A few quotes from Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society:
Classroom attendance removes children from the everyday world of Western culture and plunges them into an environment far more primitive, magical, and deadly serious. School could not create such an enclave within which the rules of ordinary reality are suspended, unless it physically incarcerated the young during many successive years on sacred territory. The attendance rule makes it possible for the schoolroom to serve as a magic womb, from which the child is delivered periodically at the schoolday's and school year's completion until he is finally expelled into adult life.
· · · · · ·School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition. ... The New World Church is the knowledge industry, both purveyor of opium and the workbench during an increasing number of the years of an individual's life. Deschooling is, therefore, at the root of any movement for human liberation.
· · · · · ·At stake in the choice between the institutional right and left is the very nature of human life. Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
· · · · · ·School has become the planned process which tools man for a planned world, the principal tool to trap man in man's trap.
· · · · · ·School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
More:
Phenomenology of School
By Their Institutions You Shall Know Them
The New Alienation
Promethean Fallacy
Also: Energy Efficiency and Consumerism
