by Ivan Illich
The literate mind of the non-reader
Two reasons commend the history of lay literacy to the attention of people who pursue research on, and not only in, education. The first is the new level of concern within the educational enterprise with universal clerical literacy as a goal to be reached before the year 2000. The other is the powerful temptation to replace the book as the fundamental metaphor of self-perception by the metaphor of the computer.
As to the first, we are all aware that new psychological, managerial and electronic techniques are being used to spread, in one more attempt, the clerical skills of reading and writing. Whether, and if so how, these literacy campaigns interact with lay literacy ought to be better understood. Fifty years ago Luria studied the major shifts that occur in mental activity as people acquire clerical literacy. Their cognitive processes cease to be mainly concrete and situational. They begin to draw inferences, not only on the basis of their own practical experience, but on assumptions formulated in language. Since 1931, when Luria did these studies in Stalinist Russia, much has been learned about the change which clerical literacy induces in perception, representation, reasoning, imagination and self-awareness. But in most of the studies, a causal link is assumed to exist between the individual’s writing skill and the new mind-frame he acquires. As I will show, in the light of the history of lay literacy, this assumption is largely false. Since the Middle Ages, the certainties that characterize the literate mind have spread, overwhelmingly, by means other than instruction in the skills of reading and writing. This is a point which must be kept in mind in the current discussions on illiteracy, semi-literacy and post-literacy. The approach currently used in spreading the skill of ‘written communication’ might actually be subversive to the literate mind.
While I want to call your attention to this independence of the literate mind from personal writing skills, my main argument centers on the current transmogrification of the literate mind itself. During the last decade, the computer has rapidly been replacing the book as the prime metaphor to visualize the Self, its activities and its relatedness to the environment. Words have been reduced to ‘message units,’ speech to the ‘use of language,’ conversation to something called ‘oral communication,’ and the text has been reduced from a string of sound symbols to one of ‘bytes.’ I want to argue that the mental space into which literacy certainties fit, and that other mental space engendered by certainties about the Turing Machine, are heteronomous spaces. The study of the mental space that is generated by lay literacy seems to me a necessary step if we are to grasp the nature of that entirely different mental space which is becoming dominant in our time. And just as lay literacy is largely independent of the individual’s clerical skills, so the cybernetic mind is largely independent of the individual’s technical proficiency with a computer.
Solid foundations for research on the literate mind have been laid; I only plead that the results of this research be applied in education, to recognize unacknowledged postulates which are implied in the axioms from which educational theories are derived. The first to observe the depth of the epistemological break between oral and literate existence was Millman Parry, some sixty years ago. Through him we come to recognize the Island of Literacy that rises out of the magma of epic orality as a potter-scribe takes down the song of a bard, which we call the Illiad. His pupil, Albert Lord, convinces us that the steps by which one becomes a bard cannot be grasped with the same concepts as those used to get at the steps by which one becomes a literate poet. Eric Havelock argues convincingly that the profound changes in the style of reasoning, in the mode of perceiving the universe, in the appearance of ‘literature’ and science in sixth- and fifth-century B.C., Greece can be understood only in light of a transition from an oral to a literate mind. Others have explored how the unique and once- and-for-all invention of the alphabet spread to Brahmin India and thence to the Orient. The circumstances under which new European people were brought into the realm of literate perception are well known to me and, therefore, I take my main examples from that epoch. Elisabeth Eisenstein, in her monumental study on the impact of the printing press on Renaissance culture, deals with another major transformation within the literate mind in yet another epoch. Jack Goody, the anthropologist, has turned our attention to the ever-ongoing ‘alphabetization of the savage mind.’ And Walter Ong, over the last two decades, has pulled together the research of psychologists, anthropologists and students of epics, to argue that alphabetization is equivalent to the ‘technologization’ of the word. So far, however, no one has attempted a history of the literate mind as distinct from clerical literacy. And it is a daunting task. The literate mind is a phenomenon both brilliantly clear and slippery — like a jellyfish whose features and shapes can be discerned only so long as it is observed within its own milieu.
The irrelevance of schooling to the literate mind
To make my plea for this novel research plausible, I will explain the steps which led me to my present position. This I can do by criticizing my book, Deschooling Society, for its naive views. My travelogue begins twenty years ago when that book was about to appear. During the nine months the manuscript was at the publishers, I grew more and more dissatisfied with its text which, by the way, did not argue for the elimination of schools. This misapprehension I owe to Cass Canfield Sr, Harper’s president, who named my baby and, in doing so, misrepresented my thoughts. The book advocates the disestablishment of schools, in the sense in which the Church has been disestablished in the United States. I called for the ‘disestablishment of schools’ for the sake of education and here, I noticed, lay my mistake. Much more important than the disestablishment of schools — I now see — was the reversal of those trends which make of education a pressing need rather than a gift of gratuitous leisure. I began to fear that the disestablishment of the educational church would lead to a fanatic revival of many forms of degraded education.
