Ivan Illich was a radical visionary writing about various aspects of civilization as he knew it back in the 60s and 70s. He covered an immense amount of ground, and his ideas were part of the general “countercultural” movement that was prevalent then. He was perhaps in the same “genius” category as say, Buckminister Fuller. As with other visionaries, in some ways his ideas are amazingly prescient. One can search for him at Wikipedia of course, and get some idea of what he was up to. His thorough-going iconoclasm made him hard to swallow, unless one was truly ready for radical change.
According to Wikipedia: Illich argued that the use of technology to create decentralized webs could support the goal of creating a good educational system:
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.[10]
The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.
Visionaries are sometimes hard to understand too. One might guess that his term “funnels” below is what today we call silos, and his “search for educational webs” are still “under development” as to how enmeshed with daily life they may, or “should”, become.
Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education.
The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education – and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.[1]