory schooling is to resist the other-control of our lives at levels that dig at the very root of family and community at a daily, visceral level. Real communities can and are being built around an opposition to monopoly schooling all across the continent . The most compelling of these movements are those which are rejecting not only government schools, but the cultural and pedagogical assumptions of schooling and education themselves. It is easily possible to envision a society where schools are transformed into community learning centres that fade into a localist fabric, and are replaced by a vast array of learning facilities and networks , specific training programs , apprenticeships, internships and mentorships , public utilities like libraries, museums and science centres . The simplistic monoculture of compulsory schooling is abandoned in favour of innumerable learning projects, based on innumerable visions of human development , and children and adults alike are able to design, manage and evaluate the pace, style and character of their own lives and learning. The implications of schools reverberate throughout our culture, and it is plainly clear that an ecological society cannot bear the burden that schools place on our kids, families and communities. They are crude constructions for a world that has been exposed as unethical and unsustainable . Deschooling represents a tangible and comprehensive site for a disciplined renunciation of centralized control , and a transformative vision , not only of personal autonomy, but of genuine social freedom .

Deschooling is crucial to combat an anti-ecological culture, foster participatory democracy, and remove the parasite that is schooling. Hern 98 – Matt Hern, Writer and activist based in East Vancouver, Founder of the Eastside Learning Center and Groundswell: Grassroots Economic Alternatives, Ph.D. in Urban Studies from the Union Institute & University, M.A. from the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfeild, Vermont, 1998 (“The Promise of Deschooling” Social Anarchism, Volume 25, Available Online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/matt-hern-the-promise-of-deschooling, Accessed 4-20-17) Politics, Pedagogy, Culture, Self-design, Community Control.It is virtually anathema in our culture, but I want to argue here that our society needs far fewer schools , not more. I believe that schools as we have conceived them in the late-20th Century are a parasite on our communities , a burden to our children and are the very essence of a hierarchical, anti-ecological culture . I further contend that dissolving the school monopoly over

our kids may well hold the key to reconstructing our communities around local control and participatory democracy . Fortunately, there are a phenomenal number of alternatives to schools and schooling already flourishing in every community across the continent, representing a major threat to centralized institutional control. The abject failure of monopoly, state-controlled, compulsory schooling is evident to anyone who looks. The nightmare of schooling is costing our kids , our families and communities dearly in every way . Schools waste more money than anyone can fully conceive of, demand that our kids spend twelve years of their natural youth in morbidly depressing and oppressive environments and pour the energies of thousands upon thousands of eager teachers into demeaning and foolish classrooms. The sanctity of public schools has become so reified in our bizarre North American public political consciousness that people reflexively mouth support for ‘ education spending’ or ‘school dollars’ without any comprehension of what they are calling for. The reality that stands as background to the sordid liberal-conservative debate about how much cash to allocate to public schools is a system that systematically nurtures the worst in humanity and simultaneously suppresses individuality and real community. Deschooling is a call for individuals, families and communities to regain the ability to shape themselves . It is a political, a cultural and a pedagogical argument against schools and schooling, and the impetus to fundamentally reorganize our institutional relationships. For many good reasons I believe schools are the linchpin of the monopoly corporate state power over local communities, and actively resisting their grip holds much of the key to local power . I want to analyze and forward deschooling here in terms of three kinds of arguments: political, cultural and pedagogical, and draw each into a rubric of radical decentralism and direct democracy.

They Say: “Capitalist/Neoliberal Revolution first” Note* - this could be read as links to an affirmative that claims Capitalism as an advantage.

Deschooling is a prerequisite to any other movement towards liberation – schools indoctrinate the logic of consumption and institutionalization, legitimizing the destructiveness of the capitalist system and removing the drive for independence. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) 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 even faster than expenditures for defense. 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 United States 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 deschooling 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's becoming wage-labor which deprived man of the opportunity to create and be recreated. Now young people are prealienated by schools that isolate them while they pretend to be both producers and consumers of their own knowledge, which is conceived of as a commodity put on the market in school. 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 people for life or makes sure that they will fit into 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. Deschooling is , therefore, at the root of any movement for human liberation .

They Say: “The Alternative Doesn’t solve – Other Institutions Shape Values”

School promotes consumption on a deeper and more profound level than any other aspect of society – challenges to the logic of consumption must start there. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) The Revolutionary Potential of DeschoolingOf 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 . The hidden curriculum of family life, draft, health care, so-called professionalism, or of the media play an important part in the institutional manipulation of man's world-vision, language, and 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 prepackaged process. School touches us so intimately that none of us can expect to be liberated from it by something else. 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 deschooling, 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 .

Deschooling spills over – liberation from schools is crucial to formulate challenges to the rest of the social system. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) "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 deschooling could train youth in the new style of revolution needed to challenge a social system featuring obligatory "health," "wealth," and "security."

They Say: “The Alternative Is Infeasible”

Aston University’s Lifelong Learning Network provides a model for sustainability learning networks. Blewitt 10 – John Blewitt, Senior Lecturer in Sustainability and Communication at Aston Business School, Former Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Huddersfield, Distinguished Schumacher Fellow, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Ph.d. from the University of Wales, MEd from Huddersfield University, 2010 (“Deschooling Society? A Lifelong Learning Network for Sustainable Communities, Urban Regeneration and Environmental Technologies,” November 12th, Sustainability, Volume 2, Issue 11, pg. 3465-3478, Available Online at: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/11/3465/htm, Accessed 5-29-17)4. Aston University’s Lifelong Learning Network Consortium: Sustainable Communities, Urban Regeneration and Environmental TechnologiesThe Lifelong Learning Network for Sustainable Communities, Urban Regeneration and Environmental Technologies led by Aston University in Birmingham ( UK ) is attempting to re- imagine and create this new approach to learning for sustainability and extra mural university education. The Network offers both vertical and lateral progression within the existing structures and frameworks of formally accredited learning without denying opportunities for significant informal and non formal learning in a wide array of spaces and lifeworlds that recognises learning as an element of what it means to be human. A sustainable learning environment needs to draw on all the resources, cultures and histories existing in the city-region including those diasporic communities that have become significant in promoting development in poor countries. Participation in global-local networks enable quick access to and transfers of human and financial resources, neighbourhood focussed community development through mentoring, capacity building through language learning, and eco and social entrepreneurship often harnessing a religious faith to fashioning a practice of sustainable wellbeing. These communities, by their nature, lend a global and development perspective to this an otherwise urban and locally based initiative sustainability learning. Interestingly, this initiative also gains some official legitimacy from the UK Government’s 2009 white paper, The Learning Revolution, which rearticulated various ideas and approaches to lifelong learning through its emphasis on informal learning, co-operation, cultural space and the need to create of webs of learning opportunity outside and maybe tangental to mainstream formal education and training. Indeed, the White Paper endorsed the social value of “open space” as a means of empowering groups and individuals ([26], p. 7),We want a broad choice of learning options to be available, including traditional classes, activities in museums, libraries and other settings, as well as opportunities to learn online. Self-organised learning is an important part of the mix. Many people are already doing this. We want to empower more people to organise themselves to learn, with opportunities designed by communities for communities . But we know that starting a group can be difficult: it can be particularly hard to find low cost space locally, and people need more expertise and tips on how to build a successful learning group.The intimation here is that what was once known as extra mural learning within the university sector could be re-formed as an enabler, animateur, co-ordinator and centrifugal force of educative endeavour. Consequently, with development funding secured from two government QUANGOs (Quasi Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations), the Birmingham, Black Country and Solihull Lifelong Learning Network and the West Midlands Business Operations project [27]. Aston

University’s new Lifelong Learning Centre established during the first part of 2010 a Lifelong Learning Network Consortium comprising of private, public and third sector organisations, groups and interested citizens. Consortium members include power companies, private consultancies, further education and sixth form colleges, professional associations, community groups, NGOs and charities whose knowledge, mission and expertise fall within the broad public purpose of promoting a green knowledge based, low-carbon economy. In the spring and summer of 2010 a number of Consortium members were engaged to design and develop new modules for university accreditation together with a growing portfolio of complementary non accredited learning opportunities particularly in learning methods and facilitation. Some existing learning programmes owned and previously developed by some Consortium members have been recognised, endorsed and/or accredited allowing them to carry and transfer higher education credit within the national qualification framework and add a further dimension to the Network’s operation. The Lifelong Learning Centre has transferred funding to some partners to develop learning materials because their knowledge, skills and values are not be readily found within the academy. These groups and individuals are at the forefront of their respective fields, are practically engaged in fashioning sustainable practices and opportunities and work directly and immediately with business, community and local government. Intellectual property rights (IPR) remain with the lead body if the Aston University has funded the materials’ development but with provision for the developer to deliver and further refine the material over a number iterations if undertaken from within the Consortium’s operational parameters. In some instances the IPR for some module learning materials are shared jointly. By the autumn of 2010 the newly accredited learning opportunities included a wide range of ten and twenty credit modules , largely at level four, with self explanatory titles including : Strategies for Local Food, Planning for Sustainable Energy and Carbon Reduction , Concepts and Issues in Sustainable Development , Low Carbon Project Management , Setting Up and Running a Social Enterprise , Sustainable Design Strategies, Engaging Communities in Climate Change , Sustainable Cities, Sustainable Built Environment, Environmental Auditing, Intelligent Sustainability and Transition, Technology and Sustainable Life , Independent Professional Practice. The intention is to develop more if and when the Consortium generates the necessary interest, demand and momentum that will be the necessary corollary of a creative politico-educative event or rupture.Delivery is by conventional face to face means, blended and in some cases purely on line at a distance. Much of the face to face delivery occurs outside the university’s campus boundaries in business premises, in neighbourhood groups, in public facilities devoted to social learning such as those provided by the library services and increasingly integrated with the learning affordances of new media technologies and applications. Thus through offering these part time and flexible opportunities the Lifelong Learning Centre has attempted to empower a connected collective of sustainability practitioners, educators, activists and entrepreneurs through a framework and space for sharing and development. The learning opportunities for sustainability are offered at a standardised fee to all citizens within the city of Birmingham, and beyond, who are capable of benefiting and succeeding at these higher level study. Marketing and promotion takes place through a variety means with the most effective being social networking activities from which Consortium members have organised information and guidance events or simply conveyed information to interested parties. Modules can be taken singly or in a cluster and credit may be accumulated to gain a higher level award qualification in Professional Development. Many adult learners have sought out these learning opportunities as part of their own personal and professional development but often to enhance their employability understandable in a region that is economically depressed. Many employers have expressed interest in fashioning learning programme that suits their own specific organisational and performance needs and this sometimes manifests itself in a demand for small units of credit (five) and a desire to negotiate learning outcomes. Thus, both award programme in Professional Development and for the independent Professional Practice

modules intended learning outcomes may be identified by the learner him/herself in dialogue with the tutor and employing or professional body (if there is one). These outcomes may be expressive rather than strictly prescriptive further enabling creative development and refinement within the learning process. Space for radical innovation and challenge is therefore built into this emerging topography of work related professional learning and development for sustainability . In certain cases, non certificated, experiential, learning is recognised and/or accredited thus acknowledging the value of informal and non formal learning Illich saw as so extremely important. As he wrote, “most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction” ([12], p. 20).The form and content of this Consortium provision articulates a public pedagogy which expresses an intermodal, interprofessional, intercultural and transdisciplinary perspective on sustainability and learning that mirrors the Mode 2 knowledge creation processes discussed by Gibbons et al. [28] in their important text The New Production of Knowledge. The Consortium , therefore, may be viewed as a educative and communication medium for sustainability and , given the fast changing nature of our social, economic and ecological environments, this medium is perhaps the dominant message for through its very existence and practice it articulates an inclusive political intervention that supports ‘the right to the city’ [29,30] by putting into place a structure overdetermined as much by sustainability than purely economic imperatives. As Harvey writes ([31], p. 23),The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is (...) one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.Although the Aston University’s Lifelong Learning Centre retains an important role in quality assurance and enhancement of the learning on offer but its approach takes due cognizance of the power, significance and necessity of fostering connectivity, co-operation and collaboration. An ethics of social equality and environmental justice is at play for to do otherwise would be to reproduce a tunnel vision and unnecessary hierarchy individual learners, private companies and other institutions can no longer afford to countenance. Learning, creativity and innovation for sustainability require an open space of sharing and engagement . To put it another way, as Illich ([12], p. 89) wrote, “a truly public kind of ownership might begin to emerge if private or corporate control over the educational aspect of ‘things’ were brought to the vanishing point.” And this vanishing point can only be reached through choosing to think politically, act differently and by engaging in an active learning project that is married to informed, reasoned, emotionally sound and ethical changes in conduct and behaviour in all areas of social and working life. This means, in effect, the Lifelong Leaning Consortium Network for Sustainable Communities is positing ethics as central to its work through performing a political vision of a sustainable future by breaking down and crossing disciplinary boundaries and by creating new spaces in which knowledge can be produced, critiques offered and transformative possibilities realised. In doing so, it invokes and refashions the Epimetheus myth presciently referenced at the end Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society and implicitly explored in Paul Seabright’s [32] book on social trust and relationships, The Company of Strangers. The Lifelong Learning Consortium is inviting sustainability educators and other practitioners to enunciate a phenomenological understanding of human co-dependency and the values of sharing, caring, meeting, dwelling and loving. It also articulates a theory of practice

