In the Mirror of the Past

by Ivan Illich

  Colonization of the ‘informal sector’

  This division between unpaid work off the job and paid work through employment would have been unthinkable in societies where the whole house served as a framework in which its inhabitants, to a large extent, did and made those things by which they also lived. Although we can find traces of both wage-work and its shadow in many societies, in none could either become the society’s paradigm of work, nor be used as the key symbol for sex-specific tasks. And since two such types of work did not exist, the family did not have to exist to couple these kinds of opposites. Nowhere in history is the family, nuclear or extended, the instrument for linking two complementary but mutally exclusive species of work, one assigned primarily to the male, the other to the female. This symbiosis between opposite forms of activity, inseparably wedded through the family, is unique to commodity-intensive society. We now see that it is the inevitable result of the pursuit of development and full employment. And since such kinds of work did not exist, sex-roles could not be defined with such finality, distinct natures could not be attributed to male and female, families could not be transformed into a solder to weld the two together.

  A feminist analysis of the history of industrial work thus removes the blindspot of economics: homo œconomicus has never been sexually neutral; homo industrialis appeared from the beginning in two genders: vir laborans, the workingman, and femina domestica, the Hausfrau. In no society that developed toward the goal of full employment has shadow work not grown apace with employment. And shadow work provided a device, effective beyond every precedent, to degrade a type of activity in which women cannot but predominate, while it supported one which privileged men.

  Quite recently, the orthodox distinction between production and consumption functions ceased to hold. Suddenly, opposing interests turn the importance of unpaid work into a public issue. Economists put shadow prices on what happens in the ‘informal’ sector; the contribution that the work done by the client in choosing, paying for and carrying his cake adds to the value of the cake; the calculus of marginal choices made in sexual activities; the value of jogging over heart surgery.

  Housewives claim pay for housework at the rate for such services in motels and restaurants. Teachers transmogrify mothers into trained but unpaid supervisors of their own children’s homework. Government reports recognize that basic needs as professionally defined can be met only if laymen also produce these services, with competence but without pay. If growth and full employment retain their status as goals, the management of disciplined people motivated by non-monetary rewards will open up as the latest form of ‘development’ in the 1980’s.

  Down to earth

  Rather than life in a shadow economy, I propose, on top of the z-axis, the idea of vernacular work: unpaid activities which provide and improve livelihood, but which are totally refractory to any analysis utilizing concepts developed in formal economics. I apply the term vernacular’ to these activities, since there is no other current concept that allows me to make the same distinction within the domain covered by such terms as ‘informal sector,’ ‘use value,’ ‘social reproduction.’ Vernacular is a Latin term that we use in English only for the language that we have acquired without paid teachers. In Rome, it was used from 500 B.C. to 600 A.D. to designate any value that was homebred, homemade, derived from the commons, and that a person could protect and defend though he neither bought nor sold it in the market. I suggest that we restore this simple term, vernacular, to oppose commodities and their shadow. It allows me to distinguish between the expansion of the shadow economy and its inverse — the expansion of the vernacular domain.

  The tension and balance between vernacular work and industrial labor — paid and unpaid — is the key issue on the third dimension of options, distinct from political right and left and from technical soft and hard. Industrial labor, paid and otherwise exacted, will not disappear. But when development, wage-labor and its shadow encroach upon vernacular work, the relative priority of one or the other constitutes the issue. We are free to choose between hierarchically managed standardized work that may be paid or unpaid, self-selected or imposed on the one hand and, on the other, we can protect our freedom to choose ever newly invented forms of simple, integrated subsistence actions which have an outcome that is unpredictable to the bureaucrat, unmanageable by hierarchies and oriented to the values shared within a specific community.

  If the economy expands, which the soft choice can permit, the shadow economy cannot but grow even faster, and the vernacular domain must further decline. In this case, with rising job scarcity, the unemployed will be integrated into newly organized useful activities in the informal sector. Unemployed men will be given the so-called privilege to engage in those production-fostering types of unpaid activity that, since their emergence as housework in the nineteenth century, have been considerately earmarked for the ‘weaker sex’ — a designation that was also first used at that time, when industrial serfdom rather than subsistence was defined as the task of women. ‘Care’ exacted for the sake of love will lose its sex-specific character, and in the process will become manageable by the state.

  Under this option, international development is here to stay. Technical aid to develop the informal sector overseas will reflect the new sexless unpaid domestication of the unemployed at home. The new experts pushing French rather than German self-help methods or windmill designs already crowd airports and conference halls. The last hope of development bureaucracies lies in the development of shadow economies.

  Many of the dissidents that I have mentioned take a stand against all this — against the use of soft technology to reduce the vernacular domain and to increase professional controls over informal sector activities. These new vanguards conceive technical progress as one possible instrument to support a new type of value, neither traditional nor industrial, but both subsistence-oriented and rationally chosen. Their lives, with more and less success, express a critical sense of beauty, a particular experience of pleasure, a unique view of life cherished by one group, understood but not necessarily shared by the next. They have found that modern tools make it possible to subsist on activities which permit a variety of evolving lifestyles and relieve much of the drudgery of old time subsistence. They struggle for the freedom to expand the vernacular domain of their lives.

