Theories of Unschooling: Illich, Reimer

Personalistic Theories: Freire, Milani, Ga HOZ

Neill (1883-1973), Scottish. He was the son of a rural teacher. It is situated in the English anti-authoritarian movement of progressive schools. His complete training with psychoanalysis.

Part of the idea that society and in particular the family and school institution are impregnated with a class character, authoritarian and moralizing that restricts the initiative of the child making him a submissive being.

On the other hand, it seeks to create a permissive environment in its school in which the child can do and express what he wishes as long as it does not interfere with the freedom of others.

During his stay in Hillerau (Germany) he founded Summerhill in 1921. For a time Neill's interest was directed towards handicapped children.

At Summerhill it is the students who in assembly decide and establish the rules to be respected. With the exception of a minimum of rules regarding the health and safety of students, there is nothing in S. that is authoritatively imposed, not even in teaching.

The Modern school aims - to train men capable of constantly evolving, capable of renewing social media and renewing themselves personally. It aims at the liberation of the individual in front of himself and in front of society -.

In the Modern school there are no exams or grades, no prizes or punishments and their comprehensive education includes only thinking, sexuality and feelings, as well as the development of the childish personality.

It was, moreover, a rationalist and therefore scientific school. Ferrer always cared about scientifically demonstrating all the truths to children in order to prepare them against the fanaticisms of faith and dogmas.

It is obvious then that Ferrer's school was radically anti-clerical and for that very reason he wanted children to enjoy their free will to learn, read and participate.

The decade of the sixties represents in some way a period endorsed by the success of a developmentalism never known until then by humanity.

Within the framework of pedagogy, a whole current of thought arises that coincides in declaring the uselessness of the school and its necessary abolition, in order to introduce new, more effective and positive forms of education.

This ideological movement received the name of deschooling, and it was immediately defined as anti-institutional, and also in its first moment as technological.

The school was criticized as obsolete, maladjusted, useless, slow, ineffective, and economically unviable.

Ivan Illich, born in Austria, is undoubtedly the great representative of unschooling, who has deepened his theorizing the most and who has left us a more and better developed alternative.

Illich proposes as an alternative his thesis of conviviality that is presented to us as a pedagogy of freedom and of the word. For this, it proposes two types of solutions: one of a technological nature, since the school would be replaced by a - knowledge bank - where everyone would have credit.

This could be achieved thanks to audiovisual and computer media.

Together with these technological institutions, Illich would complete the convivial society through a legal-economic framework, centered on legislative provisions that would prohibit the monopoly that the school has over instruction. His proposal focuses on providing families with an - educational income -, this income, based on credits, could be consumed by the subject throughout his life with which a free concurrence in instruction would be established: it is the student who decides when, how and where to proceed with the training itself.

E. Reimer, author of a work that caused a great impact - the school has died - further broadens his criticism of the school by denouncing that it is responsible for the creation of negative environments that damage the mental health of man.

Ultimately, the school only guards the children and young people.

The alternatives he proposes are pairs, in some way, with those of Illich, since he also endorses the need for educational technology. Likewise, they see the need to have personal networks or a group of people in a position to teach and guide according to the demands made on them.

And it is that for Reimer, the guilt lies exclusively with the school, but not with the teachers, who now, converted into consultants, could develop their educational and training function even more and better.

Freire affirms that there are two ways of understanding education, one is banking, closed to dialogue, creativity and awareness; the other is the liberator, founded on the capacity for reflection and critical action of the oppressed.

Freire's pedagogy can be called as consciousness, since the world and it are mutually constituted by their intentional and praxeological character establish relationships with others and things.

Paulo Freire (Recife, September 19, 1921 - Brasilia, May 2, 1997) was a Brazilian educator and pedagogue who even today is revered by many people as one of the most relevant authorities in the history of world pedagogy.

Freire exposed a number of important theoretical and practical innovations in pedagogy that have had a considerable impact on the development of current educational praxis, especially with regard to informal education and popular education.

He designed a pedagogy of liberation, closely related to the vision of developing countries and the oppressed classes, with the objective of raising awareness.

His greatest contributions are in the field of popular education for literacy and political awareness of working class youth and adults. However, Paulo Freire's work goes beyond that space and concerns all education, always with the basic foundation that there is no neutral education. According to his vision, any education is, in itself, political.

He himself called his adult education Critical Pedagogy.

His Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of the most frequently cited texts on education today, especially in Latin America and Africa. In Freire's theory, conditioning is nothing more than a way of dehumanizing ourselves, while in behaviorist theories, it becomes the engine of learning.

Lorenzo Milano was born in 1923 in Florence and was brought up in the manner of a bourgeois, liberal and atheist family.

His sudden conversion to Christianity led him to the priesthood and to the vicar of San Donato among humble peasants, lacking linguistic understanding for any type of communication. He creates a popular school to which he dedicates himself with all his energy.

The school aims to save the failure of the poor in the obligatory period by supplying their family and social deficiencies, developing a critical culture at the service of the oppressed.

Milani raised the problem from the point of view that if his parishioners did not master the language with which they should be “served”, they could not develop in “civil” life, but neither in religious instruction, that is, that a catechist reform it couldn't really exist.

Milani proposed a “political” school, where people knew how to differentiate the oppressors from the oppressed, and where the influence of any political party was null, - an idea that bothered both the communists and the Christian democrats - Milani analyzed the causes of the failure of this sector of the population, and classified them as follows:

• Inability on the part of parents to help them with homework.
• Lack of books at home.
• Incorrect ways of speaking.
• Space problems.
• Inappropriate way of using free time.

Milani, little by little, was opening the way to the idea of ​​the school, in order to build the intellectual foundations that could guarantee a coherence between the social and religious life of those people who were in an unequal situation compared to the ruling class.

For Milani, the school was not an end in itself, but a means so that the Doctrine and the Sacrament could reach the whole town, that is, that its parishioners understood its meaning for themselves and made it their own.

In the Barbiana school, Milani simply applied the “pedagogy of common sense”.

Milani gave enormous importance and value to time; the school worked twelve hours a day, every day of the year, since for the poor boy, the hours spent outside of school constituted a cultural impoverishment.