The Corruption of the Best is the Worst

If you conversed with Ivan Illich long enough about education, politics, and religion you would eventually hear him utter this Latin phrase: corruptio optimi pessima (“the corruption of the best is the worst”). Illich often used it to describe Christianity, where he saw that, in the words of this blogger, “'a community of spirit’ has been betrayed by church systems and methods designed to control, institutionalize, and manage Christian vocation.” Upon reading this New York Times article today, I’m certain Ivan would be nodding in agreement and praying even harder that we see clearly and understand the predicament we are in instead of just blindly reacting, or simply ignoring, the deeper issues these things reveal about us.

Only about one in five has much trust in banks, according to Gallup polls, about half the level in 2007. And it’s not just banks that are frowned upon. Trust in big business overall is declining. Sixty-two percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread across corporate America. According to Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, nearly three in four Americans believe that corruption has increased over the last three years.

. . . After years of dismal employment prospects, Americans are losing trust in a broad range of institutions, including Congress, the Supreme Court, the presidency, public schools, labor unions and the church.

. . . In 2001, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index ranked the United States as the 16th least-corrupt country. By last year, the nation had fallen to 24th place. The World Bank also reports a weakening of corruption controls in the United States since the late 1990s, so that it is falling behind most other developed nations.

The most pointed evidence that breaking the rules has become standard behavior in the corporate world is how routine the wrongdoing seems to its participants. “Dude. I owe you big time! . . . I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger,” e-mailed one Barclays trader to a colleague for fiddling with the [LIBOR-PF] rate and improving the apparent profit of his derivatives book.

 Have we have gotten so used to the bland lies we are told by our “betters” and officials that our internal alarms do not go off about them anymore? For instance, I have long been struck by how no one has lost a job or their standing as a credible authority for repeating throughout the nineties and the turn of the century that statewide assessments and the federal No Child Left Behind act would not result in “teaching to the test.” (I have a file of such statements from MA and federal officials over the years). This is one small example, but once our words cease to be sincere, isn’t it just another small step to where our actions cease to be sincere?

Comments

[Winslow]

As Ivan pointed out in 'Deschooling Society,' the school system is, at heart, essentially a big lie. He did not use that word; what he said was that school is a myth-making ritual, and one that works to hide its own contradictions - the gap between what it claims to accomplish and its actual results. The educational system (which now permeates society and is hardly confined anymore to the red-brick buildings we all know) claims that school will somehow eliminate inequality and level the playing field and help people lift themselves up the socio-economic ladder by their own bootstraps (choose your figure of speech) while in fact, all the evidence consistently shows this to be untrue. Yet, year after year, decade after decade, the education industry keeps talking this talk, sometimes calling it NCLB, sometimes calling it Core Standards, or whatever the latest Bill Gates-supported plan is, sometimes just calling it "reform." Much of this talk is now steeped in technology, too - the "learning Web," etc.

I believe that all this works as it does, with few people up in arms, largely because nobody wants to face the truth, which is that the economy is not doing well and there is no prospect of it every doing well again. So, afraid to look at this and what it might mean, people dance the rain dance and invest in schooling as seemingly the only ticket up and out of potential misery and decline. Hence college students taking on so much debt, sure that it is a good investment in their future, for instance. Plus, as society turns to technology - mainly digital computing and communications technology - to solve so many problems, it seems even more imperative that people get with the program and strive to be technologists. As it currently exists, the technology "system" requires constant retraining and schooling for engineers, and increasingly this model is accepted as simply necessary and the best thing to do in other fields, too. Perpetual learning and retraining and certification are increasingly the norm because "that's just how it is these days, in this modern economy, with no security for anyone, and everything subject to change and more change, all thanks to the 'progress' of technology." The current search for better educational technology, new schemes for cramming more stuff into more brains per hour, is quite insane.

Plus, as Illich pointed out, the very existence of schools produces demand for schooling. And that alone makes it exceedingly difficult for one generation, any generation, of parents to step off the merry-go-round, to step outside this system and pull its children out and question things, for that seems to risk seeing those children fail terribly in the future.

Or so it seems to me.

[Pat Farenga]

Winslow,

Well said! I like your connections to our economic woes and the education system, in particular. I agree with what you say about technology and how it forces us to "get with the program" but there's another aspect of technology that gives me some hope: young people are able to learn how to use, adapt, and improve it on their own, often without much or any adult help. I hope they can

Of course, most young people can't afford a computer and an Internet connection so they get a course instead. Sugata Mitri shows a way to overcome that problem for poor populations in India, by the way.

[D. Sayeed]

Thank you for sharing your insights. I am trying to calibrate Illich’s views with what I observe as a teacher and educator of 20 years. Illich posits that we conflate learning with schooling. He argues that learning should happen everywhere in our lives yet it does not happen in the place actually designated by society for it, at schools. For this reason, Illich concludes, we should abolish schooling so learning can really begin to happen.

If we are to achieve scholarship anywhere, and especially at schools, we must as a culture, ensure students come to learning ready to learn; fed, sheltered, clothed, and emotionally and physically safe. Maslow’s theory of needs reveals that we cannot achieve self-actualization, which is our collective goal for individual students, without meeting more basic needs first. The examples you share in the post “Corruption of the best is worst, “ prove that schools are not the problem, they are simply a reflection of the values of our society. Poverty, wealth disparity, corruption, etc. have resulted in schooling that is as inequitable and as perverted as our society. It seems we create a system of schooling that disables critical thinking of intellectual and social issues because it would put the mirror up to our disfigured face.

So I am left wondering, what will change if schooling is abolished and nothing else truly changes in our society? I wish Illich’s idea of potentially available access to learning for everyone, everywhere, were true. But I fear that without schools, some may not have access to learning at all. Illich writes that education has failed the poor in that “educational disadvantage cannot be cured by relying on education within the school.” Illich posits in chapter one of Deschooling Society that Title I has gotten us nowhere. Yes, that may be true, but if Title I alone was supposed to combat the real issues around schooling low-income students, it was doomed to failure even before funds could be disbursed. Title I funds in schools are asked to combat poverty, but schools simply cannot do that alone.

Disparities of wealth, class, status, idealogoy. If we are not courageous enough to commit to eradicating these challenges as a society, then we cannot hold schools alone accountable for the failure of learning. Yes, it is important to keep reminding ourselves of the ideal and we must keep pushing the envelope. I want to better understand what philosophers such as Illich and current educators such as Hess in his “unbundling schools” plan for us at the instructional core level-with teachers and students. I fear that our “deschooling” so that learning may happen everywhere may leave many students, especially those least able to advocate for themselves, with learning not happening anywhere.