Comparing the Education Theories of Ivan Illich and John Dewey, Essay Example

John Dewey’s article on social progress illustrates a progressive approach to education. First, he strongly emphasizes the key importance of allowing each individual person to achieve their greatest potential . Rather than focusing on specifics of learning facts and figures, he wants children trained to reason and to learn through their activities. He cites the incorporation of skills into the schools (home economics, and shop, for example) and points out that such classes are an almost instinctive method of relating learning to actions and to real life. He believes such programs literally revive the schools, and by tying lessons to pragmatic life, introduces the children to the social ethos through which they will move as adults. He recognizes the breadth of instruction found in teaching children arts and crafts and believes that it implies a happy spirit in the children engaged in this type of training, an education that literally introduces children to take their place in society. (Dewey).

In contrast, Ivan Illich’s article represents a radical view of education. He protests strongly against the bureaucracy that marks the entire concept of universal education. (Illich). He would literally like to disband the entire educational bureaucracy. He protests against the solidification of schools, and, by analogy, of society itself. Schools stultify imagination, in his perspective, making them a destroyer of society rather than a preserver.  He also feels that formal educational bureaucracy disempowers the poor, making them even more dependent on others by the implication that they are unable to learn for themselves without the “help” of a professional series of education. Yet in Illich’s view, the best arbiter of what to learn and how to learn is not a panel of professional educators, but instead the individual himself (or herself).  When schools are literally “disestablished” the disempowered in society have an opportunity to escape.

References

Dewey, John. “The School and Social Progress.” Chapter 1 in The School and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1907): 19-44.

Illich, Ivan.  “Why We Must Disestablish School.” Web. Retrieved from: http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/chap1.html