Throwing Away School: Ivan Illich, John Holt, and the Case Against Compulsory Education

By the early 1970s, a number of the most serious thinkers about education had arrived at a conclusion that seemed too radical to say aloud: the problem wasn’t how schools were run. The problem was schools.

Schools. The institution itself. The idea that you could take children away from their families, their communities, and their natural drive to learn, seal them in a building with age-mates they didn’t choose, put them under the authority of a single adult expert, and call what happened there “education”: this idea, argued Ivan Illich and John Holt, was the problem.

This is the eighth article in my series on the history of self-directed learning, and we’re now in the most provocative territory we’ll cover. Illich and Holt are the thinkers who followed the logic of everything that came before (Rousseau’s natural child, Dewey’s learning by doing, Neill’s democratic school, the Citizenship Schools’ liberation through literacy) and drew the conclusion that reforming school from within wasn’t enough.

Ivan Illich was a philosopher, a priest, and one of the most searching critics of modern institutions of the 20th century. Born in Vienna in 1926, educated in Rome and Innsbruck, he ended up in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he ran an intercultural research center and wrote a series of devastating critiques of the way institutions in modern societies (schools, hospitals, churches, development agencies) had come to create dependency rather than competence in the people they were meant to serve.

His 1970 book Deschooling Society is one of the most important and most overlooked books in the history of education. Illich’s central argument was that schools had a “hidden curriculum”: a set of lessons taught not through any explicit instruction but through the structure of the institution itself. The hidden curriculum of school, he argued, taught children that learning is a commodity, that it comes from an institution, that its quality is measured by credentials, and that a person who has not been through the institution is not truly educated.

This hidden curriculum, Illich argued, was more powerful than anything in the official curriculum. You can teach critical thinking in a classroom while simultaneously teaching, through every structural feature of the institution, that authority comes from above and that your own judgment about what to learn and when is irrelevant. The official curriculum says “think for yourself.” The hidden curriculum says “do what you’re told.” For Illich, this contradiction was not a flaw in particular schools. It was inherent to the institution.

For Illich, the solution wasn’t a better school. It was the dismantling of the institutional monopoly on education. He proposed replacing schools with what he called “learning webs”: networks of resources, skill exchanges, peer matching, and educational guides that would allow learners of any age to pursue their own learning goals outside of any institutional framework.

The first network was a reference service for educational objects: places, tools, libraries, and experiences that learners could access freely. The second was a skill exchange, connecting people who wanted to learn something with people who could demonstrate it. The third was peer matching: a way for learners to find others working on the same questions. The fourth was a network of independent educators, not professional teachers but guides and mentors who could help learners navigate their own journeys.

Read Illich’s vision today and you will notice that much of what he imagined — a world where learners can connect with resources, experts, and peers through technology — looks remarkably like the internet. Illich was writing in 1970, years before the World Wide Web existed, and he was imagining its basic architecture. Whether the internet has delivered the educational liberation he envisioned is a more complicated question. The infrastructure exists. The institution’s grip on credentials and access remains powerful.

John Holt came to a similar conclusion from a very different direction. He was a schoolteacher who had been educated at elite private schools and Yale and began teaching elementary school in Colorado and Massachusetts in the 1950s. He kept a journal of what he observed. That journal became his first book, How Children Fail, published in 1964. It was a careful, honest, unflinching account of how school systematically crushes children’s curiosity and replaces it with anxiety and the performance of understanding.

“Most children fail in school,” he wrote in that book’s introduction, not because they lack intelligence, but because school makes them “bored, afraid, and confused.” Children fail, he argued, because the institution requires them to perform competence rather than develop it, to get the right answer rather than to understand, to satisfy the teacher rather than to pursue their own curiosity. It was an indictment that landed hard in 1964 and has not lost its force since.

At this stage, Holt believed in reform. His follow-up book, How Children Learn (1967), was full of ideas for making classrooms more responsive to children’s natural curiosity. But over the next decade, as he traveled to schools, spoke with teachers, and watched reform after reform fail to change the fundamental dynamic of compulsory schooling, he grew more radical. By 1976, when he published Instead of Education, Holt had given up on school reform entirely.

His argument wasn’t much different from Illich’s: any institution whose primary feature is that students are compelled to attend is structurally incapable of supporting genuine self-directed learning. Compulsion and learning, he argued, aren’t merely in tension. They are, in the deepest sense, incompatible. You can’t force someone to be curious. You can’t mandate genuine engagement. The more you insist on the forms of learning — attendance, performance, credential — the more you undermine the substance of it.

Holt became a central figure in the homeschooling movement, starting a newsletter called “Growing Without Schooling” in 1977. He was interested not in homeschooling as a replication of school at home, but in what he called unschooling: trusting children to direct their own learning completely, providing resources and a supportive environment, and resisting the urge to impose structure.

The history here is interesting. The homeschooling movement was sparked primarily by left-wing countercultural radicals following the logic of Illich and Holt. The conservative religious adoption of homeschooling came later and for very different reasons. Both traditions have something to teach us.

Illich and Holt bring the SDL story to a crucial turning point. They represent the limit case of the argument for learner-directed education: the point at which the argument becomes not “let’s redesign school to support self-direction” but “let’s reimagine education without school altogether.” A lot of folks who work in or advocate for SDL don’t go that far. But taking Illich and Holt seriously requires us to grapple with an honest question: how much of what we are doing is genuine support for self-directed learning, and how much is the institutional form of school simply putting on a new hat?

This work draws from my book, Theoretical and Historical Evolutions of Self-Directed Learning, if you geek out about this stuff and want a deeper dive.