  Examples from Travancore to Wales may soon free those majorities who were recently captivated by the modern ‘demonstration model’ of stupefying, sickening and paralyzing enrichment. But two conditions must be met. First the mode of life resulting from a new relation between people and tools must be informed by the perception of man as homo habilis and not homo industrialis. Second, commodity-independent lifestyles must be shaped anew by each small community, and not be imposed. Communities living by predominantly vernacular values have nothing much to offer to others besides the attractiveness of their examples. But the example of a poor society that enhances modern subsistence by vernacular work should be rather attractive to jobless males in a rich society now condemned, like their women, to social reproduction in an expanding shadow economy. The ability, however, not only to live in new ways, but to insist on this freedom, demands that we clearly recognize what distinguishes the perception of homo œconomicus from all other human beings. To this end I choose the study of history as a privileged road.

  PART TWO

  The Educational Sphere

  * * *

  Fragment from notes for a lecture at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. Spring 1979

  I distinguish taught mother tongue and the process by which it is learned from vernacular language and the development of competence in its use. The former results from both formal and informal educational activities, while the concepts of pedagogics developed since the sixteenth century are only metaphorically applicable to the latter, the vernacular domain. By describing in general terms the limited appropriateness of pedagogical concepts to learning in primitive cultures, learning in pre-i
ndustrial societies and, particularly, learning of certain competences in modern, commodity-intensive economies, I use insights gained through contemporary economic history and anthropology and apply them to the field of education. The inapplicability of pedagogical concepts to the learning of vernacular language can then be extended to other areas of learning, and the implicit limits to all education can then be understood. I hope to encourage research on as distinct from research in education, that is, research that examines the myths, the practices, the structures and the assumptions that are now common to all societies where education has been ‘disembedded’ as a distinct realm of activity, as a formal context or sphere.

  The medieval mind firmly accepted the existence of heavenly spheres; the contemporary mind as certainly adheres to the existence of social spheres. My argument focuses especially on the educational spheres, but it can be generalized to the other modern spheres. On each of these spheres, two types of research can be done: that which does not go beyond the model of Copernicus, and that which tends to resemble the work of Kepler. The former is concerned with exploring the possible restructuring of the educational (or other) sphere by redefining its centerpiece, recalculating its amplitude, integrating more epicycles into its curriculum, or reassigning to it a new place or order within the hierarchy of social spheres. The latter research searches for the origins of the paradigm itself and, therefore, implicitly recognizes that, like heavenly spheres, modern social spheres might one day disappear.

  Astronomers deal with a before and an after. They know that at some date human beings were able to reckon with a Copernican and then with a relativistic sky. They remember the change when planets were first perceived as physical objects that spin around the sun. They work within a paradigm that has an acknowledged beginning and, therefore, can plausibly end. Educators still lack such a historical perspective on their own work. The sphere of their competence appears to them as beginningless. They now need to recall that Ptolemy no less than Copernicus, Aristotle no less than Thomas Aquinas, were all convinced that planets were embedded in crystal spheres — transparent, hollow, perfect globes moving in uniform fashion. According to Aquinas, science was free to investigate, first, if heavenly spheres were driven by a soul, second, precisely how many spheres there were, and third, to what degree these spheres and their epicycles were eccentric. However, their existence, their substantive, three-dimensional nature, and their uniform circular motion could not be questioned without upsetting sound philosophical truth — and the latter was needed for the explanation of Christian dogma. Today, these men’s common, firm and critical conviction about the existence of such heavenly spheres is almost beyond belief. Yet, Keynesians and Marxists, Curriculum Planners and Free Schoolers, Chinese and Americans, are all convinced that homo is educandus, that his well-being — nay, existence — depends on services from an educational sphere.

  It is precisely this well-knit assumption of an educational sphere that becomes the subject of the research on education I would recommend, but only as part of a wider research on the process by which economics, politics, wage-labor, and domestic serfdom came into being. And this is the moment for such research, because the orthodox members of the cloister have lost the innocence of their convictions, while the heterodox have not yet found their new paradigm outside. The character of the approaching paradigm change is not yet clear, for the educational community is at a stage similar to that of astronomy at the Renaissance.

  One of the principal figures in the development of astronomy at that time was Copernicus (1473–1543). He is one of the most popular examples cited when people write on paradigm changes in world views. In the literature, one finds an enormous appreciation of the importance of his De revolutionibus coelorum. All testify to his undoubted worth as a mathematical astronomer. But de Solla Price challenged this view. He actually believed it to be a dangerous myth. Since similar myths now envelope some anti-school prophets, I shall comment on Copernicus and his influence.

