For decades the educational left has dwelt at length on the iconic theories of critical pedagogy as developed by the radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and those under his influence. The result has been the wide adoption of a set of promethean ideas relating, in part, to the need to articulate a politicized definition of literacy in which one reads both the world and the word, to foment popular education as a form of historical praxis, to understand how educational institutions reproduce the oppressor and oppressed relationship, and to militate for schools as a possible source/site of human emancipation and resistance. However, the emphasis on Freire’s philosophy of education has served in many ways to occlude the concurrent history of anarchist educational theory that developed alongside it.

In this essay, then, I would like to explore a liberatory path less traveled by most contemporary educational theorists—that of the anarchistic pedagogy of Freire’s friend cum critic, the renegade and apophatic theological philosopher, Ivan Illich. Playing a sort of Bakunin and Tolstoy to Freire’s Marx, Illich in fact helped to free Freire from prison in the 1960s, provided him with safe shelter at the Center for Intercultural Documentation, and translated some of Freire’s first works. However, Illich spoke not for the “pedagogy of the oppressed” but initially for the social disestablishment of schools and then later of the dehumanizing aspects of social institutions and systems generally. Against the common sense defense of education as (at least potentially) a public good to be conserved, Illich counseled that people have always “known many things”  without curricula and called for vernacular values and convivial tools that could meet people’s needs without becoming ends in themselves, as he felt contemporary public education systems had done. Illich’s greatest counsel, though, was in hailing the need for a return of Epimethean individuals—anarchists who would be wedded to the earth and its sustainable limits, support matriarchal principles of gifting and caring, and who would represent a political culture founded on a more holistic relationship to Reason than had previously been produced by post-Enlightenment intellectuals.