The Anarchist Approach to Education: Ivan Illich as an Alternative to Institutional Education (Essay)

7 min readJul 16, 2023

This was my final essay for an Anarchist Worldviews course I took when I was in CEGEP. It was written in December of 2021.

The most feasible anarchist system

The current education system relies on rankings and certificates in order to gauge a person’s level of skill, which only serves at gatekeeping knowledge, encouraging the passive consumption of knowledge and the polarization our society into those who can engage in this structure and those who cannot, whether for monetary or neurological reasoning. Voltairine De Cleyre herself lamented the physical effects of sitting silently in a classroom for hours while being talked at.[1] Naturally, the current system poses as a major issue for anarchists, who value equality and oppose authoritarian, top-down structures like educational institutions that may restrict humanity’s potential. Illich says that the current curriculum “develops the habit of self-defeating consumption of services and alienating production, the tolerance for institutional dependence, and the recognition of institutional rankings.”[2] In all of these issues there have been attempts to make anarchist schools, but they haven’t succeeded in creating anything sustainable on a large scale, and air more on the side of libertarianism than anarchism. That being said, I argue that Illich’s approach, while not inherently anarchist, is the most feasible anarchist-adjacent system in the battle against our current system’s educational issues, because it can be (and to a certain extent, already is) implemented in our current government-run, capitalist system.

Digital rendering of the Library Learning Commons at Bishops University.

Skill centers and educational webs

Illich proposes what he calls “skill centers” to replace our institutions. Essentially, instead of having buildings dedicated to imprisoning unwilling children into a building and teaching at them with a set curriculum designed to lull them into a false sense of accomplishment, there would be building much like libraries, open to all, communally fund and equipped with four “webs” of resources.

The first being Educational Objects, referring to tool shops, libraries, labs, photo labs, practice rooms, etc., which serve to empower people to explore subjects they would have previously had to make a major monetary commitment to.

Secondly are Skill Exchanges, a system that allows apprenticeship between someone can demonstrate a skill and another who wishes to learn it. As it is now, Illich suggests people who are skilled “profit from its scarcity and not from its reproduction,” which converges their self-interest, and that the public is “indoctrinated to believe that skills are valuable […] only if they are the result of formal schooling.” With Skill Exchanges, one is qualified to teach as soon as one learns a skill, and there would be no convergence of interest conspiring to stop them from sharing a skill, meaning there will be a major rise in educators.

Thirdly is the Peer-Matching web, a network that connects students with fellow learners. This would allow them what current classrooms don’t: the right of free assembly and the ability to match with diverse students for differing perspectives.

Finally, there is Access to Professional Educators, people who have shown themselves to be masters of their craft and would be responsible for operating the aforementioned networks. They would also be there for students who seek assistance in reaching their educational goals. Each of these webs are vastly easier to organize today than in the 80s, as we have the internet for wireless communication.

But seeing as there is no standardization of skills, how would one know which skills are necessary for a given career or job? This is something that other anarchist schools such as the First Street School[3] are not prepared for. Illich, however, suggests that there isn’t any reason why jobs wouldn’t have skill centers at the workplace itself, apprenticing people until they have the necessary skills to work. This would ensure people get the jobs they set out to get and wouldn’t be too far off from current internships. Funding these skill centers isn’t too much of an issue in an anarcho-collective/communist society, as they’d either be a collective bank for education, or everything would be built and owned by all. For anarcho-capitalist societies, Illich presents the idea of an “edu-credit card” given to all at birth with money on it for educational resources only.

The question of motivation

Of course, there are a variety of critiques against anarchist (or anarchist-adjacent) education, and most have to do with human nature. The first to be addressed is whether or not children should even have the right to decide whether or not to learn how to read and write in the first place…what if they never do? I’d suggest that this is virtually impossible. Like speech, literacy often isn’t learned through formal instruction, rather by immersion. In order to read a cooking book, one must learn to read, and advertisements are all around us…one can’t escape words. In the same way that a musician can’t avoid accidently learning music theory by playing enough by ear, the only real way one could avoid reading and writing is if they actively avoid making connections between words and sounds, which would only serve to their own detriment — they would have a difficult time getting a career. For more of a logistical answer, Illich mentioned the possibility of incentivizing learning/teaching by monetary means — the more you learn/teach, the more money you get on your edu-credit card.

The question of self-awareness

The second critique to be addressed is whether anarchist education would succeed in creating unprejudiced, socially aware individuals. Suissa said of Summerhill that the students “may very well grow up to be happy, but completely self-centered individuals. […] There is little attempt to engage with broader social issues or confront present socio-political reality.” [4] What if students end up racist/homophobic/sexist? To this I’d suggest that diversity is a natural successor of anarchism, and make the difference between Summerhill and Illich. While Summerhill encourages lack of awareness by not providing easy access to diverse people, Illich’s approach, provides a system wherein diversity is inherent — Peer-Matching is designed for students to meet people they don’t know anything about within the safely of a skill center, and the probability of only ever meeting people of your exact race/sexuality/gender who are studying your exact subjects is impossibly low.

The modern equivalent

Ultimately, Illich’s approach is the most efficient anarchist system because it’s incredibly realistic in comparison to former anarchist schools and solves most, if not all, our current issues with passivity in learning. In fact, Illich’s ideas are so feasible that they’re kind of already happening. As internet becomes increasingly accessible, the argument that formal education is the only way to learn is becoming less and less convincing — with online resources such as the Edx database, Khan Academy, and Google Scholar, we are already have the basis for voluntary, active learning, and I don’t believe making the jump between anarchist(esque) education on the internet to physical spaces would be difficult at all. All it would require is the building of spaces dedicated to learning, which will eventually become the skill centers Illich proposes. Before then, Kinna suggests the way to build acceptance towards anarchist education would be to offer seminars in secondary schools to introduce anarchist thought for what it is rather than simply as “chaos.”[5] Currently, one is actively discouraged to propose new ideas until the PhD level, but with Illich’s approach, innovation will flourish in our society.

[1] Presley, Sharon & Sartwell, Crispin (eds.) Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre — Anarchist, Feminist, Genius. State University of New York Press, 2005.

[2] Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper Colophon, 1983.

[3] Dennison, George. The First Street School. Anarchy 073, 1987.

[4] Suissa, Judith. Anarchism and education: A philosophical perspective. 2006.

[5] Kinna, Ruth. The Rebel City Teaching Project. Political Studies Association, 2020.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dennison, George. The First Street School. Anarchy 073, 1987. https://libcom.org/library/anarchy-073-free-school-idea

De Cleyre (eds.) Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre — Anarchist, Feminist, Genius. State University of New York Press, 2005. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292497788_Exquisite_Rebel_The_essays_of_Voltairine_de_Cleyre_-_Anarchist_feminist_genius

Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper Colophon, 1983. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/48133146_DeSchooling_Society

Kinna, Ruth. The Rebel City Teaching Project. Political Studies Association, 2020. https://www.psa.ac.uk/psa/news/anarchism-and-education-rebel-city-teaching-project

Suissa, Judith. Anarchism and education: A philosophical perspective. 2006. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293102500_Anarchism_and_education_A_philosophical_perspective