that positions educators and cultural workers as transformative intellectuals and “militants” understood in Badiou’s sense of fashioning a new subjectivity through the learning intervention. Following Giroux ([33], p.79) these cultural workers and educators will need to, in and over time, develop a non totalizing politics that makes them attentive to the partial, specific, contexts of differentiated communities and forms of power. This is not a call to ignore larger theoretical and relational narratives, but to deepen power of analyses by making clear the specificity of contexts in which power is operationalized, domination expresses itself, and resistance works in multiple and productive ways. The possibility of, and potential for, a form of creative destruction that leads to intellectual, social and cultural innovation will depend on an emergent subjectivity that stays true to the event, and follows through with a radical trajectory of both imagining and realising a logic of practice that structures new subjective but non-individual experiences, dispositions, proclivities, relationships, ideas, common schemes of perception and conception with potentialities for alternative power blocs, political actions and habitus [34]. One emergent practice would see the development of an epistemic reflexivity that rearticulates the scholastic/academic point of view that presently apprehends the social world as a puzzle to be observed, often in abstraction, to one that embraces and resolves the rather messy, contradictory, assemblage of practical tasks and problems that are consequent upon us living and being in the exploitative, networked empire of global capitalism [35,36].For example, in curriculum terms, if learners are invited to explore the reasons for, benefits of and possibilities surrounding the growing, distributing and consuming of locally produced (organic) food a critique of mass produced food, the supermarket system, global distribution networks, pesticide use and, potentially, biotechnologies and genetic modification become implicit and explicit categories for thought and action. Such learning constitutes both a resistance, and a rupture, and as Badiou notes rupture follows resistance. Although these issues are presented for debate and discussion informing the ethic of such a learning opportunity is a view of an alternative to everyday routines of consumption, common sense opinion and of simply not thinking. “Not to resist is not to think. Not to think is not to risk risking” ([22], p. 8). And these risks, these thoughts, immanent to the infinity of a situation need to be aligned with a conception of learning as a “truth procedure”, a politics where deliberation about the possible is constitutive of the learning process itself [22]. Again, continuing with the theme of consumption a case study on palm oil production and the activities of many of those corporations embracing the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) production necessitates a close scrutiny of the activities corporations embracing, and of the WWF in promoting, the RSPO. The Indonesian rain forests are continually felled (often illegally), biodiversity continually destroyed and the orang u tan increasingly exterminated. Such a state of affairs has even been recorded in the Guinness Book of Records and such a case study requires active learning to push the term ‘sustainable’ beyond the public space of opinion and a dialogue of values into a realm that confronts and transcends the plurality of glib accommodation and the seeing of both sides [37] (Greenpeace International, 2007). The issue is not whether industrial practices can be modernized ecologically, and sustainably, but whether given the dynamic of global capitalism, the very notion of sustainable palm oil production is simply an ideological deception reinforcing the economic power of big corporations and the cultural hegemony of consumerism with a human face. Both these topics are addressed in various parts of the Consortium provision. It is important for sustainability educators to speak truth to power.5. ConclusionsAt the time of writing the Consortium is still in its early stages of development. The lead institution, Aston University, through its Lifelong Learning Centre, has taken a radical and progressive lead role in this reinvention of extra mural university learning for sustainability . Whether the development succeeds or not will depend on a number of factors but it is clear that sustainability is becoming an increasingly prominent part of the education al and other practices of higher education institutions and other sectors of society. It has to. The Conortium and perhaps university sustainability education in general is perhaps yet another contradiction of capitalism or at the very least a

parallax view [38] requiring a form of dialectical transcendence. Certainly accreditation is something Illich would be very wary of but without it development funding could not have been secured or support of other bodies enlisted. The funding, and accreditation, signifies a particular moment or political conjuncture whereby the State’s specific political autonomy from dominant economic interests allowed a certain compromise or configuration of simultaneously radical and conservative educational possibilities to form [39]. There is also value is accrediting learning opportunities for designating learning as credit worthy is, on the part of the university, a public commitment to quality although as Illich ([12], p. 19) rightly argues, “neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification”. The Consortium is above all a product of seeking to work in a radical manner within a conservative system where the tensions resulting from it offer possibilities of both success and failure. Success will lead to a reconfiguration of university led extra mural lifelong learning and failure could displace the political potential of sustainability as a means for deinstitutionalising higher education practice and for deschooling society . The last word remains with those of the inspiring Brazilian thinker Roberto Unger ([40], p.5) who in his 2006 Ralph Miliband Lecture argued that the idea of universal empowerment must be developed in to,

(…) a form of education, both original education and life long education, focus[ing] on the nurturing of a core of generic conceptual and practical capabilities. A form of education that is collective and intensive rather than encyclopaedic, that is analytical and problematic rather than informational, that is cooperative rather than authoritarian and individualist, and that is dialectical in spirit (...).

There is infrastructure and interest – The internet provides the necessary platform for deschooling networks supported by the precariat class. Jandrić 14 – Petar Jandrić, Professor at University of Applied Sciences in Zagreb, Former Senior Lecturer at The Polytechnic of Zagreb, Ph.D. in Information Science from Sveučilište u Zagrebu, MSc in Education from The University of Edinburgh, 2014 “Deschooling Virtuality,” Open Review of Educational Research, Volume 1, Issue 1, pg. 84-98, December 2nd, Available Online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23265507.2014.965193?scroll=top&needAccess=true, Accessed 6-2-17) The internet offers the complete technical and logical infrastructure for Illich's deschooling , while the growing number of precariat class provides an increasing flow of potential recruits to the struggle against the oppressive forces of global neoliberal capitalism . Some engage in a wide range of virtual learning webs such as Wikipedia, pre-publishing networks and open access academic journals, while others join the hacker community and struggle to ensure long-term sustainability of internet freedoms. At the first glance, it seems that Illich can rest in peace—his visions of deschooling through technology are slowly but surely getting embodied in virtual realities. However, this conclusion is methodologically restricted in three important ways. First, the concept of deschooling heavily depends on correctness of anarchist views to human nature. Second, deschooling society is dialectically intertwined with the concept of conviviality, while deschooling virtuality is based on non-convivial technologies which lead directly to radical monopoly. Third, even the most developed deschooling virtuality might never transform into deschooling society.Ivan Illich has already proved as true visionary in many fields from energy to medicine. However, his more radical ideas such as deschooling have often been considered as thought-provoking intellectual exercises rather than real possibilities. In words of Engin Atasay, ‘his creative critique of industrial society and everydayness provokes a critical imagination, which perhaps is Illich's richest

legacy and greatest strength as a philosopher, activist and a convivial individual’ (2013 Atasay, E. (2013). Ivan Illich and the study of everyday life. The International Journal of Illich Studies, 3(1), 57–78. [Google Scholar p. 57). This article shows that even the most radical Illich's ideas should not be taken lightly. On the contrary, it seems that something so unimaginable to the average citizen of the mass society such as large-scale deschooling has been made possible by the advent of the network society . Certainly, it is a long way from isolated examples of virtual deschooling such as Wikipedia and pre-publication networks to deschooling virtuality, and it is an even longer way from deschooling virtuality to deschooling society. However, it is important to understand that deschooling has graduated from mere vision to the real opportunity.

They Say: “The Alternative Is Utopian/No Change”

The alternative generates concrete change – deschooling and the creation of learning networks represent a series of legislative changes. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) 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.Two centuries ago the United States led the world in a movement to disestablish the monopoly of a single church. Now we need the constitutional disestablishment of the monopoly of the school, and thereby of a system which legally combines prejudice with discrimination. The first article of a bill of rights for a modern, humanist society would correspond to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: " The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education ." There shall be no ritual obligatory for all.To make this disestablishment effective, we need a law forbidding discrimination in hiring, voting, or admission to centers of learning based on previous attendance at some curriculum. This guarantee would not exclude performance tests of competence for a function or role, but would remove the present absurd discrimination in favor of the person who learns a given skill with the largest expenditure of public funds or what is equally likely has been able to obtain a diploma which has no relation to any useful skill or job. Only by protecting the citizen from being disqualified by anything in his career in school can a constitutional disestablishment of school become psychologically effective. Neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification. Learning and the assignment of social roles are melted into schooling. Yet to learn means to acquire a new skill or insight, while promotion depends on an opinion which others have formed. Learning frequently is the result of instruction, but selection for a role or category in the job market increasingly depends on mere length of attendance.

Even if the alternative solves nothing the in-round rejection of schooling represents progress towards deschooling – personal rejection is key. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) 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 deschooling, 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 the exploitation of others in the schooling process.

They Say: “The Alternative Harms Access/Equal Opportunity”

1. No it doesn’t – learning networks will be readily available and designed to spread equality – that’s Blewitt

2. Only we access unique offense – schools are already unequal. Hern 98 – Matt Hern, Writer and activist based in East Vancouver, Founder of the Eastside Learning Center and Groundswell: Grassroots Economic Alternatives, Ph.D. in Urban Studies from the Union Institute & University, M.A. from the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfeild, Vermont, 1998 (“The Promise of Deschooling” Social Anarchism, Volume 25, Available Online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/matt-hern-the-promise-of-deschooling, Accessed 4-20-17) Some common objections and some short responsesThere are many objections to a deschooling agenda, and while many of them are vigourously forwarded by those with very entrenched interests in the maintenance of schools and school funding, some of the critiques are salient. The primary set of reservations centers around access issues , the inference that without public schools, many kids will be without adequate educational opportunities, and the oft-repeated claim that a deschooled society would mean excellent facilities for rich communities and inadequate ones for poor families. These kinds of access arguments all focus around the implied belief that schools have somehow operated as great levelers, institutions that rise above societal inequalities and become places of equal opportunity where anyone can succeed regardless of their background, a claim that is patently false. Schools have always closely mimicked larger cultural and social inequities and rich kids have always had huge advantages in a schooled culture. The scenario of well-funded and prospering schools in rich areas alongside nightmare schools with abysmal resources in poor neighbourhoods is already the reality , as Jonathon Kozol has documented so clearly in Savage Inequalities. It is a pernicious myth that schools have ever acted as levelers. Moreover, the argument that school funding, if loosed from State control and returned to local communities would result in wide disparities in quality of opportunity is exactly the kind of paternalizing ethic that is so endemic in centralizing arguments. The assumption is that poor or non-affluent people cannot manage their money appropriately, and that families and communities need government agencies to spend their money for them, less they waste it. This is the paternalism that is at the heart of statism. The second major set of objections revolves around the idea that schools should shepherd and caretake an existing canon of knowledge that it is essential for everyone to comprehend, and without that understanding, kids have little chance to succeed in a society that reifies that canon. This argument is frequently forwarded by cultural conservatives lamenting the decline of Western Civilization and traditional standards and the clear articulations of education and intellectual status that were so once so easily defined. The contention that schools are the only guarantor of certain kinds of success has been convincingly refuted by the homeschooling and alternative education movements in North America and elsewhere, not to mention the examples of a plethora unschooled figures throughout history. Free school follow-up studies and the examples of families like the Colfaxes, who sent three homeschooled sons to Harvard, continue to demonstrate that success, however defined, is entirely possible beyond the constraints of compulsory schooling, and that there are innumerable paths to any goal. The final set of objections to deschooling I want to address here is argument that schools actually are not that bad and that the deschooling agenda somehow over-dramatizes their failings. The reasoning is that so many of us attended traditional schools and

emerged alright, and that there are, in fact, good teachers and nice schools out there. These assertions are all undeniably true, but miss the point entirely in a culture where it is an old clich_ that ‘all kids hate school’ As Bookchin puts it “The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking” (21), and its this kind of debilitating reformist stance that deschooling so plainly refutes.

