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Stephen Downes

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Reconfiguring Education

Spike Hall, Feb 19, 2005

In one of the weird artifacts of Radio Userland, Spike Halls's link to an article titled "Sin without Consequence: Corporate Citizenship Needs to Be Redefined" (available here, for now) leads instead to this post, a look at the wisdom of Ivan Illich. The two items are related, and not just by an odd quirk of code. Now I was interested in the corporate citizenship article because of recent news about Google, and how its now being a public company seems to have stripped from it any semblence of social responsibility. And it seems to me that if capitalization turns even the best company into something pathological, then there are serious problems with our social order that merely electing new governments will not solve (this, of course, has been addressed before and better by Joel Balkan). So what's the connection? It's this: schools are what corporations would produce. Illich: "The pupil is thereby 'schooled' to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence..."

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