Why schools are unnecessary

Ivan Illich and Deschooling Society

In 1971, nearly four decades before blockchain and when the internet existed only as ARPANET, the anarchist philosopher Ivan Illich wrote “Deschooling Society”. In it he deconstructed the education system as a centralised intermediary and proposed a concept uncannily reminiscent of modern DeFi protocols.

Earlier, the head of Professor Aremefe answered the question “Why do we need schools?”; today ForkLog examines the reverse: why educational institutions are a “fiat” system of knowledge and how to reclaim sovereignty over one’s own mind.

Not a temple but a bazaar

We have grown used to treating education as an unquestioned good and school as the only path to it. The classic educational conveyor belt arose at the behest of the industrial age. Factories needed legions of workers with a basic skill set and stamina for monotonous processes. The school system delivered standardised labour.

Today’s post-industrial economy demands something very different. Markets need adaptive specialists able to relearn constantly, parse non-standard data and solve complex problems independently. Creators of university programmes fail to keep up with technology’s tempo: curricula often go stale before they are even approved.

Higher education is morphing into an expensive service that does not guarantee a job. Most employers now judge real competencies and portfolios of shipped projects.

Illich, a critic of industrial progress, saw education otherwise. For him school was not a temple of science but a monopolistic corporation that manufactures a scarcity of knowledge in order to sell it packaged as “certificates” and “diplomas”.

His half-century-old ideas read almost like a cypherpunk manifesto: scrap intermediaries; long live direct connections and P2P skill exchange.

The centralisation of schools

Illich’s central claim is simple: the institutionalisation of learning kills learning. Crudely, the modern school operates like a central bank with a monopoly on issuance. Only instead of money it mints social status.

Illich argued that society has confused the process of learning with its symbolic outcome—a diploma. This is a classic substitution, he thought: we start to perceive the institution as the source of the phenomenon itself. It seems to us that hospitals and clinics ensure health, police ensure safety, and educational establishments produce knowledge.

“The illusion on which the school system is based is that learning is the result of teaching,” wrote the philosopher.

In crypto parlance, school is a trusted third party that has become a single point of failure. You cannot simply learn to program or to heal; you must obtain a cryptographic signature (a diploma) from a central authority, or the system will not validate you.

“The school is an advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is,” maintained Illich. 

Academic structures have turned knowledge into a scarce, certifiable commodity. A rigid hierarchy of authorised information providers and passive consumers has emerged. The student pays for time spent within the institution’s walls to receive a final rectangle of cardboard. It is a mechanism that props up the status quo, where success is measured by hours served under bureaucratic supervision.

A fundamental substitution follows. Society algorithmically equates the growth of intellect with physical attendance, and the cognition of the world with grades in a ledger. The chief metric of a pupil’s success becomes signalled loyalty. 

Cognition fuses tightly with social certification. The system engineers an artificial scarcity of prestige. Status clings to the university’s name on the document. Lacking the stamp automatically relegates even a top-tier autodidact to the pile of irrelevant candidates.

Diploma inflation and the “hidden curriculum”

As with fiat currencies, education suffers inflation. As ever more people get a degree, the value of a diploma declines. To preserve the same social standing, one must spend ever more years in schooling. It is an endless race that benefits only the factory of credentials.

The deeper problem, Illich believed, lies elsewhere. He called it the “hidden curriculum”. Officially school teaches mathematics and literature. Unofficially—and this is the main lesson—it teaches:

1. Passivity. Knowledge is what you are given, not what you take.
2. Dependence. You cannot act without permission or certification.
3. Consumerism. Any need is satisfied by purchasing an institutional service.

Those who pass through such traditional training emerge ideal consumers and loyal citizens but lose the capacity for autonomous creation. They can no longer learn on their own.

P2P networks of knowledge

The most arresting part of “Deschooling Society” is the solution proposed. Illich did not call for book-burning; he called for ending schools’ monopoly on access to the tools of learning.

In 1971 he proposed building “learning webs”. He distinguished four types of services necessary for free education, all of which fit the logic of modern marketplaces and decentralised applications:

1. Services for finding educational objects. Access to physical tools: libraries, laboratories, computers. In today’s world this resembles the sharing economy or access to computing power.
2. Skill exchange. A database where people can list their abilities and the terms on which they are ready to share them. Essentially a P2P education exchange without middlemen: “I need to learn Rust; I can teach you Spanish.”
3. Finding partners. A communications network for discovering like-minded people keen to study the same topic. A prototype of themed communities in Discord or Telegram.
4. Directory of free educators. A catalogue of independent mentors whose reputation rests not on titles but on feedback from previous pupils. It recalls reputation systems in decentralised networks.

The description reads like a fully fledged specification for architects of the web and a decentralised ecosystem.

Technologies for liberation, not control

Illich approached technology with caution, fearing its use to suppress autonomy, yet he saw its promise. What matters is not mere technical availability: society needs “convivial tools”—means that people can wield at their own discretion, acting autonomously and without institutional control.

The telephone network or post are such systems, being neutral and allowing people to connect directly. By contrast, the traditional school machine or television are built to broadcast centrally, turning a human from an active agent into a passive recipient.

The internet has partly embodied Illich’s concepts. GitHub is an example of a space for collaborative development whose possibilities are broader, though they include efficient skill exchange: programmers publish open-source solutions, scrutinise others’ code, propose architectural improvements and build rankings of professionals from their actual work. The community itself assesses a developer’s competence without formal exam inspectors.

Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAO) take independent learning a step further. Members of blockchain communities form guilds and working groups to research new cybersecurity protocols or create digital assets. Funding for educational initiatives is allocated transparently via smart contracts. 

A skills economy and verification without bureaucracy

The classical model of learning is bound up with debt. Deschooling, together with the crypto industry, offers an alternative model of Learn-to-Earn. Blockchain protocols pay rewards in tokens for testing networks, translating technical documentation and finding vulnerabilities. For the first time, upskilling begins to generate income at the very moment one is mastering the tools.

The problem of proving qualifications is being tackled by non-transferable tokens (Soulbound Tokens, SBT). The SBT concept rewires the verification of merit. A network issues digital attestations for a successful smart-contract audit or a hackathon win. These proof tokens are written permanently to a distributed ledger, forming a cryptographically secured, transparent résumé. The attestation is generated algorithmically on the fact of completed work, excluding the corrupt purchase of status.

The first step towards autonomy 

“Deschooling Society” leaves mixed impressions. On the one hand, the diagnosis offered half a century ago sounds strikingly current. We still live in a society of credentialled people dependent on intermediary institutions.

On the other hand, we finally have tools to realise Illich’s ideas. Open source is the “learning web”, where code and knowledge are open to all. Decentralisation allows the building of reputation systems independent of the state or university. 

Self-education is shifting from hobby to baseline skill for thriving in a fast-changing environment. Illich urged the dismantling of the monopoly on knowledge: 

“Liberating society from schooling means, first of all, abolishing the status that depends on the diploma.”

Illich’s approach is a call for educational sovereignty. In the co-ordinates of the digital age, the thought can be put this way: “Not your keys—not your coins.” A conscious step beyond formalised academic thinking becomes the first move towards flexible, self-directed command of one’s intellect.