They Say: “The Alternative Causes Blowback/Violent Transition”

The alternative won’t cause conflict or blowback – school protection is disorganized and powerlessIllich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, studied theology and philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) 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 nation-state, 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 endanger the survival not only of the economic order built on the coproduction of goods and demands, but equally of the political order built on the nation-state into which students are delivered by the school.

They Say: “Children need schools/can’t make decisions”

This is a link – their conception of “Childhood” is a modern construction of institutional wisdom produced by schools that causes dehumanizing psychological violence and discrimination against other ages in education, harming lifelong learning. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) 1. Age School groups people according to age. This grouping rests on three unquestioned premises. Children belong in school. Children learn in school. Children can be taught only in school. I think these unexamined premises deserve serious questioning. We have grown accustomed to children. We have decided that they should go to school, do as they are told, and have neither income nor families of their own . We expect them to know their place and behave like children. We remember, whether nostalgically or bitterly, a time when we were children, too. We are expected to tolerate the childish behavior of children. Man-kind, for us, is a species both afflicted and blessed with the task of caring for children. We forget, however, that our present concept of "childhood" developed only recently in Western Europe and more recently still in the Americas.* [* For parallel histories of modern capitalism and modern childhood see Philippe Aries, Centuries 0f Childhood, Knopf, 1962.] Childhood as distinct from infancy, adolescence, or youth was unknown to most historical periods. Some Christian centuries did not even have an eye for its bodily proportions. Artists depicted the infant as a miniature adult seated on his mother's arm. Children appeared in Europe along with the pocket watch and the Christian moneylenders of the Renaissance. Before our century neither the poor nor the rich knew of children's dress, children's games, or the child's immunity from the law. Childhood belonged to the bourgeoisie. The worker's child, the peasant's child, and the nobleman's child all dressed the way their fathers dressed, played the way their fathers played, and were hanged by the neck as were their fathers. After the discovery of "childhood" by the bourgeoisie all this changed. Only some churches continued to respect for some time the dignity and maturity of the young. Until the Second Vatican Council, each child was instructed that a Christian reaches moral discernment and freedom at the age of seven, and from then on is capable of committing sins for which he may be punished by an eternity in Hell. Toward the middle of this century, middle-class parents began to try to spare their children the impact of this doctrine, and their thinking about children now prevails in the practice of the Church.Until the last century, "children" of middle-class parents were made at home with the help of preceptors and private schools. Only with the advent of industrial society did the mass production of "childhood" become feasible and come within the reach of the masses . The school system is a modern phenomenon, as is the childhood it produces . Since most people today live outside industrial cities, most people today do not experience childhood. In the Andes you till the soil once you have become "useful." Before that, you watch the sheep. If you are well nourished, you should be useful by eleven, and otherwise by twelve. Recently, I was talking to my night watchman, Marcos, about his eleven-year-old son who works in a barbershop. I noted in Spanish that his

son was still a "ni–o,” Marcos, surprised, answered with a guileless smile: "Don Ivan, I guess you're right." Realizing that until my remark the father had thought of Marcos primarily as his "son," I felt guilty for having drawn the curtain of childhood between two sensible persons. Of course if I were to tell the New York slum-dweller that his working son is still a "child," he would show no surprise. He knows quite well that his eleven-year-old son should be allowed childhood, and resents the fact that he is not. The son of Marcos has yet to be afflicted with the yearning for childhood; the New Yorker's son feels deprived.Most people around the world, then, either do not want or cannot get modern childhood for their offspring. But it also seems that childhood is a burden to a good number of those few who are allowed it. Many of them are simply forced to go through it and are not at all happy playing the child's role. Growing up through childhood means being condemned to a process of in-human conflict between self-awareness and the role imposed by a society going through its own school age. Neither Stephen Daedalus nor Alexander Portnoy enjoyed childhood, and neither, I suspect, did many of us like to be treated as children. If there were no age-specific and obligatory learning institution, " childhood" would go out of production . The youth of rich nations would be liberated from its destructiveness, and poor nations would cease attempting to rival the childishness of the rich. If society were to outgrow its age of childhood, it would have to become livable for the young. The present disjunction between an adult society which pretends to be humane and a school environment which mocks reality could no longer be maintained.The disestablishment of schools could also end the present discrimination against infants, adults, and the old in favor of children throughout their adolescence and youth . The social decision to allocate educational resources preferably to those citizens who have outgrown the extraordinary learning capacity of their first four years and have not arrived at the height of their self-motivated learning will, in retrospect , probably appear as bizarre . Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.

They Say: “We need teachers/schools to learn”

This is a link – the idea that instruction produces learning directly promotes the myth of unending consumption, perpetuating institutionalized values. Learning doesn’t require outside manipulation. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) The Myth of Institutionalized ValuesSchool initiates, too, 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. So rebels against Alma Mater often "make it" into her faculty instead of growing into the courage to infect others with their personal teaching and to assume responsibility for the results. This suggests 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.

We learn most outside school and without teachers. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University

in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) 2. Teachers and Pupils By definition, children are pupils. The demand for the milieu of childhood creates an unlimited market for accredited teachers. School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary . We have all learn ed most of what we know outside school . Pupils do most of their learning without, and often despite, their teachers . Most tragically, the majority of men are taught their lesson by schools, even though they never go to school.Everyone learns how to live outside school . We learn to speak, to think, to love, to feel, to play, to curse, to politick, and to work without interference from a teacher. Even children who are under a teacher's care day and night are no exception to the rule. Orphans, idiots, and schoolteachers' sons learn most of what they learn outside the "educational" process planned for them . Teachers have made a poor showing in their attempts at increasing learning among the poor. Poor parents who want their children to go to school are less concerned about what they will learn than about the certificate and money they will earn. And middle-class parents commit their children to a teacher's care to keep them from learning what the poor learn on the streets. Increasingly educational research demonstrates that children learn most of what teachers pretend to teach them from peer groups, from comics, from chance observations, and above all from mere participation in the ritual of school. Teachers, more often than not, obstruct such learning of subject matters as goes on in school. Half of the people in our world never set foot in school. They have no contact with teachers, and they are deprived of the privilege of becoming dropouts. Yet they learn quite effectively the message which school teaches: that they should have school, and more and more of it. School instructs them in their own inferiority through the tax collector who makes them pay for it, or through the demagogue who raises their expectations of it, or through their children once the latter are hooked on it. So the poor are robbed of their self-respect by subscribing to a creed that grants salvation only through the school. At least the Church gave them a chance to repent at the hour of death. School leaves them with the expectation (a counterfeit hope) that their grandchildren will make it. That expectation is of course still more learning which comes from school but not from teachers.Pupils have never credited teachers for most of their learning. Bright and dull alike have always relied on rote , reading, and wit to pass their exams, motivated by the stick or by the carrot of a desired career . Adults tend to romanticize their schooling. In retrospect, they attribute their learning to the teacher whose patience they learned to admire. But the same adults would worry about the mental health of a child who rushed home to tell them what he learned from his every teacher. Schools create jobs for schoolteachers, no matter what their pupils learn from them.

Most learning happens casually absent teaching Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school , and in school only insofar as

school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.Most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction. Normal children learn their first language casually, although faster if their parents pay attention to them. Most people who learn a second language well do so as a result of odd circumstances and not of sequential teaching. They go to live with their grandparents, they travel, or they fall in love with a foreigner. Fluency in reading is also more often than not a result of such extracurricular activities. Most people who read widely, and with pleasure, merely believe that they learned to do so in school; when challenged, they easily discard this illusion.

They Say: “No Support”

1. Increasing movements towards unschooling and homeschooling along with the majority of people who hated school itself prove there is.

2. Schools are in crisis – opposition to compulsory schooling is on the rise. Illich 73 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1973 (“After Deschooling, What?,” After Deschooling What?, Published by Harper & Row, Available Online at: http://learning.media.mit.edu/courses/mas713/readings/Illich,%20I.%20After%20deschooling%20what.pdf, Accessed 6-13-17) Schools are in crisis , and so are the people who attend them . The former is a crisis in a political institution; the latter is a crisis of political attitudes. This second crisis, the crisis of personal growth, can be dealt with only if understood as distinct from, though related to, the crisis of the school. Schools have lost their unquestioned claim to educational legitimacy . Most of their critics still demand a painful and radical reform of the school, but a quickly expanding minority will not stand for anything short of the prohibition of compulsory attendance and the disqualification of academic certificates. Controversy between partisans of renewal and partisans of disestablishment will soon come to a head.

3. Attitudes are shifting away from schools – the alternative is crucial to provide a vision alternate to the SQUO. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) Attitudes are already changing. The proud dependence on school is gone. Consumer resistance increases in the knowledge industry. Many teachers and pupils, taxpayers and employers, economists and policemen would prefer not to depend any longer on schools. What prevents their frustration from shaping new institutions is a lack not only of imagination but frequently also of appropriate language and of enlightened self-interest. They cannot visualize either a deschooled society or educational institutions in a society which has disestablished school.

Affirmative Responses

Framework

2AC – Framework

Framework: the role of the ballot is to determine who did the better debating based on the desirability of the plan. That’s crucial to fairness and education.

Permutation

2AC – Permutation

Permute – Do Both. This solves without abandoning schools. Critical pedagogy within schools can reveal the system’s flaws without deinstitutionalization. Varbelow and Griffith 12 – Sanja Varbelow, Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Angelo State University, Former Field-Based Teaching Specialist in Learning and Innovation and Lecturer in Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Brownsville, Member of the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Professors of Education, Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Texas A&M University, M.A. in Education from Humbolt University, Bryant Griffith, Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, 2012 (“Deschooling Society: Re-Examining Ivan Illich’s Contributions to Critical Pedagogy for 21st Century Curriculum Theory,” Education Resources Information Center, June 6th, Accessed Online at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED532618.pdf, Accessed 6-2-17) Illich (1971) insists that the only way to learn anything at all is through “incidental or informal education” (p. 22). This is a very interesting idea because most of what we learn in schools does not pertain to subject matter but to socialization and values as dictated through the hidden curriculum by the dominant class (Apple, 1990). The things we have learned, we did learn through experience and needs; therefore, I want to argue that schools should provide such opportunities as suggested by Rousseau and Dewey (Cremin, 1959). But Illich disagrees. He (Illich, 1971) calls Dewey’s progressivism, which provides real-world experiences, “the pacification of the new generation within specifically engineered enclaves which will seduce them into the dream world of their elders” (p. 66). He extends the metaphor to the idea of Free Schools as they, too, make all valuable learning dependent on institutionalized teaching. This is the commonality between Illich and the critical pedagogues based on which they count him among their proponents.Very interesting is his comparison of learning in the village where everybody provided his services as needed and was therefore meaningful to his community. Illich (1971) says “modern man must find meaning in many structures to which he is only marginally related ” (p. 22). This is truer even more today, 40 years later. Should it then not be the responsibility of school to enable students to find that meaning for themselves , I wonder? But Illich (1971) doubts that the education system is anything other than a mechanism to “break the integrity of an entire population and make it plastic material for the teachings” (p. 50). It seems the underlying philosophy that connects both, Illich and scholars like McLaren, Kincheloe and Apple, is that all see how men “shield themselves … behind certificates acquired in school” and want to use the institution to revolt against itself by pointing out its deficiencies hoping that its members “gain in courage to talk back and thereby control and instruct the institutions they participate in” (Illich, 1971, p. 23).While this is precisely the purpose of Critical Pedagogy, for Illich, it feels like a discrepancy in his logic. I share his apprehension of institutions in general, which, by their very nature, are structured hierarchies that leave no room for the complexities of individual freedom and are, by definition, self-justifying and manipulative. He (Illich, 1971) points out the difference between the “Biblical message and institutionalized religion” and says that “Christian freedom and faith usually gain from secularization” (p. 24) thereby making a point for deschooling society. But then he (Illich, 1971) says that “the deschooling of education depends on the leadership of those brought up in schools” because “each of us remains responsible for what has been made of him” (p. 24).

