THE DIALOG OF ILLICH AND FREIRE ON EDUCATION FOR A NEW SOCIETY

Abstract

Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire were contemporaries, and their analyses of the theoretical and practical bases of oppression in Latin America are similar, rather than convergent. Ivan Illich wanted to deschool society as a means of eliminating a tool used by the ruling classes to maintain exclusion of the majority, suggesting the creation of networks of communities of learners. Paulo Freire also proposed the deschooling of education by replacing schools with culture circles, places for the manipulation of language (words) and for the preparation for a local praxis of reflection and action. Paulo Freire‘s dream of constructing an egalitarian society involved the radical transformation of the goals of education, while Ivan Illich‘s utopia of an egalitarian society envisaged a future without schools in the form they took at present, since the school, and education it brought, existed, according to Illich, to perpetuate exploitation and exclusion. Thus, both thinkers strongly criticized the capitalist system of production, and the way in which the system used opinion formers, particularly the school/ education, as a tool to consolidate the dominance of power in a specific social class.