CORRECTION: In my post of a minute ago, I miswrote something: I meant to say that "in modern times, EDUCATION is an economic business ...." Also, despite his book's title, Illich was NOT calling for the elimination of schools. Rather, he called for the disestablishment of schools, just as religion was disestablished at the founding of this nation, the U.S. Who or what you worship, if anyone/thing, is legally none of anyone's business, and likewise, no employer should be permitted to ask what degree you have - what brand name appears on it, in other words, which is simply a shorthand for how much you paid for the degree and indicates nothing about what you actually know or can do. Does this mean that quack doctors will be performing brain surgery? Possibly, but there clearly are other mechanisms for avoiding such dangers. In the world Illich envisioned, knowledge would simply be more freely available and there'd be less dependence on scarce professionals. Lots of people, for instance, would have medical knowledge and skills, which would do a great deal more to keep everyone healthy than today's hi-tech medical system. Like any radical vision, Illich's is difficult to summarize, but his books and essays, many of which are available on the Web, will make you think long and hard, if nothing else.

What Illich is referring to here - what compulsory schools advertise to and instill in students, that is - is the belief that good things come only as professionally-defined and-delivered commodities. The myth of school, he explained with such radical insight in his 1970 book Deschooling Society, is that this institution 1) nurtures children's innate curiousity and 2) "levels the playing field." In fact, Illich showed, schools have a "hidden curriculum," tacitly teaching that there is always more education - another grade, another degree, another level costing more money - to consume, and that those who have managed to consume more of this stuff called education (in the form of another, higher degree, that is, no matter whether they actually know more or are more skilled or not), are placed in a higher "class" than those without. School teaches both that "you need education" and that it (school) is the only legitimate source of that education. In the pre-industrial era, learning was a gift; now, in modern times, learning is an economic business - it is "learning under the assumption of scarcity." School doesn't level any playing fields - as the latest stats from No Child Left Behind show clearly, for instance - but it does a marvelous job of seemingly justifying the badly-tilted economic playing field we all live in and on, aka "society as it is." Thanks to the largely unquestioned myth of schooling as the great equalizer, each student is to blame for his or her own failure to do better in society; that the system may be rigged doesn't come up for consideration. Everyone oughta read Deschooling Society. Seriously, it's one of the most important books of the 20th-century. It's available widely on the Web, for free, too.