When reading Deschooling Society, I am left with the impression that Illich actually wants to deinstitutionalize society. He brings many examples of society’s regression caused by other institutions such as the one of medical care, the Army, or the system of highways and cars, all of which turn us into active members of a society focused on growth and consumption. We can add to that today’s media such as the NFL or TV with shows that “educate” us about aesthetics, epistemology and metaphysics by telling us what is considered beautiful, important, desirable, etc. I am referring to programs such as Oprah (including her book club), Hanna Montana or American Idol. And yet, the above quote seems to make an argument against this impression. However, I do not feel he had in mind what Freire said when he insisted “that it is a political imperative for critical educators to develop a strong command of their particular academic discipline” because “by doing so, they can competently teach the ‘official transcript’ of their field while simultaneously creating opportunities for students to engage critically in classroom content” (Darder et al., 2003, p. 20). When Illich calls upon the “educators brought up in school” as the leaders to deschool society, it appears that he actually refers to those who , not because of but despite of school, understand its deficiencies . If this were so, he would make an argument for the deinstitutionalization of society and against Critical Pedagogy thereby following his original logic.One of the most important points Illich (1971) makes is that it is the “transfer of responsibility from self to institution” that guarantees social regression (p. 39). Here he seems to agree with Hegel who says that the ultimate goal of education is the freedom of the individual which includes his in/dependence on institutions. By freedom I believe Hegel means the ability to make the conscious decision to be part of or to distance oneself from an institution. However, in order to make that decision, one has to have undergone the contradictions and conflicts during which one discovers oneself . It is these contradictions and conflicts that are one’s impetus and which will be integrated to reach a higher level. Based on that, Hegel would think the purpose of school is to discover oneself (Hegel, 1841).The goal then should not be to deinstitutionalize society thereby removing all conflicts arising through the demagoguery of schools, but to enable learners to see the institution for what it is . If they understand it as a manipulative mechanism whose goal it is to create compliant citizen who do not raise questions regarding ethics, epistemology, or metaphysics but instead further the influence of the dominant class by advancing its economic strength, learners should be empowered to devise strategies to change that. However, this cannot be done by deschooling society but only through applied Critical Pedagogy which affords learners to understand what it means to be a critical agent .

1AR – Permutation

Permutation do the affirmative while endorsing sustainability learning and critical pedagogy – that is sufficient to combat dominant value systems within schools without destroying them – that’s Varbelow and Griffith.

Plan and alt aren’t mutually exclusive — combo best. Voke 9 — Heather Voke, Senior Scholar in the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship and Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Georgetown University, former Academic Director of Teacher Education Programs in the School of Continuing Studies at Georgetown University, former Visiting Researcher at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, former Education Policy Analyst for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2009 (“A Critique of Ivan Illych’s Deschooling Society,” The Class Blog for PHIL 330 (Foundations of Education) at Georgetown University, January 15th, Available Online at https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/voke-foundsofeducation/2009/01/15/a-critique-of-ivan-illychs-deschooling-society/, Accessed 06-28-2017)In Ivan Illych’s article Deschooling Society he asserts that, “all over the world school has had an anti-educational effect on society” and as such should be abolished altogether and replaced by “educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each on to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.” His radical position not only makes some fundamentally flawed assumptions about human nature, but also overlooks alternative approaches to educating children that are much more realistic than completely restructuring long-established educational institutions.On the one hand, many of Illych’s criticism’s of the public school system are valid. I agree that government spending has often catered disproportionately to relatively richer children, and obbligatory public schooling has in turn polarized society to an extent. Likewise, I believe richer children have had the added advantage of increased exposure to so-called casual learning. I’ll also agree that modern american society is highly-institutionalized, which allows many of the poor to rely on the system while the more affluent can be assured job promotion because our system often allocates rules based on years of instructional teaching (which the rich tend to have more of) rather than actual learning.The fundamental mistake in Illych’s proposed solution of employing “edu-credit cards” and online intellectual match-making to facilitate the learning process is the presumption of innate intellectual curiosity that it relies on for the creation of a well-learned (if not “well-educated”) society. In his writing on the phenomenology of school, the author himself states that educational resources are allocated to “those citizens who have outgrown the extraordinary learning capacity of the first four years and have not yet arrived at the height of their self-motivated learning will.” Thus in the absence of self-motivation for learning, Illych’s forms of creative exploratory learning cannot be effective. Even specialized skill centers will be insufficient substitutes for schools if adolescents prefer to play video games rather than acquire a set of skills that will allow them to be contributing members of society. Additionally, it is often the case that people discover interests in areas that they might not have found attractive on their own. Without the variety offered by most public schools, a kid interested in public school might never have dream ed of becoming an astrophysicist or even taking a physics course.The author also presumes that traditional teaching methods and the creative exploratory learning that he proposes are mutually exclusive . In fact, independent study programs are often done in

conjunction with , but not in complete substitution for typical teacher-led instruction within the public school system. Aside from such programs, the casual learning that Illych asserts is more available to the middle-class where children are exposed to conversation and books in the home, can and does occur alongside traditional schooling regardless of socio-economic background. Even if a family cannot afford to vacation across the globe, education is recognized internationally as a fundamental tool necessary for success and concerned parents, especially in metropolitan US cities, can usually find extra-curricular programs to keep children out of the streets. Mentoring programs such as the Big Brothers program and 100 Black Men for example, can give poorer children access to the type of learning outside of the classroom that they might not get at home. Thus, a combination of traditional schooling and casual learning would be a more effective proposition before an individual reaches adulthood, at which point Illych’s intellectual matching, which already exists through sites like meetup.com, could help promote life-long learning. Increased participation in mentoring programs and skills classes outside of the school setting at no cost to the government is needed, not the omission of schools altogether. Since such programs are organized by the communities themselves, they also resolve Illych’s objection that an equal public school system is “economically absurd.”Illych’s proposal that altering the First Amendment to make obligatory schooling illegal would protect the citizens from participating in a “ritual obligation” by force is truly absurd. This is one of Illych’s many ideas, including his paralleling of the public school system and the Spanish Inquisition that seems to criticize the status quo just for the sake of being counter-culture. He states “the modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educator through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kingdoms that enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadores and inquisition. The fact that this so-called ritual obligation is preferred for most of humanity puts it into a category altogether different than the Inquisition. Schools have existed since the time of Ancient Greece and will continue to exist not because citizens have been brain-washed and indoctrinated to think schools are necessary by governments, but because parents across the world realize that they are often not equipped to teach their own children the skills that will make them competitive in the job market. Neither are the children qualified to teach themselves, and in fact need government support to facilitate the learning process. The methods of teaching Illych suggests are good supplemental resources but ultimately the deep-seated resistance to deschooling society is merited .

Reform within schools can radically alter education — creates liberated and politically aware citizens. Gintis 72 – Herbert Gintis, Visiting professor in the Economics Department of Central European University, Former Professor Emertius in Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, 1972 (“Towards a Political Economy of Education: A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich 's Deschooling Society,” Harvard Educational Review, February, Available Online at: http://hepgjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17763/haer.42.1.h2m4644728146775, Accessed 6-22-17) I have already argued that de-schooling will inevitably lead to a situation of social chaos , but probably not to a serious mass movement toward constructive social change . In this case the correspondence principle simply fails to hold, producing at best a temporary (in case the ruling elites can find an alternative mode of worker socialization) or ultimately fatal (in case they cannot) breakdown in the social fabric. But only if we posit some essential pre-social human nature on which individuals

draw when normal paths of individual development are abolished, might this lead in itself to liberating alternatives.But the argument over the sufficiency of de-schooling is nearly irrelevant. For schools are so important to the reproduction of capitalist society that they are unlikely to crumble under any but the most massive political onslaughts. "Each of us," says Illich, "is personally responsible for his or her own de-schooling , and only we have the power to do it." This is not true. Schooling is legally obligatory, and is the major means of access to welfare-relevant activity contexts. The political consciousness behind a frontal attack on institutionalized education would necessarily spill over to attacks on other major institutions. "Th e risks of a revolt against school," says Illich, . . . 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 self-protection as effectively as a nation-state, or even a large corporation. Liberation from the grip of schools could be bloodless. (DS, p. 49) This is no more than whistling in the dark.T h e only presently viable political strategy in education —and the precise negation of Illich's recommendations— is what Rudi Deutchke terms " the long march through the institutions," involving localized struggles for what Andre Gorz calls "non-reformist reforms ," i.e., reforms which effectively strengthen the power of teachers vis-a-vis administrators, and of students vis-a- vis teachers. Still, although schools neither can nor should be eliminated , the social relations of education can be altered through genuine struggle . Moreover, the experience of both struggle and control prepares the student for a future of political activity in factory and office . 93 In other words, the correct immediate political goal is the nurturing of individuals both liberated (i.e., demanding control over their lives and outlets for their creative activities and relationships) and politically aware of the true nature of their misalignment with the larger society . There may indeed be a bloodless solution to the problem of revolution, but certainly none more simple than this.

They Say: “Childhood Link”

Illich’s “Childhood” arguments are non-sensiscal. Nassif 75 – Ricardo Nassif, Professor of Philosophy and Sciences of the National University of La Plata, (“The Theory of de-schooling between paradox and utopian,” Prospects: Quarterly Review of Education, Volume 5, Issue 3, Available Online at: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0001/000155/015553eo.pdf, pgs. 329-340, Accessed 6-24-17)But the rejections do not end there. Illich jumps to one of his main rejections: that of the biological, intellectual and social maturity achieved by a gradual process which takes place in fixed stages. Illich affirms loftily that 'the discovery of "childhood" ' was 'by the bourgeoisie'; that 'only some churches continued to respect for some time the dignity and maturity of the young'; that 'if there were no age specific and obligatory learning institution, "childhood" would go out of production' , and that in line with the proposition that rejects school, considers that it 'could also end the present discrimination against infants, adults and the old in favor of children throughout their adolescence and youth', avoiding the 'segregating' that gets human beings 'to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher'.1 Th e argument—which, indeed, dispenses with the conclusions of scientific research—begins with the fallacy of assigning a negative character to immaturity when it is in fact extremely positive, since it represents the possibility of development . Rousseau, with his brilliant intuition, grasped this clearly when postulating the principle of the substantive nature of ages. Illich obviously does not think along these lines but sets out to defend, in his own way, the right of children to be respected in all their dignity. But the fact that not all human beings have the actual possibility of experiencing childhood does not imply its non-existence, but their enclosure in a certain economic and social situation which, particularly in the large urban areas, ages man prematurely (this happens in the case of all those who have to bear the brunt of work at an early age). The aim should therefore be to transform social structures so as to ensure a full life for man at each stage of his development , another of the objectives in the real struggle against alienation.