Norman Cousins published my own recantation in the Saturday Review during the very week my book came out. In it I argued that the alternative to schooling was not some other type of educational agency, or the design of educational opportunities in every aspect of life, but a society which fosters a different attitude of people toward tools. Since then, my curiosity and reflections have focused on the historical circumstances under which the very idea of educational needs can arise.
So that you might see the character of my argument, let me tell you how I came to the study of education. I came from theology. As a theologian, I specialized in ecclesiology, which constitutes the only old learned tradition which — in social analysis — distinguishes fundamentally between two entities: the visible community in which the spirit is embodied, and the quite different community which is the city or the state. This dualism is of its essence. Emboldened by 1500 years of ecclesiology, I saw the Church as more than a mere metaphor for the new Alma Mater. I tended increasingly to stress the fundamental continuity between two seemingly opposed agencies, at least insofar as they defined the meaning of education in successive centuries.
Within ecclesiology, the study of Liturgy has always been my favorite topic. This branch of learning deals with the role of cult in bringing about the phenomenon, Church. Liturgy studies how solemn gestures and chants, hierarchies and ritual objects create not only faith, but the reality of the community-as-Church, which is the object of this faith. Comparative liturgy sharpens the eye to distinguish the essential mythopoetic (myth-making) rituals from accidents of style. So sensitized, I began to look on those things that go on within schools as parts of a liturgy. Accustomed to the great beauty of Christian Liturgy, I was of course put off by the abject style so proper to schools.
I then began to study the place that the liturgy of schooling holds in the social construction of modern reality, and the degree to which it creates the need for education. I began to discern the traces which schooling leaves on the mind-set of its participants. I focused my attention on the effects of scholastic liturgy by putting
into parenthesis not only learning theory, but also research which measures the achievement of learning goals. In the articles published in Deschooling Society, I presented a phenomenology of schooling. From Brooklyn to Bolivia it consists of age-specific assemblies around a so-called teacher, for three to six hours on 200 days of the year; yearly promotions which also celebrate the exclusion of those who fail or who are banished into a lower stratum; subject matter more detailed and carefully chosen than any known monastic Liturgy.
Everywhere attendence varies from 12 to 48 pupils, and teachers are those who have absorbed several years of this mumbo-jumbo in excess of their pupils. Everywhere, pupils are judged to have acquired some ‘education’ — which school by definition monopolizes — and which is thought necessary to make pupils into valuable citizens, each knowing at which class level he has dropped out of this ‘preparation for life.’ I then saw how the liturgy of schooling creates the social reality in which education is perceived as a necessary good. And I was even then aware how enveloping, lifelong education could, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, replace schooling in its myth-making function. However, I did not suspect what I now propose as a subject for research: the waning of the traditional key concepts of literate education, since the terms for them are used in analogy with computer program language. I did not then conceive of schooling as one of the masks behind which this transmogrification could take place.
At the time I was engaged in these reflections we were at the height of the international development effort. One could see that school was like a world-wide stage on which the hidden assumptions of economic progress were being acted out. The school system demonstrated where development could not but lead: to international, standardized stratification; to universal dependence on service; to counterproductive specialization; to the degradation of the many for the sake of a few. As I wrote Deschooling, the social effects, and not the historical substance of education, were still at the core of my interest. I still accepted that, fundamentally, educational needs of some kind were a historical given of human nature.
Constitution and evolution of a mental sphere
My acceptance of the unexamined assumption that by nature human beings belong to the species of homo educandus started to dim as I studied the history of economic concepts from Mandeville to Marx (with Réné Dumont), and from Bentham to Walrass (with Elie Halévy) and, as I became aware of the historical nature of my own certainties regarding scarcity through reading Karl Polanyi. I recognized that in economics there exists an important critical tradition which analyzes as historical constructs the assumptions which economists of all colors make. I became aware that homo œconomicus, with whom we identify emotionally and intellectually, is of quite recent creation. And thus I came to understand education as ‘learning,’ when it takes place under the assumption of scarcity in the means which produce it. The ‘need’ for education in this perspective appears as the result of societal beliefs and arrangements which make the means for so-called socialization scarce. And, in this same perspective, I began to notice that educational rituals reflected, reinforced and actually created belief in the value of learning pursued under conditions of scarcity. With rather limited success, I have tried to encourage my students to do for the field of pedagogics what others have done in the field of economics.
Polanyi shows that the exchange of goods predates by many centuries, if not millenia, the economic marketing of commodities. This pre-economic exchange is performed by status traders who act more like diplomats than businessmen. Commenting on the Politics of Aristotle, Polanyi shows that the technique of marketing, in which the value of a good is made to depend on demand and supply and provides a profit for the merchant, is a Greek invention of the early fourth century B.C. I then found increasing evidence that the conceptual space within which paideia acquired a meaning comparable to what we call education, was defined at about the same time. What Polanyi calls the ‘dis-embedding’ of a formal economic sphere within society happens during the same decade in which a formal educational sphere is also dis-embedded.
