Third alternative:  be like Cee and make it up as you go.

 -- David Wright :: alphabeta at prodigy.net
    These are my opinions only, but they're almost always correct.
    "Without Bush, what will America's schoolchildren have to look down on?"
                                                       -- Bill Maher

Excerpt From:

Deschooling Society
by Ivan Illich
http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html

The Revolutionary Potential of Deschooling

Of course, school is not, by any means, the only modern institution
which has as its primary purpose the shaping of man's vision of
reality. The hidden curriculum of family life, draft, health care, so-
called professionalism, or of the media play an important part in the
institutional manipulation of man's world-vision, language, and
demands. But school enslaves more profoundly and more systematically,
since only school is credited with the principal function of forming
critical judgment, and, paradoxically, tries to do so by making
learning about oneself, about others, and about nature depend on a
prepackaged process. School touches us so intimately that none of us
can expect to be liberated from it by something else.

Many self-styled revolutionaries are victims of school. They see even
"liberation" as the product of an institutional process. Only
liberating oneself from school will dispel such illusions. The
discovery that most learning requires no teaching can be neither
manipulated nor planned. Each of us is personally responsible for his
or her own deschooling, and only we have the power to do it. No one
can be excused if he fails to liberate himself from schooling. People
could not free themselves from the Crown until at least some of them
had freed themselves from the established Church. They cannot free
themselves from progressive consumption until they free themselves
from obligatory school.

We are all involved in schooling, from both the side of production and
that of consumption. We are superstitiously convinced that good
learning can and should be produced in us-and that we can produce it
in others. Our attempt to withdraw from the concept of school will
reveal the resistance we find in ourselves when we try to renounce
limitless consumption and the pervasive presumption that others can be
manipulated for their own good. No one is fully exempt from the
exploitation of others in the schooling process.

School is both the largest and the most anonymous employer of all.
Indeed, the school is the best example of a new kind of enterprise,
succeeding the guild, the factory, and the corporation. The
multinational corporations which have dominated the economy are now
being complemented, and may one day be replaced, by supernationally
planned service agencies. These enterprises present their services in
ways that make all men feel obliged to consume them. They are
internationally standardized, redefining the value of their services
periodically and everywhere at approximately the same rhythm.

"Transportation" relying on new cars and superhighways serves the same
institutionally packaged need for comfort, prestige, speed, and
gadgetry, whether its components are produced by the state or not. The
apparatus of "medical care" defines a peculiar kind of health, whether
the service is paid for by the state or by the individual. Graded
promotion in order to obtain diplomas fits the student for a place on
the same international pyramid of qualified manpower, no matter who
directs the school.

In all these cases employment is a hidden benefit: the driver of a
private automobile, the patient who submits to hospitalization, or the
pupil in the schoolroom must now be seen as part of a new class of
"employees." A liberation movement which starts in school, and yet is
grounded in the awareness of teachers and pupils as simultaneously
exploiters and exploited, could foreshadow the revolutionary
strategies of the future; for a radical program of deschooling could
train youth in the new style of revolution needed to challenge a
social system featuring obligatory "health," "wealth," and "security."

The risks of a revolt against school are unforeseeable, but they are
not as horrible as those of a revolution starting in any other major
institution. School is not yet organized for self-protection as
effectively as a nation-state, or even a large corporation. Liberation
from the grip of schools could be bloodless. The weapons of the truant
officer and his allies in the courts and employment agencies might
take very cruel measures against the individual offender, especially
if he or she were poor, but they might turn out to be powerless
against the surge of a mass movement.

School has become a social problem; it is being attacked on all sides,
and citizens and their governments sponsor unconventional experiments
all over the world. They resort to unusual statistical devices in
order to keep faith and save face. The mood among some educators is
much like the mood among Catholic bishops after the Vatican Council.
The curricula of so-called "free schools" resemble the liturgies of
folk and rock masses. The demands of high-school students to have a
say in choosing their teachers are as strident as those of
parishioners demanding to select their pastors. But the stakes for
society are much higher if a significant minority loses its faith in
schooling. This would endanger the survival not only of the economic
order built on the coproduction of goods and demands, but equally of
the political order built on the nation-state into which students are
delivered by the school.

Our options are clear enough. Either we continue to believe that
institutionalized learning is a product which justifies unlimited
investment or we rediscover that legislation and planning and
investment, if they have any place in formal education, should be used
mostly to tear down the barriers that now impede opportunities for
learning, which can only be a personal activity.

If we do not challenge the assumption that valuable knowledge is a
commodity which under certain circumstances may be forced into the
consumer, society will be increasingly dominated by sinister pseudo
schools and totalitarian managers of information. Pedagogical
therapists will drug their pupils more in order to teach them better,
and students will drug themselves more to gain relief from the
pressures of teachers and the race for certificates. Increasingly
larger numbers of bureaucrats will presume to pose as teachers. The
language of the schoolman has already been coopted by the adman. Now
the general and the policeman try to dignify their professions by
masquerading as educators. In a schooled society, warmaking and civil
repression find an educational rationale. Pedagogical warfare in the
style of Vietnam will be increasingly justified as the only way of
teaching people the superior value of unending progress.

Repression will be seen as a missionary effort to hasten the coming of
the mechanical Messiah. More and more countries will resort to the
pedagogical torture already implemented in Brazil and Greece. This
pedagogical torture is not used to extract information or to satisfy
the psychic needs of sadists. It relies on random terror to break the
integrity of an entire population and make it plastic material for the
teachings invented by technocrats. The totally destructive and
constantly progressive nature of obligatory instruction will fulfill
its ultimate logic unless we begin to liberate ourselves right now
from our pedagogical hubris, our belief that man can do what God
cannot, namely, manipulate others for their own salvation.

Many people are just awakening to the inexorable destruction which
present production trends imply for the environment, but individuals
have only very limited power to change these trends. The manipulation
of men and women begun in school has also reached a point of no
return, and most people are still unaware of it. They still encourage
school reform, as Henry Ford II proposes less poisonous automobiles.

Daniel Bell says that our epoch is characterized by an extreme
disjunction between cultural and social structures, the one being
devoted to apocalyptic attitudes, the other to technocratic decision-
making. This is certainly true for many educational reformers, who
feel impelled to condemn almost everything which characterizes modern
schools-and at the same time propose new schools.

In his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues
that such dissonance inevitably precedes the emergence of a new
cognitive paradigm. The facts reported by those who observed free
fall, by those who returned from the other side of the earth, and by
those who used the new telescope did not fit the Ptolemaic world view.
Quite suddenly, the Newtonian paradigm was accepted. The dissonance
which characterizes many of the young today is not so much cognitive
as a matter of attitudes -- a feeling about what a tolerable society
cannot be like. What is surprising about this dissonance is the
ability of a very large number of people to tolerate it.

The capacity to pursue incongruous goals requires an explanation.
According to Max Gluckman, all societies have procedures to hide such
dissonances from their members. He suggests that this is the purpose
of ritual. Rituals can hide from their participants even discrepancies
and conflicts between social principle and social organization. As
long as an individual is not explicitly conscious of the ritual
character of the process through which he was initiated to the forces
which shape his cosmos, he cannot break the spell and shape a new
cosmos. As long as we are not aware of the ritual through which school
shapes the progressive consumer -- the economy's major resource -- we
cannot break the spell of this economy and shape a new one.