Alternative

2AC – Alternative fails (Negation)

The alternative fails and reinforces the status quo – its pessimistic negation is not liberating. Gintis 72 – Herbert Gintis, Visiting professor in the Economics Department of Central European University, Former Professor Emertius in Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, 1972 (“Towards a Political Economy of Education: A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich 's Deschooling Society,” Harvard Educational Review, February, Available Online at: http://hepgjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17763/haer.42.1.h2m4644728146775, Accessed 6-22-17) Illich recognizes that the problems of advanced industrial societies are institutional, and that their solutions lie deep in the social core. Therefore, he consciously rejects a partial or affirmative analysis which would accept society's dominant ideological forms and direct its innovative contributions toward marginal changes in assumptions and boundary conditions. Instead, he employs a methodology of total critique and negation , and his successes, such as they are, stem from that choice. Ultimately, however, his analysis is incomplete. Dialectical analysis begins with society as is (thesis), entertains its negation (antithesis), and overcomes both in a radical reconceptualization (synthesis). Negation is a form of demystification—a drawing away from the immediately given by viewing it as a "negative totality." But negation is not without presuppositions, is not itself a form of liberation . It cannot "wipe clean the slate" of ideological representation of the world or one's objective position in it. The son/daughter who acts on the negation of parental and societal values is not free — he /she is merely the constrained negative image of that which he/she rejects (e.g., the negation of work, consumption order, and rationality is not liberation but negative un-freedom). The negation of male dominance is not women's liberation but the (negative) affirmation of "female masculinity." Women's liberation in dialectical terms can be conceived of as the overcoming (synthesis) of male dominance (thesis) and female masculinity (antithesis) in a new totality which rejects/embodies both. It is this act of overcoming (synthesis, consciousness) which is the critical and liberating aspect of dialectical thought. Action lies not in the act of negation (antithesis, demystification) but in the act of overcoming (synthesis/consciousness). The strengths of Illich's analysis lie in his consistent and pervasive methodology of negation. The essential elements in the liberal conceptions of the Good Life— consumption and education, the welfare state and corporate manipulation—are demystified and laid bare in the light of critical, negative thought. Illich's failures can be consistently traced to his refusal to pass beyond negations -—beyond a total rejection of the appearances of life in advanced industrial societies—to a higher synthesis. While Illich should not be criticized for failing to achieve such a synthesis, nevertheless he must be taken seriously to task for mystifying the nature of his own contribution and refusing to step—however tentatively—beyond it. Work is alienating—Illich rejects work; consumption is unfulfilling—Illich rejects consumption; institutions are manipulative—Illich places "nonaddictiveness" at the center of his conception of human institutions; production is bureaucratic—Illich glorifies the entrepreneurial and small-scale enterprise; schools are dehumanizing— Illich rejects schools; political life is oppressive and ideologically totalitarian— Illich rejects politics in favor of individual liberation. Only in one sphere does he go beyond negation, and this defines his major contribution. While technology is in fact dehumanizing (thesis), he does not reject technology (antithesis). Rather he goes beyond technology and its negation towards a schema of liberating technological forms in education.

The cost of his failure to pass beyond negation in the sphere of social relations in general, curiously enough, is an implicit affirmation of the deepest characteristics of the existing order .30 In rejecting work, Illich affirms that it necessarily is alienating —reinforcing a fundamental pessimism on which the acceptance of capitalism is based; in rejecting consumption, he affirms either that it is inherently unfulfilling (the Protestant ethic), or would be fulfilling if unmanipulated; in rejecting manipulative and bureaucratic "delivery systems," he affirms the laissez-faire capitalist model and its core institutions ; in rejecting schools, Illich embraces a commodityfetishist cafeteria-smorgasbord ideal in education ; and in rejecting political action, he affirms a utilitarian individualistic conception of humanity. In all cases, Illich's analysis fails to pass beyond the given (in both its positive and negative totalities), and hence affirms it.

2AC – Alternative Fails (Motivation)

The alternative fails and harms disadvantaged students – those who are disinterested will turn back to manipulative institutions. Varbelow and Griffith 12 – Sanja Varbelow, Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Angelo State University, Former Field-Based Teaching Specialist in Learning and Innovation and Lecturer in Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Brownsville, Member of the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Professors of Education, Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Texas A&M University, M.A. in Education from Humbolt University, Bryant Griffith, Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, 2012 (“Deschooling Society: Re-Examining Ivan Illich’s Contributions to Critical Pedagogy for 21st Century Curriculum Theory,” Education Resources Information Center, June 6th, Accessed Online at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED532618.pdf, Accessed 6-2-17) Illich illustrates the “Reference Service to Educational Objects” with the example of a friend who brought a pair of dice to the market with which he taught volunteers rules of semantics. While some children enjoyed the educational game and benefitted from it, others walked away . This is a fundamental concern in Illich’s concept of deschooling society : Why did they leave? Did they understand too little of the concept to be curious? Or had they heard of semantics before and considered it boring? Should we ask them to stay? It can be concluded that Illich would object. If so, his approach might work only for highly motivated students but might not effective for those children we label “disadvantaged.” One of the purposes of school must be to allow children to learn enough about themselves and an idea to decide whether it is worthy of finding out more about or whether it does not interest them.I often see my students “walk away.” After having aroused their curiosity towards a particular idea, I see them never returning to it unless prompted by homework assignments to be rewarded/punished with a grade. I doubt they don’t pursue it because of their ignorance. Rather, I believe they are overwhelmed with the requirements school puts before them in order to acquire their certificate. Therefore, they have to prioritize and lack the leisure to find out more about that initially interesting idea. Now, if we gave students a choice of what we ought to require of them based on their interests, would they be more engaged or would they spend their time following the beckoning of “manipulative” institutions such as the mall ? I think Illich would not only entrust students to entertain their curiosity but also to know what concerns them based on their lives’ circumstances. His purpose of deschooling society is that students regain the ability and the courage to ask questions and voice concerns. If we successfully transform school into a “convivial” institution, students, by definition, would enjoy engaging in it.

1AR – Alternative Fails (Negation)

Illich’s negation is infinitely regressive – he even rejected his own alternative. Bruno-Jofré and Zaldívar 12 – Rosa Bruno-Jofré, Professor of the History of Education at Queen’s University in Canada, Ph.D. from the University of Calgary, Jon Igelmo Zaldívar, Professor in the History of Education at la Universidad de Deusto, 2012 ("Ivan Illich's Late Critique of Deschooling Society: “I Was Largely Barking Up the Wrong Tree”," Educational Theory, Volume 62, Issue 5, October, Available Online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2012.00464.x/full, Pg. 573-592, Accessed 6-24-2017)Illich: The Past, the Critique of Education as a Discourse, and Free LearningAfter a hiatus of many years, Illich went back to his early work on education. During this period of his intellectual life, education was one of the certainties that Illich critiqued as being the result of tools (institutions) shaping our view of reality. In 1986, he wrote,

To make my plea for this novel research plausible, I will explain the steps which led me to my present position. This I will do by criticizing my own Deschooling Society for its naïve views. My travelogue begins sixteen years ago, at a point when that book was about to appear. During the nine months the manuscript was at the publishers, I grew more and more dissatisfied with its texts. This misapprenhension I owe to Cass Canfield, Harper's owner, who named my baby, and, in doing so, misrepresented my thoughts.… Since then my curiosity and reflections have focused on the historical circumstances under which the very idea of educational needs can arise. (RLL, 11).

In the foreword he wrote in 1995 for Matt Hern's edited collection, Deschooling Our Lives, Illich pointed to three moments in his intellectual journey, starting with the publication of Deschooling Society. The first moment, having his understanding of education as the point of reference, includes the texts that would become Deschooling Society in 1971. In this book, written at the peak of the expansion of modern educational institutions, Illich articulated a radical critique of schools and the idea of progress. He made a plea for the urgent need to liberate education from the monopoly of schooling, but he also proposed avenues and actions to work toward a world without schools . Drawing on his understanding of the process of the historical institutionalization of the Catholic Church, he was able to demonstrate in his critique of schooling how many of its mythologized rituals had originated in a process of secularization. Toward the middle of the twentieth century, as the Church lost believers and the new faith in schooling became evident, the schools monopolized the possibilities of education in the same way that the Church had progressively come to dominate spiritual life in the Western world during the previous twenty centuries. His emphasis on this parallelism was such that he neglected the connections that schools and educational institutions have with their social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. About this first moment, Illich wrote, “I called for the disestablishment of schools for the sake of improving education and here, I noticed, made my mistake. Much more important than the disestablishment of schools, I began to see, was the reversal of those trends that make of education a pressing need rather than a gift of gratuitous leisure.”47The second moment in Illich's intellectual journey occurred in the five years following the publication of Deschooling Society, when he realized that even liberating education from the state's monopoly would not be enough because the state and the modern industrial society had a variety of “ educational” tools designed to put people's views in conformance with dominant ideology . The texts Illich wrote just after Deschooling Society was published were to an extent a response to the criticism of that book. In a paper he presented at the 1971 Christian Education World Assembly in Lima, Peru, entitled “La Desescolarización de la Iglesia” (Deschooling the Church), Illich stressed how

the fundamental aspects of modern society have been inculcated through schooling (for example, by means of methods of instruction accumulating canned life) while also denouncing the pseudoreligious character of “education.”48 He prepared the terrain for understanding education as one of the certainties of modernity. In this sense, his critique in Deschooling Society would not mean much without differentiating education from learning — the latter being planned, measurable, and imposed on another person. About this second moment Illich pointed out,Largely through the help of my friend and colleague Wolfgang Sachs, I came to see that the educational function was already emigrating from the schools and that, increasingly, other forms of compulsory learning would be instituted in modern society. It would become compulsory not by law, but by other tricks such as making people to pay huge amounts of money in order to be taught how to have better sex, how to be more sensitive, how to know more about the vitamins they need, how to play games, and so on. This talk of “lifelong learning” and “learning needs” has thoroughly polluted society, and not just schools, with the stench on education.49In the third moment of his intellectual journey , during the 1980s and 1990s, Illich questioned the discourse behind the notion of educational needs, learning needs, and preparation for life (that is, lifelong learning). This third moment, neglected by historians, is of interest here. In fact, Illich realized then that when he wrote Deschooling Society, the social effects rather than the historical substance of education were at the core of his interest. Illich reflected that, in the past, he had called into question schooling as a desirable means but not as a desirable end. As he wrote in 1995, “I still accepted that, fundamentally, educational needs of some kind were an historical given of human nature. I no longer accept this today.”50 In addition, during this third moment, Illich critiqued educational institutions without a particular aim beyond critique , providing no alternative and even rejecting the alternatives that he had proposed in Deschooling Society . It is a creative critique without an ulterior response and with an ahistorical touch, which makes his later readings difficult to analyze, particularly in relation to schooling. It is difficult to use Illich's critique as a transforming tool.

Illich offers no alternative and crushes social movementsWaks 96 – Leonadrd J. Waks, Professor Emeritus at Temple University, Course Lecturer in ethics, political philosophy, and American pragmatism at Purdue Univeristy and Stanford University, former Faculty Member at Penn State in the programs on science, technology, and society, 1996 (“Recontextualizing Illich's Deschooling Society,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, November, Volume 16 Number 5-6, Available Online at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0270467696016005-610?legid=spbst%3B16%2F5-6%2F262&patientinform-links=yes, Available 06-27-2017, pp. 266-267) We can evaluate Deschooling Society with respect to both the social end it advances and the means it puts forward for attaining that end. I start with problems of means.Several early critics complained that Illich offered no map , no transition strategy , to achieve a convivial society. They noted that Illich called deschooling a "political objective" but then failed to indicate any plausible political action steps .We could ask whether the "learning webs" themselves could become such action steps as a means for deschooling society, tools for ushering in a leftconvivial alternative; or, will they only be elements of convivial ends brought about by other means?Because so many influential authors were prescribing educational innovations at the time, it was all too easy to read the learning webs as prescribed innovations, and Illich's detailed descriptions made this especially tempting. John Holt and other out-of-thesystem educators immediately set up such webs in the hope of transforming education.