During the same century Euclidian space came into formal existence. Its creation and destiny provide a useful analogy to illustrate what I mean by ‘a mental space.’ Euclid was careful to state the axioms on which he built his geometry. He wanted them remembered as stipulations. However, as we moderns are now acutely aware, in one instance he stated as a self-evident axiom something which in fact requires a postulate. When Euclid stated as axiomatic that two parallel lines never intersect, he unknowingly implied the existence of only one space, namely, the particular one now named after him. He made an assumption which, remaining unexamined, turned into a certainty. And, for 2000 years, Western learned tradition took it as a natural fact. Not until the turn of our century did Riemann demonstrate that a space in which two parallel lines never intersect is, for the mathematician, only a special case.
Soon after Riemann laid the mathematical foundation for relativity, anthropologists noticed that the members of many cultures do not see with Euclidian eyes. Ethnolinguists then confirmed that, for instance, Hopis or Dogons speak about space and directions in ways that can more easily be translated into the terms of mathematical tensors than into any Indo-Germanic language. On the other hand, historians found that ancient literatures describe space much more thoroughly by reference to smells, sounds and the experience of moving through an atmosphere than by evoking visual experience. Art historians like Panofsky and philosophers like Susan Langer, have made plausible that most artists paint the space which they and their epoch see. They do not organize their perception in the perspective that Dürer created, or within the coordinates of Descartes. Perspective, so the argument goes, was introduced into painting to express the newly-found ability to see the world predominantly in a self-centered way. Parallel to Kuhn’s chain of descriptive paradigms succeeding each other in the sciences, art historians find successive descriptive paradigms which correspond to distinct ways of perceiving visual space.
Revolution by the alphabet
No attempt comparable with the historiography of economic or visual space has so far been made to explore the constitution and evolution of the mental space within which pedagogical ideas take their shape. This does not mean that all academic disciplines have remained prisoners of one space; it only means that the principal challenge to this mental confinement has come from non-educators and, so far, has not been acknowledged within the educational profession. Millman Parry’s discovery of the heteronomy between oral and alphabetic existence could have made educators recognize the questionable postulates which they unknowingly accept as the axioms of their field. But the relevance of Parry’s discovery for a historical theory of education has so far gone unnoticed.
In his doctoral thesis on Homeric epithets (1926), Parry was the first to notice that the transition from epic orality to written poetry in archaic Greece marks an epistemic break. He argued that for the literate mind it is nearly impossible to imagine the context within which the pre-literate bard composes his songs. No bridge built out of the certainties inherent in the literate mind can lead back into the oral magma. I cannot here sum up the insights and conclusions reached during the last fifty years by Lord, Havelock, Peabody, Notopoulos and Ong — the work which convinced me. But, for those who have not followed their writings on the heteronomy of epic orality and literate poetry, let me briefly note some of the firm conclusions I draw. In an oral culture there can be no ‘word’ such as we are accustomed to look up in the dictionary. In that kind of culture, what silence brackets may be a syllable or a sentence, but not our atom, the word. Further, all utterances are winged, forever gone before they are fully pronounced. The idea of fixing these sounds into a line, of mummifying them for later resurrection, cannot occur. Therefore memory, in an oral culture, cannot be conceived as a storage room or a wax tablet. Urged on by the lyre, the bard does not ‘look up’ the right word; rather, a fitting utterance from the grab-bag of traditional p
hrases moves his tongue to the appropriate beat. Homer, the bard, never tried and rejected le mot juste. But Virgil changed and corrected the Aeneid up to the hour of his death; he was already the prototype of the literate poet, the genial Schrift-Steller.
Appropriately, the equivalent of our curriculum was called Musiké in the schools of fifth-century Athens. Students learned to compose music; writing remained a servile skill exercised mostly by potters until around the year 400 B.C., when Plato went to school. Only then does true subject matter come into being; only then can the wisdom of a previous generation be transmitted in that generation’s words, to be commented upon in distinct and new words by the teacher. Alphabetic recording is as much a condition for what we call science/literature, as it is necessary for the distinction between thought and speech. Plato, one of the few giants who struggles with the divide between orality and literacy, makes this transition from ever newly recalled experience to literate memory the subject of his Phaedrus. He was acutely aware that with the teacher who sows (written) words, which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others (Phaedr. 276a), an entirely new epoch was opening, and that the use of the alphabet would bar a return to the oral past.
With more clarity than the moderns, Plato seems to have been aware that with literacy a new mental space had come into existence and, within it, previously unimagined concepts that would give an entirely new meaning to the upbringing of Lysias. Two things therefore can be distinguished in the history of educational assumptions: the beginning of pedagogical space — which might now be threatened — and the transformations of the web of pedagogical concepts that take place within this space.
