Deschooling Virtuality 2.0

Abstract

Back in early 1970s, radical thinkers including Ivan Illich (1971), Everett Reimer (1971), and Paul Goodman (1973) criticised institutional schools and called for their abandonment. For many of these thinkers, deschooling was just a distant and vague dream. For Ivan Illich, however, it was a viable alternative (Atasay, 2013: 58). Admittedly, Illich’s alternative was based on a utopian technical infrastructure. However, as information technologies have advanced to a stage where they are surprisingly close to Illich’s imagined infrastructure, his works have started to attract renewed interest from contemporary thinkers in diverse fields from technology (Hart, 2001; Jandrić, 2010) to pedagogy (Hern, 1998).