Illich himself had argued, however, that the value to be derived from at least some of the webs depended upon the prior transition to a deschooled society (p. 101) . And the webs developed by Holt and others, whatever their virtues, have hardly shaken society. At most, they have provided one kink in the educational system - while in the process co-opting Illich as an educational innovator. We must conclude that Deschooling Society fails when considered as an heuristic for generating immediate tactics for transforming society.What standards might Illich himself have set for evaluating Deschooling Society? He says: As Thomas Kuhn points out, in a period of constantly changing paradigms most of the very distinguished leaders are bound to be proven wrong by the test of hindsight. Intellectual leadership does depend on superior intellectual discipline and imagination and the willingness to associate with others their exercise (p.lOO). Herbert Gintis criticized Illich for working outside of particular local action groups such as feminist collectives or labor unions. The criticism was precisely that Illich didn 't associate with others , or at least enough of the right ones. For Gintis, this failure reflected " dialectical " shortcomings in Illich's critical method; he offered a negation , an antithesis, but failed to go beyond it to a new synthesis grounded in real people with action opportunities and achievable goals in real life situations. Illich's ideas did suggest directions for some out-ofthe-system educators. And for a short time in the early 1970's, Illich was also "news" in the education colleges; many professors of educational theory and policy used De-schooling Society and Everett Reimer's companion volume, School is Dead in required courses for educational professionals. Peter Goldstone at Temple used to refer with irony to the 3-credit "school is dead" requirement for teacher certification in Pennsylvania. His point was that the de-schooling concept offered such professionals, not a productive new direction, but a dead end.Like Gintis and Illich's marxist critics, we can also assess Illich's left-convivial vision of humanity in society as an ideal end. I have some doubts (they are no more than this) about the very possibility of convivial society as Illich depicts it. He provides only hints about left-convivial institutions. While we have both rightmanipulative society and a sociology to explain it, we possess no concrete examples of left-convivial society.I worry that IIlich may be inferring the possibility of left-convivial society from the existence of marginal left-convivial sub-groups within right-manipulative society. He ma y see his own band of roving scholars as a microcosm of convivial society, thinking "we exist - why can't everyone be just like us?" But this would be an unacceptable inference. It is one thing for some individuals in society to break away from convention and shape their own lives, but it is quite another for there to be a society composed exclusively of "disciplined dissidents ." This may enjoin something of the logical status of a "week full of weekends:' or a "lifetime of retirement."

1AR — Alternative Fails (Motivation)

Deschooling’s freedom kills motivation and detracts from instrumental skills. Mitchell 07 – Ethan Mitchell, Independent Researcher for Philica Institute in the United States, 2007 (“Educational Antidisestablishmentarianism”, Philica, Available Online at http://www.philica.com/display_article.php?article_id=74, Accessed 06-27-2017) FreedomA good many authors saw the fundamental thesis of consensual learning as an error. Freedom may not be intrinsically valuable[41], or may not be valued by children[42]. They argued that children have no experiential background to make educational choices, especially in terms of envisioning what they would find useful or fulfilling years hence[43]. The "hidden curriculum" of schools was an intentional effort to provide children with intellectual tools and patterns of thought that they would not seek out on their own accord[44]. If children are left to study only what they want, they will learn prejudices[45], impulsively switch topics[46], or simply do nothing and waste their potential (27,13). Finally, the suggestion that lessons are optional inferred that they are unimportant, and that students were valueless because adults had no expectations of them (7, 21)A more moderate version of this critique was the idea that while certain skills can be learned in a consensual environment, other indispensable skills could not be . The major focus here was literacy, whose importance was denigrated by several of the early consensual educators[47]. Their position was very widely condemned , and did not appear so much in later writings on consensual learning. In addition to its direct utility, Ashton-Warner pointed out that reading and writing have therapeutic and behavior-modifying effects which are of value in schools[48].Beyond literacy, there are other skills that society needs to reproduce -and that subgroups of society need for their own empowerment-but which arguably cannot be learned in a "spontaneous and ecstatic" fashion[49]. These include systematic and logical thought, mathematics, medicine, classical languages, and law[50]. The studium generale cannot afford to leave open the possibility that such skills will not be reproduced.Still a third group of authors, more optimistic about the potential of consensual learning, were concerned about its scope and practice. Perhaps consensual learning is adequate or even desirable for most students, but there is some group for whom it would be disastrous[51]. A particularly common criticism in this regard was that consensual learning posits essentially negative, divisive freedoms - there is little emphasis on mutualism and solidarity [52]. Students are not presented with adequate guidance, or actively drawn into new interests, which could be accomplished without coercion[53]. Moreover, they may not be encouraged to persist in the face of intellectual setbacks, a trend that Kozol terms the "Cult of Incompletion[54]." Without direction and guidance , the choices of a consensual learner resemble someone watching television, flipping from one channel to the next[55]. Finally, some authors who supported the idea of consensual learning nevertheless warned that it carries great psychic risks. It demands a great level of self-respect , and-failing that-might plunge the learner into depression , alcoholism , or insanity [56].

They Say: “Peer Matching”

Peer matching causes the commodification of knowledge and robs the alternative of its conviviality. Varbelow and Griffith 12 – Sanja Varbelow, Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Angelo State University, Former Field-Based Teaching Specialist in Learning and Innovation and Lecturer in Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Brownsville, Member of the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Professors of Education, Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Texas A&M University, M.A. in Education from Humbolt University, Bryant Griffith, Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, 2012 (“Deschooling Society: Re-Examining Ivan Illich’s Contributions to Critical Pedagogy for 21st Century Curriculum Theory,” Education Resources Information Center, June 6th, Accessed Online at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED532618.pdf, Accessed 6-2-17) However, in his third approach, which he calls “Peer-Matching,” he suggests what I perceive as a detrimental restriction to his entire theory: He (Illich, 1971) proposes that “access to a ‘class’ would be free – or purchased with educational vouchers” (p. 94), which one would earn based on the number of hours one has spent teaching a skill and “the number of pupils (one) could attract for any full two-year period” (p. 94). This seems like a sort of merit pay that contains the danger of moving school as a “convivial” institution away from the left side of the spectrum to the far right among the “manipulative” institutions . A “teacher’s” focus might shift away from voluntarily sharing a skill to earning vouchers because it will allow him to learn more himself . This would not only have a pernicious effect on the quality of his “teaching” as intrinsic motivation gives way to extrinsic motivation (Pink, 2009), but he might spend his energy and resources on advertising himself. This exemplifies the observation made by Illich’s Mexican friend “that stores sold ‘only wares heavily made up with cosmetics.’” Illich (1971) criticizes that products speak “about their allurement not their nature” for the purpose of consumption (p. 80). But under these circumstances skill sharing would become such a product. Moreover, it begs the question of who’s to decide how many pupils a teacher has to attract and hours to teach in order to earn the “educational vouchers” that allow him to learn, let’s say, what a PhD program might offer?And finally, knowledge once again would have a price . This way these restrictions would seriously endanger the system’s literal conviviality.

They Say: “Convivial Institutions Solve”

No they don’t. Gintis 72 – Herbert Gintis, Visiting professor in the Economics Department of Central European University, Former Professor Emertius in Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, 1972 (“Towards a Political Economy of Education: A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich 's Deschooling Society,” Harvard Educational Review, February, Available Online at: http://hepgjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17763/haer.42.1.h2m4644728146775, Accessed 6-22-17) Moreover, the ideology of commodity fetishism not only reflects the day-to-day operations of the economic system, it is also functionally necessary to motivate men/women to accept and participate in the system of alienated production, to peddle their (potentially) creative activities to the highest bidder through the market in labor, to accept the destruction of their communities, and to bear allegiance to an economic system whose market institutions and patterns of control of work and community systematically subordinate all social goals to the criteria of profit and marketable product. Thus the weakening of institutionalized values would in itself lead logically either to unproductive and undirected social chaos (witness the present state of counter-culture movements in the United States) or to a rejection of the social relations of capitalist production along with commodity fetishism.Third, Illich argues that the goal of social change is to transform institutions according to the criterion of "non-addictiveness," or "left- conviviality ." However, since manipulation and addictiveness are not the sources of social decay, their elimination offers no cure . Certainly the implementation of left-convivial forms in welfare and service agencies—however desirable in itself—will not counter the effects of capitalist development on social life. More important, Illich's criterion explicitly accepts those basic economic institutions which structure decision-making power, lead to the growth of corporate and welfare bureaucracies, and lie at the root of social decay. Thus Illich's criterion must be replaced by one of democratic, participatory, and rationally decentralized control over social outcomes in factory, office, community, schools, and media. The remainder of this essay will elucidate the alternative analysis and political strategy as focused on the particular case of the educational system.

They Say: “Don’t Need Teachers”

Teacher-directed learning is essential to student success. Mitchell 07 – Ethan Mitchell, Independent Researcher for Philica Institute in the United States, 2007, (“Educational Antidisestablishmentarianism”, Philica, Available Online at http://www.philica.com/display_article.php?article_id=74, Accessed 06-27-2017) TeachingThe claim that students , not teachers, are the primary agents of learning has been criticized from various directions. Teaching (or motivating students to learn new things) remains possible, even if some students learn things outside the classroom[72], and even if it could be shown that such teaching is a rarity[73]. After all, if one concedes that it is possible for teachers to indoctrinate students or crush their spirits, then they must have the influence to affect children positively as well[74]. Perhaps teacher-directed learning is less efficient than student-directed learning, but there is no evidence that this is the case [ 75]. Consensual education makes extraordinary demands of the teachers , both intellectually and emotionally[76]. In particular, consensual education demands a genuine emotional attitude on the part of teachers that cannot be a mere pragmatic strategy[77]. Love and respect cannot be faked to any useful effect.Some authors have criticized the actual teaching quality and classroom methods in free-schools , as if the teachers, satisfied at having created a liberated environment , "pretend to abdicate … the power which they do possess and continue to exercise " as expert knowledge providers [78]. Moreover, in primarily addressing educators, consensual learning shifts responsibilities away from parents and the community , which need to share them[79]. Consensual educators are also said to present a false degree of indifference between the merits of various subjects (Bach and Elvis are equivalent). Variously, consensual educators advocate the worse subject over the better one. In either case, these presentations are insincere and possibly dangerous . Kozol wrote: "It is, too often, the rich white kids who speak three languages with native fluency, at the price of sixteen years of high-cost, rigorous and sequential education, who are the most determined that poor kids should make clay vases, weave Indian headbands, play with Polaroid cameras, climb over geodesic domes[80]."Testing and SuccessTesting and certification were defended as necessary in schools so that we can measure progress (of students and schools). They also occur outside of schools , e.g. in sports, and so they cannot be thought of as a school-specific problem[81].Professional success , in a conventional understanding of the concept, matters[82]. Such standards have empirically been shown to be trans-cultural[83]. No one thinks that a street-cleaner is "just as good as" a doctor . Moreover, professional success is especially vital for poor and oppressed populations[84]. Radicals' tendency to disregard or minimize the importance of career success as an outcome measure is short-sighted[85].

Impact Defense

2AC – Environmental Resilience

The environment is resilient – species turnover is a function of resiliencyBullock et al 15 — James M. Bullock, Ecologist at NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Visiting Professor at Liverpool and Bournemouth Universities, Felix Eigenbrod, Associate Professor Ecology , Principal Investigator (Spatial Ecology),Co-Chair of Sustainability Science at Southampton, Rob Freckleton, Professor and Director of Research and Innovation, Faculty of Science, University of Sheffield, Matthew S. Heard, Terrestrial Ecologist at NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, PhD at Imperial College, Andy Hector, Professor of Ecology at University of Oxford, Plants for the 21st Century, Nick J.B. Isaac, Macroecologist in the Biological Records Centre, NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, PhD in Evolutionary Biology, Imperial College Georgina M. Mace, Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems, and Head of the Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research at University College London, Berta Martín-López, Junior Professor Leuphana University Lüneburg · Institute of Ethics and Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research, Tom H. Oliver, Associate Professor in Landscape Ecology at the University of Reading, C. David L. Orme, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College Owen Petchey, Associate Professor, Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland, Visiting Researcher, University of Sheffield, Deborah Procter, Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, Member of the British Ecological Society, Fellow of the Linnean Society, Vânia Proença, Postdoc researcher, MARETEC, Instituto Superior Técnico Biodiversity, David Raffaelli, appointed to a chair in Environment in February 2001 and was Head of Department between 2004 and 2010 at University of York, David B. Roy, Head of the Biological Records Centre at NERC, K. Blake Suttle, Department of Earth and Planetary Science at University of California Berkeley, Ben A. Woodcock, Ecological Entomologist in the Community Ecology Group at CEH Wallingford, 2015 (“Biodiversity and resilience of ecosystem functions,” University of Reading, November 2015, Available Online at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/47800/3/TREE%20paper-%20Biodiversity%20and%20resilience%20of%20ecosystem%20functions%20V18_SECOND%20REVISION.pdf, Accessed 06-24-2017)There has been much semantic and theoretical treatment of the resilience concept, but here we are concerned with identifying metrics for real world applications. An ecological system can be defined by the species composition at any point in time [26] and there is a rich ecological literature, both theoretical and experimental, that focusses on the stability of communities [16, 27-29] with potential relevance to resilience. Of course, the species in a community are essential to the provision of many ecosystem functions which are the biological foundation of ecosystem services [3]. However, the stability of species composition itself is not a necessary pre-requisite for the resilience of ecosystem functions. Turnover in species communities might actually be the very thing that allows for resilient functions . For example, in communities subjected to climatic warming, cold-adapted species are expected to decline whilst warm-adapted species increase [30]. The decline of cold- adapted species can be limited through management [31], but in many cases their local loss might be inevitable [32]. If these species have important functional roles, then ecosystem functions can suffer unless other species with similar functional roles replace them. In fact, similar sets of functions might be achieved by very different community structures [33]. Therefore, while the species composition of an ecosystem is typically the target of conservation, it is ecosystem functions, rather than species composition per se, that need to be resilient , if ecosystem services are to be maintained (Figure 1). In this case the most relevant definition of resilience is: the degree to which an ecosystem function can resist or recover rapidly from environmental perturbations, thereby maintaining function above a socially acceptable level. This can be thought of as the ecosystem-functions related meaning of resilience or alternatively as the inverse