  Importantly, he reopened the question of the earth’s mobility. And he showed that no mathematical damage was incurred by assuming that it rotated around its axis. In a sense, he did go back to the Pythagorean position that the sun is at the center of the planetary orbs. Mathematically, he was the first to create a planetary system. All his predecessors had dealt with each planet separately; he integrated them. But he did not differ in method or in basic assumptions from Ptolemy. His demonstrations are derived from the so-called Almagest, and he accepted the existence of heavenly spheres. In terms of received knowledge, he admitted even more. He prided himself for having philosophically restored a strictly uniform circular motion to the heavenly bodies. However, this necessitated the positing of more circles than Ptolemy in order to avoid the use of eccentrics.

  It can be argued that Copernicus did replace the potential crystal spheres that Dante — or, before him, Mohammed of the Ladder-Book — could visit by making planets move along prosaic spherical sections. But these neither he nor the young Kepler would think of renouncing. These men could not bring themselves to believe that there is not a natural difference between the movement of the heavens, which is perfect, and that of the sublunar, that is, sinful sphere. Perhaps for this reason the Inquisition did not bother them at all. But in 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. Bruno, like the young Kepler, was influenced by Copernicus. But unlike him, he was not an observer of nature, nor did he know any mathematics. Probably wrongly, he imputed to Copernicus the power to prove that the universe is immense, peopled by innumerable stars, and uniform throughout in its nature. With this opinion, he was suggesting that one could think about the universe without spheres — and that led him to the stake.

  But Bruno’s relationship to astronomy is somewhat akin to that of the outsider in the educational debate today. Therefore, he is of no direct interest in speaking about research on education. Before Kepler, and with the one exception of Bruno, the sky of common sense was also that of philosophical cosmology and mathematical astronomy. The common subject, however, was not the stars themselves, but rather the spheres that carried the planets and the empyrean. The common interest lay in the perfectly circular movements of transparent concentric material realities of a special kind. Each such sphere carried a planet, was generated by it, and was named after the star. The star in turn indicated the influence that the sphere exercised in the world. Copernicus was a heavenly reformer, a rearranger of these spheres. He cannot serve as an example for educators.

  In his day, Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) was the foremost observer of the heavens. Coming from a powerful Danish family, he was born when Copernicus died and, two years before his own death in 1601, accepted the young Kepler as an apprentice. During his lifetime, Brahe substantially corrected the accepted value of nearly every astronomical quantity. He was the first to allow for the refraction of the atmosphere, to introduce methods of correcting instrumental error, to suggest correctly the nature of a nova, to map the location of more than 7,000 fixed stars. As a practical astonomer, he surpassed all before him and, like them, he still looked at the sky with the naked eye alone.

  Kepler approached him to learn because he felt that only Brahe could teach him the observational skills necessary to prove Copernicus correct. But from the beginning of the apprenticeship, Brahe strongly dissuaded Kepler from undertaking such a foolish project. Again, Brahe was the first to point out that the mathematical changes introduced by Copernicus were on the whole such that they increased enormously both the complexity of the calculation and the heavenly mechanism without increasing the accuracy of prediction for the location of stars. Dissatisfied with both Ptolemy and Copernicus, Brahe designed a third system, constructed on a middle ground between Ptolemaic and Copernican assumptions. He retained the immobility of the earth, but the other planets were made to revolve around the sun. The latter, with these planets, annually circuited the earth. In addition, all planets performed a diurnal rotation with the sphere of fixed stars. His correct claim, that t
his system was more elegant and simpler mathematically than that of Copernicus, indicates the monstrous complexity of the Copernicus system. Experimentally, none of the three systems could be verified. Due to their constant improvement, the Ptolemaic predictions possessed an edge. Pascal was correct in believing that only because of a cosmological prejudice could one possibly choose among the three. Instruments to observe the parallax of fixed stars became available only three centuries later.

  When Brahe died, Kepler edited his monumental catalog of the stars. Then he began to see the point on which all three of his great predecessors — Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe — were wrong: none of them could conceive of heavenly movements detached from heavenly spheres. Kepler did not attempt to replace the spheres with something else; he simply eliminated them.

  Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) had a poetic and critical mind. Already as a student, in 1593 (a hundred years after the first return of Columbus), he had written out a series of speculations derived from Maestline’s attempts to estimate the elevations on the lunar surface by measuring, in Tübingen, the shadows on the moon; a technique the ancient Greeks had already tried to use. During the summer of 1609, he wrote out a plan for landing on the moon, earth’s closest neighbor in the sky. Kepler mentioned this project, never before conceived in scientific literature, in a letter to Galileo Galilei (April 19, 1610). He confided to his Italian friend:

  Last summer, the manuscript begun in 1593 has been expanded into a complete geography of the moon … who would have believed that a huge ocean could be crossed more peacefully and safely than the narrow expanse of the Adriatic, the Baltic Sea or the English Channel…? Provide ship or sail adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will not fear even that void … so for those who will come shortly to attempt this journey, let us establish the astronomy: Galileo, you, that of Jupiter, and I that of the moon.