of ecological ‘vulnerability’ [34]. Resilience in this context is related to the stability of an ecosystem function as defined by its constancy over time [35], but the approach of using a minimum threshold more explicitly measures deficits of ecological function that impact upon human well-being [e.g. 14]. Note that here we focus on the resilience of individual ecosystem functions, which might be appropriate for policy formulation (e.g. pollination resilience), although ecosystem managers will ultimately want to consider the suite of ecosystem functions supporting essential services in a given location.

2AC – Institutionalized Values Inevitable

The impact is inevitable – the “institutionalized values” they criticize are produced by everyday social processes and convivial institutions are irrelevant. Gintis 72 – Herbert Gintis, Visiting professor in the Economics Department of Central European University, Former Professor Emertius in Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, 1972 (“Towards a Political Economy of Education: A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich 's Deschooling Society,” Harvard Educational Review, February, Available Online at: http://hepgjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17763/haer.42.1.h2m4644728146775, Accessed 6-22-17) Mich's model of consumption-manipulation is crucial at every stage of his political argument. But it is substantially incorrect. In the following three sections I shall criticize three basic thrusts of his analysis. 75 First, Illich locates the source of social decay in the autonomous , manipulative behavior of corporate bureaucracies . I shall argue, in contrast, that the source must be sought in the normal operation of the basic economic institutions of capitalism (markets in factors of production, private control of resources and technology, etc.),3 which consistently sacrifice the healthy development of community, work, environment, education, and social equality to the accumulation of capital and the growth of marketable goods and services. Moreover, given that individuals must participate in economic activity , these social outcomes are quite insensitive to the preferences or values of individuals, and are certainly in no sense a reflection of the autonomous wills of manipulating bureaucrats or gullible consumers. Hence merely ending "manipulation" while maintaining basic economic institutions will affect the rate of social decay only minimally.Second , Illich locates the source of consumer consciousness in the manipulative socialization of individuals by agencies controlled by corporate and welfare bureaucracies. This "institutionalized consciousness" induces indivduals to choose outcomes not in conformity with their "real" needs. I shall argue, in contrast, that a causal analysis can never take socialization agencies as basic explanatory variables in assessing the overall behavior of the social system.4In particular, consumer consciousness is generated through the day-to-day activities and observations of individuals in capitalist society. The sales pitches of manipulative institutions , rather than generating the values of commodity fetishism, merely capitalize upon and reinforce a set of values derived from and reconfirmed by daily personal experience in the social system . In fact, while consumer behavior may seem irrational and fetishistic, it is a reasonable accommodation to the options for meaningful social outlets in the context of capitalist institutions. Hence the abolition of addictive propaganda cannot "liberate" the individual to "free choice" of personal goals . Such choice is still conditioned by the pattern of social processes which have historically rendered him or her amenable to "institutionalized values ." In fact, the likely outcome of de-manipulation of values would be no significant alteration of values at all . Throughout this paper, I restrict my analysis to capitalist as opposed to other economic systems of advanced industrial societies (e.g., state-socialism of the Soviet Union type). As Illich suggests, the outcomes are much the same, but the mechanisms are in fact quite different. The private-administrative economic power of a capitalist elite is mirrored by the public-administrative political power of a bureaucratic elite in state-socialistcountries, and both are used to reproduce a similar complex of social

relations of production and a structurally equivalent system of class relations. The capitalist variety is emphasized here because of its special relevance in the American context.

1AR – Institutionalized Values Inevitable

The impact is inevitable – consumption and “institutionalized values” are created by everyday observation and experience. Gintis 72 – Herbert Gintis, Visiting professor in the Economics Department of Central European University, Former Professor Emertius in Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, 1972 (“Towards a Political Economy of Education: A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich 's Deschooling Society,” Harvard Educational Review, February, Available Online at: http://hepgjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17763/haer.42.1.h2m4644728146775, Accessed 6-22-17) To understand consumption in capitalist society requires a production orientation , in contrast to illich's emphasis on "institutionalized values" as basic explanatory variables . Individuals consume as they do—and hence acquire values and beliefs concerning consumption—because of the place consumption activity holds among the constellation of available alternatives for social expression . These alternatives directly involve the quality of basic activity contexts surrounding social life — contexts which , as I have argued, develop according to the criteria of capital accumulation through the normal operation of economic institutions.What at first glance seems to be an irrational preoccupation with income and consumption in capitalist society, is seen within an activity context paradigm to be a logical response on the part of the individual to what Marx isolated as the central tendency of capitalist society: the transformation of all complex social relations into impersonal quid-pro-quo relations. One implication of this transformation is the progressive decay of social activity contexts described in the previous section, a process which reduces their overall contribution to individual welfare. Work, community, and environment become sources of pain and displeasure rather than inviting contexts for social relations. The reasonable individual response, then, is a) to disregard the development of personal capacities which would be humanly satisfying in activity contexts which are not available and, hence, to fail to demand changed activity contexts and b) to emphasize consumption and to develop those capacities which are most relevant to consumption per se.Second, the transformation of complex social relations to exchange relations implies that the dwindling stock of healthy activity contexts is parceled out among individuals almost strictly according to income. High-paying jobs are by and large the least alienating; the poor live in the most fragmented communities and are subjected to the most inhuman environments; contact with natural environment is limited to periods of vacation, and the length and desirability of this contact is based on the means to pay.Thus commodity fetishism becomes a substitute for meaningful activity contexts, and a means of access to those that exist. The "sales pitch" of Madison Avenue is accepted because, in the given context, it is true. It may not be much, but it's all we've got. The indefensibility of its more extreme forms (e.g., susceptibility to deodorant and luxury automobile advertising) should not divert us from comprehending this essential rationality.In conclusion, it is clear that the motivational basis of consumer behavior derives from the everyday observation and experience of individuals , and consumer values are not "aberrations" induced by manipulative socialization . Certainly there is no reason to believe that individuals would consume or work much less were manipulative socialization removed. Insofar as such socialization is required to stabilize commodity fetishist values, its elimination might lead to the overthrow of capitalist institutions—but that of course is quite outside Illich's scheme.

They Say: “Schools are the Panopticon”

The Panopticon is inevitable and good – it solves a laundry list of impacts. Armstrong 13 — Stuart Armstrong, Alexander Tamas Fellow in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, D.Phil in Parabolic Geometry from Oxford, 2013 (“Life in the fishbowl”, Aeon, September 30th, Available Online at https://aeon.co/essays/the-strange-benefits-of-living-in-a-total-surveillance-state, Accessed 06-24-2017)Suppose you’re walking home one night, alone, and you decide to take a shortcut through a dark alley. You make it halfway through, when suddenly you hear some drunks stumbling behind you. Some of them are shouting curses. They look large and powerful, and there are several of them. Nonetheless, you feel safe, because you know someone is watching. You know this because you live in the future where surveillance is universal, ubiquitous and unavoidable. Governments and large corporations have spread cameras, microphones and other tracking devices all across the globe , and they also have the capacity to store and process oceans of surveillance data in real time. Big Brother not only watches your sex life, he analyses it. It sounds nightmarish — but it might be inevitable . So far, attempts to control surveillance have generally failed . We could be headed straight for the panopticon , and if recent news developments are any indication, it might not take that long to get there. Maybe we should start preparing . And not just by wringing our hands or mounting attempts to defeat surveillance. For if there’s a chance that the panopticon is inevitable, we ought to do some hard thinking about its positive aspects. Cataloguing the downsides of mass surveillance is important, essential even. But we have a whole literature devoted to that. Instead, let’s explore its potential benefits. The first, and most obvious, advantage of mass surveillance is a drastic reduction in crime . Indeed, this is the advantage most often put forward by surveillance proponents today. The evidence as to whether current surveillance achieves this is ambiguous; cameras, for instance, seem to have an effect on property crime, but not on incidences of violence. But today’s world is very different from a panopticon full of automatically analysed surveillance devices that leave few zones of darkness. If calibrated properly, total surveillance might eradicate certain types of crime almost entirely. People respond well to inevitable consequences, especially those that follow swiftly on the heels of their conduct. Few would commit easily monitored crimes such as assault or breaking and entering, if it meant being handcuffed within minutes. This kind of ultra-efficient police capability would require not only sensors capable of recording crimes, but also advanced computer vision and recognition algorithms capable of detecting crimes quickly. There has been some recent progress on such algorithms, with further improvements expected. In theory, they would be able to alert the police in real time, while the crime was still ongoing. Prompt police responses would create near-perfect deterrence, and violent crime would be reduced to a few remaining incidents of overwhelming passion or extreme irrationality. If surveillance recordings were stored for later analysis, other types of crimes could be eradicated as well, because perpetrators would fear later discovery and punishment. We could expect crimes such as low-level corruption to vanish , because bribes would become perilous (to demand or receive) for those who are constantly under watch. We would likely see a similar reduction in police brutality . There might be an initial spike in detected cases of police brutality under a total surveillance regime, as incidents that would previously have gone unnoticed came to light, but then, after a short while, the numbers would tumble. Ubiquitous video recording, mobile and otherwise, has already begun to expose such incidents. On a smaller scale, mass surveillance would combat all kinds of abuses that currently go unreported because the abuser has power over the abused. You see this dynamic in a variety of

scenarios, from the dramatic (child abuse) to the more mundane (line managers insisting on illegal, unpaid overtime). Even if the victim is too scared to report the crime, the simple fact that the recordings existed would go a long way towards equalising existing power differentials. There would be the constant risk of some auditor or analyst stumbling on the recording, and once the abused was out of the abuser’s control (grown up, in another job) they could retaliate and complain, proof in hand. The possibility of deferred vengeance would make abuse much less likely to occur in the first place. With reduced crime, we could also expect a significant reduction in police work and, by extension, police numbers. Beyond a rapid-reaction force tasked with responding to rare crimes of passion, there would be no need to keep a large police force on hand. And there would also be no need for them to enjoy the special rights they do today. Police officers can, on mere suspicion, detain you, search your person, interrogate you, and sometimes enter your home. They can also arrest you on suspicion of vague ‘crimes’ such as ‘loitering with intent’. Our present police force is given these powers because it needs to be able to investigate. Police officers can’t be expected to know who committed what crime, and when, so they need extra powers to be able to figure this out, and still more special powers to protect themselves while they do so. But in a total-surveillance world, there would be no need for humans to have such extensive powers of investigation. For most crimes, guilt or innocence would be obvious and easy to establish from the recordings. The police’s role could be reduced to arresting specific individuals, who have violated specific laws. If all goes well, there might be fewer laws for the police to enforce. Most countries currently have an excess of laws, criminalising all sorts of behaviour. This is only tolerated because of selective enforcement; the laws are enforced very rarely, or only against marginalised groups. But if everyone was suddenly subject to enforcement, there would have to be a mass legal repeal. When spliffs on private yachts are punished as severely as spliffs in the ghetto, you can expect the marijuana legalisation movement to gather steam. When it becomes glaringly obvious that most people simply can’t follow all the rules they’re supposed to, these rules will have to be reformed. In the end, there is a chance that mass surveillance could result in more personal freedom, not less. The military is another arm of state power that is ripe for a surveillance-inspired shrinking . If cross-border surveillance becomes ubiquitous and effective, we could see a reduction in the $1.7 trillion that the world spends on the military each year. Previous attempts to reduce armaments have ultimately been stymied by a lack of reliable verification. Countries can never trust that their enemies aren’t cheating, and that encourages them to cheat themselves. Arms races are also made worse by a psychological phenomenon, whereby each side interprets the actions of the other as a dangerous provocation, while interpreting its own as purely defensive or reactive. With cross-border mass surveillance, countries could check that others are abiding by the rules, and that they weren’t covertly preparing for an attack. If intelligence agencies were to use all the new data to become more sophisticated observers, countries might develop a better understanding of each other. Not in the hand-holding, peace-and-love sense, but in knowing what is a genuine threat and what is bluster or posturing. Freed from fear of surprising new weapons, and surprise attacks, countries could safely shrink their militaries. And with reduced armies, we should be able to expect reduced warfare , continuing the historical trend in conflict reduction since the end of the Second World War. Of course, these considerations pale when compared with the potential for mass surveillance to help prevent global catastrophic risks , and other huge disasters . Pandemics, to name just one example, are among the deadliest dangers facing the human race . The Black Death killed a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century and, in the early 20th century, the Spanish Flu killed off between 50 and 100 million people. In addition, smallpox buried more people than the two world wars combined. There is no reason to think that great pandemics are a thing of the past, and in fact there are reasons to think that another plague could be due soon. There is also the possibility that a pandemic could arise from synthetic biology, the human manipulation

of microbes to perform specific tasks. Experts are divided as to the risks involved in this new technology, but they could be tremendous, especially if someone were to release, accidentally or malevolently, infectious agents deliberately engineered for high transmissibility and deadliness. You can imagine how many lives would have been saved had AIDS been sniffed out by epidemiologists more swiftly Mass surveillance could help greatly here, by catching lethal pandemics in their earliest stages, or beforehand, if we were to see one being created artificially. It could also expose lax safety standards or dangerous practices in legitimate organisations. Surveillance could allow for quicker quarantines , and more effective treatment of pandemics . Medicines and doctors could be rushed to exactly the right places, and micro-quarantines could be instituted. More dramatic measures, such as airport closures, are hard to implement on a large scale, but these quick-response tactics could be implemented narrowly and selectively. Most importantly, those infected could be rapidly informed of their condition, allowing them to seek prompt treatment. With proper procedures and perfect surveillance, we could avoid pandemics altogether. Infections would be quickly isolated and eliminated, and eradication campaigns would be shockingly efficient. Tracking the movements and actions of those who fell ill would make it much easier to research the causes and pathology of diseases. You can imagine how many lives would have been saved had AIDS been sniffed out by epidemiologists more swiftly. Likewise, mass surveillance could prevent the terrorist use of nukes , dirty bombs, or other futuristic weapons . Instead of blanket bans in dangerous research areas, we could allow research to proceed and use surveillance to catch bad actors and bad practices. We might even see an increase in academic freedom. Surveillance could also be useful in smaller, more conventional disasters. Knowing where everyone in a city was at the moment an earthquake struck would make rescue services much more effective, and the more cameras around when hurricanes hit, the better. Over time, all of this footage would increase our understanding of disasters, and help us to mitigate their effects. Indeed, there are whole new bodies of research that could emerge from the data provided by mass surveillance. Instead of formulating theories and laboriously recruiting a biased and sometimes unwilling group for testing, social scientists, economists and epidemiologists could use surveillance data to test their ideas. And they could do it from home, immediately, and have access to the world’s entire population. Many theories could be rapidly confirmed or discarded, with great benefit to society. The panopticon would be a research nirvana.

DAs to Alt

2AC — School Choice DA

The alternative in practice results in school choice.Reich 12 — Justin Reich, Assistant Professor in the Comparative Media Studies department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Instructor in the Scheller Teacher Education Program, Director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, 2012 (“When Leftists and Libertarians Agree about Learning Webs,” Education Week, June 18th, Available Online at http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/edtechresearcher/2012/06/when_leftists_and_libertarians_agree_about_learning_webs.html, Accessed 06-26-2017, Lil_Arj)Several weeks ago, I was in a meeting at Berkman with Howard Rheingold who recommended Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, a remarkably prescient book from 1971 which predicts the rise of technology driven "Learning Webs". These Learning Webs are computer-mediated networks where learners identify their needs, find appropriate peers and mentors to advance their skills, and pursue their own individually-crafted education experience. What Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash did for immersive virtual worlds, Deschooling Society does for education: craft a compelling vision of a near future that we can watch come to pass around us.Immediately after reading Deschooling Society, I thought to write a very clever blog post comparing Illich's vision of Learning Webs with the futurist educational vision crafted by the Libertarian/free market education reformers from the Fordham Institute, who recently published Education Reform for the Digital Era.Here's what was so terribly clever about my idea: Illich's critique is strongly informed by leftist leanings, especially in the Catholic, liberation theology tradition. The first educator he cites in his book is Paulo Friere, with whom he shares the strong belief that school systems are designed by repressive states to maintain the status quo of social hierarchies and inequities. Illich suggests that we remove these schools and replace them with learning webs , where school funding is diverted from state institutions to individuals, credentialing for educators is completely eliminated, and individuals use networked technologies to identify appropriate learning experiences. In some cases, these learning experiences are also mediated by computers, especially the repetitive drill work required for elementary skill development. In other cases, computers simply match learners with peers or mentors who can provide optimal support for skill development.Illich even goes so far as to write that "Opportunities for skill-learning can be vastly multiplied if we open the "market." This depends on matching the right teacher with the right student when he is highly motivated in an intelligent program, without the constraint of curriculum" (p. 15) Illich puts "market" in quotation marks because he imagines a small scale, artisanal-craft bazaar of learning experiences.But if you remove the quotes from "market," and if you decide to keep the curriculum, then you essentially have the Fordham position, 40 years after Illich . Educational Reform for the Digital Era calls for a backpack of funds for each student, the abolition of teacher certification (an unnecessary barrier to entry akin to a medieval guild membership), the wide-spread availability of educational experiences made available by a competitive marketplace, and the ability of individual learners to chose from among those market options. Students could buy a P.E. course from Reebok, Spanish from Rosetta Stone, Math from Khan Academy, and science from the institutions advocating Intelligent Design. The "curriculum" will be held in check by standardized tests that allow consumers to compare standardized outcomes among various for-profit and not-for-profit course providers.Sometimes I think it's helpful to imagine the American political spectrum not as a line, but as a horseshoe: go far enough to the left and right an you bend back together. I see that happening here:

both Illich and the Fordham writers have a distrust of state institutions and a belief that individuals should have control over their educational futures, and 40 years apart they arrive at a vision of learning webs that are very similar to one another. They also share a belief that the changes that we need are quite radical, and the school system as we know it needs to be dismantled.Anyway, as I said, I thought this analysis of the union of leftist and libertarian though was quite clever until I looked at the Wikipedia page for Illich. Sure enough, the libertarians of Illich's day recognized that his critique was at least compatible with, perhaps even derivative of, Milton Friedman's "tuition grants" for individual kids, especially kids from low-income families. Forty years ago, libertarians looked at Illich's learning webs and saw within them the future of a free market in education, much as today's libertarian digital reformers look at our own evolving learning webs—the edupunk movement, DIYU, flipped classrooms, Peer-to-Peer University, badges, and MOOCs—and once again see harbingers of a digitally-enabled free market in education.There is a great deal of excitement from futurists of all political leanings for leveraging technology to unbundle education. Teachers today are lecturer, assessor, coach, mentor, counselor, baby-sitter, grader, security guard, advocate, and janitor in their classroom: what if we could assign those responsibilities to specialists? Schools are responsible for teaching math, science, reading, writing, social studies, the arts, and citizenship as well as for providing transportation, college and career counseling, security, certification, and a whole host of responsibilities: what if we could assign those responsibilities to specialist institutions?Teachers and schools also create community. I'm very concerned about what happens to the development of young people and our society when we unbundle that.If we follow a path of leveraging technology to create new forms of networked learning, I think they are much more likely to end up as Friedman-inspired marketplaces than Dewey- inspired learning webs. Perhaps there are real advantages to be enjoyed in such a future, but I don't find enough thinkers—progressive, libertarian or anyone else— who have adequately considered the potential losses.

[Insert School Choice Bad]

1AR — School Choice DA

Illich’s argument supports school choice.Glenn 15 — Charles Glenn, Reporter for RefinED Online, 2015 (“A radical’s take on educational freedom,” refinED, October 13th, Available Online at https://www.redefinedonline.org/2015/10/a-radicals-take-on-school-choice-educational-freedom/, Accessed 06-26-2017, Lil_Arj)In “Deschooling Society” (1971), Illich directed that eloquence against the American educational system. He portrayed it as an unreformable bureaucracy devoted to the forced-feeding of conventional ideas into passive youth. The various reforms proposed at the time, including progressive “alternative schools” and “new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils,” he wrote, would not provide the education needed by contemporary society, nor would “the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes.”“School,” Illich insisted, “has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements.”What was needed instead, he continued, were “educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.” Specifically, individuals should be enabled to acquire the skills currently taught in schools (badly, in Illich’s view, and with accompanying bad habits and attitudes) through other routes, including individual or group tutoring and mentoring by those competent to teach a particular skill.Of course, “free and competing drill instruction is a subversive blasphemy to the orthodox educator,” but Illich argued it would be both efficient and liberating. Above all, it would deprive government of a major instrument for regimenting its citizens. “The first article of a bill of rights for a modern, humanist society,” he wrote, “would correspond to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: ‘The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.’”Illich supported school choice, with caveats.He offered a partial endorsement of a 1971 proposal by educational sociologist Christopher Jencks “to put educational ‘entitlements’ or tuition grants into the hands of parents and students for expenditure in the schools of their choice.” Jencks and others would conclude, in an important study of education’s role in perpetuating social injustice in the United States (“Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America,” 1973), that “the ideal system is one that provides as many varieties of schooling as its children and parents want and finds ways of matching children to schools that suit them. … since professional educators do not seem to understand the long-term effects of schooling any better than parents do, there is no compelling reason why the profession should be empowered to rule out alternatives that appeal to parents, even if they seem educationally ‘unsound.’”

2AC — Inequality DA

Deschooling cements inequality. Mitchell 07 – Ethan Mitchell, Independent Researcher for Philica Institute in the United States, 2007, (“Educational Antidisestablishmentarianism”, Philica, Available Online at http://www.philica.com/display_article.php?article_id=74, Accessed 06-27-2017) Re-Entrenching InequalityDeschooling, several authors contested, would be bad for the poor, who were alleged to oppose it[33]. Consensual learning as a type of laissez-faire might undo the redistributive economics of democratic education, creating new concentrations of power and privilege or maintaining the status quo[34]. By shifting to a local scale, consensual learning tended to create a race- and class-homogenous studium generale , and allowed educators in privileged communities to abandon the rest of society ; Kozol described a typical free school in Vermont as "a sandbox for the children of the SS guards at Auschwitz.[35]." On a world scale, deschooling "in its most anarchistic sense" would ossify the unequal levels of development between nations[36].These concerns are exacerbated and extended if consensual education is especially costly. Added expenses might be incurred as economies of scale are lost , or if small free-schools are expected to have "an implausibly wide range of ‘relevant equipment' or resources at their disposal .[37]" Potentially, all the successes of free schools could be attributed to the high socio-economic status of the students[38]. However, free schools seemed to run on very narrow financial margins [39 ], and thus were also criticized for being unsustainably financially vulnerable . Moreover, decision-making around finance depended on the adult community -both in the conventional and alternative models-and adults might have different and internally conflicting goals for the studium generale [40].